The Northeast is the classic case of a region suffering from self-inflicted wounds. In the year 2006, it was home to a smaller share of the U.S. population, and produced a smaller percentage of America's total value-added, than at any time in the nation's history. Why?

One big reason is that governments in the Northeast are about one-fifth more expensive than in the rest of America ($6,000 versus $5,000 of state spending per resident). An average-income family of four still saves $4,000 in lower income, property, sales taxes and fees by moving to just an average-tax state, and more like $6,000 a year by moving to, say, Florida. Since the Northeastern states tend to have highly progressive tax systems, the incentive to flee is even greater for higher-income earners.

Northeasterners complain disdainfully of the "war between the states" for jobs and businesses, and for good reason: They can't win. Southern and Western states are cherry-picking companies from the North Atlantic states. One Southern governor (who didn't want to be identified) recently told us his state had closed its economic development offices in Europe. "Why search for factories overseas when we can plunder high tax areas like Connecticut and New York?" he said.

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Auto and other manufacturing jobs are still being created in America -- but in Alabama, North Carolina and even Mississippi. It has to be infuriating to Northeasterners to learn that people and businesses are "trading up" by moving out of their region to the likes of Georgia and Alabama. But they are.

The states losing population are in effect suffering from a slow-motion version of the economic sclerosis that paralyzed much of Europe in the 1980s and '90s, particularly France and Germany with their massive welfare systems. At least the European socialist nations are finally starting to change their taxing and spending ways to win back jobs.

In 1982, I joined a bunch of my 13-year-old friends for a birthday party. We went to see a new movie, one we seemed certain to like. After all, it starred Harrison Ford, known to us as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, as a detective chasing down androids in a future world of vertiginous skyscrapers and flying cars.

As it turned out, I did like "Blade Runner," though the movie was considerably different than what I'd expected. There were gleaming skyscrapers and flying cars, but most of the movie took place either indoors or on crowded streets awash in rain and noise. Mr. Ford's character, Deckard, sure didn't seem much like Han or Indy: While he wasn't exactly the bad guy, he shot two women (one in the back) and spent much of the movie all but leveled by exhaustion, pain or both. Meanwhile, the villain -- Rutger Hauer's platinum-blonde replicant Batty -- wound up striking us as a sort of hero. In fact, the replicants seemed more caring, and more human, than the humans hunting them. For a 13-year-old it was at first confusing, then very interesting.

Now "Blade Runner" is back, in a recut, restored edition billed as director Ridley Scott's "final cut." Last week I watched the DVD, curious to see what changes had been made, if they'd improve a movie I vividly remembered in its original incarnation, and how the future imagined in "Blade Runner" holds up in an age of ubiquitous computing and communications.

Of course, "Blade Runner" never really left. It became a cult classic, appearing in a puzzling array of versions, and an Internet favorite. Not long after I first went online, I discovered newsgroup FAQs recounting the movie's troubled production, the tug-of-war between Mr. Scott and others over the story, and arguments about what the movie really "meant." I was fascinated: I hadn't known that Mr. Ford had disliked the movie, or that his Sam Spade voiceover and the oddly happy ending had been tacked on after test screenings. And I'd never seen the odd "unicorn scene" added in later releases, or read how it "proved" Deckard was also a replicant.

All this Net lore made "Blade Runner" a richer experience, but it was also frustrating: I wanted to see the movie I remembered again, but I wanted to see it the way Mr. Scott had intended it. That kept getting pushed off, though; for years Web chatter suggested a new edition would be on the way … soon.

Now, the wait is over and "Blade Runner" and I are at last reacquainted. The restored movie is beautiful, with superb sound, but I'd expected that. While it's possible the voiceover helped me get my bearings as a 13-year-old, I didn't miss it now -- particularly not in the film's powerful final minutes, with a battered Deckard left to ponder Batty's sacrifice in silence. I enjoyed following the clues about Deckard possibly being a replicant, and found the less-happy ending more satisfying. (Some of the continuity bloopers and special-effects flubs have also been cleaned up, and of course there are all manner of intriguing extras, from Mr. Scott's commentary to a exhaustive, occasionally exhausting warts-and-all documentary.)

How did the movie hold up for me? "Blade Runner" is set in Los Angeles in 2019, and some parts of that vision do now seem more derived from the early 1980s: Darryl Hannah's evil-doll replicant looks like she stepped out of first-wave MTV, Deckard wears a digital watch, and nobody has a cellphone.

And then there was one of my favorite scenes. Deckard uses a voice-activated computer to delve deep into a snapshot, zooming in until he finds the reflection of a face in a mirror in the background. It remains a startling piece of movie-making, one I often think about when working with high-resolution digital photos. But this time I found myself distracted. Why doesn't Deckard's software zoom in smoothly, like every program does today? This would be a real pain to use, I thought -- and was disappointed to think so.

But these are quibbles. I was still drawn in by the look and feel of "Blade Runner," slipping easily into the world it imagines. Yes, that world includes space colonies and attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. But we never see them, which is good -- because even in the best science fiction, everything from gadgetry to clothing typically strikes us as fantastic, and therefore fake. "Blade Runner" is different: We see a transformed but still-recognizable world, with odd but not-unfamiliar fashions, a familiar urban divide between conspicuous wealth and grinding poverty, and people trying to get by as best they can on crowded, chaotic streets.
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As a forerunner of cyberpunk, "Blade Runner" helped strip science fiction of starships and space wars, though it just pushes them offscreen instead of doing away with them entirely. (Another cyberpunk pioneer, William Gibson's "Neuromancer," also comes with the trappings of conventional sci-fi, with orbiting space stations and a self-aware supercomputer.) But "Blade Runner" also continues to speak to our hopes and fears. In 1982, it channeled fears of overpopulation and pollution, as well as American worries about Asia's rise. If some of those worries have subsided, new ones have replaced them: The weather has changed by 2019, and real animals have all but disappeared.

And the fear of being ceaselessly stifled and jostled and overwhelmed remains with us, though transferred from the real world to the virtual one. "Blade Runner" is full of noise and overrun by gadgetry, its buildings choked by the technological kudzu of advertisements and infrastructure. Yet peeking out amid the babble and clutter, we recognize things from our time -- old cars, photos, the books and piano in Deckard's apartment. They seem fragile and vulnerable, as if a few more rainy nights might leave them rotted and replaced, and we want desperately to hold onto them. Even without replicants or advertising zeppelins, that's a fear we've felt as well, watching with mingled excitement and anxiety as the digital age sweeps away old ways and familiar things.

Published on Monday, March 20, 2000 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Art Attack: Gene Stilp Uses Props And A Wicked Sense Of Humor To Focus Media Attention On Public Policy Issues
by Ralph Nader
 

Imagine a public interest artist using the town square as a canvas. Now comes Gene Stilp, a 49-year-old lawyer with a keen advocacy sense, a nose for news, and the creativity and skills to communicate a complicated public policy initiative with a prop that's guaranteed to generate media coverage and capture hearts and minds. Gene is more at home in the workshop than the courtroom.

Stilp's gallery includes some unusual works:

    A 30-foot ear of corn. This mutant vegetable greeted the participants at a Food and Drug Administration hearing on genetically modified foods in Washington, D.C. in late 1999. With about $400, Stilp and his activist associates assembled the enormous ear of corn out of chicken wire, 1,000 recycled milk cartons, and twine. The prop was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and a myriad of electronic and print sources throughout the country

    A 24-foot SUV. Stilp supplied the Public Interest Research Group with a 24-foot-long, 14-foot-high, 10-foot-wide inflatable SUV to help the group call attention to the gas-guzzling SUVs that are crowding the nations' highways. The SUV prop is hard for the media to avoid and it helps jolt the public into thinking about the consequences of wasting energy on oversized vehicles

    The Peco burnt-toast toaster. In 1998 the Pennsylvania state legislature debated electric deregulation. In order to call attention to a proposed bailout of the nuclear industry, Stilp refashioned a 1963 Airstream Trailer into a 20-foot-long, 12-foot-high toaster. Two 10-foot-long, 4-foot-high pieces of blackened toast were popping out. With the flick of a remote switch, smoke poured out of the top of the toaster to replicate burning toast. Signs adorning the toaster proclaimed, "Don't Get Burned By PECO."

Stilp has been a an outspoken activist for more than two decades on issues ranging from hunger to nuclear safety. He is always ready to help concerned citizens make their voices heard in the corridors of power.
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Stilp's motivation to build props stems from his desire to help groups that can't afford to buy television time or newspaper ads. Most Stilp creations start with a creative impulse followed by a quick trip to the hardware store or junkyard. With bailing wire and two-by-fours, he begins the job of making an issue move from the mimeograph machines of local and national activists to daily newspapers and evening news shows.

Capitalizing on the national attention generated every February by Groundhog Day, Stilp used Feb. 2 to launch the first official Global Warming Forecasting Ground Hog. With the U.S. Capitol as a backdrop, "Globbie," a small, but effective, groundhog sculpture, predicted adverse climate changes for the coming year.

The corrupting influence special-interest money has on politics is an important matter. Stilp's approach to this issue prompted him to spend about $200 to build a full-scale replica of the Lincoln Bed. (The Lincoln Bedroom was made notorious as a result of President Clinton's campaign contributors being offered a chance to sleep in the real Lincoln Bedroom in the White House.)

As the U.S. Congress gathered in Hershey, Pennsylvania for a "civility retreat" in 1997, they were greeted by the prop – with an attached meter that recorded donations for time spent in the bed. This prop focused attention on campaign finance reform and the congressional and presidential campaign finance abuse investigations, and resulted in national media coverage of the need for campaign finance reform.

Stilp was interviewed by a host of national correspondents while he lounged in the "Lincoln Bed." In the coming year, Stilp hopes to transform his lifelong passion for building props for causes into an enduring institution called the National Prop Shop. This nonprofit enterprise will help public interest groups make use of creative props and incorporate props into their campaign efforts. Stilp wants the activist community to use the National Prop Shop, but ultimately he would like to see every community have the ability to assemble local talent to build the props they might need to dramatize local issues.

People interested in contributing ideas, materials, or funds for this unique public institution should contact Stilp at The Prop Shop, 1550 FVCR, Harrisburg, PA 17112.
 

TEHRAN, Iran -- Russia is preparing to equip Iran with a powerful new air defense system that would dramatically increase its ability to repel an attack, Iran's defense minister said Wednesday.

The S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense system is capable of shooting down aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missile warheads at ranges of over 90 miles and at altitudes of about 90,000 feet. Russian military officials boast that its capabilities outstrip the U.S. Patriot missile system.

The S-300 is an improvement over the Tor-M1 air defense missile system. Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran this year under a $700 million contract signed in December 2005.

"The S-300 air defense system will be delivered to Iran on the basis of a contract signed with Russia in the past," Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said, according to state television.

Mr. Najjar didn't say when or how many of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense systems would be shipped to Iran, and Russian officials declined to comment.

The Tor-M1 is capable of hitting aerial targets flying at up to 20,000 feet.

"While Tor-M1 missiles can hit targets at low altitude, S-300 missile have an extraordinary performance against targets at high altitude," Mr. Najjar said.

Russian officials wouldn't comment on the Iranian statement. Russian officials have consistently denied they were selling the S-300 to Iran. Iranian media reports have claimed the S-300 missile systems could inflict significant damage to the U.S. or Israeli forces, were they to attack Iran.

The U.S. had said in the past that it would not rule out military action as a way to halt Iran's nuclear enrichment, claiming it was using it as cover for weapons development. But earlier this month, Washington reversed course, concluding in an intelligence assessment that Iran stopped direct work on creating nuclear arms in 2003 and that the program remained frozen through at least the middle of this year.

Israel says Iran remains a strong threat, but most analysts think any Israeli military operation is unlikely at this point.

Teams led by Mikhail Dmitriyev, head of the Russian Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, and Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, regarded as the father of Iran's missile program, held talks in Tehran this week on ways to step up defense cooperation.
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A military expert speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject said that the Russian team included experts who had installed the Tor-M1 in Iran.

Dmitriyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency Wednesday said air defense and radar systems were priorities in Russian-Iranian defense discussions.

Russia has provided Iran with Kilo-Class submarines, MIG and Sukhoi military planes and bombers in recent decades.

Iran-Russia ties increased after a visit here by Russian President Vladimir Putin in October.

Much of War and Peace is devoted to clearing away received ideas--the legacy of Napoleon, the excuse of war for moral atrocities, the elevating quality of Western ideals; and Tolstoy's style is designed to reduce a complex of sentiments rife with preconceptions to a powerful, moving, and finally rather raw feeling. This broaches another virtue of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation: the decision to keep all the French in Tolstoy's text. In Russian upper-class circles, especially in the early nineteenth century, French was entrenched as the language of culture and sophistication, following Catherine the Great's program of Westernization. Pushkin wrote his first poems in French, and an aristocrat would have been expected to be able to converse freely in the language. (Tolstoy's children were instructed to speak French at the dinner table.)

In War and Peace, French--the language in which, as Tolstoy observes, "our grandparents not only spoke but thought"--seems alternately like the Trojan Horse and the perfect symbol of liberalization and progress, a repository of both culture and illusion. The emblematic depiction of the unnatural influence of French comes when Pierre Bezukhov, feeling himself "occupying someone else's place," declares his bewildered, engineered love for the duplicitous Helene Kuragin of St. Petersburg. With the words "Je vous aime," he binds himself to a vast network of social falsehoods, and then spends most of the novel trying to extricate himself from them. The use of French also makes a significant socio-linguistic point, by marking the gap between the classes: as Napoleon's army advances on Moscow, the noble elite in Petersburg start to take private Russian lessons and charge each other forfeits for every French word spoken, and it becomes dangerous for the upper classes to greet each other in the street in Moscow, as they might be mistaken by the crowd for French spies. The supreme embodiment of French and all that it suggests is, of course, Napoleon himself, who is characterized by "the absence of the best and highest human qualities-- love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt." Self-serving, scornful of tradition, amoral, blinkered by ambition, Napoleon represents in Tolstoy's novel a moral and spiritual challenge to the novel's heroes--and, in a typical, ahistorical Tolstoyan put-down, the invading emperor speaks a bizarre mix of French and Russian.

 

Tolstoy's temperament evidently bristled at the existence of great men other than himself. He gradually quarreled with much of the Russian artistic world, nearly fought a duel with Turgenev over a minor disagreement, and flabbergasted Tchaikovsky by dismissing Beethoven as a minor artist. Years after War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote an article attempting even to annihilate the literary reputation of Shakespeare. When he was advanced in years, Tolstoy was held by many Russians to be one of Russia's "two czars," the first being the crowned sovereign Alexander II. And he was too large even for the infinite: as Gorky wrote in his memoir of Tolstoy, "With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relation of 'two bears in one den.'"

War and Peace is in part a demolition of the very idea of the "great man." History is so overwhelming, according to Tolstoy, because momentous events are the result of many factors--of so many factors that no single animating force behind them can ever be identified. The leviathan of history has causes for scales, and no one can count them all. The individual is inevitably swept up by a tide of causes beyond his or her abilities to comprehend, let alone to influence. And no single human being could possibly be the cause of something as vast as the Napoleonic campaigns, including Napoleon himself. In one sense, the deepest drama of War and Peace lies in the meeting between the self-contained universe of a single individual and the senseless and immense tide of historical events. This meeting, meaningless for history, leaves the individual shivering. As Mary McCarthy observed, "It could be said that the real plot of War and Peace is the struggle of the characters not to be immersed, engulfed, swallowed up by the landscape of fact and 'history' in which they, like all human beings, have been placed: freedom (the subjective) is in the fiction, and necessity is in the fact."

The purest evocation of an individual come face to face with history is in the battle of Schongraben, when Nikolai Rostov sees the French army advancing and thinks: "Who are they? Why are they running? Can it be they're running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?" Tolstoy's development of the problem of historical causation, in the later philosophical interludes produced during the three-year period of revision, could even be seen as an attempt at the novel's end to find answers for the questions that Nikolai asked at its beginning. But he did not find these answers; and there is a chilling and momentous echo of Rostov's baffled voice, many decades later, in Solzhenitsyn, who at the start of The Gulag Archipelago describes a man's incomprehension about his arrest by the secret police: "The darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience can gasp out only: 'Me? What for?'"

Yet the insignificance of the human, cosmically considered, is not all of the novel's wisdom. Alongside the book's illustrations of the blinkered perspectives of its people, War and Peace revels in the depiction of individual experience, internally coherent and inexhaustible, in the face of that same tide of history. The interior worlds of love and its dreams, of hunger, disappointment, spiritual unity, and the fear of death: Tolstoy reveals all of this, and the immediate impressions of his characters, however self-contained, often expand in significance to fill completely their perceptions. If there is a skeptical and abstract strain to Tolstoy's picture of human life in the novel, there is also a personal and ecstatic one. Each character stands at the center of his or her own universe, and much of the lifelike quality of Tolstoy's narrative stems from its sensitivity to the force of local sensations and desires. Amid the terrifying chaos of battle, a military doctor comes out of a tent carrying in his bloody hand a cigar "between the thumb and the little finger (so as not to stain it)."

And more, every personal universe appears limitless. In the famous scene on the battlefield of Austerlitz, the wounded Prince Andrei experiences his sweeping, almost mystical vision of the "infinite sky" all around him, and then sees Napoleon, the quintessential great man, and finds him inconsequential: "He knew that it was Napoleon--his hero--but at that moment, Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant man compared with what was now happening between his soul and this lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it." Napoleon cannot conceive of a world of which he is not the center, but neither can anyone else: Pierre, Nikolai, Natasha, and Princess Marya each experience moments of transcendence, visions of the world in its totality, encompassed by the individual soul and encompassing it. These moments are rarely shared between the characters themselves, and Tolstoy shows us not only how his characters glimpse the infinite, but also the relativity of their universal glimpses: where one sees infinity, another sees just the sky.
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Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and many others have referred to Tolstoy as a godlike author. If his message is in fact divine, Tolstoy's War and Peace might be compared with God's final words to his prophet Jonah, who desired to see the city of Nineveh destroyed for sinfulness, but fell into a rage at the destruction of a gourd that gave him shade: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in the night, and perished in a night: and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle." War and Peace can be read as a similar meditation on scale. If one man can ascend to the heavens of experience, and love, and err, and repent, and glimpse for a second the meaning of his own life, imagine the spiritual attainments of entire families, cities, and nations! Again the philosophical problems of complexity and causation seem to arise out of the local character of the narrative--out of its local infinities--as though Tolstoy in his philosophical chapters was coming at the same questions raised by the story in a different way. Of what is life composed, and toward what should it be directed when set against the world's immensity? Out of these perplexities arises not only Tolstoy's philosophy, but also his fiction.

In his introduction, Pevear paraphrases Isaac Babel as saying that "if the world could write, it would write like Tolstoy." In fact, Babel actually said that "When you read Tolstoy, it is the world writing, the variety of the world. " The life that Tolstoy portrays is forever a teeming multiplicity, and his secret is to imply even more life than that. Since the spiritual heights experienced by the main characters are so vivid, and since these characters are decidedly not great historical actors, the reader ends up believing that after the hussar mentioned in only a single sentence has ridden out of view, behind the tree line, he may go on to get rich, or to fall in love, or to see God--but no matter what, his life will continue. The passing, anonymous hussar's life beyond his appearance in this book could even be the subject of another book. It is one of the feats of Tolstoy's art that it makes mortal lives seem so autonomous and so unfathomed. And as in the Book of Jonah, the same is true for plants and animals: when, during the hunting scene, a wolf emerges from the woods and Tolstoy describes how he shudders "at the sight of human eyes, which he had probably never seen before," the entire existence of the animal flashes into view for a second. At times human life recedes into its cherished minor place in the background, and Tolstoy lets us glimpse all of nature, its animated whole.

The artistic recreation of life was among the means by which Tolstoy sought to identify the meaning of his own existence, creating in War and Peace a kind of laboratory for examining its elements and the forces acting on it. Like Pierre Bezukhov, the writer was always being consumed by a new passion, to which he intended to devote himself fully: he would become a diplomat with a degree in Oriental languages; he would marry a Cossack girl and live in an aoul like Olenin in The Cossacks; he would race horses with the Bashkirs in Samara; he would write works rivaling Homer and Shakespeare; he would be the patriarch of a great family; he would become a holy sage and teach the world the meaning of the Gospels; he would become a pilgrim and walk the earth in search of the Truth. In each of these soul-scenarios, Tolstoy saw a vision of another life, a life in which his own could be consummated and made sensible.

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After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced a religious crisis. Disillusioned with art and literature, he devoted himself to his study of the Gospels, out of which grew his once-notorious teachings of nonviolence and a churchless Christianity. At one point he intended to become a cobbler, taking private lessons from one of his tradesmen and making thick boots for his friends. (On receiving his pair, Tolstoy's friend Sukhotin put them on his bookshelf after the twelfth volume of Tolstoy's collected works, with a label that read "Volume XIII.") The vexation of his later work lies in part in Tolstoy's decision to trade complexity for simplicity and universal usefulness--in the feeling that he is attempting not to address the truth as he sees it, that he is somehow deliberately misplacing his powers. It is as though, regarding the question of what he actually believed, Tolstoy, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, "did his best to falsify the answer," and to convince the world of the strength of his faith just as it wavered more and more wildly. It worked: the popular image of Tolstoy is the one that appears in the famous photograph in which he stands next to Gorky at Yasnaya Polyana. Dressed in a heavy, rough peasant shirt tied with a thick leather belt, he stares at the camera, weary and wise, even holy, his streaming biblical beard so white that he seems to be dissolving into the snow-covered Russian landscape.

When Tolstoy was in the Caucasus as a young man, he heard the story of Hadji Murat, a famously brave and violent Avar warrior from Dagestan who decamped to the Russians in opposition to the Muslim cleric Shamil, and then betrayed the Russians, and died fighting against troops of both sides. Very late in life, having disavowed his previously literary works and become himself a destination for spiritual pilgrims, Tolstoy wrote his own account of Hadji Murat's story. At first glance, the story seems to take its cue from Homer, and Hadji Murat comes off as a latter-day Greek hero dying honorably on the field of battle. But there is more to it. The story is also a reflection on switching paths in search of the right one. In a strange way Hadji Murat is a kindred spirit of Pierre Bezukhov, both of them drawn now to one solution, now to another, examining by means of experience all the possibilities, especially the antithetical ones, zigzagging in the hope of discovering the correct choice.

When, in Tolstoy's story, a Russian general speaking at a military banquet about Hadji Murat says, in English, "All's well that ends well," the phrase has taken on a tragic irony absent from its early use as the working title for War and Peace. Hadji Murat dies a warrior's death, but he also fails in his attempt to rescue his family, pinned by the two opposing sides that he has equally betrayed. The story could be taken as an illustration of the impossibility of things "ending well," or even ending at all in the sense of reaching completion. For Tolstoy, what meaning there is lies in the attempt, not in the arrival. The lives of Pierre Bezukhov and Hadji Murat are exemplary for the ceaselessness of their flawed conversions and impassioned recalculations, all of them undertaken at the edge of what may be an abyss.

In 1910 Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana in spiritual despair, and died of pneumonia in transit, at the train station of a provincial town. In his last few days, he began dictating a letter to his English biographer and translator Aylmer Maude, but finished only the first half-sentence: "On my way to the place where I wished to be alone I was" The tragic irony that sounds over Pierre and Hadji Murat finally sounded over Tolstoy himself. Following the promptings of his soul toward an answer for the question that filled his world, he left thousands of pages in which we may recognize our own world, various, blossoming, and inconclusive.



 

A family drama of love and renunciation interspersed with several impressive military set pieces, Tolstoy's first draft ends after the battle of Borodino, rather like a problem play, with a double wedding at the Rostovs' estate attended by, among others, Prince Andrei and Petya Rostov. At the end of the final version, however, neither character has survived the battle. The writer's decision to depict their deaths was, along with the addition of numerous digressions on the philosophy of history, the central development of Tolstoy's three-year period of revisions, and enabled the transition to the sprawling meditation on happiness and causality in the final version of the novel.

Episodes and characters from the final version flash by in a few lines in the early draft, appearing suddenly and then dissolving into the crowd. In the old soldier who, marched to his execution outside of Moscow, remarks that "it's all the same in the end," we glimpse the beginnings of Platon Karataev, the peasant soldier who re-ignites Pierre's soul during his imprisonment by the French. Many of the elaborations seem to grow out of the increasing complexity of Tolstoy's philosophical positions. The transformation of Kutuzov into the massive, cautious, bear-like representative of the Russian military soul; the disquisition on the fluidity of partisan warfare; the pragmatic Platon Karataev--each echoes Tolstoy's growing sense of the inability to know anything fully, the impossibility of making reliable predictions or identifying true causes.

 
In an early scene depicting a strangely calm moment between the two overwhelming situations of war and peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, having reported to Prince Bagration just before the battle of Schongraben, passes a camp in which a sergeant is pouring vodka into the soldiers' canteen caps:

    The soldiers, with pious faces, brought the caps to their mouths, upended them, and, rinsing their mouths and wiping them on their greatcoat sleeves, walked away from the sergeant major with cheered faces. All the faces were as calm as though everything was happening not in view of the enemy, prior to an action in which at least half the division would be left on the field, but somewhere in their home country, in expectation of a peaceful stay.

Less than half a page later, Prince Andrei witnesses a man being whipped "crying out unnaturally" and sees

    a young officer, with an expression of perplexity and suffering on his face, walk[ing] away from the punished man, looking questioningly at the passing adjutant.

Finally, he rides along the frontline:

    Our line and the enemy's stood far from each other on the left and right flanks, but in the center, where the envoys had passed that morning, the lines came so close that the men could see each other's faces and talk to each other.

Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only one in which the word "face" is used to denote all the visages in this sequence, all five times, exactly as in the Russian text. Their version is especially admirable for its attention to such a feature of Tolstoy's style. The example may seem prosaic, but in fact it demonstrates a regular method of Tolstoy's novelistic composition. Such repetition heightens the effects of Tolstoy's battle scenes: conditions of hunger or unease over uncertain terrain, tides of morale and enthusiasm, and experiences of danger are all depicted by means of expressions on the faces of individuals. Soldiers are frequently sketched in this way--registered almost like an assemblage of colored diodes, which light up in different hues depending on their state: terror, triumph, piety, confusion, fervor.

In a typical reversal of the senses, Tolstoy describes Rostov's attempt to cross the field during the battle of Austerlitz: "Having drawn even with the infantry guards, he noticed that cannonballs were flying over and around them, not so much because he heard the sound of the cannon, but because he saw the uneasiness on the soldiers' faces, and on the officers' an unnatural military solemnity." This sort of observation, obliquely empirical and not reported directly by the senses, jars the reader into a fresh recollection of the humanity of the soldiers. For Tolstoy, humanity is contagious, and it is most readily transmitted through the face. At the end of the scene with Prince Andrei, laughter erupts when one of the Russians, considered an expert in French, speaks a few garbled phrases. With the soldiers close enough to see one another's faces, ironically at the very point of greatest tension, the battle seems ridiculous: "Peals of such healthy and merry guffawing came from among the soldiers that it crossed the line and involuntarily infected the French, after which it seemed they ought quickly to unload their guns, blow up their munitions, and all quickly go back home."

In their introduction to War and Peace: Original Version, Bromfield and Coates announce their decision to vary Tolstoy's repetitions "in the name of stylistic euphony," explaining that while the "hammering" effect works in Russian, English "abhors repetition of this kind." This seems to have been the view of many translators of the novel, and Pevear is right to note his predecessors' tendency in his own introduction. But such "euphony" is in fact a misrepresentation of Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's device of repeating one word many times in a single passage, or repeatedly employing an entire phrase word for word, is striking and jarring in the original Russian. The effect is deliberate: it is not that Tolstoy could not think of another word, but that he wanted us to be unable to think of another one.

Tolstoy's contemporaries criticized him for the repetitions, and implored him to clean up and harmonize his sentences. The writer Konstantin Leontiev suggested that Tolstoy "throw out of [War and Peace]" all the repetitions: "strange, strange, hands, hands, hastily, hastily, sob, sob, rich lip, rich lip." The repetitions in the novel's philosophical sections, as the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum pointed out, play a role similar to the repetitive digressions that mark new chapters of the Iliad, reinforcing the novel's epic quality. Tolstoy's repetitions have the ironic effect of linking him to both the highest and the lowest forms of literary language--to the Homeric and the homely. The repetitions additionally imbue the novel with a sense of what it may have been like to listen to Tolstoy speak, as in Gorky's observation that "one must have heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary, indefinable beauty of his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect, abounding in repetitions of the same word, saturated with village simplicity."

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Repetition is also a means of defamiliarization, the technique by which objects and situations are "made strange" and depicted with an unusual clarity, quite contrary to the way we habitually see (and thus do not genuinely see) them. "The very fact of repeating an item, repeating a word takes it out of line already and renders it strange," observed Viktor Shklovsky, the great Russian formalist critic who pioneered the concept of "estrangement" as an essential technique of literature, and who acknowledged Tolstoy as one of the masters of the device. War and Peace contains scene after scene in which the descriptions seem first counterintuitive and then revelatory: Natasha's trip to the opera, where the stage is shown as "painted pieces of cardboard on the sides representing trees, and canvas stretched over the boards at the back"; Pierre, dazed and intrigued, wandering through the crucial battle of Borodino in a white hat and green tailcoat, looking for the battle; Nikolai's fixation on Dolokhov's "broad-boned, reddish hands, with hair showing from under the cuffs," which appear to grow so large and monstrous that they completely dominate his impressions. Senses are shifted or apparently misattributed. War is rendered with images of peace, peace with images of war. Laughter erupts in moments of solemnity. Bullets whiz by "merrily." Prince Andrei waits outside the room where his son is being born and, hearing the baby crying, thinks to himself, "Why did they bring a baby there?" Again and again the world is seen, very suddenly, with the startling and unclouded truthfulness of Tolstoy's alien but earthly eye.

 

After they were married, Tolstoy and Sonya settled into family life on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana (the model for Otradnoe, the Rostov estate, in the novel), where Tolstoy had spent the first years of his life, and which he had inherited at the age of nineteen when the family property was divided between the five Tolstoy children, four brothers and a sister. Thanks to his marriage, Tolstoy experienced a dream of family life of a kind that he had never known as a child. He was only twenty-three months old when his mother died, and only nine at the death of his father, and by the time he began War and Peace he had lived through the death of his paternal grandmother, who cared for him after his parents, and of two of his brothers. Settled peacefully at home with Sonya, Tolstoy was able to work without interruptions for the first time in his life. This was in no small part owed to Sonya's abilities at managing the estate, running back and forth with a giant ring of keys, overseeing all the tasks, keeping distractions away from her husband.

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As early as 1856, Tolstoy had begun to contemplate a novel that would depict the return from Siberian exile of one of the Decembrists, a group of young idealistic noblemen, mostly army officers, who, having pursued Napoleon back to Paris after the campaign of 1812, returned to Russia to find its social inequality, and especially its institution of serfdom, unworthy in their eyes of the country's newly won military glory. The movement came to a head in 1825, on the eve of Czar Nicholas I's coronation, when its members revolted on the Palace Square in St. Petersburg. The revolt was suppressed, its leaders were hanged, and the remaining participants were sent into exile. Tolstoy originally planned a trilogy composed of three stand-alone but related novels: the first set in 1812, the year of the decisive Russian defeat of Napoleon; the second in 1825, the year of the Decembrist revolt; and the last in 1856, the year of the exile's return after the pardon announced by the new czar, Alexander II.

Vestiges of Tolstoy's original plan for the trilogy can be seen in War and Peace in Pierre's philosophical argument with Nikolai at the end of the novel, in which he employs what would have been recognized as Decembrist rhetoric. The reader's recognition of the political disaster awaiting Pierre, and most likely Prince Andrei's son Nikolenka, lends War and Peace a sense of dramatic irony somewhat like that of The Republic, in which the discussion is electrified by the reader's awareness that not long afterward Socrates will be imprisoned and executed.

 

After writing the first few chapters of the final volume, set in 1856, Tolstoy put the book aside and began to contemplate the earlier history of his character. He then jumped back in time, first to 1825, then to 1812, then to 1805--finding, like one of his hated historians, that the events were comprehensible only when they were related to what came before. But he could not go back indefinitely: in fixing upon this period, Tolstoy selected an age to which he was, through his parents and his grandparents, connected. Later, after completing War and Peace, he tried to write another historical novel, about the period of Peter the Great, but found himself unable to penetrate the heads of his protagonists, settling in the end on the theme of contemporary married life, out of which Anna Karenina took shape.

The decision to set the novel fifty years before the present also defied the literary fashion of the time, championed by Turgenev and Nekrasov, the editor of The Contemporary, which sought to fashion literature into a medium of social change addressing the injustices of its own day. By 1861, the serfs had been liberated by the decree of Alexander I, marking the end of an aristocratic lifestyle that had lasted for more than a century, and so Tolstoy's depiction in 1869 of the relationship between landowner and serf, particularly in the account of Nikolai Rostov at the end of the novel, was self-consciously anachronistic. For readers in our own time, the social world of War and Peace sometimes seems, especially in the terrible context of the revolutionary twentieth century, irreversibly remote, a distant pastoral dream of a life long ago lost; but it is worth remembering that even for Tolstoy the world portrayed in his novel was already gone, and almost mythical. In this sense, both the writing of this book and his life at Yasnaya Polyana were efforts to persist in a tradition that was showing clear and insistent signs of obsolescence.

Between 1863 and 1866, Tolstoy wrote and published the first few chapters in The Russian Herald, under the title "The Year 1805." Along the way the vast scope of the final version began to take shape, and Tolstoy's colossal ambition for the work is evident in an entry in his diary on September 30, 1865, written while composing the novel (Braddon is the English novelist Mrs. Braddon, and The Hunting Ground is an early work by Tolstoy):

    A novelist's poetry is contained (1) in the interest of the combination of events--Braddon, my Cossacks, my future work; (2) in the picture of manners and customs based on a historic event--The Odyssey, The Iliad, 1805; (3) in the beauty and cheerfulness of the situations--Pickwick, The Hunting Ground, and (4) in the characters of the people--Hamlet, my future works....

After the publication of the first several sections, Tolstoy continued his work on the novel, drafting the final chapters and planning at first to serialize the entire book. In a letter to the poet Afanasy Fet, Tolstoy wrote that he hoped to complete the whole book by 1867 (he actually finished two years later) and that the final version would be titled All's Well That End's Well. On Sonya's advice, Tolstoy decided not to serialize the final chapters, and so these sections did not appear until the complete book was published in 1869. For three years, Tolstoy wrote the last chapters of the final version of the novel and substantially revised the earlier chapters, most notably altering the plot to include the deaths of two of the central characters and adding the numerous discourses on the philosophy of history.

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War and Peace: Original Version is a translation of what is purportedly Tolstoy's first complete draft, beginning with the sections published in the Russian Herald, before the three-year period of revisions. In the 1980s the Russian scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur reconstructed the later chapters of this "original" draft from Tolstoy's notoriously indecipherable drafts, and published the version in an academic journal, including the variations on single lines and an elaborate apparatus of explanatory notes. In 2000, Igor Zakharov, an ex-philologist turned publisher, pruned the scholarly version of its notes and its variations, and "massaged" the text with elements of several different existing versions of the book, and published it as Tolstoy's original manuscript, purportedly unknown for decades: "half as long and twice as interesting," and without any of the intrusive philosophical meditations or incomprehensible French. The book was harshly criticized in the Russian press for its misleading presentation and its editorial methods. Upon hearing that his version would be translated into English, Zakharov reportedly declared that he "felt like Napoleon."

Although the "original version" is a far cry from the final version of the novel, Andrew Bromfield's translation is extremely good and has many beautiful moments, particularly in the descriptions of landscape. But the circumstances and the presentation of the book in its American incarnation are dubious. For a start, there are the three quotations on the back jacket from Woolf, Flaubert, and Mann, praising Tolstoy. But not one of them ever read the so-called original version, because Tolstoy never published it. Turgenev, on the other hand, who did read the first sections in the Russian Herald, called the book "positively bad, boring, and unsuccessful"; it was only later, after the publication of the complete novel, that he judged Tolstoy to be the greatest writer in Russia. The introduction to the "original version," by Bromfield and Jenefer Coates (who edited the volume), provides no clear account of how the book came into being, hinting only vaguely at the backstory of the Russian edition, and presenting itself more like a newly discovered director's cut than a scholarly supplement to a different and more significant text.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled sitting at the Café Lilas with the poet Evan Shipman and discussing the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace. "They say it can be improved on.... I'm sure it can although I don't know Russian," Shipman said. "But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over." Shipman was right, and most people who have read the novel in English would have agreed with him: despite the flaws in the translation, which may be numerous, War and Peace comes out as one of the great novels in any language.

Reading certain books in translation brings to mind Dante's encounter with Adam, the first man and the originator of language, who, enveloped in light, appeared like an animal moving inside a sack: you get a sense that something is trying to break out, something amazing, but it is all so muffled and tangled that it is impossible to make out what. In the case of War and Peace, the cat has always been out of the bag: Tolstoy's immense story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia has never awaited the final, saving translation that would at last reveal its previously inaccessible and infinite-hearted humanity. It was one of the greatest books from the start.

The new English version by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is wonderful, a milestone of translation--but it should be taken more like a newly restored 35mm print of a film, with brighter colors and sharper sound. The sights and sounds are meant to be spectacular in this version: the rustle of a white gauze dress during a waltz, the unnatural thud of a cannonball digging into the ground at Borodino, a troika race through the midnight snow at Christmas, the scar left on a soldier's face by a Turkish bayonet.

The novel is famously, almost impossibly, enormous. It feels like a cosmos unto itself, a complete ecosystem. The book is an entire library: within this volume is a dictionary of received Russian ideas of the nineteenth century, a study in psychosomatics (particularly as manifested in the human face), a pamphlet on historiography (with a supplemental treatise on the philosophy of history), an encyclopedia of Russian military regalia, and several albums of pictures, most notably showing the Russian landscape in all the seasons, and a series of portraits of the Russian aristocracy frontally and in profile.

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The action of War and Peace (action in this instance meaning almost the entirety of human life) centers on the fates of two families loosely based on Tolstoy's own ancestors--the impractical, soulful Rostovs, associated with Moscow, and the dignified, elegant Bolkonskys, associated with St. Petersburg (and both families with the countryside)--and depicts something like the transition from the generation of Tolstoy's grandparents to that of his parents, who are children at the start of the novel and adults in the midst of family life at its end. Borne on by the grand currents of the Napoleonic wars, the protagonists witness the Russian defeat at Austerlitz, the victory at Borodino, and the burning of Moscow; they catch glimpses of the adored Aleksandr I and of the reviled and admired Napoleon. At the same time they pursue ill-fated and later beautiful love affairs, lose money, dream of the future, act and react without thinking, and face death. They live in history but not by it, laughing off its minor catastrophes and trying to evade its major ones.

Unsatisfied by the distant accounts of historians and the imperfect reminiscences of individuals, Tolstoy chose to write the story of his origins himself, and War and Peace is in a sense a reconstruction of his family's world before his arrival in it. His grandfathers Ilya Andreivich Tolstoy and Nikolai Andrei-vich Volkonsky, whose portraits hung on the wall of his study, lent their features and qualities to Count Rostov (the lax charm, the generosity with money) and the elder Prince Bolkonsky (the severity, the discipline); and the figures of Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya are based on the writer's own parents. The two remaining male protagonists, Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov, appear to have been modeled on a single historical personage, but of a later generation: Leo Tolstoy himself.

 

According to his own account, Tolstoy "spent five years of ceaseless and exclusive labor, under the best conditions of life" writing War and Peace, from about 1863 to 1869, when the book was published in its entirety in six volumes. In September 1862, when he was thirty-four, Tolstoy had married the eighteen- year-old Sonya Behrs. She was the second of the three daughters of Lyubov Behrs, a childhood sweetheart of the writer, whom he had once pushed over a balcony in a jealous fit. By the time of their courtship, Tolstoy was already a literary celebrity, having published his autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, as well as his Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences during the campaign against the French in the Crimea, which appeared in the prestigious journal The Contemporary, founded by Pushkin. The young Sonya, who remembered meeting Tolstoy in his military uniform at the age of ten, knew entire passages from his books by heart and had copied out several lines from Childhood, which she hid as a charm under the waistband of her skirt.

Much of Natasha Rostov was perhaps modeled on Tanya Behrs, Sonya's youngest sister: her ability to dance in the Russian style, as Natasha does at Uncle's house in the forest; her singing voice; her dazzled reactions to a ball (Leo accompanied her to one). During one of her visits with the Tolstoys when Leo was writing War and Peace, Tanya suggested that her presence had become a nuisance, to which the writer reportedly replied: "Surely you don't suppose you are not paying for your keep? Why, you are posing for your portrait, my dear."

Before his marriage, Tolstoy had lived an alternately wild and secluded life, swinging between fits of physical desire and impassioned attempts at selfcontrol. Night after night he went out carousing with gypsies and--like Pierre early in War and Peace, in the company of the troublemakers Anatol Kuragin and Dolokhov--making trips to "***," the unnameable three-star establishment of nineteenth-century Russian prose. Following one of these visits, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Girls, silly music, girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls!" After a series of evenings like this one, he would return to his estate and castigate himself, and plan countless projects for self-improvement--music composition, gymnastics, a school for peasant children, religious devotion, literature.

Tolstoy's decision to travel with his brother Nicholas to the Caucasus, his first experience of military life, was in part an attempt to avoid the temptations of the city, particularly the thrill of gambling. He was a compulsive gambler, frequently signing promissory notes for his losses and writing in desperation to his brothers for assistance. At one point, fearing he would not have the money to pay off his debts, he was forced to dismantle and sell the central building of his ancestral home, which was reassembled twelve miles away and later completely demolished for firewood. He experienced firsthand the panicked sensation felt by Nikolai Rostov, during the game with Dolokhov, at the sudden and inexplicable loss of money he did not have.

In November 2003, an American socialite living in Hong Kong served her millionaire banker husband a drugged milkshake, bludgeoned him to death, wrapped him in a carpet, dumped him in a storage closet and then rang up a moving company.


Most commentators turn it into a parable about the evils of wealth.

The Kissels certainly had a lot of it. As a fresh New York University business school grad, he started off with a small investment house but soon jumped to Lazard Frères, where he made his name in "distressed debt," the business of buying up bankrupt companies, revamping them and reselling them. Later he landed a job at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. His timing was perfect. The Kissels moved to Asia just as a massive financial crisis hit and Rob's talents were most needed. He made a small mint.

Rob became "an investment banker, not a mere man," whose wealth was "never enough" -- hence the book's title. Rob enjoyed luxuries like single-malt scotches and fancy cigars. He took long business trips that kept him away from home which may have pushed Nancy away.

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Still, Rob was a loving father (the Kissels had three children) and apparently devoted to his marriage despite its increasingly dysfunctional character. Perhaps Rob was simply blinded by his passions -- hardly the first time that's happened to an overachiever. He met his wife on a nude beach at Club Med in the Turks and Caicos Islands and quipped: "I bet you'd look great with your clothes on." Nancy wa a "knock-out" blonde, a "full-breasted five foot four" woman with "shapely legs" and a "provocatively dirty mouth" who had dropped out of two colleges and ended up working at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Manhattan. They married in 1989.

In Hong Kong, Nancy let her Filipina maid do most of the parenting while she spent her days shopping at glitzy malls. When Rob asked her to stay in Hong Kong for another three years, she threatened to divorce him and badgered him into buying her a $2 million vacation home in Vermont. There she started an affair with a local television repairman, Michael Del Priore.

When Rob's marriage started to disintegrate and he found out about her affair, he bought spyware, hired a private detective, consulted friends and wrote poems. It was only just before his murder that he started to contemplate divorce seriously. Nancy, by contrast, didn't seem to enjoy any productive passions. Devoid of a steady career and uninterested in her children, she seems to have been corroded less by her wealth than by a chronic lack of purpose. Murdering Rob may have finally given her a project of sorts.

She carefully stockpiled milkshake-enhancing depressants such as Stilnox (also known as Ambien) and Rohypnol (the date-rape drug) from various doctors. And she ordered up the objects she would need once the job was done -- bleach powder to clean up; packing cartons, rope, packing tape, and polyethylene sheeting to wrap the body; and peppermint oil to cover the smell of domestic carnage.

Even after her arrest, Nancy remained obsessed with Mr. Del Priore and wrote to him regularly. For example: "Just got back from court . . . wow . . . what a day . . . [prosecutor Peter] Chapman's closing took only 3 hours . . . pretty pathetic . . . 75% of his closing was about you! . . . he based his entire closing on you and I premeditating to do . . . well . . . you know . . . I can't even write it it's so absurd." She has continued to write him from her jail cell at Hong Kong's Tai Lam Center for Women, where she is serving a life sentence.
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In an interview after the murder, Mr. Del Priore was described as "a not terribly bright, not terribly appealing human being." Sounds like a good description of Nancy, as rich as she was -- or as poor as she is now, and alone.

Population growth in several of the fastest-growing states is slowing -- in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, in particular -- in a trend both reflecting and fueling the housing-market malaise in those areas.

"This is our first chance to see what has been the migration impact of the housing-market slowdown, and it's showing up in these highflying states," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

 
•  The Census Shows: Growth in several of the fastest-growing states has slowed.
•  What It Reveals: Malaise in the housing market is changing the way Americans relocate.
•  Bottom Line: The West and South continue to gain residents from the Midwest and Northeast.
• Home-Price Declines Accelerate1

The Census Bureau's annual estimate of state population changes covers the 12 months that ended July 1. It shows that people continue to flee the Midwest -- especially Michigan, one of two states to lose people -- and that the Mountain states in the West continue to post large population gains as people arrive from California and elsewhere.

Arizona, Florida and Nevada are still among the fastest-growing states in the country, by percentage. Nevada saw an increase of 2.9%, or 72,955 people, tallying births, deaths and migration from inside and outside the U.S.

That was less than the previous year's 3.5% increase and lower than the 3%-plus growth rate for the six previous years. Arizona, the second-fastest-growing state, saw its population increase 2.8% in the most recent period, compared with a 3.6% rise in the previous year.

Florida, which has suffered heavily in the housing bust, saw the sharpest falloff in population growth. Florida grew 1.07%, slightly faster than the U.S. growth rate of 0.96%. During the year, 35,301 people moved to Florida from another state, 134,798 fewer than in the previous year. That is the slowest rate of domestic migration into Florida since at least 1990, the year the Census Bureau began publishing annual estimates of migration between states.

Pain in the manufacturing sector, especially auto manufacturing, continued to purge residents from the Midwest. Michigan lost 30,500 residents, a 0.3% decline. Ohio was essentially flat, gaining 3,404. Besides Michigan, the only state to lose population was Rhode Island.

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Broadly, people in the Northeast and Midwest continue to leave for the West and South. Utah and Idaho were the third- and fourth-fastest-growing states, respectively. Colorado and Wyoming were eighth and ninth, respectively. Both states saw their rate of growth increase.


Residents of California, on the other hand, continue to leave: In the most recent period, 263,035 people left California for another state. The state's 0.8% population growth was mostly because of births.

In the South, states including Georgia and North Carolina have taken the fast-growing mantle away from Florida, while Texas continues to suck up new residents. Georgia and North Carolina grew 2.17% and 2.16%, respectively. Texas grew 2.12%. Those states also are among the biggest gainers in absolute terms. Texas gained 496,751 residents, more than any other state. Georgia had the third-largest increase, with 202,670, and North Carolina was fifth, with 191,590.


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Following the exodus of residents after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana added about 50,000 people in the year to July 1. There is still a ways to go, though: From July 2005 to July 2006, the state lost about 220,000 residents.


 

Board gaming is a hobby that has always been dear to me. My interest in the field is wide, ranging from simple and straightforward “social” games such as the relatively recent “Carcassonne” to far more complex rule monstrosities like the 1990 Avalon Hill game “Republic of Rome”.

Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.

In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.

In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.

A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.


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On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.

Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.

Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.

Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.

Introduction

“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.

The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.

I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
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The game

“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).

Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!

“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
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How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
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While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.

My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.

Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.

These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.

All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.

If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.

The components

If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.

The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.

One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.

One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.

The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.

Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.

Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.

What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.

All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.

Longevity

One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?

Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.

I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.

“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.

Closing remarks

I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.

As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Availability and more information

Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.

As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.

March 16, 2007 -- For adults who suddenly collapse, CPR is more effective if rescuers focus on chest compression over mouth-to-mouth ventilation.

CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It's used on people whose hearts suddenly stop beating. Using this emergency technique, you can keep a person alive until professional help arrives.

Currently, CPR includes two techniques. The first is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the so-called breath of life. The other is chest compression: pushing down hard on a victim's chest, more than once a second, pressing it down at least an inch and a half before releasing.

A major reason why bystanders don't give CPR to people who suddenly collapse is reluctance to put their mouths on the mouth of a stricken person. That reason no longer exists.

Now, for adults who suddenly collapse, there's powerful evidence that chest compression alone is far better than doing nothing. In fact, the new evidence suggests that by interrupting lifesaving chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation may do more harm than good.
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Weeks before it is to begin, an ambitious American aid plan to counter militancy in Pakistan’s tribal areas is threatened by important unresolved questions about who will monitor the money and whether it could fall into the wrong hands, according to American and Pakistani officials and analysts familiar with the plan.

The disputes have left many skeptical that the $750 million five-year plan can succeed in competing for the allegiance of an estimated 400,000 young tribesmen in the restive tribal region, a mountainous swath of territory left destitute by British colonialists and ignored by successive Pakistani governments. Today, the Taliban, Al Qaeda and other foreign militants use the area as a base to fuel violence and instability in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan and to plot terrorist attacks abroad.

Critics of the aid plan say the region is rife with corruption, and even Pakistan’s own government has limited reach there. But the risk of leaving it isolated and undeveloped is greater than ever. This month, Bush administration officials acknowledged they were reviewing their Afghan war plans top to bottom.

The civilian aid program would provide jobs and schooling, build 600 miles of roads and improve literacy in an area where almost no women can read. It adds to the more than $1 billion in American military aid to Pakistan annually — much of which does not make its way to frontline Pakistani units, some American officials now acknowledge. The tribal area for which this new money is intended remains so unsafe that no senior American official has visited in the last nine months.

“My sense is they are ready to start, but who is going to be responsible for management?” said Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts, who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is one of several members of Congress who have begun pushing the State Department for details of how the civilian aid will be monitored. They said they had not received satisfactory answers. The importance of the issue, they said, was underlined by the scores of investigations into corruption connected with vast amounts of money and equipment for reconstruction and strengthening Iraq’s Army and police forces that cannot be accounted for.

“We’re not quite certain about it,” Mr. Tierney said. “I have concerns that it not be a repeat of situations in Iraq.”

In fact, wary of corruption and hamstrung by local hostility, American officials say that as in Iraq they will rely heavily on private contractors to administer the development aid, a decision that could eat up as much as half the budget. Other proposals, like training a civilian conservation corps., have yet to gain traction.
Louis J Sheehan

The matter that makes up everything we can see or touch, either on Earth or beyond, is exceedingly rare, cosmically speaking. Most of the material in the universe is something called dark matter, mysterious stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and doesn’t interact with what we think of as ordinary matter. It reveals its presence only by its gravitational effects, guiding the evolution of the early universe and still affecting the motion of galaxies. Earth-based experiments have attempted to detect dark matter particles, but so far they have drawn a blank.

Astronomers, however, have had a better year, continuing to find evidence of the crucial role dark matter plays in shaping the visible cosmos. Thanks to about a thousand hours of observation by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have compiled a dark matter map of a tiny slice of the sky, about two square degrees of the entire sky’s 40,000-square-degree span. The map, which was published in the journal Nature last January, confirmed a central prediction of modern astrophysics: Galaxies formed in, and remain bound to, enormous clouds of dark matter.

In the early universe, astronomers believe, dark matter provided the gravitational scaffolding on which ordinary matter coalesced and grew into galaxies. According to these dark matter theories, as the visible galaxies formed, some of the matter surrounding them should have clumped together into hundreds of small satellite galaxies, most of which should survive today. But the observed number of satellite galaxies is only a fraction of what the theory predicts. “We sho