The 6th Floor Blog: How to Read Like a Reporter Who Gets Behind the Scenes

Stephen Rodrick is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the making of the film "The Canyons," starring Lindsay Lohan and directed by Paul Schrader. HarperCollins will publish his first book, "The Magical Stranger," in May.

Book I'm reading now:

"All That Is," by James Salter.

I've spent much of the past three years writing about my father, who was a navy pilot killed off The Kitty Hawk when I was 13. I never got to talk with him about his flying, and Salter's memoir, "Burning the Days," served as a literary substitute. Salter was an Air Force pilot in the years immediately after World War II and spent much of 1952 flying missions over Korea. His take on flying is completely unromantic; he describes in painful detail the time he crashed a training plane into a house in Great Barrington, Mass., and remembers a squadron mate who bluffed his way into a fighter plane despite no training time in the particular aircraft. Since then, I've worked my way through most of his back catalog, filled with concise short stories and vivid travel writing, all written in the same manner: no melodrama, just beautiful sentences not about how things should be but how things really are. His new novel is centered on a Navy man turned book editor living in New York City in the last half of the past century. Salter is 87 and his book has an elegiac feel to it. I thought of Ted Williams, a Korean War pilot like Salter, as I read it. In one of his last interviews Williams said, "You gotta let go somewhere." He was talking about hitting, but it applies to writing and living too. If this is where Salter lets go, we should all be that lucky.

Last book I loved:

"The Misfits," by Arthur Miller and Serge Toubiana.

When I was writing about "The Canyons," this photography book was never far away. It became so much a part of the story that I can't remember who told me about it first, either the director Paul Schrader or Joanna Milter, one of the magazine's ace photo editors. "The Misfits" was the last film of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe; the director John Huston allowed a slew of photographers to swarm the set. Monroe was erratic and elusive, and the shoot in the Nevada desert dragged on endlessly. The book starts with a wonderful interview with Arthur Miller, the screenwriter of "The Misfits" and Marilyn's husband. If you want a primer on the creative process in all of its beauty and chaos, get this book.

Unread book on my night stand that gnaws at my conscience:

"The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected Music Writings," by Robert Forster.

I'll cheat a little here. I don't so much dread reading this as I'm rationing the book out for maximum pleasure. Forster and Grant McLennan were the creative geniuses behind the Go-Betweens, a critically acclaimed, poorly selling Australian band trafficking in what I call unpopular pop. Forster and McLennan went to college together, recorded nine albums and even wrote an unproduced screenplay before McLennan died at 48 in 2006. Forster was left wondering what to do with the rest of his life and answered with a great solo album, "The Evangelist," and by becoming one of Australia's greatest music critics, quite by accident. The opening essay about an elderly Glen Campbell ends with Forster's description of Campbell's cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" and is so moving that it makes me want the other essays to last a little longer.

Three books in my field I'd recommend:

Because my upcoming book is half-memoir about my family's struggles after my dad's crash and half-reportage following his old squadron as they deployed for missions over Afghanistan, I tried to keep perspective and humor among all the dross, and these three sort-of memoirs helped:

"Things the Grandchildren Should Know," by Mark Oliver Everett.

Everett is better known as E, the man behind Eels, a great L.A. band. This is a memoir less about music and more about his father, Hugh Everett III, a physicist partially credited with discovering string theory. Mark's dad lived his life in his head, and his relation with his son was distant, brought physically close only when a teenage Mark discovered his father's body, dead of a heart attack at 51. The book is about depression, realizing you're not as different from your parents as you think and giving yourself a break. Great stuff.

"Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War," by Alison Buckholtz.

America goes to war. Husband leaves. Wife is left with two small kids in a postcard town thousands of miles from family and friends. What happens next? A note-perfect account of what passes for normal in a military family.

"The Buddha of Suburbia," by Hanif Kureishi.

"My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost." Kureishi's first novel is a fictionalized memoir of a boy growing up in 1970s London, the son of an Englishwoman and an Indian immigrant who transforms himself from bureaucrat to a chanting new-age guru. Bell-bottoms and punk rock intervene. I came to writing fairly late and read this at 24, and it was one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Kureishi tricked me. He made it look easy.

A book I would recommend to anyone:

"Jerry Engels," by Thomas Rogers.

Described by Philip Roth as an American Evelyn Waugh, Rogers was a longtime Penn State professor who published "At the Shores" in 1980, which introduces us to Jerry Engels, a teenage boy in love with love. "Jerry Engels" starts up shortly after "At the Shores" ends, but it took Rogers nearly 25 years to write the sequel and find a publisher. Our boy hero is now a young man at State College in the 1950s, busy flunking out and seducing an English professor when he's not shimmying down drain pipes to elude irate third parties. Funniest book I've ever read.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Songs for the Week, Surpassingly Cool Edition

Wm. Ferguson creates "The Music They Made," an end-of-the-year tribute to musicians as part of our annual The Lives They Lived  Issue. Here he presents three songs you should listen to this week.

''Paris 1919,'' John Cale
I had the good luck last Saturday to see John Cale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing his 1973 album "Paris 1919." The few friends who actually know this record asked me how the show was with a hushed reverence, as if the answer could only be a beatific nod. I obliged with such a nod. (To the extent such a thing is possible over e-mail.)

The vogue for performing classic albums live is a great idea that would benefit from a standards committee. I mean, is it necessary to see the original members of Judas Priest, all in their 60s, do "British Steel" from start to finish? Surely there's a Judas Priest tribute band somewhere called British Steel that can do a credible and certainly more lithe rendition? Or maybe it would be enough just to blast "Living After Midnight" from a car stereo in a 7-Eleven parking lot and call it a day?

That is not the case for Cale, one of the coolest people on earth. Among his achievements: bluffed his way into a Leonard Bernstein scholarship at Tanglewood as a young man, where he studied under Yannis Xenakis; moved to New York, where he played with La Monte Young (and occasionally scored weed for him); founded the Velvet Underground. And all this happened before his woefully unheralded solo career, of which "Paris 1919″ is only one highlight. ("Fear," from 1974, is new wave a full three years before Television's "Marquee Moon" invents new wave.) Being in the presence of Cale is necessary.

Anyway, Cale is 71 this March, though he was by far the most virile presence onstage at BAM. He shared the stage with one of those hip orchestras with musicians who wear leather leggings and have good hair and who were also clearly out of their depth. But that's what maybe made it so great: The politely sawing violins trying to keep up with Cale's wrought-iron melodies, like gulls trailing an ocean liner.

Here's a clip of "Paris 1919″ from an earlier performance, at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.

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''I Would Be Your Slave,'' David Bowie

Bowie needs less setup than Cale and is equally surpassingly cool. But . . . It's been a while, Dave, hasn't it? Bowie released a new single last week, "Where Are We Now?" in advance of "The Next Day," his first album in 10 years. It's gorgeous and languid and a somewhat daring move as the first single, which is hearteningly Bowiesque. (The daring choice of single, I mean.) There's a video for it by the artist Tony Oursler — which I think is better in concept than in execution. But maybe that's a testament to how good the song is.

"Where Are We Now?" doesn't sound like any of the more beloved Bowie iterations — Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, Berlin Bowie. But it made me wonder, What are we supposed to call post-"Scary Monsters" Bowie? Would that be midperiod Bowie? Dave's lost years? It has been 20 years since "Black Tie White Noise," an album that no one fawns over as they do "Lodger" or "Hunky Dory." But there is great music in the recent Bowie catalog. I predict that bands forming in the next decade will revere "Heathen," from 2002. "I Would Be Your Slave" from that record has some of the fragility of "Where Are We Now?"

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''Hiccup,'' Buke and Gase

If you want to sound like no one else, it helps to play instruments that no one else has. Buke and Gase is the duo Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez. I'm fairly certain that Arone is the woman and Aron is the man, although I may have that backward. But it doesn't really matter because both are transfixing presences. I do know that the pair left Brooklyn for Hudson, N.Y., where they live some unimaginably bohemian life making their own instruments (buke=bass ukelele; gase=guitar/bass hybrid) and drinking Mexican hot chocolate at the cool cafe in Hudson. Buke and Gase play tonight at Bowery Ballroom; "Hiccup" is from the band's excellent new record "General Dome."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Books in the Sun

As a graphic designer for a print publication, I am heavily invested in the question of whether print will ever die. (No!) One way I reassure myself is by looking at the niche market of art books, which appears to be alive and well.

For example, the first L.A. Art Book Fair, which opens tomorrow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will feature hundreds of presses, booksellers, antiquarians, artists and independent publishers from 21 countries. The fair is being put on by the New York book store Printed Matter, which hosts the annual New York Art Book Fair (last year more than 20,000 people attended over three days to check out real books!).

So what's the point of moving this New York institution across the country?

For one, California has a rich history of conceptual artists working in book form. To me, the prototypical Californian artist book is Ed Ruscha's "Nine Swimming Pools," from 1968.

Adam O'Reilly from Printed Matter says that the fair will feature a "huge selection" of books by artists using the same format as Ruscha. (Other examples of his photography-driven publications include "Some Los Angeles Apartments" (1970), "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966) and "A Few Palm Trees" (1971).) O'Reilly's pick for a quintessentially "Californian" artist's book is "Life Size," by Sam Falls.

The book fair will also feature two California-themed editions commissioned by Printed Matter, one by the photographer David Benjamin Sherry, "Self-Portrait as Golden (Death Valley CA,)" and another by the artist Andrew Kuo, who has designed graphics for the Times Magazine.

Kuo's project, a print called "Reasons to Move to L.A.," provides metric visualizations of the relative merits of living in New York versus moving to Los Angeles. Among his reasons to move to Los Angeles, my favorites are "Finally spending time with Moby Dick (the audio version) while idling in traffic" and "If humans were meant to live in cold weather, we'd be covered in fur or hibernating."

Kuo says he was honored to make a print for Printed Matter, one of his favorite places, though he isn't really considering moving to Los Angeles. "The thought of never leaving New York is scary, but so is driving!"

The L.A. Art Book Fair boasts other West Coast touches like yoga studios alongside the fair's publishing symposiums, and an homage to the late Los Angeleno artist Mike Kelley. There will also be a Larry Clark pop-up shop, a project devoted to the California rare book dealer Steven Leiber and lots of international exhibitors, including Alec Soth's Little Brown Mushroom project from St. Paul, Minn.; Ed Varie Gallery, Swill Children and Aperture Foundation from New York; Art Metropole and Bad Day Magazine from Canada; and Frieze Magazine from London.

The L.A. Art Book Fair opens tomorrow and runs until Feb. 3. It is free and open to the public.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Opening a Sketchbook and Finding a Spark

Some photographs start with a sketch. Ina Jang, the photographer behind this past weekend's cover story on restitution for victims of child pornography, has been keeping sketchbooks since 2006. It was that year that Jan arrived in New York to study at the School of Visual Arts (Jang grew up in Seoul and later lived in Tokyo). She always draws in a black Moleskine, with a pen, never a pencil. It must be a Japanese pen, the Mitsubishi Uniball SIGNO, which has a very fine point. Jang buys them at Kinokuniya, a Japanese bookstore across from Bryant Park. If she doesn't have this pen with her, she doesn't draw.

Jang opened her sketchbooks for us to reveal the ways her drawings have informed her photography.

As part of her ongoing work dealing with themes of obscurity and identity, Jang began making images using tracing paper as a way of masking part of the identity of her subject, while at the same time letting some details come through. It was this work that led us to commission Jang to make this week's cover and inside opening photograph. We knew we wanted to make portraits of the women featured in the article without revealing their identities. We felt that Jang's sensibility would bring just the right combination of emotional power and graphic strength to the portraits, and at the same time protect their anonymity.

Below, a sketch and photograph that inspired the work Jang did for our article:

---

The inspiration for the drawing below came from seeing a woman with red hair standing on the Bedford L subway platform. Jang knew she wanted to make the picture about the red hair, so she added red yarn to elongate it.

---

The idea for the following sketch came when Jang saw two girls who looked alike. She knew she wanted to make a clean, simple image, for which she used four socks to connect the two girls. She found the blue wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

---

Jang drew this bird because she realized that she had written a sad entry on the last page of a journal and she wanted to lighten things up.

---

At this point, Jang was exploring notions of identity and anonymity in her work. She wanted to completely obscure someone's face, so she had this plywood cut into an oval shape to be held up as a mask.

---

Jang was exploring structures and patterns. The idea for a polka-dot floor with one erect polka dot rising from the sea of dots came to her mind. She knew from the start she wanted one black circle to be folded upward.

---

Here, Jang continued to work with obscuring certain elements in her images.

---

Jang made the sketch and photograph below for her first assignment for The Times Magazine. The grid of photographs was published on the table of contents of the Aug. 22, 2010, issue with the cover story "What Is it About 20-Somethings?" For that issue we asked a group of 13 young photographers, including Jang, to make photographs of 18-to-29-year-olds using an iPhone camera.

---

Jang acknowledged the recurring themes in her work. When I interviewed her, she said that she sometimes thinks she has a new idea, only to go back to an old journal and find that the idea was already there.

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It’s the Economy: Do Unions Have a Shot in the 21st Century?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

For 25 years, Monty Newcomb has worked at the same chemical plant in Calvert City, Ky., making products that hold pills together and remove sediment from beer. In his early years, Newcomb watched his union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, lose one battle after another in its ongoing struggle with management. In the '80s and '90s, workers throughout the country justifiably feared that their plants might close and move to a union-free state. Or that they might simply import products from low-wage, nonunionized countries like Mexico and China. Newcomb told me that at his company, International Specialty Products, workers were disgruntled and the work suffered — for example, more than 20 percent of one chemical they produced didn't pass inspection.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Organizing has been successful in some of the least likely industries.

2. But a world without unions is not hard to imagine.

3. And that could make our inequality problem much worse.

It's the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

As a union steward, Newcomb feared that unless something changed, the plant would shut down and everyone would lose his job. So in the mid-'90s, his union asked management to attend its High Performance Work Organization Partnership program, which was creating a revolution in labor-management relations. In addition to regular collective bargaining, union members and their managers engaged in trust-building exercises and developed plans to collaborate on improving conditions, products and profits. After a tough few years ("I mean really tough," Newcomb said), the union persuaded management to provide an incentive program and improve the pension and insurance plans. When management requested more efficiency, Newcomb helped them downsize not by firing workers but by not replacing retiring ones. These changes helped it thrive despite two recessions in a decade. And although the plant, now owned by Ashland Inc., currently exports about 50 percent of its product, it's keeping production in Kentucky, where it recently invested $15 million in upgrades. "We make things so much cheaper than anyplace now," Newcomb explained. Ninety-nine percent of that particularly pesky chemical now passes inspection.

For decades, the growth of technology and the global market has created an existential crisis for U.S. labor unions. While the country's manufacturing output continues to grow steadily, it no longer produces significant job growth. Factories compete against low-wage foreign labor by investing in automated machinery and implementing new techniques — like the aptly named Lean system, which focuses on efficient work flow — to make them far more productive. Since 2000, factories have shed more than five million jobs. Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that union membership is at a 97-year low of 11.3 percent.

Workers have obviously chafed at these job-shrinking strategies, but Matt Vidal, a labor sociologist at King's College London, told me that Lean actually works best for everyone (executives, employees, customers) when managers work with unions to preserve jobs and foster worker support. This tends to lead to more worker self-management. "In my research, it was clearly the case that the leanest factories I saw in the U.S. were largely union factories," he said. In 2010, Bob King, the president of the United Automobile Workers, embraced this when he called for a new age of union-management collaboration.

Collaboration, however, is definitely not the only technique being used to successfully combat the perceived existential threat. Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has become something of an organized-labor star by employing the old-school approach of unifying workers in distrust of rapacious managers in new ways. And his successes have come in unlikely places: vulnerable, often immigrant workers in low-skill, itinerant jobs. He recently organized the workers at five New York City carwashes and at a poultry plant in Alabama, a state particularly allergic to unions. "We don't argue to owners, 'We're doing this for your sake,' " he said. "We're not going to be the ones who say, 'We think you have to cut back on things to make your stockholders more profitable.' "

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Five-Ku: Haikus About Jason Statham

Correction Appended

While the world was scrambling to anoint the next big action hero — a crown that has rested, often uneasily, on the brows of everyone from Vin Diesel to Dwayne (the Rock) Johnson to Tayler Lautner to Chloe Moretz — Jason Statham sort of sneaked up on us. Or rather, he sneaked up on us wearing a Savile Row tailored suit, then snapped our necks, then said something charming in a Cockney accent. (British accent-ologists, feel free to correct me here.)

This recent appreciation of Statham by Andy Webster in The Times speculated that his new film, "Parker," might be the one that "finally pushes Mr. Statham into a Hollywood tier above his usual shoot-'em-up ghetto," a sentiment we agree with, though we'll confess we also spend a lot of time hanging out in the cinematic shoot-'em-up ghetto and kind of like it there.

That said, Webster's article is a great introduction to/endorsement of Statham, to which we can only add these five haikus, part of our ongoing series, Five-Ku, in which we celebrate famous people in haikus.

Enjoy — or, as Statham might say: "Enjoy" [Snap. Slump. Lights cigarette.]

Bruce Willis, Stanley
Tucci, Yul Brynner and now
Statham: Hot Bald Dudes

Statham! Eats modern
Namby-pambs like Pattinson
As snacks, between takes.

You really dove for
British national team? Once
12th in world? Statham!

No kids' films for you,
Unless film titled ''Bloke in
A Suit Who Kills Folks''

Statham! Your girlfriend
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Not haiku-friendly.

---

Correction: January 29, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the given name of a one of the stars of the ''Twilight Saga'' film series. He is Taylor Lautner, not Tyler.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Making Doughnuts in the Snow

Looking out our windows on the sixth floor of the Times building on Saturday, Kathy Ryan, our director of photography and resident Instagram fanatic, spotted this sight. She climbed to the 10th and 11th floors of the building to capture the image, which she posted to Instagram.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Opening a Sketchbook and Finding a Spark

Some photographs start with a sketch. Ina Jang, the photographer behind this past weekend's cover story on restitution for victims of child pornography, has been keeping sketchbooks since 2006. It was that year that Jan arrived in New York to study at the School of Visual Arts (Jang grew up in Seoul and later lived in Tokyo). She always draws in a black Moleskine, with a pen, never a pencil. It must be a Japanese pen, the Mitsubishi Uniball SIGNO, which has a very fine point. Jang buys them at Kinokuniya, a Japanese bookstore across from Bryant Park. If she doesn't have this pen with her, she doesn't draw.

Jang opened her sketchbooks for us to reveal the ways her drawings have informed her photography.

As part of her ongoing work dealing with themes of obscurity and identity, Jang began making images using tracing paper as a way of masking part of the identity of her subject, while at the same time letting some details come through. It was this work that led us to commission Jang to make this week's cover and inside opening photograph. We knew we wanted to make portraits of the women featured in the article without revealing their identities. We felt that Jang's sensibility would bring just the right combination of emotional power and graphic strength to the portraits, and at the same time protect their anonymity.

Below, a sketch and photograph that inspired the work Jang did for our article:

---

The inspiration for the drawing below came from seeing a woman with red hair standing on the Bedford L subway platform. Jang knew she wanted to make the picture about the red hair, so she added red yarn to elongate it.

---

The idea for the following sketch came when Jang saw two girls who looked alike. She knew she wanted to make a clean, simple image, for which she used four socks to connect the two girls. She found the blue wall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

---

Jang drew this bird because she realized that she had written a sad entry on the last page of a journal and she wanted to lighten things up.

---

At this point, Jang was exploring notions of identity and anonymity in her work. She wanted to completely obscure someone's face, so she had this plywood cut into an oval shape to be held up as a mask.

---

Jang was exploring structures and patterns. The idea for a polka-dot floor with one erect polka dot rising from the sea of dots came to her mind. She knew from the start she wanted one black circle to be folded upward.

---

Here, Jang continued to work with obscuring certain elements in her images.

---

Jang made the sketch and photograph below for her first assignment for The Times Magazine. The grid of photographs was published on the table of contents of the Aug. 22, 2010, issue with the cover story "What Is it About 20-Somethings?" For that issue we asked a group of 13 young photographers, including Jang, to make photographs of 18-to-29-year-olds using an iPhone camera.

---

Jang acknowledged the recurring themes in her work. When I interviewed her, she said that she sometimes thinks she has a new idea, only to go back to an old journal and find that the idea was already there.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

It’s the Economy: Do Unions Have a Shot in the 21st Century?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

For 25 years, Monty Newcomb has worked at the same chemical plant in Calvert City, Ky., making products that hold pills together and remove sediment from beer. In his early years, Newcomb watched his union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, lose one battle after another in its ongoing struggle with management. In the '80s and '90s, workers throughout the country justifiably feared that their plants might close and move to a union-free state. Or that they might simply import products from low-wage, nonunionized countries like Mexico and China. Newcomb told me that at his company, International Specialty Products, workers were disgruntled and the work suffered — for example, more than 20 percent of one chemical they produced didn't pass inspection.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Organizing has been successful in some of the least likely industries.

2. But a world without unions is not hard to imagine.

3. And that could make our inequality problem much worse.

It's the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

As a union steward, Newcomb feared that unless something changed, the plant would shut down and everyone would lose his job. So in the mid-'90s, his union asked management to attend its High Performance Work Organization Partnership program, which was creating a revolution in labor-management relations. In addition to regular collective bargaining, union members and their managers engaged in trust-building exercises and developed plans to collaborate on improving conditions, products and profits. After a tough few years ("I mean really tough," Newcomb said), the union persuaded management to provide an incentive program and improve the pension and insurance plans. When management requested more efficiency, Newcomb helped them downsize not by firing workers but by not replacing retiring ones. These changes helped it thrive despite two recessions in a decade. And although the plant, now owned by Ashland Inc., currently exports about 50 percent of its product, it's keeping production in Kentucky, where it recently invested $15 million in upgrades. "We make things so much cheaper than anyplace now," Newcomb explained. Ninety-nine percent of that particularly pesky chemical now passes inspection.

For decades, the growth of technology and the global market has created an existential crisis for U.S. labor unions. While the country's manufacturing output continues to grow steadily, it no longer produces significant job growth. Factories compete against low-wage foreign labor by investing in automated machinery and implementing new techniques — like the aptly named Lean system, which focuses on efficient work flow — to make them far more productive. Since 2000, factories have shed more than five million jobs. Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed that union membership is at a 97-year low of 11.3 percent.

Workers have obviously chafed at these job-shrinking strategies, but Matt Vidal, a labor sociologist at King's College London, told me that Lean actually works best for everyone (executives, employees, customers) when managers work with unions to preserve jobs and foster worker support. This tends to lead to more worker self-management. "In my research, it was clearly the case that the leanest factories I saw in the U.S. were largely union factories," he said. In 2010, Bob King, the president of the United Automobile Workers, embraced this when he called for a new age of union-management collaboration.

Collaboration, however, is definitely not the only technique being used to successfully combat the perceived existential threat. Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has become something of an organized-labor star by employing the old-school approach of unifying workers in distrust of rapacious managers in new ways. And his successes have come in unlikely places: vulnerable, often immigrant workers in low-skill, itinerant jobs. He recently organized the workers at five New York City carwashes and at a poultry plant in Alabama, a state particularly allergic to unions. "We don't argue to owners, 'We're doing this for your sake,' " he said. "We're not going to be the ones who say, 'We think you have to cut back on things to make your stockholders more profitable.' "

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.

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Stair Racing, a Sport to Make an Ironman Whimper

Stephen Ferry/Redux, for The New York Times

A runner climbs a 48-floor building in the Ascenso Torre Colpatria race in Bogotá, Colombia.

When you watch the video from the start of last February's Empire State Building Run-Up, an 86-story stair race, one man stands out. Thomas Dold, a 28-year-old German wearing Bib No. 1, is already a few inches ahead when the starting horn blasts. His shins are canting into a run, and with his left arm he's pushing at the chest of a runner to that side of him. A split second later, his right arm juts up to block more runners.

All around Dold, the racers are wincing, for what's coming is harsh. There are 1,576 steps ahead of them, 10 to 12 minutes of suffering. And before that, less than 10 yards from the start, there's a door to get through. It's standard size, 36 inches wide, and everyone, Dold especially, wants to be the first one there. The jockeying is desperate. In 2009, Suzy Walsham, an Australian, was shoved into the wall next to the door. "The impact was so great," she says, "that I initially thought I had broken my nose and lost teeth." She fell and was trampled before she rose and ran on to victory. "I get super nervous and anxious whenever I start" at the Empire State Building, says Walsham, who has won the women's division three times and will be one of about 650 competitors at this year's race, which takes place Feb. 6. "I really dread the start."

What the racers may dread even more, however, is the sight of Thomas Dold dashing up the stairs two at a time, yanking along on the railings. Dold has won Empire State (known as Esbru among the stair-racing community) a record seven consecutive times. He is the only person in the world who makes a living at stair racing (his sponsors include a German health care company), which makes him the lord of an obscure but nonetheless codified sport. According to the World Cup rankings on towerrunning.com, Dold finished 2012 in first place, with 1,158 points, 157 more than the runner-up, Piotr Lobodzinski of Poland. Four hundred of those points came from his victory at Esbru, tower racing's unofficial world championships, and its oldest contest, dating to 1978. Another 156 stair races, held in 25 nations, generate World Cup points as well.

Dold also sits atop the Vertical World Circuit, a championship tour of eight celebrated races — among them, Esbru — and he is a minor celebrity on YouTube. In one clip, you can see a smiling Dold sprinting stadium steps at a photo shoot for a print ad. In another video, from the Corrida Vertical, a 28-story dash in São Paulo, the announcer cracks, "A shortcut to win the race is break Dold's legs . . . or giving him some sleeping pills." Dold wins and, as he crosses the finish line, still running, peels off his plain white race jersey to reveal a sleek undershirt emblazoned with his Web address, run2sky.com.

In New York last year, Dold may have gotten away with a false start; the video is fairly incriminating. "I was moving before the start," he told me recently. But then, he said, he caught himself and stopped. So he was actually at a disadvantage, he said, "moving backward when the others are moving forward."

In interviews, Dold is chipper and exudes supreme confidence. "I can run backward faster than most people can run forward," he boasts. (He is in fact one of the world's premier backward runners, having completed a heels-first mile in 5:46, a world record.) At times, he lapses into the third person, like a major-sports star, or Donald Trump. "It's all about beating Dold," he told a German reporter not long ago, summing up the stair-racing world. "That's the goal for hundreds of participants."

Most of the important stair races happen in Europe and Asia. A tiny cadre of die-hards — roughly a dozen men and three or four women — travel the globe chasing minuscule cash prizes­. The largest single prize, in Taipei, is less than $7,000. Esbru offers no prize money. The race sites are often architecturally significant: the Messeturm tower in Basel; the Palazzo Lombardia in Milan; the Swissôtel in Singapore, designed by I. M. Pei. "There's something very elemental about climbing an iconic building," says Sproule Love, a New Yorker who has finished third at the Empire State Building three times. "You can survey the area and see how far you have come."

Still, the stair racers don't experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. "Some stairwells turn to the left," she said. "Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they're steep. And the number of floors always varies."

Walsham, who works in Singapore as a manager for a computer-security firm, spent about $12,000 traveling to races last year. In the United States, a small contingent of stair climbers are shelling out similar sums to get to the 100 or so American races offered each year. When I went to Los Angeles recently, for the 51-story Climb for Life race, I met Daniel Dill, who flew in from Texas, happy to pay the $50 entry fee and the requisite $100 donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for a race that would take him less than 13 minutes. Dill, a large man dressed in articulated-toe sneakers, brought with him a special warm-up tool, an Elevation Training Mask. It was designed for Mixed Martial Arts fighters, he said. "It's supposed to stimulate red blood cells and open up the lungs."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Jim Courier Wins Australian Open Again

As if the gutty, four-hour, five-set Australian Open semifinal today between Andy Murray and Roger Federer weren't enough to make East Coast tennis fans glad they woke up at 3:30 a.m. to watch it live, viewers who hung on to see Jim Courier's interview with Murray (scroll toward end of video) after his victory got an extra treat. Courier, who won the last of his four Grand Slam titles in Australia exactly 20 years ago, was a power baseliner as a player. As an interviewer, though, he's a crisp serve-and-volley man. His questions are brief and informed, and they encourage his subjects to actually say something, as opposed to the all-too-common inane sportscaster queries like "How big was that . . . ?" and "What does it mean to have . . . ?" Courier was overshadowed during his fine playing career by contemporaries like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, but as an on-court interviewer, he's almost unbeatable.

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Look: Popping Wheelies in Charm City

It's illegal to ride dirt bikes on the streets of Baltimore, which is part of the thrill for the young men who do so anyway, usually on Sunday afternoons, in a noisy display that city residents call both intimidating and thrilling. The Baltimore police are prohibited from pursuing the riders in high-speed chases, so they try to confiscate bikes and push for tougher punishment. Last November, a 23-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced to nearly six months in prison after two arrests for riding a dirt bike on city streets. Lotfy Nathan, who is directing a documentary about the bikers, called "The 12 O'Clock Boys," describes the rides as a form of escapism. "You can imagine a certain population who doesn't want to join the Boy Scouts," Nathan says. "A lot of them resort to this sort of street sport with a certain degree of celebrity status. In parts of the inner city, they are pretty highly regarded."

Estimated number of active dirt-bike riders in Baltimore: more than 100

Age of riders: about 13 to late 30s

Bikes and ATVs confiscated by the police last August: 15

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Stair Racing, a Sport to Make an Ironman Whimper

Stephen Ferry/Redux, for The New York Times

A runner climbs a 48-floor building in the Ascenso Torre Colpatria race in Bogotá, Colombia.

When you watch the video from the start of last February's Empire State Building Run-Up, an 86-story stair race, one man stands out. Thomas Dold, a 28-year-old German wearing Bib No. 1, is already a few inches ahead when the starting horn blasts. His shins are canting into a run, and with his left arm he's pushing at the chest of a runner to that side of him. A split second later, his right arm juts up to block more runners.

All around Dold, the racers are wincing, for what's coming is harsh. There are 1,576 steps ahead of them, 10 to 12 minutes of suffering. And before that, less than 10 yards from the start, there's a door to get through. It's standard size, 36 inches wide, and everyone, Dold especially, wants to be the first one there. The jockeying is desperate. In 2009, Suzy Walsham, an Australian, was shoved into the wall next to the door. "The impact was so great," she says, "that I initially thought I had broken my nose and lost teeth." She fell and was trampled before she rose and ran on to victory. "I get super nervous and anxious whenever I start" at the Empire State Building, says Walsham, who has won the women's division three times and will be one of about 650 competitors at this year's race, which takes place Feb. 6. "I really dread the start."

What the racers may dread even more, however, is the sight of Thomas Dold dashing up the stairs two at a time, yanking along on the railings. Dold has won Empire State (known as Esbru among the stair-racing community) a record seven consecutive times. He is the only person in the world who makes a living at stair racing (his sponsors include a German health care company), which makes him the lord of an obscure but nonetheless codified sport. According to the World Cup rankings on towerrunning.com, Dold finished 2012 in first place, with 1,158 points, 157 more than the runner-up, Piotr Lobodzinski of Poland. Four hundred of those points came from his victory at Esbru, tower racing's unofficial world championships, and its oldest contest, dating to 1978. Another 156 stair races, held in 25 nations, generate World Cup points as well.

Dold also sits atop the Vertical World Circuit, a championship tour of eight celebrated races — among them, Esbru — and he is a minor celebrity on YouTube. In one clip, you can see a smiling Dold sprinting stadium steps at a photo shoot for a print ad. In another video, from the Corrida Vertical, a 28-story dash in São Paulo, the announcer cracks, "A shortcut to win the race is break Dold's legs . . . or giving him some sleeping pills." Dold wins and, as he crosses the finish line, still running, peels off his plain white race jersey to reveal a sleek undershirt emblazoned with his Web address, run2sky.com.

In New York last year, Dold may have gotten away with a false start; the video is fairly incriminating. "I was moving before the start," he told me recently. But then, he said, he caught himself and stopped. So he was actually at a disadvantage, he said, "moving backward when the others are moving forward."

In interviews, Dold is chipper and exudes supreme confidence. "I can run backward faster than most people can run forward," he boasts. (He is in fact one of the world's premier backward runners, having completed a heels-first mile in 5:46, a world record.) At times, he lapses into the third person, like a major-sports star, or Donald Trump. "It's all about beating Dold," he told a German reporter not long ago, summing up the stair-racing world. "That's the goal for hundreds of participants."

Most of the important stair races happen in Europe and Asia. A tiny cadre of die-hards — roughly a dozen men and three or four women — travel the globe chasing minuscule cash prizes­. The largest single prize, in Taipei, is less than $7,000. Esbru offers no prize money. The race sites are often architecturally significant: the Messeturm tower in Basel; the Palazzo Lombardia in Milan; the Swissôtel in Singapore, designed by I. M. Pei. "There's something very elemental about climbing an iconic building," says Sproule Love, a New Yorker who has finished third at the Empire State Building three times. "You can survey the area and see how far you have come."

Still, the stair racers don't experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. "Some stairwells turn to the left," she said. "Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they're steep. And the number of floors always varies."

Walsham, who works in Singapore as a manager for a computer-security firm, spent about $12,000 traveling to races last year. In the United States, a small contingent of stair climbers are shelling out similar sums to get to the 100 or so American races offered each year. When I went to Los Angeles recently, for the 51-story Climb for Life race, I met Daniel Dill, who flew in from Texas, happy to pay the $50 entry fee and the requisite $100 donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for a race that would take him less than 13 minutes. Dill, a large man dressed in articulated-toe sneakers, brought with him a special warm-up tool, an Elevation Training Mask. It was designed for Mixed Martial Arts fighters, he said. "It's supposed to stimulate red blood cells and open up the lungs."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Jim Courier Wins Australian Open Again

As if the gutty, four-hour, five-set Australian Open semifinal today between Andy Murray and Roger Federer weren't enough to make East Coast tennis fans glad they woke up at 3:30 a.m. to watch it live, viewers who hung on to see Jim Courier's interview with Murray (scroll toward end of video) after his victory got an extra treat. Courier, who won the last of his four Grand Slam titles in Australia exactly 20 years ago, was a power baseliner as a player. As an interviewer, though, he's a crisp serve-and-volley man. His questions are brief and informed, and they encourage his subjects to actually say something, as opposed to the all-too-common inane sportscaster queries like "How big was that . . . ?" and "What does it mean to have . . . ?" Courier was overshadowed during his fine playing career by contemporaries like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, but as an on-court interviewer, he's almost unbeatable.

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Look: Popping Wheelies in Charm City

It's illegal to ride dirt bikes on the streets of Baltimore, which is part of the thrill for the young men who do so anyway, usually on Sunday afternoons, in a noisy display that city residents call both intimidating and thrilling. The Baltimore police are prohibited from pursuing the riders in high-speed chases, so they try to confiscate bikes and push for tougher punishment. Last November, a 23-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced to nearly six months in prison after two arrests for riding a dirt bike on city streets. Lotfy Nathan, who is directing a documentary about the bikers, called "The 12 O'Clock Boys," describes the rides as a form of escapism. "You can imagine a certain population who doesn't want to join the Boy Scouts," Nathan says. "A lot of them resort to this sort of street sport with a certain degree of celebrity status. In parts of the inner city, they are pretty highly regarded."

Estimated number of active dirt-bike riders in Baltimore: more than 100

Age of riders: about 13 to late 30s

Bikes and ATVs confiscated by the police last August: 15

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Stair Racing, a Sport to Make an Ironman Whimper

Stephen Ferry/Redux, for The New York Times

A runner climbs a 48-floor building in the Ascenso Torre Colpatria race in Bogotá, Colombia.

When you watch the video from the start of last February's Empire State Building Run-Up, an 86-story stair race, one man stands out. Thomas Dold, a 28-year-old German wearing Bib No. 1, is already a few inches ahead when the starting horn blasts. His shins are canting into a run, and with his left arm he's pushing at the chest of a runner to that side of him. A split second later, his right arm juts up to block more runners.

All around Dold, the racers are wincing, for what's coming is harsh. There are 1,576 steps ahead of them, 10 to 12 minutes of suffering. And before that, less than 10 yards from the start, there's a door to get through. It's standard size, 36 inches wide, and everyone, Dold especially, wants to be the first one there. The jockeying is desperate. In 2009, Suzy Walsham, an Australian, was shoved into the wall next to the door. "The impact was so great," she says, "that I initially thought I had broken my nose and lost teeth." She fell and was trampled before she rose and ran on to victory. "I get super nervous and anxious whenever I start" at the Empire State Building, says Walsham, who has won the women's division three times and will be one of about 650 competitors at this year's race, which takes place Feb. 6. "I really dread the start."

What the racers may dread even more, however, is the sight of Thomas Dold dashing up the stairs two at a time, yanking along on the railings. Dold has won Empire State (known as Esbru among the stair-racing community) a record seven consecutive times. He is the only person in the world who makes a living at stair racing (his sponsors include a German health care company), which makes him the lord of an obscure but nonetheless codified sport. According to the World Cup rankings on towerrunning.com, Dold finished 2012 in first place, with 1,158 points, 157 more than the runner-up, Piotr Lobodzinski of Poland. Four hundred of those points came from his victory at Esbru, tower racing's unofficial world championships, and its oldest contest, dating to 1978. Another 156 stair races, held in 25 nations, generate World Cup points as well.

Dold also sits atop the Vertical World Circuit, a championship tour of eight celebrated races — among them, Esbru — and he is a minor celebrity on YouTube. In one clip, you can see a smiling Dold sprinting stadium steps at a photo shoot for a print ad. In another video, from the Corrida Vertical, a 28-story dash in São Paulo, the announcer cracks, "A shortcut to win the race is break Dold's legs . . . or giving him some sleeping pills." Dold wins and, as he crosses the finish line, still running, peels off his plain white race jersey to reveal a sleek undershirt emblazoned with his Web address, run2sky.com.

In New York last year, Dold may have gotten away with a false start; the video is fairly incriminating. "I was moving before the start," he told me recently. But then, he said, he caught himself and stopped. So he was actually at a disadvantage, he said, "moving backward when the others are moving forward."

In interviews, Dold is chipper and exudes supreme confidence. "I can run backward faster than most people can run forward," he boasts. (He is in fact one of the world's premier backward runners, having completed a heels-first mile in 5:46, a world record.) At times, he lapses into the third person, like a major-sports star, or Donald Trump. "It's all about beating Dold," he told a German reporter not long ago, summing up the stair-racing world. "That's the goal for hundreds of participants."

Most of the important stair races happen in Europe and Asia. A tiny cadre of die-hards — roughly a dozen men and three or four women — travel the globe chasing minuscule cash prizes­. The largest single prize, in Taipei, is less than $7,000. Esbru offers no prize money. The race sites are often architecturally significant: the Messeturm tower in Basel; the Palazzo Lombardia in Milan; the Swissôtel in Singapore, designed by I. M. Pei. "There's something very elemental about climbing an iconic building," says Sproule Love, a New Yorker who has finished third at the Empire State Building three times. "You can survey the area and see how far you have come."

Still, the stair racers don't experience architecture so much as stairwells. I assumed their races are characterized by a mind-numbing sameness, but Walsham assured me I was wrong. "Some stairwells turn to the left," she said. "Some turn to the right. Sometimes the stairs are shallow, sometimes they're steep. And the number of floors always varies."

Walsham, who works in Singapore as a manager for a computer-security firm, spent about $12,000 traveling to races last year. In the United States, a small contingent of stair climbers are shelling out similar sums to get to the 100 or so American races offered each year. When I went to Los Angeles recently, for the 51-story Climb for Life race, I met Daniel Dill, who flew in from Texas, happy to pay the $50 entry fee and the requisite $100 donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for a race that would take him less than 13 minutes. Dill, a large man dressed in articulated-toe sneakers, brought with him a special warm-up tool, an Elevation Training Mask. It was designed for Mixed Martial Arts fighters, he said. "It's supposed to stimulate red blood cells and open up the lungs."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Jim Courier Wins Australian Open Again

As if the gutty, four-hour, five-set Australian Open semifinal today between Andy Murray and Roger Federer weren't enough to make East Coast tennis fans glad they woke up at 3:30 a.m. to watch it live, viewers who hung on to see Jim Courier's interview with Murray (scroll toward end of video) after his victory got an extra treat. Courier, who won the last of his four Grand Slam titles in Australia exactly 20 years ago, was a power baseliner as a player. As an interviewer, though, he's a crisp serve-and-volley man. His questions are brief and informed, and they encourage his subjects to actually say something, as opposed to the all-too-common inane sportscaster queries like "How big was that . . . ?" and "What does it mean to have . . . ?" Courier was overshadowed during his fine playing career by contemporaries like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, but as an on-court interviewer, he's almost unbeatable.

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Eat: Surf and Turf Revisited

Sam Kaplan for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Theo Vamvounakis.

Even the best foods can become tiresome, which is the only reason you would ever do anything with oysters other than opening and swallowing them. For something almost as primitive, the people of western France, where some of the world's best oysters are produced, perfected the idea of teaming them with sausage.

I was introduced to this combination in Brittany years ago. It happened before dinner, as an appetizer, and came just a few hours after a lunch that consisted of four dozen of the region's finest.

Oysters go down easy, so I didn't see this as a problem. If I was puzzled by this incongruous-looking duo, that lasted only until I started eating. The combination of crisp, hot, spicy sausage and cold, creamy oysters may have been unpredictable, but it was as sensible as waffles and ice cream.

It's not exactly a recipe — grill some sausage, open some oysters, slice some lemons, serve — but it did make me think of other beloved combinations of meat and seafood. Our contribution to this world — a filet mignon with a lobster — is pathetic: the foods don't play well together, and I suspect that the dish was originally a conceit born of an urban desire to showcase abundance and wealth.

Not so the more traditional versions. If you steam mussels with chorizo — or any other sausage — all you're doing is adding a big shot of flavor for very little effort. Similarly, if you steam clams with prosciutto — or some other cured meat; you get the idea — you're doing pretty much the same. (I cook both of these differently than I did years ago, using far less added liquid — sometimes none — than most classic steamed mussels or clams recipes, relying on the juices that the mollusks themselves exude.)

Then there's my liberal interpretation of the classic Portuguese pork with clams (usually called á alentejana, because it's from Alentejo), a magnificent expression of surf and turf, with the brininess of the clams almost overwhelmingly flavoring the pork. Over the years, for whatever reason, I've come to prefer this with chicken, which is more reliably tender (good pork is harder to find than good chicken) and marries with the clam juice equally well.

I've also occasionally done it in a kind of Chinese style, adding not only ginger to the garlic but also sesame oil and soy sauce. This, I believe, is the perfect adaptation (at least that's what I think this year), exploiting flavors and textures of both clam and chicken in ways that are just as good as the sausage and oysters, if not quite as primitive.

Recipes: Chicken With Clams | Oysters With Sausage | Mussels With Chorizo | Clams With Prosciutto

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The 6th Floor Blog: How to Read Like a Blog Boss

Edith Zimmerman is the founder and editor of the Web site The Hairpin. Her most recent articles for the magazine were about Candace Bushnell and Joseph P. Kennedy III.

Book I'm reading now:

"If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit," by Brenda Ueland, first published in 1938. At first it sounded like nothing I'd pick up on my own — it's a how-to book, I'd never heard of it or the author, and it seemed like a weird one to read on the subway — but I got it as a gift and fell into it right away. It's clear and strong and good and kind of feels like a lighthouse.

Last book I loved:

The last book whose characters I missed when I wasn't reading was probably "Lonesome Dove," by Larry McMurty, which I wish had a Narnia-style portal on its last page. And "Jesus' Son," by Denis Johnson, although I didn't love that one so much as have a dirty, all-consuming crush on it.

Unread book on my bedside table that gnaws at my conscience:

"This Is How You Lose Her," by Junot Diaz. I don't know how I'm still only halfway through it, because "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was so great. And this one's good, too. I guess I'm just moving more slowly. If we were all whales, I'd say Junot Diaz seems to be closer to the surface and taking deeper, cleaner gulps of air. That's kind of how I envision his brain. Right below the waves.

A book in my field that I highly recommend:

Books about . . . blogging? Ah, no, I would actually do an anti-recommendation. Do not buy any books about blogging!

One book I would recommend to anyone:

Chris Ware's graphic novel "Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth." A friend first recommended it in a "here, just read this" way, but if I had to describe it — moving, beautiful, basically perfect.

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Could Cyril Ramaphosa Be the Best Leader South Africa Has Not Yet Had?

Pieter Hugo for The New York Times

Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected by the African National Congress in December to be the deputy president of the A.N.C.

By the time I met Cyril Ramaphosa in 1992, he was Nelson Mandela's choreographer at the negotiations that would eventually bring three centuries of white dominion to a thrilling and relatively peaceful end. Every day a polyglot, multiparty assembly — of former prisoners and their onetime oppressors, Communists and Bantustan autocrats and Afrikaner nationalists and union militants — mingled in a conference center outside Johannesburg to discuss what would be, in effect, the terms of surrender.

Trevor Samson/AFP/Getty Images

Cyril Ramaphosa, right, with James Motlatsi, president of the mineworkers' union, during a strike in 1987.

At times the endeavor seemed to shudder with the prospect of failure, even civil war — most ominously when two white supremacists gunned down a charismatic young Communist leader in his driveway. Another day a group of Afrikaner bitter-enders drove an armored truck through the plate-glass front of the conference building. (It is a little eerie now to recall that the venue was called the World Trade Center.)

Mandela provided the aura, the moral authority. Ramaphosa, then secretary general of the anti-apartheid alliance, the African National Congress, was the business end. Big, round-faced, grinning through a peppercorn beard, a charming manipulator in multiple languages, he was adept at both creating tension and defusing it, at threatening to send his constituents on a campaign of "rolling mass action" and then easing the pin back into the grenade. Janet Love, a member of Ramaphosa's negotiating team who now runs a human rights law center in Johannesburg, reminded me recently how he resolved the conundrum that arises when you have a constellation of 19 parties and alliances in which some matter more than others — namely: How do you know when something should be regarded as decided? Ramaphosa came up with the concept of "sufficient consensus." It sounds absurdly vague, but it was a polite way of saying that when the white National Party and the A.N.C. came to terms, everyone else, as Ramaphosa explained later to a reporter, "can get stuffed."

When the deal was done, he was the obvious choice — in fact, he was Mandela's choice — to be the first deputy, next in line for the presidency. But the party elders, especially the powerful faction that spent the struggle in exile, were wary of Ramaphosa, who had worked the home front as a union organizer and came late to the A.N.C.

So on my visit to South Africa this past December, I met a new Cyril Ramaphosa: Cyril the tycoon, at the office of his holding company, Shanduka Group, a sleek sandstone-colored complex in Johannesburg's most upscale neighborhood. On the Forbes list of the richest Africans, Ramaphosa is No. 21. His worth is estimated at $675 million — Russian oligarch money, astounding wealth in a country where about 40 percent of the population survives on less than $2 a day. How he became so rich is a story we'll get to, but I was there because of reports that he was considering a return to politics.

Sure enough, a week after our conversation, the governing African National Congress summoned him back to the national cause, voting him the party's deputy president by a landslide. The election put Ramaphosa, now 60, back on the track Mandela had in mind for him 18 years ago. At last, we may find out whether he is, as many South Africans have long believed, the best president South Africa has not yet had.

To someone visiting after a long absence, South Africa feels both prosperous and precarious. The malls of the tonier neighborhoods are filled with shoppers of all races. The airports and sports arenas of Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban are world-caliber. And there is a class of very rich black capitalists like Ramaphosa. But the wealth does not completely hide a malaise, born of stubborn inequality and conspicuous corruption and discharged in bursts of violent discontent.

The most unsettling recent reminder that South African liberation is far from fully delivered was a wildcat strike in August that ended with the massacre of platinum miners in a town called Marikana. The mine killings entangled Ramaphosa in a controversy that, in America, would surely have the suffix "gate" attached to it. He is a shareholder and board member of the platinum company whose mine was the scene of the killings. Indeed, his portfolio is stuffed with investments in the mining industries — gold, diamonds, coal and platinum. In the days of white rule, Ramaphosa organized South Africa's powerful black mineworkers' union. So the industries that made him a champion of the liberation struggle have, more recently, made him a very wealthy man and caused some to question where his loyalties lie. He is now trying, with characteristic political agility, to turn a tragedy that looked at first to be a liability into an asset — a spur to action for a democracy in dire need of a second wind.

Bill Keller is a former executive editor of The Times and was the paper's Johannesburg bureau chief from 1992 to 1995. He writes a column for the Op-Ed page.

Editor: Dean Robinson

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 24, 2013

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the position to which the African National Congress elected the South African business tycoon Cyril Ramaphosa in December 2012. He is deputy president of the A.N.C., not the deputy president of South Africa.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz's Experiment with Images

When Taryn Simon, a photographer and artist, collaborated with the computer programmer Aaron Swartz last April, she noticed that the way he logged into his online accounts seemed exceptionally complex. "The length of time it took to enter his password conveyed a certain pressure that was upon him," Simon told me. And indeed, he was facing criminal charges at the time, following his arrest in 2011 for illegally accessing Jstor, a private scholarly database. "There was this sense that something was closing in on him," Simon added. "Something that needed to be guarded against."

Despite the government's case against him, Swartz, who committed suicide last week at the age of 26, was regarded by some as an Internet folk hero and a visionary activist devoted to making locked-up information of public interest freely available. Emily Bazelon, has written at Slate, where she's an editor, that "the government's ratcheting up of charges against Swartz reeks of the worst kind of prosecutorial intimidation." (Bazelon has also written for the magazine.)

Simon and Swartz were paired together as part of the 2012 edition of Seven on Seven, an annual conference organized by Lauren Cornell at the New Museum where artists and technologists are given 24 hours to create a project together.

The result of Simon and Swartz's collaboration was Image Atlas, a visual search engine that performs real-time queries in 17 different countries. Internet search results can vary depending on what part of the world they originate from — if you're sitting in Paris Googling the words "Jew" or "Breaking Bad," the results will be different than if you're searching the same terms from, say, Tel Aviv. Image Atlas first translates any search term into the language corresponding to each country; it then uses each country's most popular search engine to run an image search. The result is like Google Images with international context — it forces us to think about what we are and are not seeing when we browse online. (Try it for yourself).

Simon and Swartz were intrigued by the idea that Internet search results express a certain type of authority; people generally aren't suspicious of a search-results page in and of itself. "We wanted to question the neutrality of statistical data," she told me.

They also observed that people around the world are communicating more and more with one another through visual imagery rather than text. Image Atlas seems to suggest that visual thinking is far from universal and instead varies greatly across cultures (search "America" in Egypt and you'll get the Statue of Liberty; in Iran, Taylor Swift; in Kenya, the Bank of America logo).

Simon, whose photographs of items confiscated by security at Kennedy Airport were featured in the magazine, remembers Swartz as being "astounding to watch" when he was coding something, a "wizardly court stenographer." It took him just 10 minutes, Simon recalled, to create an early prototype of Image Atlas after the hours they spent brainstorming to conceptualize it.

Image Atlas served as inspiration for Simon's latest project, "The Picture Collection," which opened at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco on Wednesday. The work is a series of photographs of the contents of an archive also called the Picture Collection, located in the New York Public Library. Founded in 1915, the archive consists of more than 12,000 folders, each labeled with a term like "happiness," "veils" or "accident" and filled with clippings of related images. For years, before there was anything like Google Images, artists and designers went to the archive for inspiration. Simon photographed the contents of 44 folders from the Picture Collection for her project.

Looking ahead, Simon told me that she is planning to publish a book based on how Image Atlas results vary over time, as international events and moods change. "It is something Aaron would have been a part of," she said.

Image Atlas will continue on as a Web site. Since the news of Swartz's death, the site's servers have at times become overloaded. "Normally, if the site would stop working, I would turn to Aaron in those moments," Simon told me. "But now the wizard is gone."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Where Dead Animals Seem Alive

The American Museum of Natural History has been a source of inspiration since I moved to New York more than eight years ago. One of my first trips there was with my drawing class during my freshman year at the School of Visual Arts. We were assigned to make a series of drawings based on a shape that inspired us at the museum. I chose a shape that I saw on a 3-D cross-section of a space rock.

After hearing that the Hall of North American Mammals  reopened in October after a yearlong restoration, I recently had a chance to visit it again. According to the museum's Web site, the sprucing up involved designers, artists, taxidermists and conservators who "worked to recolor faded fur, dust delicate leaves and selectively restore the background paintings." The vibrancy of the colors found in every diorama makes a tour of the Hall of North American Mammals not unlike taking stroll through the Met's postmodern wing where Rothkos and Kellys line the walls.

As an artist and a designer, I appreciate the way the dioramas express a devotion to detail. Everything seems to have been considered: the lighting, the animals' gestures, the overall compositions. It's no surprise that the scenes have lent themselves to spell-binding photographs. The restoration process is detailed in these videos:

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How Good Does Karaoke Have to Be to Qualify as Art?

John Brophy, the mastermind of America's greatest karaoke night, lives in a well-kept bungalow in a neighborhood of small homes in southeast Portland, Ore. When I visited on a weekday afternoon last spring, Brophy, then 36, wore a ringer T-shirt and dark jeans. His wrist was encircled by a half-dozen bracelets, and his dark hair swooped in front of his face. Like many Portlanders, he's in a band, called Gingerbread Patriots, although currently the band is on hiatus — the "Shows" section of the Gingerbread Patriots Web site is empty but for the words "2009 will bring shows shows and more shows!"

While his daughters, ages 10 and 15, did homework, Brophy and I sat on his bed in front of a flat-screen monitor as he showed me how he builds a karaoke track. Over the course of the next two hours, he would create a karaoke video for Radiohead's song "Electioneering," complete with snazzy graphics, Thom Yorke's lyrics and Jonny Greenwood's electrifying guitar solo, so that I could sing the song at the karaoke night he runs, Baby Ketten Karaoke. Rotating between private parties, bars and a pizza place, Baby Ketten is ecstatic, virtuosic and a little intimidating. At the center of Portland's amazingly creative karaoke scene, it's something close to a genuine artistic movement. And it's ridiculously fun.

Every week, Brophy adds as many as 20 tracks to the Baby Ketten songbook. Some of these are songs he purchases from karaoke studios, not unlike any karaoke jockey, or K.J., in America. But many of them are songs hand-assembled by Brophy, much as he's doing with "Electioneering" — B.K.K. originals that Brophy constructs either because the studios that recorded "official" karaoke versions did bad jobs, or because the song is such an obscurity that no studio has ever recorded a karaoke version. For example, if you'd like to sing Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," the Gregory Brothers' "Bed Intruder Song" (with full Auto-Tune), Danger Doom's "Sofa King" or Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea," Baby Ketten has them all. (I know: I saw people sing them.) Your local karaoke bar doesn't.

To build his B.K.K. originals, Brophy scours eBay for old 45s with instrumental B-sides. He sometimes builds hip-hop songs by isolating the samples the original producers used and stacking them block by block, like Legos. He works on songs online with a network of like-minded D.I.Y. K.J.'s around the world. Sometimes, in a sound-dampened studio in his basement, he records whole tracks from scratch, playing the guitar and bass himself. He once drove himself crazy recording the bass for Joy Division's "Transmission." "That choppy bass at the beginning, I always thought it was early stuff, Peter Hook was unpolished, he was playing poorly," Brophy told me. "But listening to it with headphones — it's all intentional, he's doing pulloffs." He demonstrated on an air bass: "Dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun," pulling his left-hand fingers off the fret with every single eighth note, a staccato exercise that looked exhausting for three measures, much less a four-minute song. "I don't play bass like that, but I had to get as close as possible. Well, I didn't have to."

To build "Electioneering," Brophy started with a French studio's rerecording of the song as his template, then spliced the actual Radiohead song's instrumental intro and outro (featuring Greenwood's solo) onto the middle section of the track, with a dozen deft clicks of the mouse. He Googled the song's lyrics. Then he stretched, clapped his hands together and prepared to "tap it out."

In order to tell the program he uses to highlight each word of the lyrics during playback — when the bouncing ball, as it were, should bounce — Brophy must tap each syllable of the song lyrics in rhythm. Perched on the edge of the bed, Brophy listened intently, his finger poised above the space bar, as the song filled the room. As Yorke sang each syllable — I go for wards you go back wards and some where we will meeeeeeeeet — Brophy jabbed the space bar. Watching his rhythmic tapping, each finger landing just a millisecond before the beat, I was reminded of his demonstration of the intricacies of Peter Hook's bass. This is just another way of making music: the space bar a string, a computer with 16 gigabytes of RAM an instrument, the actual singer off in the future — me, the customer, who would later that week look to Brophy's video to guide me through the song.

Every so often, a city becomes a crucible of innovation for a particular musical form: a place where circumstances conspire to create a very special creative flowering; where mad geniuses push one another to innovate further and further beyond where anyone thought they could go. Seattle, 1990. The Bronx, 1979. Memphis, 1954. These moments changed American entertainment.

But what if a musical revolution wasn't in grunge, or hip-hop, or rock 'n' roll? What if it was in karaoke? Is it possible that one of the most exciting music scenes in America is happening right now in Portland, and it doesn't feature a single person playing an actual instrument?

You may recall when you were younger that many nights achieved, for perhaps an hour or two, a state of euphoria so all-consuming that the next morning you could only describe the nights as "massive" or "epic." Adventures were had. Astonishing things were seen. Maybe you stole a Coke machine, whatever. You would toss off these words — massive, epic — casually at brunch, annoying the middle-aged people sitting nearby who were grimly aware that even as those nights become few and far between, the price you pay afterward in hangovers and regrets is significantly greater. (If you are younger, you may be in the middle of a massive night right now, in which case you should stop reading this article. Put down your phone and go to it! This might be the last one.)

For me, those few such nights I get anymore revolve around karaoke. Something about the openness required to sing in public — and the vulnerability it makes me feel — allows me to cut loose in an un-self-conscious way. It's hard, anymore, to lose myself in the moment. Karaoke lets me do that.

But I recently moved to Arlington, Va., with two children, and so I rarely go out at night to sing (or do anything). We have friends in Arlington, but not the kind of friends we had in New York — not yet. I sing whenever I can on business trips, with friends I browbeat into renting rooms at trusty karaoke spots like BINY or Second on Second. But for quite some time, I'd been reading Facebook status updates and tweets from acquaintances in Portland that suggested the city was some kind of karaoke paradise — a place in which you could sing every night in a different bar, and where the song choices were so outlandishly awesome that you might never run out of songs to sing.

My mission in Portland was to see if this could possibly be true. Portland does have dozens of karaoke bars, and over the course of six nights we did our best to visit them all. I sang Lee Ann Womack in a honky-tonk in far southeast Portland, Kanye West in a comedy club and INXS in a Chinese restaurant. I watched Emilie, my seven-months-pregnant sister-in-law, sing Melanie's "Brand New Key" onstage at Stripparaoke night at the Devils Point, a teensy, low-ceilinged club on a triangular lot well outside Portland's downtown, while a topless dancer worked the pole next to her. Afterward, the dancer — whose bare stomach featured a tattoo of a vividly horrible shark and the word REDRUM — gave Emilie a sweet hug.

And one night, I went with Emilie, her husband and my wife to the Alibi Tiki Lounge, which advertises itself as Portland's "Original Tiki Bar." Inside, the crowd seemed at first to be the familiar karaoke mix of wannabes and birthday celebrators you might find in any bar in any city. Someone sang "Sweet Caroline" almost as soon as we walked in. A drunken birthday girl couldn't handle the Ting Tings song she'd chosen, so the K.J. switched midtrack to Rebecca Black's "Friday," which was more her speed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 23, 2013

An earlier version of this article  referred incorrectly to a puppet that appeared in a show at a local karaoke club. It is known as Señor Serpiente, not Señora Serpiente.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Luke Mogelson on Embedding with the Afghan Army

Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer for the magazine, wrote this week's cover article about going on patrol with the Afghan National Army. He recently wrote for the magazine about the Afghanistan- Pakistan-Iran border region and a hospital in Kabul. He is the co-founder and editor of an online magazine called Razistan.

Where did you first get the (seemingly dangerous) idea to accompany the Afghan National Army on patrol?

Right now, embedding with the Afghan Army is the obvious thing for a journalist here to want to do. Every day the balance of responsibility tips further away from the international forces, toward the A.N.A. There is still a lot of fighting happening in Afghanistan — but most of it is being done by the Afghans.

It was by luck that I met Lt. Col. Mohammad Daowood and his battalion. I'd originally planned to embed with an Afghan unit in Logar Province, which borders Wardak. Along with the photographer Joël van Houdt and an interpreter, I drove down to Logar and linked up with the A.N.A. there, intending to get to some outposts in the south. Soon after we arrived, however, a commander told us that one of his platoons was leaving for Wardak to support a "big" A.N.A. operation scheduled to commence the next day. Did we want to go? We jumped in the convoy and ended up at Dash-e Towp.

Daowood has some unusual counterinsurgency methods. Did he develop those himself?

This is the third war in which Daowood has commanded soldiers. My impression was that he was guided mostly by instinct rather than any kind of formal strategic doctrine. Because of his deep experience, though, it was an instinct you were inclined to trust.

Did you see any other techniques that American soldiers do not use?

Well, I never saw this myself, but Daowood told me that they often go on patrols without bomb-disposal technicians, like Shafiullah, whom I mention in the article. At such times, according to Daowood, when they encounter an I.E.D., they shoot at it with rifles from a distance until it explodes.

You write about Shafiullah and Daowood and a Hazara soldier named Abdul Karim. Did the other A.N.A soldiers have background stories that caught your attention?

Every A.N.A. soldier has a story that I expect would capture anyone's attention. For that matter, so does nearly every adult Afghan at this point. You would have to live a pretty charmed life to have made it through the past few decades in Afghanistan unharried by adversity and grief.

You write that Americans blame "cultural differences" for the highly publicized "green on blue" killings. Have you talked to Afghans about these killings?

You know, I tried many times to get Afghan soldiers and officers to speak frankly about this. They were reluctant to do so. It was the one subject, in fact, that rendered them reticent, cagey. I think they felt ashamed. They seemed both mystified and embarrassed by the attacks. No one provided anything like a satisfying explanation or hypothesis. My colleagues at the Times bureau in Kabul have done a lot of trenchant and illuminating reporting on the green-on-blue phenomenon, however, and I'd refer to those articles anyone interested in trying to understand it.

You write that the decision to destroy far-flung posts and leave the A.N.A in charge seems like a retreat on the part of the coalition forces. Do the members of the A.N.A. that you spoke to see it that way?

Without question, the A.N.A. in Wardak did not want to give up those posts. Of course, some of the lower-ranking grunts might have been relieved not to have to man them anymore — life on a bigger base is much safer and more comfortable — but the officers all considered it a fatal tactical move.

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Well: The Appetite Workout

Every January, many people start working out, hoping to lose weight. But as studies attest, exercise often produces little or no weight loss — and even weight gain — and resolutions are soon abandoned. But new science suggests that if you stick with the right kind of exercise, you may change how your body interacts with food. It's more than a matter of burning calories; exercise also affects hormones.

A 2012 study from the University of Wyoming looked at a group of women who either ran or walked and, on alternate days, sat quietly for an hour. After the running, walking or sitting, researchers drew blood to test for the levels of certain hormones and then directed the women to a room with a buffet. Human appetite is complicated, driven by signals from the brain, gut, fat cells, glands, genes and psyche. But certain appetite-related hormones, in particular ghrelin, which stimulates hunger, are known to be instrumental in determining how much we consume.

Studies have shown that exercise typically increases the production of ghrelin. Workouts make you hungry. In the Wyoming study, when the women ran, their ghrelin levels spiked, which should have meant they would attack the buffet with gusto. But they didn't. In fact, after running they consumed several hundred fewer calories than they burned.

Their restraint, the researchers said, was due to a concomitant increase in other hormones that initiate satiety. These hormones, only recently discovered and still not well understood, tell the body that it has taken in enough fuel; it can stop eating. The augmented levels of the satiety hormones, the authors write, "muted" the message from ghrelin. Sitting and, notably, walking did not change the blood levels of the women's satiety hormones, and the walkers overate, consuming more calories at the buffet than they had burned.

A related study published in December looked at the effects of moderate exercise, the equivalent of brisk jogging. It found that after 12 weeks, formerly sedentary, overweight men and women began recognizing, without consciously knowing it, that they should not overeat.

Researchers gave volunteers doctored milkshakes. Some contained maltodextrin, a flavorless sweetener that packed 600 calories into the drinks. The others, without maltodextrin, had 246 calories. Before beginning the exercise program, the volunteers ate more at a buffet lunch and throughout the rest of the day after drinking the high-calorie shake than when they were given the lower-calorie version. Their appetite regulation was out of whack.

But after three months of exercise, the volunteers consumed fewer calories throughout the day when they had the high-calorie shake than the lower-calorie one. Exercise "improves the body's ability to judge the amount of calories consumed and to adjust for that afterward," says Catia Martins, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, who led the study.

But not all exercise. Running, it would seem, better hones the body's satiety mechanisms than walking. And longevity counts. You need to stick with the program for several months, Martins says, to truly fine-tune appetite control.

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The Ethicist: Must I Get a Flu Shot?

The calculus of getting a flu shot is pretty straightforward: If I don't, I could get sick — and potentially get a bunch of other people sick too. I work in an open-air office, eat in crowded restaurants and take the subway. But here's the thing: I don't want a flu shot. I don't feel right about it. My mother, an M.D., who now practices alternative medicine, was — and is — anti-vaccine. Like a kid inheriting his parents' faith, I grew up with a strong sense of that value system. Am I ethically obligated to get a flu shot? BEN REININGA, NEW YORK

This will seem like a lame response, but it's the only one I can give. Should you get a flu shot? Yes. It's more socially responsible, and thus more ethical (relative to doing the opposite). But are you obligated to do so? You are not.

It's one thing to directly put others in harm's way (like entering a crowded workplace when you know you're already sick). But your question is different. Your question involves a potentiality. It's certainly possible that not getting a flu shot could affect other people, but that possibility is not even close to absolute. And it's just not reasonable to make every personal decision based on what might theoretically happen to a stranger. You're a person, too. You have the right to decide what's injected into your body. Personal freedom is not limitless, but it certainly extends to the elective medical procedures you choose for yourself. If those around you are worried that you'll infect them with the flu, they should get their own flu shots (simply because people who view the world through your lens clearly do exist).

LAYOFF NOTICE

A co-worker casually asked me if I happen to know if he is getting fired. Am I ethically obligated to tell him if I know? NAME WITHHELD, MINNEAPOLIS

Assuming you don't work for a company with a specific, inflexible policy prohibiting co-workers from sharing information (and assuming such a disclosure would not place your own livelihood in jeopardy), I'd argue that you're obliged to admit what you know. Why? Because there's no ethical justification for doing otherwise.

It's not as if this is idle gossip; this is meaningful information that could have a huge impact on someone's life. Your silence protects no one. If the situation were reversed, you'd obviously want your co-worker to give you the same kind of honest answer. Technically, it's not your business. But you didn't insert yourself into the conversation — your co-worker asked you directly. I would tell him: "It's not my decision to make, so I can't answer with certitude. But I think you're getting fired." When he asks why you believe that, tell him as much as you can without breaching any other confidences. If you're unwilling to be that direct, say, "I don't feel comfortable answering that question." Because — in this context — that's the same as saying yes.

E-mail queries to ethicist@nytimes.com, or send them to the Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018, and include a daytime phone number.

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Obama’s First Term: A Romantic Oral History

Nadav Kander for The New York Times

Clockwise from top left: Joseph R. Biden Jr., vice president; Desirée Rogers, former White House social secretary; Jon Favreau, speechwriting director; Rahm Emanuel, former White House chief of staff; Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser; David Axelrod, former senior adviser.

Four years ago, on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration, this magazine devoted nearly an entire issue to a photo essay, "Obama's People." The photographs, 52 of them, depicted a team arriving on a wave of hope despite inheriting an economy in trouble, a collapsing auto industry, two wars and a continuing terrorist threat.

Four years later, they have met some of those challenges, been daunted by others and created new ones of their own. The economy is better but still anemic. Osama bin Laden is dead and the Iraq war over, but Afghanistan remains a morass and the prison at Guantánamo Bay remains open. The auto industry has been saved and health care expanded, but national debt has soared. A dictator in Libya has been toppled, but a dictator in Syria slaughters his own people undeterred.

Roughly half of the people in the photo essay are now gone, some embittered by realities they did not anticipate or cast aside by a president cutting losses. The gauzy hope of 2009 has faded into the starker realism of 2013. The Washington they promised to transform is as divided as ever. As the president prepares to take the oath of office for a second term, his team looks back at the four years that brought them to this point. Told in their own voices, the story is, unsurprisingly and perhaps out of necessity, a romantic one.

Melody Barnes, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council (2009-11): I remember coming out of the transition office the day before the inauguration, and it was like walking into a street festival. It was sunny, and people were happy, and there were tons of people, and it was very, very festive.

Desirée Rogers, White House social secretary (2009-10): We had a certain amount of time to prepare the home for the first family. Someone asked me, "What side of the bed does the president sleep on?" I'm like, Yikes, I don't know if I know that. For people that look like me, for my race, to be there and to have witnessed that — I just kept thinking about my grandfather and how he would feel had he lived to see this day, because in so many instances the gentlemen that served the president looked like my grandfather.

During the swearing in of the president, Chief Justice John Roberts mangles the words in the oath.
Gregory Craig, White House counsel (2009-10): This opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel says that if the president does not say all the words of the oath, then he is not president of the United States. I said, "Is there anybody over there that really thinks he's not president?" David [Barron, acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel] said: "No, no, no, we all think he is president. But there may be a judge somewhere, or some hearing could be called on this, or it could be a problem in the future." I thought, We gotta fix this. There was a long line of people waiting to shake hands with the president in the residence. We said, "Mr. President, can we talk to you a second?" There was a little bit of, "You gotta be kidding." I said, "I'll call the chief justice's chambers and see if he can come down." The chief justice carried his robes, and the president arrived. The chief justice goes into the corner and says, "This is a ceremonial occasion, I'm going to put on my robe." The chief justice is doing it from memory again, and I thought to myself, Would it be wrong for me to go forward and say something? At which point, the president says, "Now, let's keep this real slow." They did it, and that was it.

Shortly after taking office, Obama decides to sign a large spending bill with thousands of earmarks to avoid undercutting Congressional support for his $800 billion stimulus package. In doing so, he helps establish an image of himself as a big spender.
David Axelrod, White House senior adviser (2009-11): He was very much of a mind to veto the bill. We were in the midst of trying to pass the Recovery Act, and some of his legislative folks said, "Mr. President, you can veto the bill, but if you do, you jeopardize our ability to pass the Recovery Act." He was very frustrated. He just kind of glared, and he ultimately sort of nodded. I'm not sure he even said anything. But I know in retrospect that was probably one of the decisions he regretted the most.

In March 2009, after a sharp debate among his advisers, Obama decides to bail out the auto industry.
Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff (2009-10): All the advisers were divided, the public was absolutely against it. Nobody is giving you consensus, there is no consensus. Nobody had ever done what we were about to do. And he picks the hardest option.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 20, 2013

A collection of pictures on Page 36 this weekend with an article about President Obama's first term includes members of the administration or key players during Mr. Obama's first term; not all of them are members of the administration. Also, the pictures tinted blue represent either members of the administration or key players who are planning to leave or who have already left — not only those who have left.

And Ken Salazar, who is not shown as one of those leaving, announced after the magazine had gone to press that he was stepping down as Secretary of the Interior, as expected.

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