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Britain’s Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (Comment Central)

Britain’s first ever televised prime ministerial debate, which took place on April 15 in Manchester, can be seen on C-Span here (though when I watched it the sound and pictures were distractingly out of sync), or heard on BBC Radio 4 here.

There was another first, perhaps more consequentially important than the debate itself: for the first time, the broadcast media gave a Liberal Democrat leader equal time and prominence with his Labour and Conservative counterparts. Since the debates (two more will follow, on April 22 and 29) were announced in March, it’s been said that the outsider, Nick Clegg, would “win,” provided he could hold his ground against David Cameron and Gordon Brown. He not only held his ground, he exacted every possible advantage from the claim that his opponents represented the “old politics” while he stood for the new.

Well-briefed and fluent, talking directly to the cameras and the nation, he won the debate by a mile, according to three respected polls, which gave him, on average, 52 percent against Cameron’s 25 percent and Brown’s 18 percent. (Along with most of the commentators that I read, I thought Brown did much better than that; defending his incumbency, and 13 years of Labour rule, with impressive logic and vigor—but he undeniably has what Neil Kinnock described earlier this week as a “radio face,” whose natural expression in repose is jowly and forbidding.) If Clegg’s success in the debate translates into a several-point rise for the Liberal Democrats in the opinion polls, where they are presently stuck at around 20 percent, and in the real poll on May 6, a hung parliament will very probably result.

For decades, the Liberal party, then the SDP-Liberal Alliance, now the Lib Dems, have made proportional representation, based on the single transferable vote (STV) in multi-member constituencies, a major part of their platform. Under that system, once a candidate has enough votes to be declared the winner, the remaining votes would be apportioned to other candidates. Until now, such radical electoral reform has seemed a vain ambition. Election after election, the Liberal Democrats pick up a sizeable chunk of the national vote (22 percent in 2005) but win a disproportionately small number of seats (less that 10 percent in 2005, which was a good year for them).

When given a level media playing field, as they were on Thursday (and in the “Ask the Chancellors” debate on March 29, which Vince Cable, the Lib Dem shadow chancellor, won handsomely against George Osborne and Alistair Darling), the party has performed exceptionally well, thereby reinforcing their claim to be treated fairly at the ballot box. If, on May 6, they manage to retain the 63 seats they held in the last parliament and capture some Labour and Conservative marginals, they may well be in a position to wring from Gordon Brown a commitment to immediate electoral reform in exchange for their support of a minority Labour government—though such a deal with Cameron seems a lot less likely.

Britain already has proportional representation: the STV system is used in elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, and “List PR” for the European Parliament elections. The country is out of step with the rest of Europe and the Republic of Ireland in clinging to the first past the post system for its domestic elections, and the electorate is showing every sign of having had its fill of one-or-the-other, Conservative or Labour government. One of the most striking and persistent features of recent opinion polls has been the number of people (ranging from around 30 percent to 43 percent) who’ve said that Britain’s interests would “best be served” by a hung parliament—in other words, they want to vote for a coalition. Or, as Paddy—now Lord—Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, said the other day, “The mood of the country, I think, is that Gordon Brown deserves to lose, but David Cameron doesn’t deserve to win.” This is the perfect climate for his party.

Britain hasn’t been ruled by a true coalition since the Churchill government of 1940-1945, though Harold Wilson in 1974, and James Callaghan, from 1977-1979, kept their minority Labour governments alive by doing deals with other parties (mainly the Liberals, as they were then) to save them from no-confidence motions in the House of Commons. Should the Lib Dems do well in May, and at last achieve the electoral reform they have so long promoted, it’ll be the end of the two-party system, and government by coalition is likely to be the norm in Britain for the foreseeable future, with no party able to secure an overall majority. My brother Colin, a lifelong Labour voter, now a Liberal Democrat supporter (Blair’s juvenile complaisance in the Bush/Cheney Iraq project was my bro’s final straw), said to me over the phone last week: “It seems to work alright in Germany, so why not here?”

Jose Guadalupe Posada: Sublime Creator of Heaven and Earth, Deliver Us from Another Earthquake

“It was Guillermina who woke me. She always sleeps more lightly than I do. I jumped out of bed and grabbed Pedro and Rosita who never wake up, ever. You know, the young are like that, great for sleeping. The tremor knocked me over. I got up and managed to open the door. I threw them one by one down the corridor. First Pedro and then Rosita. And I held out my hand to Guillermina. She was trying to get out of the room but it looked as if the room was swallowing her . I could feel windows exploding and dust falling from above. The floor was shaking—it was like being in a boat. The orange trees were smashing into each other, their branches were lashing about like madmen, and we could hear the crashing of the zinc panels on the roof and the tiles hurtling off.

When my grandfather’s grandfather lived here in Quechereguas [a country village in the Maule region of central Chile], the house was almost the same as it is now. Who knows how many earthquakes it has survived. My great grandmother remembered the one of 1906 and another tremendous one before it; and my grandmother always used to tell us about the one of 1918, and also the one in Talca in 1928, and in Chillan in 1939. But the house couldn’t cope with this one. Each tile weighs twenty-five kilos, and tons of tiles were flying about together with adobe bricks, smashing into bits as they hit the ground. One of those adobe bricks weighs thirty kilos, and they were falling from more than 10 metres up. It was very difficult to do anything. We were all holding hands and I was dragging them along so that we could get closer to the middle of the patio. This rain of tiles was a death trap. But while I was dragging them along I fell down and couldn’t get to my feet again.

And the dogs? Not one of them was barking and they got tangled up in our feet. Something happened to the moon that night—there was an odd feeling that night, I’m sure. The moon was full, immense. I have never seen one like it in Quechereguas, I can tell you. Never. And the sky was covered with stars. And the dogs didn’t bark that night. Not a single bark. Earlier afternoon the sun had also been strange, smoother and more yellow than usual, as if it were painted. The birds were flying about harum-scarum. Like they didn’t know where to hide from that painted sun.

I remember the horses in the stalls were whinnying. The colt was snorting and kicking and stamping. But now they weren’t whinnying. Or at least I didn’t hear them, because the only thing you could hear was the noise from the zinc panels, and the glass and the adobe walls collapsing, and the tiles flying off and hitting the ground. And you couldn’t see anything. Anything. Just dust and earth, nothing else. I couldn’t see my children or Guillermina, I was alone and couldn’t get myself up. I was thinking: the earth’s going to open up, shit, the ground’s going to open.

After it was over we looked at each other, and we began touching each other and looking at each other with damp eyes. We moved like ghosts, our faces bloodless, our eyebrows white with dust. We looked at the wreckage, the collapsed walls and we couldn’t bring ourselves to enter the house because some walls were still standing, even some high ones —I don’t know how they stayed upright in spite of so many having collapsed, and of their large cracks. We’d lost the dogs and we crossed ourselves. One other thing happened: the chickens didn’t cluck and they still don’t lay eggs. The colt, every time there’s a tremor, stamps the ground.

Camilo Mori Serrano: Paisaje desértico

But what is all this compared to what happened to others? To Don Osvaldo, who lived very nearby around Sagrada Familia: a beam fell on him and killed him. The man didn’t even manage to leave his bedroom. He was getting on in years. And to my brother, who was in Iloca. The water came right up to the house but he managed to get away. He saw cars going into the tsunami wave with their headlights on. What a wave that must have been. When he arrived here he could hardly breathe. He didn’t want to speak. Maybe it was because of the things he had seen, my poor brother. But he told me about this lawyer who, when that tremendous wave came, in Iloca or Llico—I can’t really remember—grabbed his two older sons and made a run for it; his wife did the same, taking the two youngest kids in her arms. But the black wave got her. They found her afterwards about a block away, exhausted but alive. They still haven’t found the two kids.

A little later, Guillermina smelled wine in the air and I came out to have a look, and, would you believe it, there was wine running through the street like a river. The oak wine casks had burst open and so had the stainless steel ones. At first, the people were frightened that the river would wash away what was left of their houses and their belongings. But later they gained confidence and went out to collect the wine in buckets. It was running like it was never going to stop, you see. It cheered me up. It wasn’t bad, that wine. The gutters and the ditches were full of the stuff and so was the lake. Everyone was walking about with fear in their eyes and wine on their breath. And the fish got drunk. They floated around on the surface and you could throw them a line and they wouldn’t even take the bait. I went into the water and caught myself a couple of really big carp with my hands. I shall never forget the two carp that I got, just like that, bare-handed.”

—Translated by John Bell

Arturo Fontaine is a Chilean writer. His best known works are his novels Oír su voz and Cuando éramos inmortales, both published by Alfaguara.

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa standing in front of the building they designed for the Zollverein School, Essen, Germany, 2006 (Thomas Mayer/arcspace.com)

A usually melancholy springtime ritual for lovers of the building art is the announcement of the latest winner of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. Thus the revelation of this year’s surprise winners—Kazuyo Sejima, 53, and Ryue Nishizawa, 43, principals of the Tokyo firm SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates)—has been cause for rejoicing among those who treasure the honorees’ delicately calibrated and deeply humane sensibility. They are further unusual in architecture as a female-male pairing not married to one another, and rarer still, one in which the senior partner is a woman.

The $100,000 Pritzker was instituted in 1978 by the Chicago-based Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt hotel chain, whose claim that this would become the Nobel of architecture struck some observers as rather presumptuous, to say nothing of quite ironic, given that the donors have erected so many banal structures in cities around the world. That skepticism seemed hardly misplaced when in 1979 Philip Johnson, the dark prince of Modernism, was named the first Pritzker recipient, a choice that hinted at a certain cynicism and want of imagination.

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2007 (Hisao Suzuki/SANAA)

More admirable figures immediately followed: Luis Barragán (1980) and James Stirling (1981). But thereafter (with intermittent happy exceptions) the Pritzker went either to stars with overinflated reputations—Kevin Roche (1982), Hans Hollein (1985), Gordon Bunshaft (1988), and Jørn Utzon (2003)—or lesser-known architects whose reputations could not be inflated by any accolade—Gottfried Böhm (1986), Christian de Portzamparc (1994), Sverre Fehn (1997), and Paulo Mendes de Rocha (2006).

This year’s selection of Sejima and Nishizawa, however, marks a significant departure from past Pritzker practices-–including those that adversely affected the prize’s credibility. In 1994 the award went to Robert Venturi but not his collaborator and wife, Denise Scott Brown, with the specious explanation that it is bestowed on individual practitioners, not firms. Persistent rumblings about that gratuitous snub—made worse because there were thirteen male winners before Venturi but no women whatsoever—evidently prompted the Pritzker to play catch-up ball by selecting the team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron (2001) and the first female recipient, Zaha Hadid (2004).

With Sejima and Nishizawa, in contrast, there is not a hint of remedial tokenism or backpedaling for the award’s prior lapses. SANAA richly deserves an honor that now takes on new luster thanks to the current Pritzker jury, which is headed by the British arts patron Peter Palumbo and includes one earlier laureate, Renzo Piano (1998).

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2004 (Hisao Suzuki/SANAA)

SANAA is best known in the United States for two exceptional museum commissions: their Glass Pavilion (2001–2006) at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and the New Museum (2003–2007) on New York City’s Bowery. Along with their 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan (1999-2004), this nearly contemporaneous trio of public galleries offers an impressive demonstration of the designers’ virtuosity within one functional category, and shows the remarkable breadth of expression they are able to wrest from the restricted Minimalist palette.

The Kanazawa museum is a low-rise circular structure meant to serve as a unifying center for a small provincial city that, like most Japanese communities of all sizes, is sorely bereft of non-commercial civic cynosures. The building’s round ground plan was adopted to make it inviting and accessible from all approaches, and the nearly invisible curving glass elevations are intended to eliminate an off-putting official aura and attract ordinary townspeople with little experience of museum-going.

The Toledo Museum’s freestanding exhibition building, which houses its noteworthy glass collection, makes similar use of literal transparency. But more than being just an extra-large vitrine, this gently contoured, intriguingly layered, and teasingly reflective display space takes a high place in the long line of variations on one of classic Modernism’s enduring themes, the glass pavilion.

Glass Pavilion, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, 2006 (Thomas Mayer/arcspace.com)

Minimalist architecture is thought to require an extraordinary degree of perfection in materials, finish, and detailing in order to compensate for the lack of range inherent in this severely reductive aesthetic. Yet SANAA’s repeated (though never repetitive) use of pure geometric forms, unadorned white surfaces, and large expanses of clear glass (seemingly held in place by little more than the designers’ willpower) is not in the least dependent on the top-of-the-line specifications characteristic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s early and late Minimalist masterpieces: his jewel-like German Pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition (1928-1929) and the majestic Seagram Building (1954–1958) in New York City.

Instead, Sejima and Nishizawa focus our attention through masterful handling of light and space. Unlike many other high-style architects, they pay little obvious attention to the finer points of joints and surfaces. Their uncanny ability to triumph over physical and financial limitations is most apparent in their New Museum in Manhattan, a slender, off-kilter high rise shoehorned into an improbably tiny midblock site that the architects exploit with all the cunning of urban planners inured to the impossibly tight building lots of Tokyo.

Though the New Museum is far from flawless—the lighting is often infelicitous and the galleries are not ideally proportioned—it is nonetheless miraculous in its economy. It cost a thrifty $50 million, in contrast to big-city museums that easily run four or five times as much.

Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima (Takashi Okamoto/SANAA)

Personal presentation plays an important role in architects’ advancement. Philip Johnson’s access to corporate boardrooms unquestionably benefitted from his impeccable navy pinstriped suits and commanding black Corbusier spectacles. Zaha Hadid’s outsized éclat derives in large measure from her dramatic dress sense and tempestuous demeanor, which make her seem the prima donna in her own private Aïda.

Thus a recent photograph of Sejima and Nishizawa is refreshingly antithetical to architectural power portraiture. Nishizawa resembles an amiable novice yoga instructor in his rumpled white shirt, while the adorably dorky Sejima, wearing a doll-like frock and droopy eyeglasses, brings to mind a Roz Chast character in the flesh, bemused and a bit bewildered. So, for that matter, are those of us who had long given up the Pritzker for dead, as it now springs back to life thanks to these worthy beneficiaries.

John Paul Stevens; drawing by David Levine

In the celebration of Justice John Paul Stevens as he brings his long career on the Supreme Court to an end, it is worth remembering what might seem to be an untypical moment in that career: the flag-burning case of 1989.

Gregory Lee Johnson was convicted in Texas of “desecrating a venerated object,” the flag. When the case went to the Supreme Court, the radical lawyer William Kunstler argued that Johnson’s act was protected by the First Amendment as a form of free expression. Justice Stevens asked Kunstler whether the Government had “any power at all to regulate how this flag is displayed in public places.” Kunstler said he didn’t believe so. “There is no state interest whatsoever?” Justice Stevens asked. Kunstler answered that he saw none. “I feel quite differently,” Justice Stevens said.

The Supreme Court decided the case in Johnson’s favor, by a vote of 5 to 4, finding his act to be protected symbolic speech. Justice Stevens dissented, reading his opinion from the bench with such force that his face reddened. The flag, he said, was “a symbol of freedom, of equal opportunity, of religious tolerance…. It cannot be true that the flag that symbolizes [those ideas] is not itself worthy of protection.”

I mention the flag-burning case not because I agree with Justice Stevens. I find Justice William Brennan’s powerful opinion for the majority entirely persuasive. (In a follow-up case, United States against Eichman in 1990, Justice Brennan’s majority opinion concluded: “Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering.”) But the case says something important about John Paul Stevens. Throughout his career he has mostly been portrayed as a detached, quiet judge. But there are fires of passion in him that blaze up from time to time. That was notably so earlier this year when a 5-to-4 majority overruled a century of law and held that corporations must be given the same freedom of political speech, including contributions, as individuals. Justice Stevens spoke for the dissenters in an 88-page opinion that savaged the majority for deciding broad issues that the parties had not even originally brought to the Court. He concluded:

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Justice Stevens had that rarity, a genuinely independent mind. He could please conservatives, as in the flag-burning case, and liberals, as in the corporate political spending case. When he announced his retirement, he was described, correctly, as the leader of the often-outvoted liberals on the Court. But that position was forced on him by the increasingly strident conservatism of the usual majority, the evident determination of Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues—Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and sometimes Kennedy—to move the Supreme Court far to the right on such issues as executive power and affirmative action.

One consistent theme in Justice Stevens’s judicial life was resistance to concentrated power. He wrote for the Court in 1998 striking down the line-item veto, which transferred power from Congress to the president. And he wrote the majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush in 2004, rejecting the Bush administration’s claim that it could detain prisoners at Guantanamo indefinitely without review by federal courts or petition for habeas corpus. The issues in the two decisions were very different. The fear of power was the same.

It makes me unhappy, and uneasy, to see the Supreme Court reduced in the public mind to an on-off switch, everything being reduced to “liberal” or “conservative.” Whether there was ever a golden age when justices were less predictable, less subject to a litmus test, I am not sure. But Justice Stevens has led what the subtitle of a biography due out next month says. Written by Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, it is entitled John Paul Stevens: An Independent Life.

It would be wonderful if the vacancy on the Supreme Court could be filled without the left-right and cliched attitudes of recent years. For one thing, it would be a blessing to see President Obama consider sources of nominees other than the Federal courts. (All nine justices now were promoted from lower Federal courts.) The private bar, law school faculties, state courts, and elected and appointed officials have all been rich sources in the past. President Ford said he picked Justice Stevens on his merits as a lawyer and a human being, and he was telling the truth.

Known for his large-scale photographs of dilapidated buildings in places like Cuba, Russia, and Times Square, Andrew Moore has now turned his attention to Detroit. These images are from his new collection, Detroit Disassembled, published by Damiani and the Akron Art Museum, where an exhibition of his work will be on view from June 5 to October 10.

Moore’s photographs present a devastating scene of urban deterioration, offering us glimpses into abandoned motor plants, train stations, theaters, schools, hotels, police stations, and office buildings, along with vistas of vacant houses and lots. All of the buildings are in deep states of decay: moss grows on the floor of an office at the former Ford Motor Company headquarters; thousands of books molder in the Public Schools Book Depository; an unseen person keeps a small fire going under a plastic shelter inside the trash-filled engine works room of the Dry Dock Company Complex. One of Moore’s photographs, showing an abandoned nursing home, appears in the April 29 issue of The New York Review, in Tony Judt’s essay “Ill Fares the Land.”

Another book on the same subject, The Ruins of Detroit, by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, will be published by Steidl this summer. Marchand and Meffre had already begun their project when they met Moore, whose earlier work they knew, and they urged him to photograph Detroit as well. As a result, there are now two distinctive takes on the decline of a once-powerful center of the US economy: while Moore’s book is slender, with an essay by the poet Philip Levine, Marchand and Meffre’s collection puts across a broader sociological analysis. Both books allow an astonishing amount of beauty to surface, whether in the fading traces of ornate architectural elements or in the rich colors of freshly sprouted vegetation.

Women gathering at the tomb of Shaikh Nizamuddin, Delhi (Ianthe Ruthven)

Walking above the village of Mehrauli on Delhi’s southern perimeter, we pass a woman with a half-empty bottle of water—one of several we have already noticed since daybreak. Dressed immaculately in a brightly-colored sari, she emerges from behind a prickly bush on a tract of waste ground. If she were a man we might not have merited such discretion. India is about the only country in the world where you actually see human adults defecating. When traveling by road or rail you can be struck by the image of men squatting openly, impervious to the public gaze. The UN estimates that 600 million people—or 55 per cent of the Indian population—still defecate out of doors. The practice is clearly born of necessity in a crowded country where the development of public amenities has conspicuously failed to keep pace with economic and demographic growth.

Conspicuous defecation, however, is restricted to males. Female modesty—enjoined by Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism alongside age-old patriarchal codes—dictates that women may relieve themselves only after dark, or in the most secluded reaches of the forest, a practice that exposes them to violence or even snake bites. The consequences for women’s health can be devastating. Women of the poorest classes notoriously suffer from a range of urinary and bowel disorders born of taboos about pollution and other social constraints applied to the most basic and banal of bodily functions.

My companion and I are looking for the walls of Lal Kot—the oldest of Delhi’s seven cities, dating from the tenth century, before the first Muslim invasion. The three-kilometer walls enclose a space that has been largely abandoned to jungle. The cladding of irregular quartzite blocks has been cut so accurately that no mortar was needed to hold them together. Set high on a ridge overlooking the present-day city, Lal Kot is a magnificent outpost of a forgotten civilization—a worthy precursor to the great Delhi Sultanate that flourished during the centuries of Islamic rule, as well as to its grandiose successor, New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker barely two decades before Britain was forced to abandon its empire.

Lal Kot is far from the tourist trail. To reach it you have to cross a large rubbish dump, and negotiate the odiferous detritus—what used to be known as night soil—left by Mehrauli’s less favoured human residents. They sleep rough, in old tombs or in flimsy home-made shacks erected near the open sewers that intersect the area’s magnificent architectural monuments. In the absence of municipal services, refuse disposal is performed by long-haired pigs, which eat up every kind of organic matter, not excluding human and canine waste. (As Moses and Muhammad taught their followers, ham and bacon are best avoided in southern latitudes.)

A pig foraging in Mehrauli (Ianthe Ruthven)

The lack of sanitation is emblematic of India’s failure as an emerging economic giant to include most of its population in its achievements. India is now home to the fourth largest number of billionaires. According to Tim Sebastian, the former BBC journalist who chairs a forum in Doha, Qatar, for debate about social and political issues in the Middle East, some 60 million people in India—who make up the world’s most populous and most powerful middle class—now enjoy living standards higher than Britain and France. Yet the vast majority are excluded from India’s version of the American dream. As a former government minister Mani Shankar Ayar told Sebastian:
“We have a tiny elite that is obsessed with itself. If democracy doesn’t deliver for the rest—we could be heading for violence. We’re seeing a failure to bring 900 million people inside the system of entitlements. Without entitlements, you pick up the gun.”

A third of the country’s districts are now facing rural insurgencies spearheaded by the Maoist Naxalites. Is it not just a matter of time before violence spreads to major conurbations such as Delhi, home to 20 million people, many of them living on less than a dollar a day?

A visit to one of Delhi’s poorest quarters provides a glimmer of hope. The Nizamuddin district takes its name from the shrine of a holy man— Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya (1238–1325)—renowned for his religious inclusiveness, his commitment to the poor, his disdain for rulers, and a love of music and dance that set him apart from his more austere Muslim contemporaries. The shrine attracts visitors from all over the Islamic world, as well as non-Muslim devotees. It typifies the spiritual syncretism one finds in India, where the tombs of holy persons attract followers from all religions. Until recently this run-down area was crammed with rural migrants and pilgrims hoping to benefit spiritually from the Shaikh’s baraka (blessedness), or materially by taking odd-jobs serving other pilgrims.

With no serviceable toilets available for pilgrims, the ground beneath the pillars of the overhead metro railway that is now under construction (causing a huge disruption to Delhi’s burgeoning traffic) has become an open latrine, a magnet for flies and disease. Now the Aga Khan Foundation, in partnership with other NGOs and agencies, is rehabilitating the area in a major initiative with the municipal corporation of Delhi. Measures include the organized collection of refuse, the provision of public toilets managed by the community, where users are charged a small fee for cleaning and supervision, and the re-housing of squatters who had constructed precarious additions to the fourteenth-century baoli or stepwell—the water is reached by descending flights of steps—now being dredged and reconstituted using the latest radar technology.

The local government school in Nizamuddin has received a comprehensive make-over funded by the Aga Khan Foundation in collaboration with one of India’s oldest charities, the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. In addition to bright new classrooms, well-designed for children, a vital outcome of the project, the headmaster suggests, is the renovated toilet block with separate cubicles for girls and boys. In Delhi—as in rural Gujarat, where similar conditions prevail—school drop-out rates have been highest among girls. Purely cultural factors—such as the demands of mothers for domestic help—are partly responsible. But teachers and aid workers see the lack of toilets as the primary reason girls have not been attending school, since there is no private place where they can relieve themselves. A program for building school toilets in Gujarat I looked at several years ago has yielded not just improvements in family health and hygiene, but a marked increase in female school attendance. Fifteen of the girls who took part in the program—whereby the children themselves cleaned the toilets—were going on to higher education.

Since the introduction of the new toilets in the Nizamuddin school, female drop-out rates have declined dramatically: the ratio of girls to boys attending the school is now 55–45 percent. Living in London one takes the humble loo for granted. A fortnight in Delhi reveals its potential for kick-starting a social revolution.

Simon Keenlyside in the title role of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet at the Metropolitan Opera House, March 12, 2010 (Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera)

The new production of Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 Hamlet—the first time the Met has staged the work since 1897—brings to New York a revival first performed fourteen years ago in Geneva. It is an opera that has met with a fair amount of derision over the years, chiefly for its laughable original ending in which Hamlet finishes off Claudius and mounts triumphantly to the throne of Denmark. (The Met production substitutes a cobbled-together and not especially satisfying alternative in which, following an unexpected intrusion of the Ghost into the graveyard scene, the prince more appropriately dies. Perhaps, since no one would mistake Thomas’s Hamlet for Shakespeare’s anyway, it would make more sense to restore the original happy ending.)

Overall it is a production of intermittent pleasures, chiefly musical. On opening night a boorish claque resoundingly booed the conducting of Louis Langrée, who to my ears had (despite a few ragged horn passages at the outset) capably and often beautifully sustained the tone of the work, with its firmly anchored balance between resounding choruses, full-bodied and neatly delimited vocal trios, duets, and solos, and the delicate lyrical passages that serve as preludes and entr’actes. The continuity of the whole is finally more important than any particular highlight; Thomas’s music, if rarely inspired, extends with complete control the prescribed variants of a single vein. The only moment when I was genuinely startled was at hearing an unexpected modern sound in the fifth act music of the gravediggers, as if a bar or two of Kurt Weill had leaked into the 1860s.

Any sense of deep dramatic involvement was evoked more by the work of the orchestra and the singers than by the staging of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser. The production design centered around some large moveable walls that bore a disturbing resemblance to the room partitions frequently deployed at convention hotels, and the use of theatrical space seemed quite limited, very much horizontal and elongated, with only limited employment of depth, the singers often reduced to figures cast against big dark empty backdrops. The more frenzied moments (Hamlet pouring blood-red wine over himself at the end of the play scene, or running madly against a wall) seemed inadequate attempts to wrench the opera into a style at odds with its music.

It is admittedly hard to imagine a body language consonant with the stately four-square architecture of Thomas’s music, a body language that would not seem impossibly stilted and grandiose, but here the direction at times had a desperate quality, as if things needed to be modernized or livened up so as to keep the opera running. In fact it moves along very well on its own sonic gears, even if its pace might strike some contemporary listeners as ponderous or needlessly protracted. I was myself very pleased to be borne along, however unsurprisingly, on its pleasant underpinnings.

Where the directors did bring things to life was in the more intimate confrontations of the piece, notably in the second-act trio of Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet. Here was an object lesson in how to transform Shakespearean tragedy into walloping domestic melodrama, with Jennifer Larmore the driving force in her intensified rendering of a fear-wracked Gertrude. In this scene, as again in Gertrude’s third-act duet with Hamlet, the opera is like a chamber play in the French nineteenth-century style; it was not surprising to learn that Alexandre Dumas had a hand in the adaptation on which the librettists based their work. Instead of opening out into immense metaphysical or political perspectives, Thomas’s Hamlet narrows at its best into vigorously sketched emotional face-offs. For a moment you could almost imagine you were watching an opera based on one of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers set among the modern French haute bourgeoisie (while remembering that Chabrol himself indulged in his own Hamlet variation, the long-lost 1962 Ophelia).

The production is very much built around Simon Keenlyside’s quite stirring performance, beautifully sung (his diction was so clear that the lyrics could be understood without difficulty) and acted with an emotional expressiveness that sometimes made the music seem more subtle and ambiguous than it actually is (even when his costumes seemed designed to cast him, a little distractingly, as a trenchcoated Bogart surrogate). Marlis Petersen (replacing, more or less at the last moment, Natalie Dessay, who had sung the role elsewhere with Keenlyside) did full justice to Ophelia, a role requiring a great deal of fine singing but not much dramatic effectiveness.

For me the evening belonged—along with Keenlyside and Petersen and Larmore—above all to the much-maligned Ambroise Thomas. His score, widely characterized as mediocre and overlong, is a piece of machinery, but it’s machinery cast in an idiom whose pleasures are solid and consistently diffused, a matter not of flashes of inspiration but of unwavering attention. It’s an idiom that might be called industrial lyricism, evoking a world of firmly, none too subtly defined intentions and equally firmly defined limits, in which emotions are permitted to pour without restraint through channels carefully and sturdily built for that purpose.

In that light Ophelia’s mad scene can properly be appreciated as the enactment of an operatic convention, an analogue rather than a description of madness, a licensed, carefully circumscribed transgression. Perhaps such a scene can only assume its full meaning when imagined taking place at the Paris Opera in 1868. A work like the Hamlet of Ambroise Thomas cannot really be updated. It speaks with utter confidence the language of its moment. As we listen to it we are inevitably listening backwards.

Nick Brandt has been photographing the wild animals of East Africa for the past ten years; these images are from his new collection, A Shadow Falls, out now from Abrams.

“My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa,” Brandt has written. “They’re my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.” Brandt approaches his work in a manner unlike almost any other contemporary photographer of wildlife—not after the “dramatic single moment” of an animal in motion, he refuses to use a telephoto lens. Instead he prefers to get very close to his subjects, using a medium-format camera to photograph them “in the same way I would a human being, watching for the right ‘pose’ that hopefully will best capture his or her spirit.” In these portraits and panoramas we see elephants, zebras, giraffes, and other animals at rest, “in the state of being.” While there are no people in his photographs, Brandt’s introduction describes their impact on this parched landscape, where to provide water for their domesticated cattle, the Maasai depend on the same scarce resources that these wild animals need to survive.

A photograph from A Shadow Falls, showing a lioness feeding her cub, accompanies Tim Flannery’s review essay on animal behavior, “Getting to Know Them,” in the April 29 issue of The New York Review. For more about Brandt’s work, including his earlier collection, On This Earth, see www.nickbrandt.com.

Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke working on 2001: A Space Odyssey in Kubrick’s apartment in New York (from Moonwatcher’s Memoir by Dan Richter)

In the early 1960s, I wrote an appreciative essay for The New Yorker about the science fiction of Arthur Clarke. Not long after I got a letter from Clarke written from Sri Lanka where he lived. He told me that he was coming to New York in a few weeks and wanted to meet me. When we met, I asked him the purpose of his visit. His answer totally astonished me. “I am working on the son of Dr. Strangelove,” is what he said. The film had just come out and the first time I saw it I was so impressed that I sat through it a second time. “Stanley,” he said referring to Kubrick, “is a remarkable man. You should meet him.”

I told Clarke that nothing would please me more. Much to my amazement, the next day Clarke called to say that I was expected that afternoon at Kubrick’s apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a movie mogul and had no idea what to expect. But as soon as Kubrick opened the door I felt an immediate kindred spirit. He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light. I explained to him that according to the theory of relativity no information bearing signal could go faster. We conversed like that for about an hour when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go. “Why?” he asked, seeing no reason why a conversation that he was finding interesting should stop.

I told him I had a date with a chess hustler in Washington Square Park to play for money. Kubrick wanted the name. “Fred Duval” I said. Duval was a Haitian who claimed to be related to Francois Duvalier. I was absolutely positive that the name would mean nothing to Kubrick. His next remark nearly floored me. “Duval is a patzer,” is what he said. Unless you have been around chess players you cannot imagine what an insult this is. Moreover, Duval and I were playing just about even. What did that make me?

Kubrick explained that early in his career he too played chess for money in the park and that Duval was so weak that it was hardly worth playing him. I said that we should play some time and then left the apartment. I was quite sure that we would never play. I was wrong.

I wrote a Talk of the Town on my meeting with Kubrick, which he liked. I was thus emboldened to ask if I could write a full scale profile of him. He agreed but said that he was about to leave for London to begin production of what became 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still better, I thought: I could watch the making of the film. Our first meeting was at the Hotel Dorchester in London where he was temporarily living with his family. Kubrick brought out a chess set and beat me promptly. Then we played three more games and he beat me less promptly. But I won the fifth game!

Stanley Kubrick and George C. Scott playing chess on the set of Dr. Strangelove

Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001 we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. Finally we reached the 25th game and it was agreed that this would decide the matter. Well into the game he made a move that I was sure was a loser. He even clutched his stomach to show how upset he was. But it was a trap and I was promptly clobbered. “You didn’t know I could act too,” he remarked.

The scene now shifts to the spring of 1972. I was spending the year at Oxford, and spent some Sundays with the Kubricks. Our interest again turned to chess but this time it was with the imminent match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Iceland. One Sunday, Kubrick and I watched Fischer’s interview with Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes.” It was around the time of Fischer’s birthday and Wallace had come with a cake. “I don’t like that kind of cake,” Fischer said graciously. Then he told Wallace how he had learned to play chess. His older sister had taught him the moves. He soon began beating her so he spotted her pieces. Then he said that that no longer worked so he began playing with himself—Fischer vs. Fischer. “Mostly I won,” he commented with no trace of humor.

I expected a pleasant summer in Oxford reading about the match but one morning in May the phone rang in my office. The man on the line identified himself as the features editor of Playboy. He informed me that Hugh Heffner was interested in chess and had read my New Yorker profile of Kubrick. They had decided that I was the perfect person to write about the Fischer-Spassky match for Playboy. They would pay all my expenses and I would even have the American grandmaster Larry Evans at my disposal. It sounded too good to be true and, indeed, I had a problem. My writing for the New Yorker was not going down that well with my academic colleagues and writing for Playboy would be the last straw. He said not to worry I could use an assumed name. So I agreed. (I chose “Jay Amber”—“Bernstein” being the German for “Amber.”)

Much has been written about the match and I will only add a few personal recollections. Fischer got there the fourth of July, two days after the match had been scheduled to start. When the first game actually began on the eleventh, Spassky showed up on time but there was no Fischer. Finally, Fischer arrived, and quickly made it clear that he was much more concerned by a TV cameraman’s recording of the games than actually playing them. Indeed, after an incredibly bad move, he lost. Fischer then failed to appear at all for the second game, which he forfeited to go down two-zip.

That was about as good as it got for Spassky. Once Fischer actually began to play it was clear that Spassky had no chance. Fischer was in another league. There was a room at the tournament where grandmasters met to watch. They would predict Fischer’s next move and, more often than not, he would do something none of them had anticipated. A remarkable group of writers including Arthur Koestler and Harold Schonberg, who had played chess with Fischer and was the music critic of The New York Times, also turned up. We gathered in the lobby of the Hotel Loftleider to exchange stories and to catch an occasional glimpse of Fischer as he went off for midnight bowling.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey

When the match ended Schonberg predicted that Fischer would never play another. At the time I thought that Schonberg was surely wrong, but he wasn’t. The only match he ever did play was in 1992 when he played Spassky again, this time in Yugoslavia. Fischer won but the experts detected a decline in his game. He was succeeded as world champion first by Anatoly Karpov and then by Garry Kasparov, whose 1997 loss to the chess computer Deep Blue, had, in a sense, been predicted by Kubrick and Clarke decades earlier. In Kubrick’s 2001, before HAL 9000, the villainous computer, turns murderous, he roundly beats his human opponent, the astronaut Frank Poole, in a chess match.

For his part, Fischer spent the rest of his life a fugitive from both American and Japanese law. In 2005 he returned to Iceland, where he sought asylum. He was granted Icelandic citizenship and died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.

Gordon Brown; drawing by John Springs

Trying to follow the impending British general election from afar, I’ve been reading The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley, chief political commentator for the Observer. Eight hundred pages long, and crammed with “inside” political gossip (or credible intelligence, if you prefer), it’s a book as hard to admire as it is to put down. Though the text is bespattered with authenticating footnotes (many say no more than “Conversation, Cabinet minister”), it reads like airport fiction. Its flawed (and credible) hero is Tony Blair, its cardboard villain Gordon Brown.

The End of the Party seems to have gone to the printers in November 2009. The plot of the book then appeared unassailable. David Cameron’s Conservatives’ lead over Labour in the polls stood at twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty points, pointing to Brown’s humiliation in the 2010 election (which will almost certainly take place on May 6). The commentariat had appointed Cameron as Britain’s next prime minister, and Gordon Brown and his party were yesterday’s men.

But for the last few months and weeks, the polls have been tightening. The Conservatives are still ahead (averaging out polls over the last twenty days, the useful site UK Polling Report puts the Conservatives at 38 percent, Labour at 31 percent, and the Liberal Democrats at 19 percent). Because the Lib Dems have 63 seats in the present parliament, it’s going to be a far tougher battle than was predicted a few months ago for either the Conservatives or Labour to gain an overall majority. There’s now much talk of a hung parliament and a minority government working in coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.

There’s also talk—unthinkable when Rawnsley finished his gravedigging job for Brown’s corpse—of the no longer inconceivable possibility of a Labour victory. On March 25, Andy Beckett wrote a long and characteristically thoughtful piece in the Guardian titled “What Happens If Cameron Loses?”; on March 28, Matthew D’Ancona, the former editor of the Spectator, imagined Gordon Brown relishing his first morning after an election that returns him to Downing Street, while the Conservatives tear themselves apart in their search for David Cameron’s replacement.

The End of the Party begins in June 2001, at the start of Blair’s second term as prime minister, and ends with the closing ceremony at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on September 30 last year. The plot is a smooth tragic arc: the noble enterprise of New Labour, as it was conceived by the triumvirate of Blair, Brown, and Peter Mandelson in the early ’90s, is led to inevitable and “cataclysmic” defeat by the incompetence and odious character of Mr. Brown, whom Rawnsley represents as a jealous, secretive, foul-tempered, paranoid bully.

When attributing lines of dialogue to his characters, Rawnsley usually settles for the straightforward “X said,” but not in Brown’s case. Before each set of quote marks opens, we have to read, “Brown barked,” “Brown growled,” “Brown shouted,” “Brown yelled,” “Brown raged,” lest we forget the man’s an ogre. When Brown, as Chancellor, is resident at 11 Downing Street, and goes next door to visit Blair at No. 10, he doesn’t walk but “thunders” there. Such verbal abuse, inflicted by an author on a character, is liable to backfire, and, fifty pages into the book, Rawnsley had me rooting keenly for Gordon Brown. I’m in no position to judge what basis there is in fact for the multitude of allegations that Rawnsley makes against the prime minister, but many if not most of them sound like Blairite folklore and embellished hearsay, picked up from unnamed ministers, MPs, and civil servants.

Rawnsley’s portrait of Blair is often admiring, always forgiving and understanding. He writes about Blair’s most calamitous mistakes (not least his toadying to Bush as he dragged Britain into the Iraq war) with the solicitude of a Trollope following the progress of political heroes like Phineas Finn and Plantaganet Palliser. Where Blair lives in several dimensions in The End of the Party, Brown is flat on the page, an inert, repetitive cartoon whose sole function in the book is to scheme Blair’s downfall, then squander his precious legacy. Even Brown’s indisputable achievements, like his swift and decisive handling of the banking crisis, hailed by Paul Krugman in a Times column that began with the (unironic) question, “Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?” are grudgingly acknowledged and belittled. It is typical of Rawnsley’s style and method that he devotes a sour paragraph to the Krugman column, telling us that (a) he himself told Brown about it over the phone and (b) Brown ordered his office to distribute this flattering piece of news to the media within the hour. So it turns into yet another story of Brown’s intolerable egotism—a quality by no means lacking in his author.

The recent polls hardly suggest a revival of enthusiasm for Brown and Labour; they seem more to reflect a nationwide puzzlement over what Cameron’s “modernised” Toryism actually means. At last year’s Conservative party conference, his own loyalists appeared baffled when Cameron said such un-Toryish things as “Vote blue, go green” and “You could sum up my priorities in just three letters: NHS.” When Tony Blair came back to the campaign trail on March 30, he derided Cameron’s slogan, “Time For A Change” as “the most vacuous in politics,” which it surely is.

For me, the oddest aspect of the current polls is the relatively poor performance of the Lib Dems, who, under their then leader, Charles Kennedy, took 22 percent of the vote in the 2005 election. Since then, they have escaped largely unscathed from the great “expenses scandal” of last year, orchestrated by the Telegraph (which had obtained a bootleg disk of every MP’s claims under the Additional Costs Allowance), and which caused a media-led wave of public contempt for politicians, especially Labour and Conservative ones. Why haven’t the Lib Dems benefitted from this? They have an articulate, personable, youngish leader (Nick Clegg is 43) and their Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable, a professional economist, is widely admired across the country for his wit as well as for his grasp of fiscal policy. (Nearly everyone, including the studio audience, agreed that Cable handily won the first televised debate of the election.) On March 30, the Lib Dems unveiled their first election posters, advertising the Labservative party. Against a black background, the logos of the Tories and Labour, tree and rose, are merged; the party slogan is “For More of the Same.” Amusing as the posters are, I doubt if they’ll gain the Lib Dems many votes. Stuck at between 17 percent and 20 percent, they shouldn’t allow themselves to be seen as the jokers on the sidelines of a two-party election—although one new poll, published on April 1, and possibly an outlier, does suggest the Lib Dems may after all be on the rise.

Meanwhile Andrew Rawnsley, a jealous author, whose deterministic plot is now threatening to unravel, continues his assault on Brown’s character in his weekly columns for the Observer.

Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour (Viking, 2010)

Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, March 6, 2010 (Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images)

The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church. Now is the time to challenge that requirement. From the United States to Ireland to Germany, the widespread abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic priests has done enormous damage to the image of the church. It also reveals the depth of the crisis. In Germany Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, speaking as chairman of the Conference of German Bishops, has made a public statement on behalf of the Church. His declaration that the cases of abuse were “heinous crimes”—together with the bishops’ statement of February 25, 2010, asking forgiveness from all the victims—are first steps toward dealing with the crisis. But much more must be done. Zollitsch’s statement, moreover, contains serious misrepresentations that need to be challenged.

Consider his first claim: sexual abuse by priests has nothing to do with celibacy. Objection! Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).

During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and—outside the Roman Catholic Church—remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.

The second claim by Archbishop Zollitsch: it is “completely false” to trace the cases of abuse to defects in the structure of the church. Objection! The rule of celibacy did not exist during Christianity’s first millennium. Under the influence of monks (who lived in voluntary abstinence) it was instituted in the Western Church during the eleventh century, in particular by Pope Gregory VII, against the staunch opposition of the clergy in Italy and especially in Germany. Only three German bishops dared to promulgate the decree from Rome; thousands of priests protested it. In a petition at the time, the German clergy asked rhetorically whether the pope was “unfamiliar with the word of the Lord: ‘He that is able to receive it, let him receive it?’” (Matthew 19:12). In this, his only statement on the question, Jesus advocates voluntary abstinence.

Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.

What would be the best way to attract more young people to the priesthood? Abolish the rule of celibacy, the root of the whole problem, and allow the ordination of women. The bishops know this and should have the courage to say it out loud. They would have the vast majority of Catholics behind them. All recent polls show that the laity favor allowing priests to marry.

Third claim: the bishops have assumed adequate responsibility for the problem. It is of course welcome news that serious measures are now being taken to educate Catholics about sexual abuse and prevent it in the future. But are not the bishops themselves to blame for decades of concealment and the frequent transfer of perpetrators to other parishes while keeping their deeds a closely-held secret? Should the former concealers now be solely entrusted with the task of enlightenment? Ought not independent commissions be installed?

Up to now, the bishops have not admitted any personal complicity. They have been able to protest that they were merely following directives from Rome. And it is a fact that in order to maintain absolute confidentiality, the secretive Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith assumed jurisdiction over all important cases of clerical sexual abuse. Between 1981 and 2005, those cases landed on the desk of the Congregation’s prefect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. As late as May 18, 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a formal letter concerning these serious offenses (“Epistula de delictis gravioribus”) to all bishops of the Catholic Church. The letter declared that cases of abuse had been placed under “papal secrecy” (“secretum Pontificium”), violation of which is punishable under canon law.

Doesn’t the church have the right to expect a “mea culpa” from the pope and his colleagues the bishops? As reparation for the abuse that has taken place, shouldn’t free and open discussion of the rule of celibacy, forbidden at the Second Vatican Council, now be allowed? The same frankness at long last being applied to the cases of abuse themselves must also be permitted in discussion of one of their essential structural causes: the rule of celibacy. The bishops need to muster the courage to urge this emphatically on Pope Benedict XVI.

—Translated by David Dollenmayer

New Yorkers currently have two large exhibitions with which to take the pulse of contemporary art, and neither shows the patient feeling altogether well. At the Whitney Biennial, this time around presenting many videos along with paintings, installations, and artists’ collaboratives performing music, the spirit is retiring, docile, and a little like spending an afternoon at some lackluster shows in Chelsea.

There are some veterans on hand—the minimalist sculptor Robert Grosvenor, the whizbang figurative painter George Condo, and James Casebere, who photographs tabletop models of buildings and interiors he first makes by hand; but they aren’t seen at their best. And while there are a number of engaging works, especially videos (which I will come back to), one takes in what feel like inevitable Biennial items: abstract paintings of a monkish austerity, a sofa upholstered with newspaper clippings about current politics, a photo display showing how alike Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire were (maybe you knew this already).

At the New Museum, on the other hand, which has been given over to “Skin Fruit,” the title of a selection of works from the collection of the Athens-based Dakis Joannou—he has been acquiring art since 1985—the message is raucous, almost assaultive. In the crowded and vivid show, which has been organized by the artist Jeff Koons (who has chosen one of his own works for inclusion), our chief impression is of large, sometimes overbearing, figurative sculptures. The scariest, Roberto Cuoghi’s Pazuzu, a takeoff on Assyrian art, is some twenty feet high. More specifically, Joannou’s collection tends to show the human body as a tarnished or humiliated survivor—and not in an abject spirit but with a certain glee. This is an exhibition where pieces such as Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix, a performance art reenactment of the Crucifixion, and David Altmejd’s The Giant, which gives us, in effect, Michelangelo’s David as it might appear after some futuristic cyclone, are right at home.

There are sweet surprises, particularly Christiana Soulou’s delicate pencil drawings of women, and we are given the chance to brush up on work by a number of by now well-known and esteemed figures, including Cindy Sherman, Charles Ray, Robert Gober, Chris Ofili, and Kiki Smith. But either their voices are lost in the din, or else their own feeling for the gruesome (in Sherman’s case), or for a kind of Gothic woe (in Smith’s case), or for showing innocuous items—like kitchen sinks—gone creepily wrong (in Gober’s case) blends in all too well with the show’s essentially Expressionistic, and overinsistent, way of saying “We are all damaged goods.”

Muted as the Whitney Biennial is (it could use some Expressionism), it offers a few pieces that made sharp impressions, if only because they presented artists I was unfamiliar with or, maybe more importantly, were occasionally funny, an element in short supply in Joannou’s choices.

A still from Alex Hubbard: Annotated Plans for an Evacuation, 2009
(Gaga Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo, and Maccarone Inc., New York)

Alex Hubbard’s Annotated Plans for an Evacuation, for example, a video of a fellow doing various inane things to a car, has a winning comic pointlessness. On a Ford outfitted with a sail-like board on its roof, he slathers the hubcaps with plaster, mucks up the windows, takes a drive, stops, tries to balance oil drums on the trunk, and the story is over. It is as if the silent film comedians, who also industriously went nowhere, and William Wegman, who, in his videos from the 1970s, might demonstrate how something didn’t work, were adding a crazed fellow traveler to their ranks.

In Marianne Vitale’s video Patron, in which the artist, speaking from a TV-size screen, harangues us about a movement called Neutralism, we are again unprepared for the comedy. Vitale is every high-flying drill sergeant, angry feminist, or despotic chef-owner in one; everything in her manner has the force of a demand or a threat except that what she is saying is amusingly nonsensical. Both her and Hubbard’s videos are punctuated with little edits along the way, which come across like twitches and make the pieces seem speedier, another plus.

Dawn Clements: Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1945), detail

Dawn Clements’s Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1945), however, an awkwardly titled, wall-size ballpoint drawing based on a little-known 1940s Hollywood melodrama, is one of a few works that need extra time to be deciphered. Recreating, in jumpily discontinuous form, the different living room scenes in this “woman’s picture,” which she drew while watching the movie on TV, Clements makes space itself twist and stretch, shatter and regroup. We seem to see, following along, the way a memory or thought comes haltingly to life.

2010: The Whitney Biennial, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, is on view through May 30. Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, an exhibition at the New Museum, New York City, is on view through June 6.

Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009

A long time ago—less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead…. Where was I?

Oh yes. A long time ago, back in June of 2009, when we were planning the launch of The Year of the Flood and I was building a Web site for it. Why was I doing this building, rather than the publishers? Well, they had their own sites, and I wanted to do some non-publishing things on mine, such as raise awareness of rare-bird vulnerability and heighten Virtuous Coffee Consumption (Arabica, shade-grown, doesn’t kill birds) and blog the seven-country dramatic-and-musical book tour we were about to do. Anyway, the publishers were at that time hiding under rocks, as it was still the Great Financial Meltdown, not to mention the Horrid Tsunami of Electronic Book Transmission. “That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said. But it’s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth—or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button—you can’t take them back.

Anyway, there I was, back in 2009, building the site, with the aid of the jolly retainers over at Scott Thornley + Company. They were plying me with oatmeal cookies, showing me wonderful pictures, and telling me what to do. “You have to have a Twitter feed on your Web site,” they said. “A what?” I said, innocent as an egg unboiled. To paraphrase Wordsworth: What should I know of Twitter? I’d barely even heard of it. I thought it was for kiddies.

But nothing ventured, no brain drained. I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.

I was told I needed “followers.” These were people who would sign on to receive my messages, or “tweets,” whatever those might turn out to be. I hummed a few bars from “Mockingbird Hill”—Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee—and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator. He duly appeared in the form of media guru McLean Greaves, who loosed his carrier pigeons to four of his hundreds of Twitterbuddies; and with their aid, I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked.

One follower led to another, quite literally. The numbers snowballed in an alarming way, as I scrambled to keep up with the growing horde. Soon there were 32,000—no, wait, 33,000—no, 33,500… And before you could say LMAO (“Laughing My Ass Off,” as one Twitterpal informed me), I was sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole. And here I am.

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?

But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers—I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I’ve even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: “The ‘call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia’ badge.” It looks like this:

They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for “dold socks”—one of my typos—and “Thnax,” another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

They raise funds for charity via things like Twestival, they solicit donations for catastrophe victims, they send word of upcoming events, they exchange titles of books they like. Once in a while they’re naughty: I did get word of a fellow who’d made a key safe by hollowing out one of my books. (Big yuks from his pals, one of whom ratted him out to me and even sent a pic.) But after I threatened to put the Purple Cross-eyed Zozzle Curse on him, he assured me that no disrespect was intended. (He was forgiven.)

So what’s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.

How long will I go on doing this? I’m asked. Well, now. I can’t rightly say. How long—in no more than 140 characters—is “long”?

Former Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law attending a mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican, April 2, 2007 (Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

Rome is under siege these days. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, always willing to assume the role of martyr, continues to claim that everyone is out to get him: the Communists, pinko magistrates (called “red togas” in Roman parlance), and the Left in general. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, responding to the sudden torrent of sexual abuse allegations against the priesthood, says that everyone is out to get the Church and the Pope. Everywhere this spring, the open city seems to be sprouting new street barriers, or permanent guard posts, or at least a vanload of police.

Last summer, Berlusconi’s Roman residence, Palazzo Grazioli, was a party pavilion as porous to willing women as the White House proved to have been recently to the interloping Salahis. Now, however, the building looks more and more like the blinkered, bunkered US Embassy on the Via Veneto. The piazza behind Palazzo Grazioli used to be a parking lot, but recently the Prime Minister’s henchmen have set up a bulwark of concrete planters as if a car bomber were about to take aim (when the local traffic is mostly on foot, and consists of culture vultures bound for the glorious Doria Pamphilj Gallery next door, customers for the local library, and high school students from the nearby Liceo Visconti). The palazzo has always fronted on a bus stop—but this putative man of the people has kindly put an end to that public service. (The man has his own official residence, Palazzo Chigi, and there is no earthly reason that he has to live in this particular downtown palazzo; he just does, and expects the Eternal City to rearrange accordingly.)

Egyptian cat, Palazzo Grazioli

The guardians at the Prime Ministerial gate once scolded me for standing with my back to Palazzo Grazioli and telling students about the fifteenth-century structure it faces, perhaps because that building, Palazzo Venezia, once housed the headquarters of Benito Mussolini—did they suspect that I might have been drawing parallels? To this date, fortunately, the Carabinieri at the back entrance have yet to apprehend me for pointing out the ancient Egyptian cat on a rearward cornice, a relic of the ancient temple to Isis that stood on this site.

That shrine was built almost two thousand years ago by another resident of Rome who knew that everyone was out to get him: the Emperor Domitian, a man so paranoid that he faced the walls of his residence with mirror-like mica, and slept in a subterranean bedroom carved deep into the Palatine Hill—where he was slain by the Praetorian Guard in 96 AD. Paranoids, as we know, may have good reason to be afraid.

Pedophiles, meanwhile, as Cardinal Bertone and many of his colleagues have been observing with alacrity of late, crop up more frequently in the population at large than they do in Sancta Romana Ecclesia; ergo there is no pressing need at this particular moment to discuss longstanding Vatican policies like that of priestly celibacy. Saint Peter had a family, to be sure, but that was a very long time ago. Emperor Domitian was a mere babe in arms.

In fact, however, the Church’s pedophile scandal already began to generate a siege mentality here in Rome six years ago (if not much earlier, as recent revelations from Ireland, Germany, and the United States suggest), when the former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, took up residence in Rome as titular cardinal of the ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore after resigning from his position in the US, a step brought on by revelations of priestly abuse and his own reluctance to take action against it. The Cardinal’s new destination was no remote parish church; founded in the year 432, Santa Maria Maggiore was the first church dedicated in Rome to the Virgin Mary, and is one of the city’s four patriarchal basilicas—the most venerable and important of Rome’s four hundred-odd places of Christian worship.

Detail from the Magi Visiting Herod, fifth century, Santa Maria Maggiore

Santa Maria Maggiore sits dramatically atop a spur of the Esquiline Hill, its curved apse enhanced by a Baroque cascade of steps that sweep up to its two back doors. In the 1970s, those doors stood open all day, every day, welcoming flocks of faithful pilgrims and tourists into the ancient sanctuary, where one priest even advertised hearing confessions in Esperanto. That feeling is long gone. Aluminum barriers have blocked the steps for years in fear that drunks might loll on them, proving that a blocked staircase creates a noticeable aura of decay far more effectively than a staircase full of motley humanity creates a public nuisance. The back doors of the basilica have been out of use for so long that one formerly open rear entrance has become a storage area for stacks of plastic chairs—right next to the tomb of the great artist Gianlorenzo Bernini and right beneath the fifth-century mosaics (fifth-century—the Roman Empire still existed!) that show the Three Kings in striped outfits as jaunty as any Swiss Guard’s.

The front of Santa Maria Maggiore has acquired a more permanent barrier, a metal fence installed by Cardinal Law to keep the beggars (and perhaps not only the beggars) away from the basilica’s doors; this is the only church in Rome where I have ever heard a priest yell, really yell, in a full-throated snarl, at a gypsy who must have tried to come within the fence. The atmosphere of Santa Maria Maggiore, once so full of joyous mystery, ranges from merely oppressive to downright nasty. Perpetual masses blare out from the seventeenth-century Pauline Chapel, and well they might, considering the burden of atonement the place now bears. My students and I were once rushed into the basilica’s gift shop as the basilica’s guards shut the doors behind us; when I asked what was happening, the answer was “Ci passa una messa”—“a Mass is passing.” In other words, as we were able to determine later, the cardinal formed part of the procession, and he wanted no disturbance.

Most cardinals walk around Rome freely, as Cardinal Ratzinger did, visibly, until his election as Pope. Cardinal Law clearly cannot walk in peace inside his own basilica. On the other hand, however acutely he may be suffering his own kind of imprisonment within Santa Maria Maggiore, that is no reason, for his sins, to transform a place designed to mimic Heaven on earth into a vision of Purgatory for everyone else. At the very least, there must be a closet somewhere in that vast building that can hold a stack of plastic chairs. And he might note that Prime Minster Berlusconi’s barriers all sprout palm trees. A little shrubbery on the ramparts helps to mask the brute reality of their presence. Now, however, with stories spreading about the abuse by priests, without effective Vatican intervention, of 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin and of choir boys in Germany, shrubbery may not be enough.

Republica Portuguesa, a collage by Janet Malcolm, 6¼ x 17 in., 2003
(Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art)

I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.

Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.

Since one of the occupational hazards of journalism is the atrophying (from disuse) of the journalist’s powers of invention, the journalist who sets out to write an autobiography has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre. When one’s work has been all but done—as mine has been for over a quarter of a century—by one brilliant self-inventive collaborator after another, it isn’t easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room. It is particularly hard for someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room.

Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.

Preposterously premature acclaim has posited the London-based Iraqi Zaha Hadid (who turns sixty next Halloween but has yet to produce a body of built work commensurate with her hyperbolic reputation) as the world’s foremost female architect. Instead, that designation rightfully belongs to Denise Scott Brown, a truly towering figure in the modern history of the building art.

Scott Brown, who is nearly two decades Hadid’s senior, was long dismissed as a junior partner in the Philadelphia firm she heads with her husband, Robert Venturi, or reviled as a jumped-up feminist shrew. However, as she approaches her eightieth birthday next year, she has been having an easier time of it. Though the couple’s sophisticated melding of high Mannerism and pop culture rubs many patrons the wrong way, their Sainsbury Wing (1985–1991) for London’s National Gallery—the brilliant site planning of which is largely attributable to Scott Brown—has worn well. It has become as integral a part of its venerable vicinity as such nearby landmarks as William Gibbs’s St. Martin’s in the Fields (1721–1726) and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House (1619–1622).

Scott Brown recently saw the publication of Having Words, her provocative collection of writings from 1967 to 2009. Later this year, Bob and Denise, a documentary film produced by the couple’s only child, James Venturi, will be released. (Last year, the younger Venturi made a shorter feature, Saving Lieb House, which follows the removal of the eponymous seaside residence (1967–1969) designed by his parents from its original site on Long Beach Island, New Jersey to its new location in Glen Cove, New York, via a barge that memorably navigated the Atlantic coast, New York City’s waterways, and Long Island Sound.)

Scott Brown and Venturi’s Lieb House being moved from Long Beach Island, NJ to Glen Cove, NY, March 13, 2009 (Todd Sheridan)

Scott Brown is now being honored with two exhibitions and symposia on what many consider her central contribution to contemporary architectural thought—Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the illustrated polemic she wrote with her husband and their late associate, Steven Izenour. In 1965, two years before Scott Brown and Venturi married, she visited the Nevada gambling resort for the first time and was mesmerized by the dazzling electronic signage of the Las Vegas Strip, not only as a manifestation of American Pop vitality but also as an inspiration for a high-style architectural response to transformations of urban forms and planning practices imposed by the burgeoning car culture.

Scott Brown returned to Glitter Gulch the following year and took Venturi with her. In 1968 they taught a research and studio course at Yale School of Architecture that served as the template for Learning from Las Vegas. That publication incited outrage from the outset among those who saw it as glorification of the roadside vernacular at its most crass and vulgar.

The controversy has never subsided. Mirthless neo-Marxists have decried the book’s non-judgmental premise as acquiescence to the rampant commercialization of the public realm by laissez-faire capitalism, while prissy New Urbanists are equally appalled by departures from traditional practices they hope to restore to town planning. But the lingering notoriety of Learning from Las Vegas has also led to the rediscovery of Venturi and Scott Brown by a younger generation thanks particularly to the advocacy of Rem Koolhaas, whose value-neutral worldview owes a huge debt to the couple’s work in general and this text in specific.

Now, an exhibition about the book and the research that went into it, “Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” has opened at the Pacific Design Center branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (where a panel discussion will be held on April 11). The show was on view at Yale earlier this year, along with another exhibition, “What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown”. This January, Yale held a three-day scholarly conference, Architecture After Las Vegas, organized by the Swiss architectural historian Stanislaus von Moos, author of the two-volume Venturi and Scott Brown catalogue raisonné.

(Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc.)

One of the event’s most surprising revelations was that the first draft of the book was written by Venturi, even though the three authors collaborated closely on its content. For years it had been widely assumed that Scott Brown was principally responsible for Learning from Las Vegas. Several of the book’s hallmark concepts are certainly hers—especially the “duck,” which she defined as a building of willful sculptural effect diametrically opposed to the generic “decorated shed,” the “ugly and ordinary” prototype championed by her and her husband. For example, they see the boxy, vibrantly patterned Doge’s Palace in Venice as a paragon of the decorated shed, whereas its multi-domed next-door neighbor, St. Mark’s Basilica, qualifies as a duck.

Any doubts about Scott Brown’s credentials as a writer on a par with her surpassingly literate spouse—who wrote the classic Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)—are put to rest by Having Words. This physically modest paperback, not much larger than a Palm Pilot, is part of the AA Words series issued by the Architectural Association, the London alternative design academy where Scott Brown studied during the early Fifties.

“A Worm’s Eye View” (1984), her highly opinionated account of (inter alia) that city’s dynamic postwar architectural scene, is a valuable record of the creative ferment that made Britain a world center of innovative architectural thought, not least because of Alison and Peter Smithson, the husband-and-wife team who served as role models for the Venturis’ personal and professional partnership.

Along with a thoughtful post-Katrina disquisition on “What Should New Orleans Do?” (2005) the two most heartfelt essays in Having Words address Scott Brown’s struggle for recognition as a woman in her male-dominated profession. In 1967, she wrote “Planning the Powder Room,” her witty yet withering dissection of public restroom design for women. “There are some areas where, in the nature of our society, personal experience is impossible for the male architect, and feedback from the public unlikely,” she writes. “I have become convinced that the architect’s lack of personal experience and involvement in what he is planning constitutes a real problem here—the more so since I imagine he is unaware of it.”

She argues obliquely but forcefully that the conception of bathrooms and their fittings, which serve the most basic of functions—architectural as well as bodily—reflects the diminished status of women in public spaces. Anyone who has witnessed the disproportionately long lines outside men’s and women’s bathrooms at concert halls and theaters will understand why this topic provides such an apt metaphor for architectural misogyny.

More scathingly, “Sexism and the Star System” (1989) lays out Scott Brown’s account of the repeated indignities she has suffered even after her superior talent was established beyond question. Those who have deemed her a retributive whiner—something often maintained in the boy’s club atmosphere of the building profession’s innermost sanctums—are here refuted with a litany of slings and arrows far worse than had been imagined. She has certainly eased the way for a rising generation of women architects, among them Hadid, who will never know the trouble she’s seen. But Scott Brown nonetheless ends on this upbeat note. “I have been helped,” she writes,

by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose projects inspire us, have no problem in understanding my role. They are the sophisticates. Partly through them I gain heart and realize that, over the last twenty years, I have managed to do my work and, despite some sliding, to achieve my own self-respect.

“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown” will be showing at the Pacific Design Center branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art in West Hollywood through June 20. Denise Scott Brown’s Having Words was published by the Architectural Association, London, 2009.

Nuclear test “Smoky,” August 31, 1957, 5:30 a.m.

With the renewed interest in nuclear weapons I have been struck by how few people there still are who have seen one explode. There are a few survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there are a small number who witnessed some of the above ground test explosions. But the last American above-ground test was in 1962 and the last above-ground test by any country was conducted by the Chinese in 1980. This means that the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis—to say nothing of the Iranians and North Koreans—have never seen a nuclear explosion. In the main, this is a very good thing: the fallout from such a test is a real health hazard. But there is a downside. We have lost the experience of watching a nuclear explosion—perhaps the most powerful lesson about nuclear bombs there is.

In the spring of 1957, Kenneth Bainbridge, chairman of the physics department at Harvard, where I was finishing a two-year post-doctoral appointment, asked me if I would be interested in spending the summer at Los Alamos. I had no interest in working on nuclear weapons. But I had a great curiosity about Los Alamos, which was, at the time, a closed city surrounded by barbed wire. When I arrived I was assigned an office with Ken Johnson, who was also a Harvard postdoc. The weapons work seemed to be going on elsewhere; we were told nothing about it. I had an idea for a project in elementary particle physics but needed help to carry it out. Ken, who died a few years ago, was a very powerful mathematical physicist, so we worked on our problem.

My other activity was playing tennis on the Los Alamos cement courts. My partner was usually a senior physicist named Francis Low. Toward the end of August Francis said that he would not be available to play for the next week; he was going to Mercury, Nevada to watch some bomb tests, at the invitation of the head of the Theory Division, a Canadian named Carson Mark. I asked if there was any chance of my going too and on the morning of August 30, Francis, Carson, and I got into a light plane that flew from Los Alamos to Albuquerque and then by commercial airline to Las Vegas, which was about 65 miles from the test site.

My ignorance about how nuclear weapons actually worked was nearly total. I simply went where I was told to go, asking nothing. The plane was met by a government car that took us to a Las Vegas casino where we killed a couple of hours playing blackjack. Then we were driven to Mercury, an hour or so away, where we got a couple of hours of sleep. When Carson got us up it was still dark and quite chilly. He took us to a nearby meteorological station. Mercury had its own wind patterns, which were very important. If the fallout blew in the wrong direction it might irradiate Las Vegas. Then we went outside to a kind of concrete structure to await the test.

I recognized Al Peaslee, a Harvard graduate student, who had gone off to Los Alamos to work. Peaslee said that just after the explosion I should turn away for several seconds and put the smoked lenses I had been given over my eyes. He also said that I should expect the “shock wave.” I did not know what he meant. I learned from Peaslee that the bomb that was going to be tested was called “Smoky” and came from Edward Teller’s laboratory at Livermore. The Livermore devices were named after mountains while the Los Alamos bombs were named after scientists. That is all he told me.

The 700-foot shot tower for the “Smoky” test

In the distance I could see the tower, on top of which was the bomb. This tower was the tallest one that had ever been built for such a test, about two-thirds the height of the Empire State building. It had been deliberately placed in front of a bank of hills covered with Joshua Trees— so that the bomb’s effect on this kind of terrain could be studied. An alarm sounded and the countdown began. At zero there was an ungodly flash of light, which I could see reflected off the wall in front of me. I counted off a few seconds and turned around.

What I saw defies description. The photograph above gives some sense but not of the scale. At first there was no noise. Then came the shock wave that made a disagreeable click in my ears and finally the rolling thunder of the noise. The Joshua trees were aflame as if in some obscene pagan rite. The bomb had evaporated the tower. The fire ball rose and above it was a dark and very menacing radioactive column. It seemed to come towards us and I wondered if we should seek shelter. Above it was the mushroom cloud. We were all very silent when we returned to our bunkhouse for a little more sleep.

Sometime in mid-morning I heard the sound of helicopters. I recall saying to Carson without knowing the meaning, “They’re flying,” and his responding, “They’re flying and flying.” We had a bit of lunch and Carson took us on a visit around the site. The places where there had been explosions looked like the surface of the Moon, except that there were warning signs about the level of radioactivity. The first stop was at a five-hundred-foot tower where “Galileo,” a Los Alamos device, was being readied for the next morning’s test. There was an open lift that took us some feet below the platform on which Galileo had been placed. We had to climb a somewhat rickety ladder to get there. I remember looking down at the scrub desert somewhat anxiously until it occurred to me how ludicrous was this touch of acrophobia in comparison to approaching a bomb nearly as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

Carson did not explain where we were going next: a concrete building quite far away that was set in a bunker. He opened the door and inside on shelves were the interiors—the “pits”—of a vast array of nuclear weapons. Carson casually picked one off the shelf and handed it to me. It was about the size and weight of a bowling ball—a bowling ball made out of plutonium and, in this case, with an outer layer of beryllium. It was slightly warm to the touch from the radioactivity. In the middle of the room there was a table. On it was a pit and a man was gluing high explosives to the sphere. A woman was next to him knitting. It was an uncanny scene about which I understood little. The next morning we watched Galileo explode. This time I knew what to expect but the experience was still overwhelming. Then we returned to Los Alamos.

Over the years Francis, who died in 2007, said very little about our experiences watching these two explosions at Mercury, so I do not know how they affected him. I know how it affected me. I was never quite the same. I cannot think of nuclear weapons as an abstraction. I listen to debates on nuclear proliferation and wonder if these people really understand what they are debating.

Soldiers watching an explosion at the Nevada Test Site, November 1951

But I set out to learn, as the data became unclassified, about just what I had seen. Here is what I found out. Operation Plumbbob was a series of twenty nine tests nearly all above ground. They had begun on May 28, 1957 with “Boltzmann” and ended on October 5 that year with “Morgan.” The series, which was the most extensive ever done at Mercury, put 58.3 million curies of radio-iodine into the atmosphere. One-thousandth of a curie is what would be used in a liver scan. The radioactivity went all over the United States, with clusters in places like Maine. It is estimated that these tests caused some 38,000 thyroid cancers leading to about 2,000 deaths. The health burden of these tests put enough pressure—despite the protests of people like Edward Teller—to bring a halt to them. The same information can be gathered from an underground test witnessed only by mechanical devices.

It took some years before I understood the significance of the helicopters we heard that morning. In 1957, it was the height of the Cold War. The possibility of a ground war in Europe with the Soviet Union was taken very seriously. It was expected that a confrontation with the Soviets would go nuclear so troops were being trained for this eventuality. There were thousands at Mercury: fifteen hundred of them had been assembled about thirteen kilometers from ground zero of Smoky. By 6 a.m. they had been transported by helicopter to ground zero itself. They had very poor radiation monitors. This was to accustom them to nuclear war. Of these fifteen hundred soldiers some got leukemia and died.

Barack Obama; drawing by John Springs

The speed and certainty with which the conventional wisdom in Washington flips can be a comical thing to watch. A mere forty-eight hours ago, Barack Obama was a struggling president, even a likely one-termer. Today, in the wake of the House’s narrow passage of the health-reform bill—which is to say, on the strength of a grand total of four votes, which if cast the other way would have ensured reform’s defeat—he’s suddenly once again a political mastermind and one of the most consequential presidents of the last half-century!

I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the passage of health reform. It is certainly historic—the largest piece of progressive domestic legislation to become law in an astounding 45 years (since Medicare). Obama did place an immense amount of political capital at risk in recent days, speaking personally with more than 90 Democratic House members and rallying them Saturday with a fine and even brave speech in which he called on them to set electoral calculations to the side and do the right thing. Nancy Pelosi, a target of Republican jibes for so many years chiefly because she happens to be from San Francisco, proved herself a skillful leader who is clearly respected across the breadth of her caucus. Against the combined forces of Tea Party rage and hundreds of corporate millions invested in killing the bill, securing its passage was a formidable accomplishment.

But just as liberal despair in recent months was short-sighted and overwrought, the liberal euphoria of today is similarly worth examining, for three reasons.

First, the passage of the bill into law marks a beginning rather than an end. The law’s most conspicuous elements—the creation of the exchanges, the subsidies for coverage, the full range of new regulations governing insurance companies—won’t take effect until 2014. Even when they take effect, myriad complex questions of implementation will need sorting out. Whether the exchanges really work will depend, for example, on the success of “risk adjustment” policies, so that the plans offered in the exchanges won’t vary too greatly in terms of what they charge and offer consumers. There will be dozens of such questions to be answered by future bureaucrats, and inevitably, there will be misjudgments and unforeseen difficulties. The passage of this bill merely starts a health-care debate that will continue, at varying levels of ferocity, for years.

Second, there is the matter of the political consequences of this bill—and the way it was passed— for other Democratic initiatives. It is natural to think that a crucial legislative victory will embolden the winners to push ever onward, aiming their mighty sword at fresh targets. Progressives will certainly hope that this will be the case—with regard to, say, financial reform, or climate change legislation, or immigration reform. It seems to me that there are more reasons to think the opposite will be the case. This battle was so epic that legislators, an extremely cautious class by nature, will be loath to step into another fight like it.

Congress may tackle financial reform this year, since the bill has already progressed fairly far through the Senate (the House passed its version last December). But it seems likely that senators will try to avoid any health-care-style donnybrook. Other legislation of consequence will be put on hold until after the mid-term elections, and depending on how they go, the Democrats may not have the numbers necessary to do anything else of importance.

Which leads into my third reason for caution, the Republican Party. The GOP was determined to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo,” as Republican Senator Jim DeMint put it last year. That failed. But the party shows no signs yet of changing its approach. Here is what Mitt Romney—who as governor of Massachusetts signed into a law a health-care bill that is quite similar in spirit and letter to the one Obama is about to sign, and that, despite budget problems, is working out rather well so far—had to say about Sunday night’s vote:

America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation—rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.

He calls his accomplishment “historic”—in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process—he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in either chamber, bribed reluctant members of his own party, paid-off his union backers, scapegoated insurers, and justified his act with patently fraudulent accounting. What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, “what starts twisted, ends twisted.”

His health-care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.

The Republicans failed to block health care simply because the Democrats managed to get it through the Senate while they still had their super-majority of 60 votes. They no longer have that majority, and the near-term prospects of getting any Republicans to agree to work toward good-faith negotiation on anything seem remote (with the possible exception of climate change, on which South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham is supposedly committed to a solution; but on that issue, several Democrats, moderates and others from industrial states, are balking).

The broader partisan logjam will continue. This moment is very much worth savoring, but Obama was not the failure of last week’s conventional wisdom, and he is not the invincible conqueror of this week’s. The march remains a long one.

In “The Best Faces of the Enlightenment,” from the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Willibald Sauerländer writes about a new exhibition of the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom he calls “the last and probably greatest French sculptor of the eighteenth century.” In his works—a selection of which can be seen in this slide show—the “panegyric rhetoric of the baroque” and the “flounces and wigs of the rococo” give way to “an unadorned naturalism.” “Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sensuous Sculpture” was organized by the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, Germany, and is on view at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France, until June 27. It includes nineteen works by Houdon (1741–1828); it also includes works by some of his most important contemporaries, including Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Augustin Pajou, and Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne.