It’s the Economy: Are We in Danger of a Beer Monopoly?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Every day, the Web site BeerPulse tries to list every single new beer available in the United States. And that's harder than you might imagine. Recently, the site posted Cigar City's Jamonera Belgian-style Porter, Odell Tree Shaker Imperial Peach IPA, as well as a rye lager, a cherry blossom lager and a barley wine. And the list goes on, and on. In 1978, there were 89 breweries in the United States; at the beginning of this year, there were 2,336, with an average of one new brewery per day. Most of them are tiny, but a handful, like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada, have become large national brands. At the same time, sales of Budweiser in the United States have dropped for 25 consecutive years.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Economists use game theory to predict which mergers are good for consumers.

2. Expect many more of them in the near future.

3. One day soon, the Justice Department might be the least of megacompanies' worries.

It's the Economy

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

So I was surprised to learn that the Justice Department is worried that Anheuser-Busch InBev, the conglomerate that owns Bud, is on the cusp of becoming an abusive monopoly. In January, the department sued AB InBev to prevent it from buying the rest of Mexico's Grupo Modelo, a company in which it already carries a 50 percent stake. The case is not built on any leaked documents about some secret plan to abuse market power and raise prices. Instead, it's based on the work of Justice Department economists who, using game theory and complex forecasting models, are able to predict what an even bigger AB InBev will do. Their analysis suggests that the firm, regardless of who is running it, will inevitably break the law.

For decades, they argue, Anheuser-Busch has been employing what game theorists call a "trigger strategy," something like the beer equivalent of the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine. Anheuser-Busch signals to its competitors that if they lower their prices, it will start a vicious retail war. In 1988, Miller and Coors lowered prices on their flagship beers, which led Anheuser-Busch to slash the price of Bud and its other brands in key markets. At the time, August Busch III told Fortune, "We don't want to start a blood bath, but whatever the competition wants to do, we'll do." Miller and Coors promptly abandoned their price cutting.

The trigger strategy, conducted in public, is entirely legal. In fact, it's how airlines, mobile- phone companies and countless other industries keep their prices inflated. Since that dust-up in the late '80s, the huge American beer makers have moved in tandem to keep prices well above what classical economics would predict. (According to the logic of supply and demand, competing beer makers should pursue market share by lowering prices to just above the cost of production, or a few cents per bottle.) Budweiser's trigger strategy has been thwarted, though, by what game theorists call a "rogue player." When Bud and Coors raise their prices, Grupo Modelo's Corona does not. (As an imported beer, Corona is also considered to have a higher value.) And so, according to the Justice Department, AB InBev wants to buy Grupo Modelo not because it thinks the company makes great beer, or because it covets Corona's 7 percent U.S. market share, but because owning Corona would allow AB InBev to raise prices across all of its brands. And if the company could raise prices by, say, 3 percent, it would earn around $1 billion more in profit every year. Imagine the possibilities. The Justice Department already has.

Representatives from AB InBev, however, have stated that the potential Corona acquisition is less about dominating the dwindling (albeit still $90 billion per year) U.S. beer market and more about a larger, global strategy. In that regard, AB InBev has been on quite a roll. The Brazilian firm Companhia de Bebidas das Américas, or AmBev, was born in 1999 around the concept of using innovative technology and managerial efficiency to disrupt the competition and channel the profits into buying them out. The company swallowed up several Latin American firms; in 2004, it merged with the Belgian giant Interbrew; in 2008, the new conglomerate, InBev, took over Anheuser-Busch. Along the way, it also picked up China's third-largest brewer and the Canadian beer company Labatt.

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

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Instagram Your Local Escapes

This Sunday we will publish our Voyages Issue, which includes photographs and articles from around the world. But we are also interested in travels closer to home — the nearby treasures that you can find over, say, a long lunch break. On Thursday, we will feature a gallery of Instagrams submitted both by readers and the photographers we assigned; we will continue adding new photos until Monday, March 4. Share your photos with us starting now by tagging them on Instagram with #NYTvoyage, and include in the caption a description of where the picture was taken and how far it is from your home. It needn't be the biggest waterfall or the tallest mountain, or even an outdoor spot. We simply want to see your midday getaway, wherever it is in the world.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: What Does Your T-Shirt Say About You?

We'll start with what our T-shirts say about us.

For most of its history, The New York Times Magazine included a section devoted to fashion. And while these days, we don't cover fashion in the same way (our sister magazine, T: The Times Style Magazine does a thorough job of that), we are still interested in the ways that clothing can communicate meaning.

Yesterday, we asked members of the magazine's staff to bring in their favorite T-shirts. They are featured in the photographs here. Some are purely functional, others have emotional histories attached to them. Almost all are soft and worn.

Take our quiz below on which T-shirt belongs to which type of person and write your guesses in the comments section.

---

Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to the Iowa-born managing editor of the magazine? Which belongs to an athlete who owns a sailboat?

---

Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to a Canadian former competitive figure skater? Which belongs to a reality-television junkie who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village? Which one belongs to a Latin dancer from Kentucky?

---

Of the nine T-shirts below, which belongs to a runner with an encyclopedic knowledge of music history? Which belongs to the yoga fanatic who refuses to get a Twitter handle?

---

We will publish the answers to our quiz in a follow-up post.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Michael Moss on Addictive Foods and What He Eats for Breakfast

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for The Times, wrote this week's cover article on the processed-food industry. The article is adapted from his book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us," which will be published this month.

What first brought your attention to this topic?

I had been writing for the paper about contaminants in food — like salmonella in peanuts and E. coli in hamburger — and the industry scientists I met in the course of reporting said to me, "Michael, as tragic as these E. coli cases are, if you want to see something that makes a lot more people sick, look at the stuff the food giants are adding intentionally to their products." They were mostly involved in meat production, so they were alarmed by enormous quantities of salt added to processed meats. As I continued reporting, it became clear that salt, fat and sugar together formed the holy grail for the processed-food industry. We all knew that these were in heavy use, but one of the things I was curious about was how the industry was wrestling with the issue. The whole idea was to go inside the industry and see how it was dealing with reports of enormous levels of obesity and diabetes. I was stunned by how many senior officials had over the years become alarmed about the effects of these products. Certainly having thousands of pages of insider documents helped get people to talk, but I was surprised how many were willing to tell the story. What a lot of them had created in the '80s had meanwhile morphed into something else, something more problematic.

And that change in the food industry carries a whiff of conspiracy in your story.

Well, these are companies after all. Their main purpose is to make money. If they elevate health concerns to the top of their agenda, Wall Street and their competitors are waiting to eat them alive. As I describe in the book, some of the biggest companies did choose to do the right thing by consumer health at various points. But these were unilateral moves, and they were beaten by competitors.

Do you see the only way forward as promoting regulations, or is an agreement among food giants possible?

It's hard to disagree with the growing number of people who see government regulation as the way to deal with this. And adjusting regulations to give other products, like fruits and vegetables, a more even playing field with products, like corn, that are used in processed foods could be another step. But the $1 trillion a year food industry and its lobby still dominates the Department of Agriculture. Still, I was struck by the former C.E.O. of Philip Morris saying that he's no friend of government regulation but that what you are seeing in the processed-food industry is that there is no way any one company can make tremendous progress. The industry collectively won't decide to do it, and at a minimum government regulation would give these industries cover from the huge pressure they have from Wall Street to keep their profits up.

You report that a big concern among food-industry heads was to keep processed food from being compared to cigarettes. But if processed foods became as maligned as cigarettes have, might that be the best thing from a public-health standpoint?

Conceivably. Remember that Philip Morris was the only cigarette company to embrace government regulation as a means of self-preservation. They were worried about losing everything. But at that moment they expanded into noncigarette products. The other grain of salt with the Philip Morris strategy is that it embraced more regulation in this country as it was expanding its market abroad. And in the last decade the processed-food industry is spending more time exporting and marketing these foods abroad, and it is now a problem that the world must deal with. Part of it is the saturation of the American market but also its increasing fears here. But usually the industry has been flexible in its responses to consumer concerns. Sugar was an issue in the '80s, so you would see low-sugar products; fat was an issue in the '90s, so you'd see low-fat products. Now salt is more of an issue. But the low-fat products and low-salt products are high in sugar, and the low-sugar products are high in fat. They'll dial down one ingredient but dial up the others. From the companies' perspective it is understandable: they want to make as popular a product as possible. But collectively the whole industry is responsible for our heightened collective craving.

Aren't appetites for salt, sugar and fat natural human cravings?

Every one of our 10,000 taste buds is wired for sugar. But we aren't born liking salt — we develop a taste for it at about 6 months. There has been some recent science indicating that our liking for salt and our craving is hugely dependent on our exposure to processed foods. Scientists at the Monell Center in Philadelphia, which is partly financed by the food industry, recently did a study where they dumped children into two categories, those who were exposed to processed foods and those who weren't, starting at 6 months. The first category, by the time they were in preschool, were practically licking the salt shakers. Companies are experimenting with replacing sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because most of the health problems come from sodium. It works for some products, but if you diminish the amount of sodium, people want sugar and fat instead. In Britain, the country as a whole has managed to dial down  doses of salt, and that may help address high blood pressure, but obesity continues to rise.

After working on this book, do you live in some pristine otherworld of quinoa and salad?

My family is dependent on processed foods. We have two boys, ages 8 and 13. My wife, Eve, and I both work outside the home. There's no way with our lifestyle that we can lose all of that dependency. That said, Eve arbitrarily set a limit on the kids of five grams of sugar in cereal — even before I started reporting on the subject. Oatmeal is easy to make, but maybe kids don't want it. Five grams still leaves choices like basic Cheerios and Total. And it gives them choice and engages them in a discussion. The boys may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high to get the cereal, because Fruit Loops are displayed at eye-level. Eve pulled five grams out of thin air. There is no federal guideline for sugar. It is the one big thing missing from nutrition facts because the F.D.A. has declined to set a number.

Did reporting on this topic change your habits at all?

Yes, to a certain extent. It turns out convenience foods are not all that convenient. Oatmeal, I mentioned, is easy, and making tomato sauce for pasta has about two steps. But as a culture, we have lost the will but also the knowledge to make these. One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

What has the response been like to your article so far?

I haven't had time to go through the thousand-plus comments yet. I've been responding to e-mails, from people saying their families are struggling with diet issues and that having the information is empowering for them, but also from company executives. I got calls from doctors saying if you want to see something really deplorable, look at hospital cafeteria food. People from the White House got in touch, to talk to me but also to get in contact with Jeff Dunn, the Coca-Cola former president who is now trying to market baby carrots as junk food. They are interested in his strategies. The response has been enormous.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the given name of the former president of Coca-Cola North America. He is Jeff Dunn, not John.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

It’s the Economy: Are We in Danger of a Beer Monopoly?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Every day, the Web site BeerPulse tries to list every single new beer available in the United States. And that's harder than you might imagine. Recently, the site posted Cigar City's Jamonera Belgian-style Porter, Odell Tree Shaker Imperial Peach IPA, as well as a rye lager, a cherry blossom lager and a barley wine. And the list goes on, and on. In 1978, there were 89 breweries in the United States; at the beginning of this year, there were 2,336, with an average of one new brewery per day. Most of them are tiny, but a handful, like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada, have become large national brands. At the same time, sales of Budweiser in the United States have dropped for 25 consecutive years.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Economists use game theory to predict which mergers are good for consumers.

2. Expect many more of them in the near future.

3. One day soon, the Justice Department might be the least of megacompanies' worries.

It's the Economy

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

So I was surprised to learn that the Justice Department is worried that Anheuser-Busch InBev, the conglomerate that owns Bud, is on the cusp of becoming an abusive monopoly. In January, the department sued AB InBev to prevent it from buying the rest of Mexico's Grupo Modelo, a company in which it already carries a 50 percent stake. The case is not built on any leaked documents about some secret plan to abuse market power and raise prices. Instead, it's based on the work of Justice Department economists who, using game theory and complex forecasting models, are able to predict what an even bigger AB InBev will do. Their analysis suggests that the firm, regardless of who is running it, will inevitably break the law.

For decades, they argue, Anheuser-Busch has been employing what game theorists call a "trigger strategy," something like the beer equivalent of the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine. Anheuser-Busch signals to its competitors that if they lower their prices, it will start a vicious retail war. In 1988, Miller and Coors lowered prices on their flagship beers, which led Anheuser-Busch to slash the price of Bud and its other brands in key markets. At the time, August Busch III told Fortune, "We don't want to start a blood bath, but whatever the competition wants to do, we'll do." Miller and Coors promptly abandoned their price cutting.

The trigger strategy, conducted in public, is entirely legal. In fact, it's how airlines, mobile- phone companies and countless other industries keep their prices inflated. Since that dust-up in the late '80s, the huge American beer makers have moved in tandem to keep prices well above what classical economics would predict. (According to the logic of supply and demand, competing beer makers should pursue market share by lowering prices to just above the cost of production, or a few cents per bottle.) Budweiser's trigger strategy has been thwarted, though, by what game theorists call a "rogue player." When Bud and Coors raise their prices, Grupo Modelo's Corona does not. (As an imported beer, Corona is also considered to have a higher value.) And so, according to the Justice Department, AB InBev wants to buy Grupo Modelo not because it thinks the company makes great beer, or because it covets Corona's 7 percent U.S. market share, but because owning Corona would allow AB InBev to raise prices across all of its brands. And if the company could raise prices by, say, 3 percent, it would earn around $1 billion more in profit every year. Imagine the possibilities. The Justice Department already has.

Representatives from AB InBev, however, have stated that the potential Corona acquisition is less about dominating the dwindling (albeit still $90 billion per year) U.S. beer market and more about a larger, global strategy. In that regard, AB InBev has been on quite a roll. The Brazilian firm Companhia de Bebidas das Américas, or AmBev, was born in 1999 around the concept of using innovative technology and managerial efficiency to disrupt the competition and channel the profits into buying them out. The company swallowed up several Latin American firms; in 2004, it merged with the Belgian giant Interbrew; in 2008, the new conglomerate, InBev, took over Anheuser-Busch. Along the way, it also picked up China's third-largest brewer and the Canadian beer company Labatt.

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

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Instagram Your Local Escapes

This Sunday we will publish our Voyages Issue, which includes photographs and articles from around the world. But we are also interested in travels closer to home — the nearby treasures that you can find over, say, a long lunch break. On Thursday, we will feature a gallery of Instagrams submitted both by readers and the photographers we assigned; we will continue adding new photos until Monday, March 4. Share your photos with us starting now by tagging them on Instagram with #NYTvoyage, and include in the caption a description of where the picture was taken and how far it is from your home. It needn't be the biggest waterfall or the tallest mountain, or even an outdoor spot. We simply want to see your midday getaway, wherever it is in the world.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

How Come Martin Brodeur Is Still So Good?

Richard Burbridge for The New York Times

Martin Brodeur, the 40-year-old goalie for the New Jersey Devils.

The best hockey player in the New York area right now is also one of the greatest hockey players ever, and he's a Methuselah, a 40-year-old in a sport where pro careers typically last five or six years. Martin Brodeur, now in his 20th season with the New Jersey Devils, has played so well for so long that even hockey people have tended to take him a little for granted. He's hardly an unknown, but he would be more fussed over and wondered at if he didn't play in Newark and if his position were not the lowly, unglamorous one of goalie.

Denis Brodeur

Brodeur in 1977 at age 5, during a minor-hockey practice in St-Léonard, Quebec.

"Playing goal is not fun," Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, wrote in a memoir. "It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return." While his teammates zip around, the goalie lumbers, weighed down by his cumbrous equipment, and he spends the whole game by himself, down at one end of the rink, within easy earshot of heckling fans, in front of a red light that flashes on whenever he fails and lets a goal slip by. He has flurries of activity, but a lot of the time he just watches and worries. There's very little he can do to win a game, and mostly he hopes only not to lose it.

In hockey mythology, it's an article of faith that all goalies are a little flaky. You have to be a bit nuts, the theory goes, to want to play the position in the first place — to stand in front of the net while people sling hard rubber discs at you at more than 100 miles an hour — and only certain personality types can withstand the strain. The annals of the game are full of memorable head cases. Glenn Hall, a goalie during the '50s and '60s for the Red Wings and the Blackhawks, used to throw up before every game. Gary Smith, a goalie from the same era, insisted on removing all his gear and taking a shower between periods.

The loopiest goalie of all was Gilles Gratton, who bounced around in the minors in the '70s before ending his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. Gratton liked to skate in the nude sometimes, wearing just his goalie mask, and refused to play if the stars did not line up properly. He believed that in a previous life he was an executioner who stoned people to death, and that he was fated to become a goalie — someone on the receiving end of a stoning, so to speak — as punishment.

Brodeur, who has been the Devils' starting goalie since 1993, the backbone of the team's three successful Stanley Cup campaigns, is the exception to this tradition of brooding and eccentricity. He's probably the most well adjusted, happiest-seeming person I have ever met, so normal that it's a little eerie. Jokey and gregarious, he doesn't even mind talking to the media, though like a lot of hockey players he speaks to the press in breathless run-on sentences, like someone dashing across thin ice, fearful that if he stops, he'll fall through.

Chico Resch, the former Devils goalie who is now a broadcaster for the team, cautioned me last summer about taking Brodeur at face value. "There's more to Marty than meets the eye," he said — meaning his competitiveness, I think. And Brodeur admitted that he's not always as unruffled as he seems. "You come in from a bad period and start breaking the sticks — I'm not going to say it never happened," he told me, smiling. "I know there is a lot of pressure on a goalie, a lot of responsibilities, but if you add on to yourself more than you need to, it makes it harder to deal with the adversity." Hockey people say that Brodeur's particular strength is his ability to bounce back from a bad goal or a bad game and not let it gnaw at him. Hockey was locked out for the first half of this season, and during the Devils' truncated training camp last month, you could see that he hates to be scored on even in practice, rapping his stick or ducking his head in disgust after letting one in. But the cloud passes in an instant, and then he's bouncing on his skates and looking for more pucks to swat away. Lou Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager, says, "Marty's mental toughness, his ability to overcome a bad game, is just phenomenal."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2013

An article on Page 42 this weekend about the New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur misspells the given name of a former goaltender who competed during the '50s and '60s. He is Glenn Hall, not Glen. The article also misidentifies the team for which goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere played when he was named the M.V.P.in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2003. It was with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, not the Colorado Avalanche. And the article misidentifies the team that drafted the goalie Trevor Kidd. He went to the Calgary Flames, not to the Vancouver Canucks.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Cover Story: Michael Moss on Addictive Foods and What He Eats for Breakfast

Michael Moss, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter for The Times, wrote this week's cover article on the processed-food industry. The article is adapted from his book, "Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us," which will be published this month.

What first brought your attention to this topic?

I had been writing for the paper about contaminants in food — like salmonella in peanuts and E. coli in hamburger — and the industry scientists I met in the course of reporting said to me, "Michael, as tragic as these E. coli cases are, if you want to see something that makes a lot more people sick, look at the stuff the food giants are adding intentionally to their products." They were mostly involved in meat production, so they were alarmed by enormous quantities of salt added to processed meats. As I continued reporting, it became clear that salt, fat and sugar together formed the holy grail for the processed-food industry. We all knew that these were in heavy use, but one of the things I was curious about was how the industry was wrestling with the issue. The whole idea was to go inside the industry and see how it was dealing with reports of enormous levels of obesity and diabetes. I was stunned by how many senior officials had over the years become alarmed about the effects of these products. Certainly having thousands of pages of insider documents helped get people to talk, but I was surprised how many were willing to tell the story. What a lot of them had created in the '80s had meanwhile morphed into something else, something more problematic.

And that change in the food industry carries a whiff of conspiracy in your story.

Well, these are companies after all. Their main purpose is to make money. If they elevate health concerns to the top of their agenda, Wall Street and their competitors are waiting to eat them alive. As I describe in the book, some of the biggest companies did choose to do the right thing by consumer health at various points. But these were unilateral moves, and they were beaten by competitors.

Do you see the only way forward as promoting regulations, or is an agreement among food giants possible?

It's hard to disagree with the growing number of people who see government regulation as the way to deal with this. And adjusting regulations to give other products, like fruits and vegetables, a more even playing field with products, like corn, that are used in processed foods could be another step. But the $1 trillion a year food industry and its lobby still dominates the Department of Agriculture. Still, I was struck by the former C.E.O. of Philip Morris saying that he's no friend of government regulation but that what you are seeing in the processed-food industry is that there is no way any one company can make tremendous progress. The industry collectively won't decide to do it, and at a minimum government regulation would give these industries cover from the huge pressure they have from Wall Street to keep their profits up.

You report that a big concern among food-industry heads was to keep processed food from being compared to cigarettes. But if processed foods became as maligned as cigarettes have, might that be the best thing from a public-health standpoint?

Conceivably. Remember that Philip Morris was the only cigarette company to embrace government regulation as a means of self-preservation. They were worried about losing everything. But at that moment they expanded into noncigarette products. The other grain of salt with the Philip Morris strategy is that it embraced more regulation in this country as it was expanding its market abroad. And in the last decade the processed-food industry is spending more time exporting and marketing these foods abroad, and it is now a problem that the world must deal with. Part of it is the saturation of the American market but also its increasing fears here. But usually the industry has been flexible in its responses to consumer concerns. Sugar was an issue in the '80s, so you would see low-sugar products; fat was an issue in the '90s, so you'd see low-fat products. Now salt is more of an issue. But the low-fat products and low-salt products are high in sugar, and the low-sugar products are high in fat. They'll dial down one ingredient but dial up the others. From the companies' perspective it is understandable: they want to make as popular a product as possible. But collectively the whole industry is responsible for our heightened collective craving.

Aren't appetites for salt, sugar and fat natural human cravings?

Every one of our 10,000 taste buds is wired for sugar. But we aren't born liking salt — we develop a taste for it at about 6 months. There has been some recent science indicating that our liking for salt and our craving is hugely dependent on our exposure to processed foods. Scientists at the Monell Center in Philadelphia, which is partly financed by the food industry, recently did a study where they dumped children into two categories, those who were exposed to processed foods and those who weren't, starting at 6 months. The first category, by the time they were in preschool, were practically licking the salt shakers. Companies are experimenting with replacing sodium chloride with potassium chloride, because most of the health problems come from sodium. It works for some products, but if you diminish the amount of sodium, people want sugar and fat instead. In Britain, the country as a whole has managed to dial down  doses of salt, and that may help address high blood pressure, but obesity continues to rise.

After working on this book, do you live in some pristine otherworld of quinoa and salad?

My family is dependent on processed foods. We have two boys, ages 8 and 13. My wife, Eve, and I both work outside the home. There's no way with our lifestyle that we can lose all of that dependency. That said, Eve arbitrarily set a limit on the kids of five grams of sugar in cereal — even before I started reporting on the subject. Oatmeal is easy to make, but maybe kids don't want it. Five grams still leaves choices like basic Cheerios and Total. And it gives them choice and engages them in a discussion. The boys may have to reach low, or I may have to reach high to get the cereal, because Fruit Loops are displayed at eye-level. Eve pulled five grams out of thin air. There is no federal guideline for sugar. It is the one big thing missing from nutrition facts because the F.D.A. has declined to set a number.

Did reporting on this topic change your habits at all?

Yes, to a certain extent. It turns out convenience foods are not all that convenient. Oatmeal, I mentioned, is easy, and making tomato sauce for pasta has about two steps. But as a culture, we have lost the will but also the knowledge to make these. One reason that we eat processed foods is the decline of home economics. Restarting home economics classes is one of the key things we could do to get this issue moving.

What has the response been like to your article so far?

I haven't had time to go through the thousand-plus comments yet. I've been responding to e-mails, from people saying their families are struggling with diet issues and that having the information is empowering for them, but also from company executives. I got calls from doctors saying if you want to see something really deplorable, look at hospital cafeteria food. People from the White House got in touch, to talk to me but also to get in contact with Jeff Dunn, the Coca-Cola former president who is now trying to market baby carrots as junk food. They are interested in his strategies. The response has been enormous.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 25, 2013

An earlier version of this post misstated the given name of the former president of Coca-Cola North America. He is Jeff Dunn, not John.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

It’s the Economy: What Corona Has That Budweiser Wants

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Every day, the Web site BeerPulse tries to list every single new beer available in the United States. And that's harder than you might imagine. Recently, the site posted Cigar City's Jamonera Belgian-style Porter, Odell Tree Shaker Imperial Peach IPA, as well as a rye lager, a cherry blossom lager and a barley wine. And the list goes on, and on. In 1978, there were 89 breweries in the United States; at the beginning of this year, there were 2,336, with an average of one new brewery per day. Most of them are tiny, but a handful, like Sam Adams and Sierra Nevada, have become large national brands. At the same time, sales of Budweiser in the United States have dropped for 25 consecutive years.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Economists use game theory to predict which mergers are good for consumers.

2. Expect many more of them in the near future.

3. One day soon, the Justice Department might be the least of megacompanies' worries.

It's the Economy

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

So I was surprised to learn that the Justice Department is worried that Anheuser-Busch InBev, the conglomerate that owns Bud, is on the cusp of becoming an abusive monopoly. In January, the department sued AB InBev to prevent it from buying the rest of Mexico's Grupo Modelo, a company in which it already carries a 50 percent stake. The case is not built on any leaked documents about some secret plan to abuse market power and raise prices. Instead, it's based on the work of Justice Department economists who, using game theory and complex forecasting models, are able to predict what an even bigger AB InBev will do. Their analysis suggests that the firm, regardless of who is running it, will inevitably break the law.

For decades, they argue, Anheuser-Busch has been employing what game theorists call a "trigger strategy," something like the beer equivalent of the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine. Anheuser-Busch signals to its competitors that if they lower their prices, it will start a vicious retail war. In 1988, Miller and Coors lowered prices on their flagship beers, which led Anheuser-Busch to slash the price of Bud and its other brands in key markets. At the time, August Busch III told Fortune, "We don't want to start a blood bath, but whatever the competition wants to do, we'll do." Miller and Coors promptly abandoned their price cutting.

The trigger strategy, conducted in public, is entirely legal. In fact, it's how airlines, mobile- phone companies and countless other industries keep their prices inflated. Since that dust-up in the late '80s, the huge American beer makers have moved in tandem to keep prices well above what classical economics would predict. (According to the logic of supply and demand, competing beer makers should pursue market share by lowering prices to just above the cost of production, or a few cents per bottle.) Budweiser's trigger strategy has been thwarted, though, by what game theorists call a "rogue player." When Bud and Coors raise their prices, Grupo Modelo's Corona does not. (As an imported beer, Corona is also considered to have a higher value.) And so, according to the Justice Department, AB InBev wants to buy Grupo Modelo not because it thinks the company makes great beer, or because it covets Corona's 7 percent U.S. market share, but because owning Corona would allow AB InBev to raise prices across all of its brands. And if the company could raise prices by, say, 3 percent, it would earn around $1 billion more in profit every year. Imagine the possibilities. The Justice Department already has.

Representatives from AB InBev, however, have stated that the potential Corona acquisition is less about dominating the dwindling (albeit still $90 billion per year) U.S. beer market and more about a larger, global strategy. In that regard, AB InBev has been on quite a roll. The Brazilian firm Companhia de Bebidas das Américas, or AmBev, was born in 1999 around the concept of using innovative technology and managerial efficiency to disrupt the competition and channel the profits into buying them out. The company swallowed up several Latin American firms; in 2004, it merged with the Belgian giant Interbrew; in 2008, the new conglomerate, InBev, took over Anheuser-Busch. Along the way, it also picked up China's third-largest brewer and the Canadian beer company Labatt.

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

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Scenes: Models and Their Mothers

Howard Schatz is best known for dynamic photographs of athletes, like the one for Sam Anderson's cover story on the Oklahoma City Thunder in November. But he also has a more contemplative side. For the past 12 years, Schatz, along with his wife and agent, Beverly Ornstein, has been working on a series of portraits of female models and their mothers, some of which are featured in this week's Look. Schatz has photographed between 200 and 300 model-mother pairs, and he hopes to shoot 1,000, with the aim of publishing a book in a few years. I spoke with him about the project.

How did come up with the idea for this?

Many, many models have come through our studio over the years, for all kinds of castings — editorial and advertising. And they come from all lands: Chile, China, Senegal, Sweden, Argentina and Austria, just everywhere. Many of them are young kids, they're in their teens or 20s. I'd ask them: How did you get here? Who helped you set up? Where did you find your apartment? And they talked about how their mothers helped them. Their mothers would come every few months or every year to visit them and see if they were O.K. They'd still talk to their mothers every night, even though their mother might be in Siberia. That interested me, so I asked a few of the models, "When your mother comes to New York, why don't we do a portrait?"

What did you notice during the photo sessions?

If the models had been working for a year or more, you put a camera in front of them, and their eyes squint, and their head turns, and they become a little alluring. Some models would even direct their mothers — "Tilt your chin down." I'd then ask them not to pose like a sexy fashion model but to pose as their mother's daughter. I'd ask both mother and daughter to look at the camera as if they were listening to each other, as if they were having a long distance conversation and the other one is speaking. I'd try to get a face that wasn't designed to affect the photograph, that wasn't telling the camera what it's supposed to see.

What about the relationships between the pairs? What did you see there?

Their emotional relationship informed their physical relationship during the photo session. Some of the mother-daughter pairs could sit close to each other, hug each other, they couldn't keep their hands off each other from affection and warmth and being happy to be next to each other. Others were a little tentative, and there was no affection. I'd ask them to sit near each other, but they'd shift a little to get an inch away. Sometimes the mother would try to be her daughter's big sister. She'd try to live through her daughter's career, emulating their daughter, dressing like their daughter, posing like their daughter. I found that was very interesting.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of a country native to models who were photographed by Howard Schatz. It is Chile, not Chili.

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The 6th Floor Blog: When Living Hand to Mouth Becomes a Career

This mouth, appearing on the cover of this weekend's issue, belongs to Laura Williams, a model whose lips, teeth and hands are frequently sought for advertisements.

When we conceived of an image to accompany Michael Moss's article on the addictive science of junk food, we wanted to emulate the way a food advertisement looks and feels — idealized, clean, enticing. So we called Parts Models, an agency that specializes in body parts, and it led us to Williams.

Williams says she initially aimed to do "normal modeling," never imagining that something so specific as her teeth or her nails would become a focus of her career. While Williams's mouth is the focal point of our cover, it was her hands that first caught the attention of parts modeling agents (those are her fingers, too, on our cover).

Roughly 50 percent of her modeling work involves parts modeling. The "abnormally close" photographs in parts modeling demand "such a different level of perfection," Williams says, that if a model has slightly flawed hands, or a strange space between her teeth, it can detract from the product being advertised. She has modeled in advertisements for Revlon, Colgate, Hilton Hotels and others.

But while her teeth are remarkable (they have never been professionally whitened), Williams says she is better known for her appearance on the covers of more than 1,000 romance novels — she has heard that she is the top female book-cover model in the world. Williams has fans who follow her because of this; there are fan sites that offer images of her as desktop screen savers.

Williams says that she has to be careful of actions as simple as digging around in her purse — she could break a nail. (Unlike some obsessive hand models, though, she does shake people's hands). Williams stays away from cigarettes, harsh soaps, most sports and anything that poses a physical risk.

"If you're a normal person and you break your pinkie finger, it's not a big deal, but when you're a model, it could mean you're out of work."

This is Williams's first time on the cover of a national magazine.

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How Come Martin Brodeur Is Still So Good?

Richard Burbridge for The New York Times

Martin Brodeur, the 40-year-old goalie for the New Jersey Devils.

The best hockey player in the New York area right now is also one of the greatest hockey players ever, and he's a Methuselah, a 40-year-old in a sport where pro careers typically last five or six years. Martin Brodeur, now in his 20th season with the New Jersey Devils, has played so well for so long that even hockey people have tended to take him a little for granted. He's hardly an unknown, but he would be more fussed over and wondered at if he didn't play in Newark and if his position were not the lowly, unglamorous one of goalie.

Denis Brodeur

Brodeur in 1977 at age 5, during a minor-hockey practice in St-Léonard, Quebec.

"Playing goal is not fun," Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, wrote in a memoir. "It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return." While his teammates zip around, the goalie lumbers, weighed down by his cumbrous equipment, and he spends the whole game by himself, down at one end of the rink, within easy earshot of heckling fans, in front of a red light that flashes on whenever he fails and lets a goal slip by. He has flurries of activity, but a lot of the time he just watches and worries. There's very little he can do to win a game, and mostly he hopes only not to lose it.

In hockey mythology, it's an article of faith that all goalies are a little flaky. You have to be a bit nuts, the theory goes, to want to play the position in the first place — to stand in front of the net while people sling hard rubber discs at you at more than 100 miles an hour — and only certain personality types can withstand the strain. The annals of the game are full of memorable head cases. Glenn Hall, a goalie during the '50s and '60s for the Red Wings and the Blackhawks, used to throw up before every game. Gary Smith, a goalie from the same era, insisted on removing all his gear and taking a shower between periods.

The loopiest goalie of all was Gilles Gratton, who bounced around in the minors in the '70s before ending his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. Gratton liked to skate in the nude sometimes, wearing just his goalie mask, and refused to play if the stars did not line up properly. He believed that in a previous life he was an executioner who stoned people to death, and that he was fated to become a goalie — someone on the receiving end of a stoning, so to speak — as punishment.

Brodeur, who has been the Devils' starting goalie since 1993, the backbone of the team's three successful Stanley Cup campaigns, is the exception to this tradition of brooding and eccentricity. He's probably the most well adjusted, happiest-seeming person I have ever met, so normal that it's a little eerie. Jokey and gregarious, he doesn't even mind talking to the media, though like a lot of hockey players he speaks to the press in breathless run-on sentences, like someone dashing across thin ice, fearful that if he stops, he'll fall through.

Chico Resch, the former Devils goalie who is now a broadcaster for the team, cautioned me last summer about taking Brodeur at face value. "There's more to Marty than meets the eye," he said — meaning his competitiveness, I think. And Brodeur admitted that he's not always as unruffled as he seems. "You come in from a bad period and start breaking the sticks — I'm not going to say it never happened," he told me, smiling. "I know there is a lot of pressure on a goalie, a lot of responsibilities, but if you add on to yourself more than you need to, it makes it harder to deal with the adversity." Hockey people say that Brodeur's particular strength is his ability to bounce back from a bad goal or a bad game and not let it gnaw at him. Hockey was locked out for the first half of this season, and during the Devils' truncated training camp last month, you could see that he hates to be scored on even in practice, rapping his stick or ducking his head in disgust after letting one in. But the cloud passes in an instant, and then he's bouncing on his skates and looking for more pucks to swat away. Lou Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager, says, "Marty's mental toughness, his ability to overcome a bad game, is just phenomenal."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2013

An article on Page 42 this weekend about the New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur misspells the given name of a former goaltender who competed during the '50s and '60s. He is Glenn Hall, not Glen. The article also misidentifies the team for which goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere played when he was named the M.V.P.in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2003. It was with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, not the Colorado Avalanche. And the article misidentifies the team that drafted the goalie Trevor Kidd. He went to the Calgary Flames, not to the Vancouver Canucks.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Scenes: Models and Their Mothers

Howard Schatz is best known for dynamic photographs of athletes, like the one for Sam Anderson's cover story on the Oklahoma City Thunder in November. But he also has a more contemplative side. For the past 12 years, Schatz, along with his wife and agent, Beverly Ornstein, has been working on a series of portraits of female models and their mothers, some of which are featured in this week's Look. Schatz has photographed between 200 and 300 model-mother pairs, and he hopes to shoot 1,000, with the aim of publishing a book in a few years. I spoke with him about the project.

How did come up with the idea for this?

Many, many models have come through our studio over the years, for all kinds of castings — editorial and advertising. And they come from all lands: Chile, China, Senegal, Sweden, Argentina and Austria, just everywhere. Many of them are young kids, they're in their teens or 20s. I'd ask them: How did you get here? Who helped you set up? Where did you find your apartment? And they talked about how their mothers helped them. Their mothers would come every few months or every year to visit them and see if they were O.K. They'd still talk to their mothers every night, even though their mother might be in Siberia. That interested me, so I asked a few of the models, "When your mother comes to New York, why don't we do a portrait?"

What did you notice during the photo sessions?

If the models had been working for a year or more, you put a camera in front of them, and their eyes squint, and their head turns, and they become a little alluring. Some models would even direct their mothers — "Tilt your chin down." I'd then ask them not to pose like a sexy fashion model but to pose as their mother's daughter. I'd ask both mother and daughter to look at the camera as if they were listening to each other, as if they were having a long distance conversation and the other one is speaking. I'd try to get a face that wasn't designed to affect the photograph, that wasn't telling the camera what it's supposed to see.

What about the relationships between the pairs? What did you see there?

Their emotional relationship informed their physical relationship during the photo session. Some of the mother-daughter pairs could sit close to each other, hug each other, they couldn't keep their hands off each other from affection and warmth and being happy to be next to each other. Others were a little tentative, and there was no affection. I'd ask them to sit near each other, but they'd shift a little to get an inch away. Sometimes the mother would try to be her daughter's big sister. She'd try to live through her daughter's career, emulating their daughter, dressing like their daughter, posing like their daughter. I found that was very interesting.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of a country native to models who were photographed by Howard Schatz. It is Chile, not Chili.

18.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

The 6th Floor Blog: When Living Hand to Mouth Becomes a Career

This mouth, appearing on the cover of this weekend's issue, belongs to Laura Williams, a model whose lips, teeth and hands are frequently sought for advertisements.

When we conceived of an image to accompany Michael Moss's article on the addictive science of junk food, we wanted to emulate the way a food advertisement looks and feels — idealized, clean, enticing. So we called Parts Models, an agency that specializes in body parts, and it led us to Williams.

Williams says she initially aimed to do "normal modeling," never imagining that something so specific as her teeth or her nails would become a focus of her career. While Williams's mouth is the focal point of our cover, it was her hands that first caught the attention of parts modeling agents (those are her fingers, too, on our cover).

Roughly 50 percent of her modeling work involves parts modeling. The "abnormally close" photographs in parts modeling demand "such a different level of perfection," Williams says, that if a model has slightly flawed hands, or a strange space between her teeth, it can detract from the product being advertised. She has modeled in advertisements for Revlon, Colgate, Hilton Hotels and others.

But while her teeth are remarkable (they have never been professionally whitened), Williams says she is better known for her appearance on the covers of more than 1,000 romance novels — she has heard that she is the top female book-cover model in the world. Williams has fans who follow her because of this; there are fan sites that offer images of her as desktop screen savers.

Williams says that she has to be careful of actions as simple as digging around in her purse — she could break a nail. (Unlike some obsessive hand models, though, she does shake people's hands). Williams stays away from cigarettes, harsh soaps, most sports and anything that poses a physical risk.

"If you're a normal person and you break your pinkie finger, it's not a big deal, but when you're a model, it could mean you're out of work."

This is Williams's first time on the cover of a national magazine.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

How Come Martin Brodeur Is Still So Good?

Richard Burbridge for The New York Times

Martin Brodeur, the 40-year-old goalie for the New Jersey Devils.

The best hockey player in the New York area right now is also one of the greatest hockey players ever, and he's a Methuselah, a 40-year-old in a sport where pro careers typically last five or six years. Martin Brodeur, now in his 20th season with the New Jersey Devils, has played so well for so long that even hockey people have tended to take him a little for granted. He's hardly an unknown, but he would be more fussed over and wondered at if he didn't play in Newark and if his position were not the lowly, unglamorous one of goalie.

Denis Brodeur

Brodeur in 1977 at age 5, during a minor-hockey practice in St-Léonard, Quebec.

"Playing goal is not fun," Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, wrote in a memoir. "It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return." While his teammates zip around, the goalie lumbers, weighed down by his cumbrous equipment, and he spends the whole game by himself, down at one end of the rink, within easy earshot of heckling fans, in front of a red light that flashes on whenever he fails and lets a goal slip by. He has flurries of activity, but a lot of the time he just watches and worries. There's very little he can do to win a game, and mostly he hopes only not to lose it.

In hockey mythology, it's an article of faith that all goalies are a little flaky. You have to be a bit nuts, the theory goes, to want to play the position in the first place — to stand in front of the net while people sling hard rubber discs at you at more than 100 miles an hour — and only certain personality types can withstand the strain. The annals of the game are full of memorable head cases. Glenn Hall, a goalie during the '50s and '60s for the Red Wings and the Blackhawks, used to throw up before every game. Gary Smith, a goalie from the same era, insisted on removing all his gear and taking a shower between periods.

The loopiest goalie of all was Gilles Gratton, who bounced around in the minors in the '70s before ending his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. Gratton liked to skate in the nude sometimes, wearing just his goalie mask, and refused to play if the stars did not line up properly. He believed that in a previous life he was an executioner who stoned people to death, and that he was fated to become a goalie — someone on the receiving end of a stoning, so to speak — as punishment.

Brodeur, who has been the Devils' starting goalie since 1993, the backbone of the team's three successful Stanley Cup campaigns, is the exception to this tradition of brooding and eccentricity. He's probably the most well adjusted, happiest-seeming person I have ever met, so normal that it's a little eerie. Jokey and gregarious, he doesn't even mind talking to the media, though like a lot of hockey players he speaks to the press in breathless run-on sentences, like someone dashing across thin ice, fearful that if he stops, he'll fall through.

Chico Resch, the former Devils goalie who is now a broadcaster for the team, cautioned me last summer about taking Brodeur at face value. "There's more to Marty than meets the eye," he said — meaning his competitiveness, I think. And Brodeur admitted that he's not always as unruffled as he seems. "You come in from a bad period and start breaking the sticks — I'm not going to say it never happened," he told me, smiling. "I know there is a lot of pressure on a goalie, a lot of responsibilities, but if you add on to yourself more than you need to, it makes it harder to deal with the adversity." Hockey people say that Brodeur's particular strength is his ability to bounce back from a bad goal or a bad game and not let it gnaw at him. Hockey was locked out for the first half of this season, and during the Devils' truncated training camp last month, you could see that he hates to be scored on even in practice, rapping his stick or ducking his head in disgust after letting one in. But the cloud passes in an instant, and then he's bouncing on his skates and looking for more pucks to swat away. Lou Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager, says, "Marty's mental toughness, his ability to overcome a bad game, is just phenomenal."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 24, 2013

An article on Page 42 this weekend about the New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur misspells the given name of a former goaltender who competed during the '50s and '60s. He is Glenn Hall, not Glen. The article also misidentifies the team for which goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere played when he was named the M.V.P.in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2003. It was with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, not the Colorado Avalanche. And the article misidentifies the team that drafted the goalie Trevor Kidd. He went to the Calgary Flames, not to the Vancouver Canucks.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Are Standardized Tests Worth the Stress?

Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman's Feb. 10 article on why some students are "worriers" (those who fall apart when under pressure) while others are "warriors" (those who thrive on it) generated 404 online comments. Central to the debate was whether standardized testing is beneficial or not.

Rarely is a debate in the comments section so evenly divided. Readers argued:

What do you think? Are standardized tests worthwhile? Or have they become too pervasive and too taxing on students? Write your response in the comments section.

This graphic will appear on the Reply All page in this weekend's magazine.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Behind the Scenes: Models and Their Mothers

Howard Schatz is best known for dynamic photographs of athletes, like the one for Sam Anderson's cover story on the Oklahoma City Thunder in November. But he also has a more contemplative side. For the past 12 years, Schatz, along with his wife and agent, Beverly Ornstein, has been working on a series of portraits of female models and their mothers, some of which are featured in this week's Look. Schatz has photographed between 200 and 300 model-mother pairs, and he hopes to shoot 1,000, with the aim of publishing a book in a few years. I spoke with him about the project.

How did come up with the idea for this?

Many, many models have come through our studio over the years, for all kinds of castings — editorial and advertising. And they come from all lands: Chile, China, Senegal, Sweden, Argentina and Austria, just everywhere. Many of them are young kids, they're in their teens or 20s. I'd ask them: How did you get here? Who helped you set up? Where did you find your apartment? And they talked about how their mothers helped them. Their mothers would come every few months or every year to visit them and see if they were O.K. They'd still talk to their mothers every night, even though their mother might be in Siberia. That interested me, so I asked a few of the models, "When your mother comes to New York, why don't we do a portrait?"

What did you notice during the photo sessions?

If the models had been working for a year or more, you put a camera in front of them, and their eyes squint, and their head turns, and they become a little alluring. Some models would even direct their mothers — "Tilt your chin down." I'd then ask them not to pose like a sexy fashion model but to pose as their mother's daughter. I'd ask both mother and daughter to look at the camera as if they were listening to each other, as if they were having a long distance conversation and the other one is speaking. I'd try to get a face that wasn't designed to affect the photograph, that wasn't telling the camera what it's supposed to see.

What about the relationships between the pairs? What did you see there?

Their emotional relationship informed their physical relationship during the photo session. Some of the mother-daughter pairs could sit close to each other, hug each other, they couldn't keep their hands off each other from affection and warmth and being happy to be next to each other. Others were a little tentative, and there was no affection. I'd ask them to sit near each other, but they'd shift a little to get an inch away. Sometimes the mother would try to be her daughter's big sister. She'd try to live through her daughter's career, emulating their daughter, dressing like their daughter, posing like their daughter. I found that was very interesting.

---

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2013

An earlier version of this post misspelled the name of a country native to models who were photographed by Howard Schatz. It is Chile, not Chili.

18.37 | 0 komentar | Read More

How Come Martin Brodeur Is Still So Good?

Richard Burbridge for The New York Times

Martin Brodeur, the 40-year-old goalie for the New Jersey Devils.

The best hockey player in the New York area right now is also one of the greatest hockey players ever, and he's a Methuselah, a 40-year-old in a sport where pro careers typically last five or six years. Martin Brodeur, now in his 20th season with the New Jersey Devils, has played so well for so long that even hockey people have tended to take him a little for granted. He's hardly an unknown, but he would be more fussed over and wondered at if he didn't play in Newark and if his position were not the lowly, unglamorous one of goalie.

Denis Brodeur

Brodeur in 1977 at age 5, during a minor-hockey practice in St-Léonard, Quebec.

"Playing goal is not fun," Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, wrote in a memoir. "It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return." While his teammates zip around, the goalie lumbers, weighed down by his cumbrous equipment, and he spends the whole game by himself, down at one end of the rink, within easy earshot of heckling fans, in front of a red light that flashes on whenever he fails and lets a goal slip by. He has flurries of activity, but a lot of the time he just watches and worries. There's very little he can do to win a game, and mostly he hopes only not to lose it.

In hockey mythology, it's an article of faith that all goalies are a little flaky. You have to be a bit nuts, the theory goes, to want to play the position in the first place — to stand in front of the net while people sling hard rubber discs at you at more than 100 miles an hour — and only certain personality types can withstand the strain. The annals of the game are full of memorable head cases. Glenn Hall, a goalie during the '50s and '60s for the Red Wings and the Blackhawks, used to throw up before every game. Gary Smith, a goalie from the same era, insisted on removing all his gear and taking a shower between periods.

The loopiest goalie of all was Gilles Gratton, who bounced around in the minors in the '70s before ending his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. Gratton liked to skate in the nude sometimes, wearing just his goalie mask, and refused to play if the stars did not line up properly. He believed that in a previous life he was an executioner who stoned people to death, and that he was fated to become a goalie — someone on the receiving end of a stoning, so to speak — as punishment.

Brodeur, who has been the Devils' starting goalie since 1993, the backbone of the team's three successful Stanley Cup campaigns, is the exception to this tradition of brooding and eccentricity. He's probably the most well adjusted, happiest-seeming person I have ever met, so normal that it's a little eerie. Jokey and gregarious, he doesn't even mind talking to the media, though like a lot of hockey players he speaks to the press in breathless run-on sentences, like someone dashing across thin ice, fearful that if he stops, he'll fall through.

Chico Resch, the former Devils goalie who is now a broadcaster for the team, cautioned me last summer about taking Brodeur at face value. "There's more to Marty than meets the eye," he said — meaning his competitiveness, I think. And Brodeur admitted that he's not always as unruffled as he seems. "You come in from a bad period and start breaking the sticks — I'm not going to say it never happened," he told me, smiling. "I know there is a lot of pressure on a goalie, a lot of responsibilities, but if you add on to yourself more than you need to, it makes it harder to deal with the adversity." Hockey people say that Brodeur's particular strength is his ability to bounce back from a bad goal or a bad game and not let it gnaw at him. Hockey was locked out for the first half of this season, and during the Devils' truncated training camp last month, you could see that he hates to be scored on even in practice, rapping his stick or ducking his head in disgust after letting one in. But the cloud passes in an instant, and then he's bouncing on his skates and looking for more pucks to swat away. Lou Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager, says, "Marty's mental toughness, his ability to overcome a bad game, is just phenomenal."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 23, 2013

An article on Page 42 this weekend about the New Jersey Devils goalie Martin Brodeur misspells the given name of a former goaltender who competed during the '50s and '60s. He is Glenn Hall, not Glen. The article also misidentifies the team for which goalie Jean-Sebastien Giguere played when he was named the M.V.P. in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 2003. It was with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks, not the Colorado Avalanche. And the article misidentifies the team that drafted the goalie Trevor Kidd. He went to the Calgary Flames, not to the Vancouver Canucks.

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The 6th Floor Blog: The Reality Behind Virtual War Zones

In my essay, "A War Zone I Can't Escape," which ran in the magazine a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the urban, decimated streetscape of the Middle East city in the combat video game that my stepson was playing had looked disquietingly similar to my native city Beirut, which during my childhood was enmeshed in a civil war between Lebanon's innumerable, and irreconcilable, militias (outside forces, like Syria and Israel, also played considerable roles).

I was surprised to discover, then, the work of Mark Tribe, a New York-based artist who uses digital landscapes created for first-person shooter video games and films of militia training sites as the basis for his project "Rare Earth." (Tribe is also married to Emily Eakin, who wrote an article on Napoleon Chagnon that appeared in last weekend's issue of the magazine.)

Anchored by a series of screenshots of tranquil-looking scenes used as backgrounds for warfare in video games, Tribe's "Rare Earth," which was shown last summer at Momenta Art in Brooklyn, highlights the increasingly murky line between the fictionalized terrain of virtual combat and the real-life environment of militia drill exercises. In collaboration with the artist Chelsea Knight, Tribe had been working on another project, "Posse Comitatus," for which he and Knight had turned militia movements into a dance performance that they filmed. For "Rare Earth," he made five videos, each composed of a single static shot of an upstate militia campground whose topography is chillingly indistinguishable from that of the game-derived stills.

The mesmerizing rural vistas in "Rare Earth" that Tribe has rendered into high-resolution pigment prints call to mind the exquisite landscapes by the Hudson River School, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jan van Goyen, J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

But while landscapes can be seductive, and even comforting, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not neutral territory. "They're always some kind of projection of our desires: economic interests, imperialist designs, or military fantasies," says Tribe, who is the founder of Rhizome, a new-media arts organization, and assistant professor of modern culture and media studies at Brown University. The images he extracted from combat video games, he says, "are yet another example, a new genre of landscape representation that is freighted and fraught with complex agendas having to do with violence and power, preparedness, self-defense, camaraderie and manhood."

Tribe's project on the virtual renditions of nature — the most sedate aspect of combat video games — is thought-provoking and revelatory. "It is interesting that most game publishers invest tremendous resources in producing beautiful, vivid, lush landscapes as backdrops for violent conflict," he said. "They seem to see nature as the ultimate stage on which to perform acts of aggression."

Tribe and Knight's ongoing "Posse Comitatus" will be exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from June 20 to Sept. 8.

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Eat: Gnocchi of a Different Color

A phrase often used (overused, really) to describe well-made gnocchi is "light as a cloud." It's not an especially instructive description for a piece of real food, and for cooks hoping to try their hands at gnocchi for the first time, it can be downright daunting.

It's true that gnocchi requires a bit of technique, but achieving that cloudlike texture — "light" is perhaps a simpler, less intimidating word — isn't actually that difficult.

It's all in the dough. There are just a few keys to remember: 1) Use starchy potatoes, like regular old russets (baking potatoes); nothing fancy. It's the starch from the potatoes — along with the gluten from the flour — that holds the dough together.

Elaisha Stokes and Gabe Johnson/The New York Times

Mario Batali share his recipe for gnocchi with butternut squash with Mark Bittman.

2) You don't want overcooked, waterlogged potatoes; the wetter they are, the more flour you'll need. I bake them whole, which is effortless, but you could also boil them whole and unpeeled. If time allows, you might dry them out in a low oven for a little while, once they're fully tender. 3) Use as little flour as you can get away with to make the dough hold its shape. Add the flour a little at a time, and test-boil a piece of dough — even if you think it's not ready yet — to see if it holds together. 4) Be gentle when mixing and kneading; the idea is to avoid overdeveloping the gluten — which is the offense most likely to make your gnocchi decidedly un-cloudlike.

Another option is to add an egg, which makes success more likely but — and reasonable people disagree about this — makes the final product a tad heavier.

Once you've got the basic recipe down, you can start messing around with other vegetables in combination with potatoes. Carrots, beets and spinach are all terrific — especially for their colors — as are squash, parsnips, sweet potatoes, chard and kale. Cook them in olive oil until soft, purée them in the food processor and mix them into the cooked potatoes — because the vegetables carry some extra moisture, you'll most likely need a little more flour.

Whatever version you make, all it needs is a simple sauce — and not too much of it. The gnocchi is the star — or should I say, the cloud?

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How Come Martin Brodeur Is Still So Good?

Richard Burbridge for The New York Times

Martin Brodeur, the 40-year-old goalie for the New Jersey Devils.

The best hockey player in the New York area right now is also one of the greatest hockey players ever, and he's a Methuselah, a 40-year-old in a sport where pro careers typically last five or six years. Martin Brodeur, now in his 20th season with the New Jersey Devils, has played so well for so long that even hockey people have tended to take him a little for granted. He's hardly an unknown, but he would be more fussed over and wondered at if he didn't play in Newark and if his position were not the lowly, unglamorous one of goalie.

Denis Brodeur

Brodeur in 1977 at age 5, during a minor-hockey practice in St-Léonard, Quebec.

"Playing goal is not fun," Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens, wrote in a memoir. "It is a grim, humorless position, largely uncreative, requiring little physical movement, giving little physical pleasure in return." While his teammates zip around, the goalie lumbers, weighed down by his cumbrous equipment, and he spends the whole game by himself, down at one end of the rink, within easy earshot of heckling fans, in front of a red light that flashes on whenever he fails and lets a goal slip by. He has flurries of activity, but a lot of the time he just watches and worries. There's very little he can do to win a game, and mostly he hopes only not to lose it.

In hockey mythology, it's an article of faith that all goalies are a little flaky. You have to be a bit nuts, the theory goes, to want to play the position in the first place — to stand in front of the net while people sling hard rubber discs at you at more than 100 miles an hour — and only certain personality types can withstand the strain. The annals of the game are full of memorable head cases. Glenn Hall, a goalie during the '50s and '60s for the Red Wings and the Blackhawks, used to throw up before every game. Gary Smith, a goalie from the same era, insisted on removing all his gear and taking a shower between periods.

The loopiest goalie of all was Gilles Gratton, who bounced around in the minors in the '70s before ending his career with the St. Louis Blues and the New York Rangers. Gratton liked to skate in the nude sometimes, wearing just his goalie mask, and refused to play if the stars did not line up properly. He believed that in a previous life he was an executioner who stoned people to death, and that he was fated to become a goalie — someone on the receiving end of a stoning, so to speak — as punishment.

Brodeur, who has been the Devils' starting goalie since 1993, the backbone of the team's three successful Stanley Cup campaigns, is the exception to this tradition of brooding and eccentricity. He's probably the most well adjusted, happiest-seeming person I have ever met, so normal that it's a little eerie. Jokey and gregarious, he doesn't even mind talking to the media, though like a lot of hockey players he speaks to the press in breathless run-on sentences, like someone dashing across thin ice, fearful that if he stops, he'll fall through.

Chico Resch, the former Devils goalie who is now a broadcaster for the team, cautioned me last summer about taking Brodeur at face value. "There's more to Marty than meets the eye," he said — meaning his competitiveness, I think. And Brodeur admitted that he's not always as unruffled as he seems. "You come in from a bad period and start breaking the sticks — I'm not going to say it never happened," he told me, smiling. "I know there is a lot of pressure on a goalie, a lot of responsibilities, but if you add on to yourself more than you need to, it makes it harder to deal with the adversity." Hockey people say that Brodeur's particular strength is his ability to bounce back from a bad goal or a bad game and not let it gnaw at him. Hockey was locked out for the first half of this season, and during the Devils' truncated training camp last month, you could see that he hates to be scored on even in practice, rapping his stick or ducking his head in disgust after letting one in. But the cloud passes in an instant, and then he's bouncing on his skates and looking for more pucks to swat away. Lou Lamoriello, the Devils' general manager, says, "Marty's mental toughness, his ability to overcome a bad game, is just phenomenal."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of a former goaltender who competed during the '50s and '60s. He is Glenn Hall, not Glen.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Before Adele, There Was Lulu

Fans of Adele (and Duffy, Amy Winehouse, Emeli Sandé and Paloma Faith) probably know that she is part of the second wave of British women with a deep affinity for American pop and soul music. The first was in the '60s, when the great triumvirate was Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and Lulu, who made her first New York appearance in a 50-year career Saturday night at B.B. King's.

That career has had long legs in Britain in music, film and TV (she plays herself in a series of hilarious cameos on "Absolutely Fabulous"). But Lulu has had a number of big splashdowns on this side of the Atlantic, too. There was her signature song, "To Sir, With Love," a mammoth No. 1 hit in 1967 that has survived numerous remakes, including a couple by Lulu herself. That one, like her other hits — "Oh Me, Oh My (I'm a Fool For You Baby)," "The Man Who Sold the World" — combines a growly, gravelly energy with decorous phrasing that finds the sweet spot between melody and rhythm.

At B.B. King's this weekend, she tore through a catalog of American soul, with the help of Paul Shaffer and the "Late Show" band. Now 64, she has lost little of the power and the passion in her voice. But as thrilling as it was to hear her sing "Unchain My Heart" and "Try a Little Tenderness,'' the best moments of the show were her own "I Don't Wanna Fight" (which she wrote for Tina Turner in the '90s) and a stomping version of the Beatles' "You Can't Do That.'' Even "To Sir, With Love" held a surprise as she sang it with the fluid, soulful arrangement Al Green used in his '70s remake. The wall-to-wall crowd couldn't get enough, and not just because they were happy to be in the same room with a legend. She brought the goods; may this show be only the first of a renewed love affair with her American audiences.

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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Grant Cornett for The New York Times

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America's largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.'s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called "stomach share" — the amount of digestive space that any one company's brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.'s on America's growing weight problem. "We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue," Behnke recalled. "People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies." Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. "C.E.O.'s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they're uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things," Behnke said. "They don't want to be embarrassed. They don't want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy."

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury's chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease. In the months leading up to the C.E.O. meeting, he was engaged in conversation with a group of food-science experts who were painting an increasingly grim picture of the public's ability to cope with the industry's formulations — from the body's fragile controls on overeating to the hidden power of some processed foods to make people feel hungrier still. It was time, he and a handful of others felt, to warn the C.E.O.'s that their companies may have gone too far in creating and marketing products that posed the greatest health concerns.

The discussion took place in Pillsbury's auditorium. The first speaker was a vice president of Kraft named Michael Mudd. "I very much appreciate this opportunity to talk to you about childhood obesity and the growing challenge it presents for us all," Mudd began. "Let me say right at the start, this is not an easy subject. There are no easy answers — for what the public health community must do to bring this problem under control or for what the industry should do as others seek to hold it accountable for what has happened. But this much is clear: For those of us who've looked hard at this issue, whether they're public health professionals or staff specialists in your own companies, we feel sure that the one thing we shouldn't do is nothing."

As he spoke, Mudd clicked through a deck of slides — 114 in all — projected on a large screen behind him. The figures were staggering. More than half of American adults were now considered overweight, with nearly one-quarter of the adult population — 40 million people — clinically defined as obese. Among children, the rates had more than doubled since 1980, and the number of kids considered obese had shot past 12 million. (This was still only 1999; the nation's obesity rates would climb much higher.) Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a "national epidemic."

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The 6th Floor Blog: Moving Pictures, and the Empty Spaces Left Behind

I'm an avid Instagram follower, and every day I look forward to posts by Pete James, curator of photographic collections at the Library of Birmingham in England, which for nearly 40 years has housed one of Britain's most significant photography collections. The collection, which comprises approximately 3.5 million images spanning from 1841 to today, is currently closed to the public as the staff prepares for a move to a new building, which is still under construction but expected to open on Sept. 3.

The quiet, empty spaces in the library have made James nostalgic about the building where he has worked for more than 20 years. So he began photographing the interiors several months ago and posting his photographs on Instagram "to make a little record for myself." James, who does not consider himself a photographer, cites influences like Sir Benjamin Stone, whose collection is housed at the library, and William Eggleston. He says he just looks for "patterns and shapes and colors."

Below is a sample of his images:

The library has also commissioned four photographers to formally document the move. James describes the endeavor as "a creative response to the new library project." The commissioned images will be part of the first exhibition in the new space when it opens this fall.

James says that he may need to look for a new project once the move is complete; he has become an Instagram addict.

For more of James's photos, follow him on Instagram.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Before Adele, There Was Lulu

Fans of Adele (and Duffy, Amy Winehouse, Emeli Sandé and Paloma Faith) probably know that she is part of the second wave of British women with a deep affinity for American pop and soul music. The first was in the '60s, when the great triumvirate was Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and Lulu, who made her first New York appearance in a 50-year career Saturday night at B.B. King's.

That career has had long legs in Britain in music, film and TV (she plays herself in a series of hilarious cameos on "Absolutely Fabulous"). But Lulu has had a number of big splashdowns on this side of the Atlantic, too. There was her signature song, "To Sir, With Love," a mammoth No. 1 hit in 1967 that has survived numerous remakes, including a couple by Lulu herself. That one, like her other hits — "Oh Me, Oh My (I'm a Fool For You Baby)," "The Man Who Sold the World" — combines a growly, gravelly energy with decorous phrasing that finds the sweet spot between melody and rhythm.

At B.B. King's this weekend, she tore through a catalog of American soul, with the help of Paul Shaffer and the "Late Show" band. Now 64, she has lost little of the power and the passion in her voice. But as thrilling as it was to hear her sing "Unchain My Heart" and "Try a Little Tenderness,'' the best moments of the show were her own "I Don't Wanna Fight" (which she wrote for Tina Turner in the '90s) and a stomping version of the Beatles' "You Can't Do That.'' Even "To Sir, With Love" held a surprise as she sang it with the fluid, soulful arrangement Al Green used in his '70s remake. The wall-to-wall crowd couldn't get enough, and not just because they were happy to be in the same room with a legend. She brought the goods; may this show be only the first of a renewed love affair with her American audiences.

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Eureka: When Mutant Mosquitoes Attack

Illustration by Brecht Vandenbroucke

It's no wonder that Goethe wrote "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" near the dawn of the industrial age. The poem, which most of us now learn from Mickey Mouse, tells the story of a young man who, left to his own devices, mimics his boss's spell for making brooms fetch water pails. Once the task is done, he doesn't know how to stop the thing, so he chops the broom in half, which only enables it to work double duty. The sorcerer eventually returns, fixing the mess his subordinate has made (his situation never got quite as out of hand as Mickey's). Lesson learned: Solutions to problems at hand can create new, sometimes unforeseeable, challenges in the future.

As scientists consider using genetically modified mosquitoes to combat deadly diseases in the developing world, Goethe's poem should serve as a warning. Scientists are aware that their interventions in the natural world will have unintended effects, and in order to behave ethically, these potential risks must be considered. Even something as innocuous as a mosquito net may carry a considerable downside.

A mosquito net is a simple piece of technology: it creates a protective barrier between sleeping humans and the disease-carrying mosquitoes that would otherwise feast on them during the night. Combined with antimalarial drugs and in-home spraying of pesticide, nets are responsible for a 25 percent drop in global malaria deaths since 2000. But in Kenya, Tanzania and other countries that use bed nets, scientists are beginning to see evidence of a new problem: mosquitoes might be adapting to the solution, finding workarounds.

We are the mosquitoes' food, Nora Haenn, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University, reminded me, and like most creatures, they feed where the food is. (Or in this case, when it is.) Mosquito nets work because the mosquitoes most responsible for transmitting malaria in sub-Saharan Africa feed at night. But now they're trying their luck earlier, and outdoors. In other cases, night-feeding species seem to be losing ground to more flexible competitors — these also carry malaria.

Researchers have yet to prove definitively that mosquitoes are adapting their behavior in response to nets, but Haenn brought up the possibility to make a point: By solving certain problems, we often create new ones. For Haenn, who is part of an interdisciplinary program at N.C. State aimed at inserting discussions about ethics and responsibility into the early stages of biotech research, the side effects of scientific meddling weigh heavily.

There are many different organizations experimenting with mosquitoes in an effort to eradicate malaria and dengue fever — Haenn's colleagues at N.C. State; a group at the University of California, Irvine; and Oxitec, a private company in England. Of the many ways to tinker with mosquito DNA, two strategies are promising.

One approach, focused on dengue, aims to reduce the mosquito population by making it difficult for them to breed. Fred Gould, an entomologist at N.C. State, has been involved in an effort to design mosquitoes that produce flightless females. Only female mosquitoes draw blood, which they must do in order to reproduce. If they can't get off the ground, it will become impossible for them to mate, and the subsequent generation will be smaller than it would have been otherwise.

The other approach, focused on malaria, won't get rid of the pesky things, but it will make them less deadly. There are different types of malaria, Anthony A. James, a professor of microbiology at the University of California, Irvine, told me, and they're host-specific. Mice can't catch human malaria, and vice versa. James takes the genes that help mice fend off human malaria and transfers them into mosquitoes. Theoretically these altered mosquitoes would destroy the disease in their own bodies instead of spreading it to humans. To make it work on a large scale, scientists would have to connect this gene to what James calls "a drive system" — some trait that makes the malaria-immune mosquitoes more likely to reproduce than their normal cousins. Should someone figure out how to do this with mosquito DNA, natural selection would do the rest.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is science editor at BoingBoing.net and author of "Before the Lights Go Out," on the future of energy production and consumption.

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