Kindle Edition, 2013 © Time Inc.

Bloomberg Unbound
He's remade New York. Next up, the world

PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLES OMMANNEY FOR TIME

Carte blanche The soon-to-be-ex-mayor of New York City has been planning his next chapter, including new projects in Paris and London

Michael Scherer | 3290 words

These are the parts of Paris you assume exist but never get to see, hidden behind ivy-clad walls, guarded by armed men and surrounded by black Mercedes. The brother of King Louis XVI once staged his immodest fêtes galantes at this 18th century maison, and the building later housed a literary society founded by Balzac, Hugo and Dumas. Now the 13th wealthiest person in the world is walking in from his chauffeured car, having just arrived on a private pond hop from New York, the city he runs for a few more months.

He starts talking right away about the parts of America that still don't believe in evolution or global warming, how his ex-wife remains his best friend, his aversion to the fanciest restaurants in Paris because, well, they are all just so terribly fancy. White-bread toast, Skippy peanut butter and bacon. That's how Michael Rubens Bloomberg, 71, describes his ideal meal. "The cholesterol will go right to your veins," he cautions, shifting in his polished loafers. Health is on his mind, you see. As mayor, he has banned trans fats in restaurants, made chains post calorie counts and tried to limit the size of sodas people can buy. Now health has brought him to France, where as a cause, it is eating a noticeable chunk of his personal fortune.

Through the grand doors, up the double staircase, into the corner salon that once housed the grand bedroom, a high council has gathered. If Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man once sold themselves as superheroes, this group would be the Legion of Doom: leaders from the World Health Organization, the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and other masters in the international cabal to end smoking. Bloomberg is the guest of honor, the moneyman. And he knows the numbers. "Tobacco is going to kill a billion people in this century unless we do something about it," he says upon entering the room.

For most people, that is just a fact. For a modern billionaire, it might be a call to action. But for Bloomberg, it's a work in progress. A slide flashes on the screen, showing the money he has personally spent against smoking since 2007, a straight-arrow chart pointed out the window over the manicured gardens into the sky: 556 grants, 61 countries, $109,244,391, so far. And that doesn't count the ban on smoking in public spaces that Bloomberg passed in New York City, a policy that took off around the world. You can't light up in Paris bistros or North Carolina taprooms anymore. In New York, adult smoking rates have dropped nearly twice as fast as those nationwide, and life expectancy has climbed three years in a decade. "California actually passed smoking-ban legislation before New York," Bloomberg boasts, "and nobody paid attention."

The team gathered before him has mapped global smoking trends with the precision of a hedge fund gaming currency markets. They know rates are rising in Thailand because of low roll-your-own taxes. They have a plan to end the Chinese tradition of giving cigarettes as gifts. They name the Indian ministers blocking reform because they own bidi factories on the side. This isn't a meeting about more advertising or another lung-cancer hospital. It's about using enormous private wealth to change government policies and shift human behavior. "Nothing any of us will ever do will save as many lives as limiting the use of tobacco products," Bloomberg says.

For the 16 experts at the table, that's not in question; most of these tobacco fighters have only a single career. But for Bloomberg, the statement is a calculation; his hands are in a lot of different pots and behind a lot of crusades these days. And he is not alone. Over the past 30 years, the world has been transformed by globalization and technology, and from that tumult has emerged a new class of billionaires who profited from the change, innovators, business leaders and heirs. In the prime of their lives, many have turned their attention to remaking the world, often through policy and politics. It's a return to the era of great benefactors like the Rockefellers, Mellons and Carnegies. It's their world. You just vote in it.

The examples are so many, they crowd together. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg gives $100 million to rewrite the rules for Newark public schools, spends millions more on political television ads and then travels to Congress to demand immigration reform. The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bets $100 million to elect Republican candidates who mostly lose in 2012, and then publicly vows to do it again. Without financiers George Soros and Peter Lewis, marijuana legalization would not have proceeded so far in so many states. Without the generosity of conservative industrialists David and Charles Koch, the groups now organizing to defund Obamacare would be a shadow of themselves. Without billionaires like Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Eli Broad and Jim Walton, the revolution now taking place in K-12 education--charter schools, standardized tests, Common Core, merit pay, the end of tenure--would be years behind schedule.

Not since the early 20th century have individuals had so much power to unilaterally shape our lives and shift our ideas. And never in history have they been able to exert their will so easily on such a global scale. This is the backdrop upon which Bloomberg is attempting to define his legacy, as a social and political engineer.

"Bouncing the Check"

He makes no secret of his ambition. "I want to do things that nobody else is doing," he told TIME on a two-day swing through Europe in late September, where he met with the mayors of London and Paris and chatted with British Prime Minister David Cameron between visits to art galleries and an antique-furniture dealer. Officially he was still serving as mayor of New York City, but in practice he had already begun his next life, a jet-setting blur of wealth, power and international recognition. He launched a privately funded European competition to improve city governance, boasted of his 17-city international effort to increase volunteerism and reviewed plans to impose further helmet and road-safety laws in the developing world. "A lot of elected officials are afraid to back controversial things. I'm not afraid of that," he said. "You're not going to hurt my business, and if you are, I don't care. I take great pride in being willing to stand up."

Bloomberg's money flows out through a complex web of nonprofit foundation work and private entities, often in chunks so small or anonymous that they are difficult to track. He has invested in local government, funding teams of consultants to work for the mayors' offices in New Orleans and Chicago on issues as vital as murder and as mundane as small-business permitting. He has spent more than $100 million to genetically engineer a better mosquito, in the hopes of eliminating malaria, and given $100 million to stamp out polio in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Africa, he has built maternal-health centers. In Vietnam, he pushed for stiff helmet laws. On the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, he is funding ocean conservation.

Closer to home, he helped shutter coal-fired plants and lobbied Congress with Rupert Murdoch on immigration reform. He's involved in setting fracking policy, supporting Planned Parenthood and passing gay-marriage referendums. In local, state and federal elections around the country, he is spending millions more to back candidates who would further gun control and education reform and defeat those who oppose them. And then there is the money he has spent to get himself elected three times in New York City, north of $250 million, more than any single person has ever spent on U.S. elections.

That investment in U.S. politics is likely to grow in the coming year. "I'm not going to play golf like I threatened to do full time," he says of his plans after leaving city hall on Jan. 1. He also has pledged not to return to managing his old company. On Oct. 6, he announced a $1 million advertising effort to support the New Jersey Senate campaign of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a friend and ally he can no longer speak to without risking a violation of campaign-finance rules. "I would be interested whether Cory really was surprised," he jokes. He is looking to sink more money into the Virginia governor's race this year to support the candidate more in favor of gun control. And he plans to spend heavily in Arkansas to defeat Senator Mark Pryor, who recently voted against federal background checks. How heavily? One plan would involve calling every Democrat in the state to discuss Pryor's record. "If you support reasonable background checks, I will support you, even though we have probably nothing in common on any other issue," Bloomberg says he told Senator Pat Toomey before the conservative Pennsylvania Republican decided to back more gun control this spring.

Later this year in Colorado, Bloomberg will be backing a tax-hiking school-reform initiative, and he plans to continue the spending on state and local school-board elections around the country. "We need to elect reformists to city councils," Bloomberg says. He has also looked at finding a way to bring nonpartisan redistricting and elections to more states, in the model of recent election-law reforms in California. He blames the current shutdown in Washington and the prospect of a debt default on a refusal to attend to these issues. "It all comes from gerrymandering," he said of the brinkmanship. "That pulls people away from the center."

There is no clear limit on how much Bloomberg is willing to spend on politics. His political adviser and deputy mayor Howard Wolfson, a former aide to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, oversees Bloomberg's political spending without an annual budget. "What will it take?" Bloomberg will ask people as they pitch him. And if they digress from the hard numbers into storytelling, Bloomberg will cut them off. "Quit finger painting," he will say.

Bloomberg is a data guy, so the numbers matter. When he first ran for mayor in 2001, he was worth about $4 billion, owing to the news and financial-information company he founded that bears his name. When he leaves office on Dec. 31, he will be worth about $31 billion, or about 400,000 times the median American family's net worth. Trust funds have already been established for his daughters and other loved ones, and he is not far from owning as many houses, planes, paintings and sculptures as he needs. The rest he has promised to give away--"bouncing the check to the undertaker," as he puts it.

In 2013, Bloomberg plans to spend about $400 million on pet causes, which at 1.3% of his fortune is barely a rounding error. If his net worth holds steady, or even if it fails to gain a bit of interest over the coming decades, the annual giveaways will have to rise substantially to meet his goal of spending down the fortune in the lifetimes of his daughters, ages 30 and 34. Ask him about the challenge, and Bloomberg will smile. "That's a nice problem to have," he says.

London's city hall is a swirling glass seedpod of a building perched on the Thames. It was designed by British architect Norman Foster, whom Bloomberg happens to have commissioned to create two new buildings for his company a few blocks from the river's far bank. That project is massive, consuming an entire block, and it sits atop an ancient Roman temple where archaeologists have already discovered thousands of artifacts from the first years of the city's existence. Several hundred feet over the site hangs a video camera put there by builders and which Bloomberg, and only Bloomberg, can control from his computer in New York. Most of the time, when he logs in, it's night in London, so the view isn't that great. But such are the hardships of someone with his stature.

Besides, at the moment, he is not far away, having gathered the mayors of London, Warsaw and Florence at city hall to announce a competition offering a €5 million prize for the European city with the most innovative idea to improve local governance. It's a repeat of a competition Bloomberg held in America in 2012, a part of his effort to fund improvements in local governance. The winner of the last prize was Providence, R.I., which will now buy small digital recorders to track the number of words the city's low-income children are exposed to daily. Research has shown that poor kids enter school with a more limited vocabulary, and the goal of the project is to give the tools to their parents to encourage more communication with their children.

After the initial presentation, a reporter asks the mayors to speak in general about the importance of private philanthropy, a tradition that is far more developed in the U.S. than in Europe. Bloomberg takes the bait. It's a topic on which he has thought quite a bit. "You can do things that the public does not think are appropriate or conventional for public moneys," he says. "If we didn't have private philanthropy, you never would have had Impressionism, for example. Nobody thought that that was art, and today that commands prices 10 times that of the old masters."

This conviction, that big money should operate independently of public opinion, is at the core of Bloomberg's philosophy, and it is the reason so many people have come to regard him as a cause for concern. In conservative circles, he is the poster child of the nanny state and a punch line for Sarah Palin's road show, the ultimate big-city elitist in monogrammed shirts imposing his will on a freedom-loving country. Two states, Mississippi and North Carolina, have passed anti-Bloomberg laws that prevent their cities from banning soda drinks sold in supersize containers, undermining another project of the mayor's. Both Virginia and West Virginia have passed laws to outlaw Bloomberg's pet practice of hiring private investigators to show how easy it is to buy guns outside the law at high-traffic gun stores.

Bloomberg takes all the populist backlash as validation. He talks of tobacco firms and soda companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi as enemies of long life. And he is open in his condescension for those who resist the data on which he bases his decisions. "I feel sorry for the people of Mississippi," he says later, when I mention the legislation there to ban restrictions on soda size. In New York City, life expectancy is now above 80. "In parts of Mississippi, by the delta, it's in the 60s. Now what did I miss here? Who's right, and who's winning? They are not winning."

At the center of Bloomberg's worldview is a notion that he exists beyond the baser irrationality of the political process. When he wrote his memoir in 1997, he spoke of the importance of having a loyalty to a political party, saying he sometimes supports Democrats "even when I don't really believe they are the best on the ballot." Today he casts himself outside of partisanship and ideology, telling a story about teasing liberal billionaire Soros about being the same as conservative David Koch in his giving. "He had a heart attack, but they are [similar]," Bloomberg says. "Whether one's view is left, one's view is right, so what?"

But on most issues he is involved in, from climate change and abortion to guns and obesity, Bloomberg sits squarely at the liberal end of the political spectrum. (His defense of Wall Street and support for stop-and-frisk policing are clear exceptions.) This is clearest in his gun campaign, an effort to almost single-handedly fund a grassroots effort to counter the effect of the National Rifle Association, even if it means defeating Democrats and electing Republicans. Earlier this year, Bloomberg's money proved instrumental in passing background-check laws and other restrictions in Connecticut, New York, Colorado and Maryland. More recently, the NRA struck back, funding successful recall campaigns, with some help from the Koch family, against two state politicians in Colorado. Bloomberg refuses to see that defeat as a setback or to revise his ambitions. The Colorado gun-control law, he notes, remains on the books. "What do you mean we lost? I'm sorry for those two people," he says. "But we won in Colorado. On to the next state."

In addition to his homes in Bermuda; London; Vail, Colo.; upstate New York; and the Upper East Side, Bloomberg has acquired perhaps the best symbol of this new gilded age of philanthropy. In 2006, he purchased for $45 million a six-story Beaux Arts limestone-and-brick mansion on East 78th Street in Manhattan as a home base for his philanthropic efforts, his own money-management team and the opinion section of his media empire, Bloomberg View. The building was erected at the end of the 19th century by Stuyvesant Fish, a railroad baron.

After gutting and refurbishing it as a futuristic office building, with window shades that automatically respond to the sun, Bloomberg outfitted the place with rotating art exhibits along with giant saltwater fish tanks that long ago became a trademark of any Bloomberg outpost. In many ways, he sees himself as the legatee of the last great boom in American wealth and even a few before that. His New York home is appointed with a Georgian Chippendale couch estimated to be valued at $1 million, and his friends have mused about his admiration for the lifestyles of the 19th century railroad barons. "Look, there have been great billionaires all along," Bloomberg says when asked about his place in history. "If you think of what the Rockefellers have done, or the Carnegies or Mellons, and there were plenty of others, and there were plenty back in the Renaissance days."

And like those before him, he is happy to exploit his status as a master of the universe. At the end of his European barnstorm, he found himself in a corner room at 10 Downing Street, admiring the view out a back window. "The building you should look at is at this end," he said knowingly, as he pointed across a yard toward the building in which Winston Churchill ran the war effort. Then he began talking about his former father-in-law, who served in the Royal Navy.

When Cameron, the Prime Minister, entered, the two men spoke broadly about Cameron's plans for a speech to his party and the recovery of the British economy. Bloomberg's advice was characteristically confident, spoken like a man who has made it and has the vast wealth and power to prove it. "The worst combination of things is to not try to do the right thing, and to lose," Bloomberg remembers telling the Prime Minister. "Then you have nothing to hold your hat on." Whatever happens, this is not a fate any would predict for Bloomberg himself.

10 Questions.
Tennis legend turned school founder Andre Agassi talks about regrets, crystal meth and German habits

ANDRE AGASSI: JAVIER SIRVENT FOR TIME

Belinda Luscombe | 586 words

So, Andre Agassi's Box Buddies: You're getting into snack foods now?

I wouldn't say I'm getting into snack foods. I'd say I'm extending my reach in helping public education. I was approached to do a for-profit venture that I had no interest in, and I said, Well, wait a second ... so 100% of the proceeds go to my foundation.

You offer applesauce that comes in a tube. Do you eat applesauce?

I don't. Truth be told, we lean toward being healthier, but obviously if it were superhealthy, no one would eat it.

Why, since leaving tennis, have you increasingly focused on education?

Because it was the only way, I eventually realized, you can make systemic change. I didn't have a choice in my life, and I didn't have education. I was lucky and found myself good at tennis, but without that, I don't know where I'd be. I look at the circumstances of these kids, and without education, I know exactly where we'll be--we'll be building prisons instead of schools.

Anything you'd change about your charter school in Las Vegas if you were starting it now?

I would've started off in preschool and slowly expanded. Instead I started in third grade, fourth and fifth, and I panicked as we spent all our time trying to get these kids up to speed.

You're a partner in an investment fund specifically for school buildings. Why that?

I had a $40 million campus in the most economically challenged area of Las Vegas. I assure you, Ambien is no match for a $40 million mortgage. The single greatest impediment to the growth of best-in-class charter schools is not the software but the hardware--the actual facilities. We come in with private capital and allow schools time to incubate.

You wrote in your memoir Open that you hate tennis. Do you hate philanthropy as well?

No, no. Actually, philanthropy got me to not hate tennis. Tennis is lonely--I would have been better off in a team sport. When I started to make a difference in children's lives, I felt like I finally had my team.

After reading in Open that crystal meth made you tidy your house, I was thinking of trying it.

It does help you clean your house. And then it takes everything away from you.

You and your wife Steffi both had domineering dads. How are you handling your kids' sporting abilities?

My daughter is on two hip-hop dance competition teams, and she loves it. If she continues and my son continues baseball, of course I'd support them. But I know those careers can come to an end in one day.

Do you watch tennis?

More than ever. I don't have to solve for it anymore, so I watch it with much more enjoyment.

Roger Federer challenged you to serve at 113 m.p.h. recently, and you hit 114. Can you reliably do that?

He knows my game. It'd be easier for me to hit a serve 114 on the nose than to give me five tries to hit 68. There's not a circumstance in the world where I'd hit a 68-m.p.h. serve.

Me neither.

But 114 is like an aggressive second serve.

Any hairstyle you regret?

Yes. All of them before I shaved my head. I haven't seen a picture that I don't want to burn.

Bonus reader question from Germany: Have you picked up any German habits while married to Steffi?

I've now incorporated into what you would call "appropriate conversations" the word Scheisse. They use this word in any environment. Somehow they can say s--- in German and it's O.K. Nobody bats an eyelid.

Vo Nguyen Giap
Victorious general

GIAP: DENNIS GRAY--AP

Mark Thompson | 168 words

Most military commanders would be happy winning a single war. Giap, the North Vietnamese general who died Oct. 4 at 102, could claim two. His 1954 defeat of French troops at Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French Indochina. Then, as his nation's Defense Minister in 1968, the self-taught strategist oversaw the Tet offensive against American forces that hastened the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the ultimate fall of South Vietnam.

Second in standing only to his mentor, North Vietnam's communist leader Ho Chi Minh, Giap was ruthless, willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his fellow Vietnamese. "Any American commander who took the same vast losses would not have lasted three weeks," said Army General William Westmoreland, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. But Westmoreland's infamous "enemy body counts" didn't count what mattered. The Vietnamese were fighting for their homeland, and Washington seemed unable to grasp that it was largely nationalism, not communism, that fueled Vietnam's bloody efforts to rid itself of outsiders.

World

AL-SHABAB: MOHAMED SHEIKH NOR--AP

Militants of al-Shabab take part in training exercises outside Mogadishu, Somalia, on Feb. 17, 2011

Cleo Brock-Abraham, Andrew Katz, Mark Thompson | 848 words

U.S. Counterterrorism Tactic: Go Small, Go Home

BY MARK THOMPSON

As the U.S. entered its 13th year in Afghanistan Oct. 7, a pair of special operations thousands of miles away in Africa displayed America's changing approach to terrorism. A successful snatch of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai--alias Anas al-Liby--by U.S. commandos in Tripoli ended a 15-year hunt for the alleged al-Qaeda operative indicted in 2000 for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. U.S. Army Delta Force troops attacked al-Liby's black Hyundai SUV as he returned from morning prayers Oct. 5, smashing the driver's window, pulling him out and fleeing with him moments later.

But that same day, 3,000 miles away in Somalia, Navy SEAL Team 6 failed to get Abdikadir Mohamed Abdikadir, a leader of al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked group that killed more than 60 civilians at a Nairobi shopping mall last month. After coming ashore in small boats at the town of Barawe, the SEALs retreated when a firefight threatened civilians. No U.S. casualties were reported in either operation.

The twin missions suggest a U.S. shift from decadelong alliance wars to unilateral captures, maximizing intelligence while minimizing civilian casualties. They also suggest that poorly governed nations like Libya and nongoverned ones like Somalia will continue to serve as terrorist incubators. U.S. officials are interrogating al-Liby on the U.S.S. San Antonio in the Mediterranean ahead of an expected trial.

ISRAEL

'If the people of Iran were free, they could wear jeans, listen to Western music and have free elections.'

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Israeli Prime Minister, speaking to BBC Persian TV in an attempt to detail Iranian restrictions on youth; Iranians responded by tweeting photos of themselves in jeans

POLL

DO YOU TRUST YOUR BANKS?

Gallup surveyed about 7,000 people from seven euro-zone nations and asked them whether they had confidence in their financial institutions. Below, the percentage of yeses in 2013 (vs. 2012):

40%

Portugal (up 4 points)

37%

Germany (down 1 point)

17%

Greece (up 4 points)

11%

Spain (down 7 points)

11%

Cyprus (down 26 points)

The Explainer

The Plan to Rid Syria Of Chemical Weapons

Syria signed the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) after its troops killed hundreds of civilians in a sarin-gas attack on Aug. 21 near Damascus. Now the U.N. and the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are overseeing a three-step plan to dispose of Syria's 1,000 tons of chemical agents:

DISMANTLE THE SITES

A joint team arrived in Damascus to visit weapons sites and catalog munitions, toxins and delivery systems, then check them against the inventory supplied by Syria. Four production sites must be sealed and destroyed by Nov. 1.

WIPE OUT THE WEAPONS

Under the CWC, the chemicals and their containers can't be tossed into seas or buried. They will likely be incinerated--first diluted with water and a caustic agent, like sodium hydroxide, to neutralize toxicity before being burned or exploded in a "bang box." Mobile units will be used if the weapons can't be safely transported out of Syria.

ELIMINATE THE PROGRAM

The rest of the program will be erased over the next year. Syria claims it will fully comply, but doubts remain about whether some of its arsenal will be cached. If Syria hinders the process, U.N. Resolution 2118 gives the Security Council power to act.

Monstrous Crash

MEXICO

Spectators react after a monster truck plowed into the stands during a rally at El Rejon park, on the outskirts of Chihuahua, on Oct. 5. Eight people were killed and 79 injured when the driver--reportedly detained and suspected of drinking and driving--lost control and rammed into the unprotected crowd. The governor declared three days of mourning. Photograph by Eduardo Alanis--El Diario de Chihuahua/Reuters

Africa's Billionaires Club

Africa has 55 billionaires--a big jump from earlier figures--with a combined estimated wealth of $143.88 billion, according to Ventures Africa magazine's recently released study of African wealth. Here are a few of Africa's growing elite:

WEALTHIEST

Aliko Dangote, 56

Estimated wealth $20.2 billion

A commodities trader from Nigeria, he started Dangote Group more than a decade ago; it is now the largest manufacturer in West Africa. The group includes Dangote Cement, valued at $20 billion.

AS RICH AS HIS COUNTRY

Nathan Kirsh, 82

Estimated wealth $3.6 billion

Kirsh's wealth nearly matches his nation's: Swaziland has a GDP of $3.7 billion. Kirsh's fortune rests on real estate and distribution under his company, Kirsh Holding Group.

WEALTHIEST WOMAN

Folorunsho Alakija, 62

Estimated wealth $7.3 billion

Africa's richest woman, from Nigeria, heads Famfa Oil. She parlayed a fashion career into ownership of an oil block in the 1990s and has more than $200 million worth of real estate in the U.K.

MOST PROFESSORIAL

Mohamed Mansour, 65

Estimated wealth $2.3 billion

Mansour once taught at Auburn but now heads the family firm, Mansour Group, which runs Egypt's largest supermarket chain, Metro, and the country's McDonald's franchises.

CHINA

2 MILLION

Number of government Internet monitors in China, among the world's most heavily censored nations

Trending In

+

ENVIRONMENT

Scotland announced that its remote Colonsay and Oronsay islands will become native-honeybee sanctuaries in January

INVESTIGATIONS

A French judge ended a probe into whether former President Nicolas Sarkozy accepted secret cash during his 2007 campaign

SURVEILLANCE

Russia will monitor "all communications" of athletes and spectators at the Sochi Olympics, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal

PUNISHMENT

Four men in Saudi Arabia were jailed after a video surfaced of one dancing naked on a car; he was fined $13,000 and faces 2,000 lashes

-

Briefing

SCALIA: GETTY IMAGES

242 words

THE WEEK

THE SHUTDOWN DRAGGED ON

50%

Actual amount of chicken meat in chicken nuggets from two major fast-food chains, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the American Journal of Medicine

'If I were him, I wouldn't have come, probably, either.'

VLADIMIR PUTIN, President of Russia, on Obama's decision to skip trips and summits during the government shutdown

GOOD WEEK

NFL

Scheduled three games in London for 2014 to expand its fan base

BAD WEEK

IOC

The Olympic torch went out in Russia ... twice

'It is a childish spectacle.'

ANTONIN SCALIA, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, on the State of the Union address, which he hasn't attended for 15 years

0 Number of women on Twitter's board of directors, a fact that has drawn criticism in the tech community

'We will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays, who will be ... barred from entering.'

YOUSUF MINDKAR, director of public health in Kuwait, explaining his plan to conduct medical screenings to keep gay people out of Kuwait

'What right does the United States have to sanction companies that are not North American?'

ABELARDO MORENO, Deputy Foreign Minister of Cuba, arguing that--after 50-plus years--the U.N. should finally condemn the economic embargo on Cuba

9 Age of a child who sneaked onto a Delta flight from Minneapolis to Las Vegas; he was promptly returned to his family after landing

'Hannah Montana ... was murdered.'

MILEY CYRUS, during her SNL opening monologue, killing off the Disney Channel character that made her famous

Sources: New York; Saturday Night Live; Reuters; International Business Times; Washington Post

Sign Up if You Can

Kate Pickert | 127 words

Millions of Americans have visited the new Obamacare health-insurance-exchange websites since they launched on Oct. 1. Early figures show that computer problems prevented some of those interested in buying coverage from getting it. Officials say they are fixing glitches, but they have to move quickly. "By November, the sites have to be able to handle major traffic," says Joel Ario, former director of the exchange program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Americans must sign up for coverage by Dec. 15 to have a plan that begins Jan. 1.

[The following text appears within 2 charts. Please see hardcopy or PDF for actual charts.]

MARYLAND

OCT. 1--6

Unique visitors to state's exchange website

174,023

Applications submitted

566

Enrollments

326

KENTUCKY

OCT. 1--7

Unique visitors to state's exchange website

174,442

Applications submitted

14,755

Enrollments

6,946

(Enrollment data include private health plans and Medicaid)

Milestones

YOSEF: ABIR SULTAN--EPA

160 words

AWARDED

To Peter Higgs and François Englert, the Nobel Prize in Physics for their role in postulating the existence of the Higgs boson--the "God particle"--which was confirmed at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

DIED

Ovadia Yosef, 93, prominent rabbi and spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, known for his fiery rhetoric and strong appeal to his nation's Sephardic Jews.

DIED

Nicholas Oresko, 96, oldest surviving recipient of the U.S.'s Medal of Honor, awarded to him for single-handedly taking out two German machine-gun positions during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.

SOLD

The largest diamond ever to reach auction, for $30.6 million at Sotheby's in Hong Kong. The 118-carat jewel bested a 101-carat white diamond sold for $26.7 million in May.

DIED

Ruth Benerito, 97, U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist who helped perfect wrinkle-free cotton, better known as permanent press.

DIED

Patrice Chéreau, 68, French director famous for radical restagings of opera classics, notably his 1976 version of Wagner's Ring cycle as a tale of class struggle.

The Deep Web
An arrest in San Francisco reveals an unpoliced corner of the Internet

ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY DAKE FOR TIME

Jay Newton-Small | 438 words

To his two roommates, "Josh" seemed like a regular guy, living much of his life online like many other Bay Area techies. But to federal authorities, Ross Ulbricht, 29, was far better known as Dread Pirate Roberts, owner and creator of Silk Road, thought to be the Internet's largest marketplace for illicit drugs.

Visitors to Ulbricht's highly encrypted site could browse the wares of thousands of dealers, buying LSD, cocaine and other narcotics using bitcoin, an untraceable Internet currency. Silk Road would then deliver the drugs--or the fake IDs, hacking software or automatic weapons also for sale there--by mail. In return, Ulbricht earned about $80 million in fees, the feds alleged in a 39-page indictment.

Authorities had been chasing Ulbricht for years, but it wasn't until a U.S. customs agent on the Canadian border opened a package during a routine search in July and found nine fake IDs bearing Ulbricht's picture that they closed in on their target. The package led authorities to his San Francisco apartment. Ulbricht has been charged in New York with narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money laundering. He's also been charged in Maryland with conspiring to commit murder for allegedly hiring an assassin to take out a hacker who had been threatening him.

The case illuminated both the depth of criminal activity in the Web's back rooms and the obstacles to shutting them down. Without the ability to subpoena and search the Web's hidden levels, authorities are forced to resort to old-fashioned shoe leather to track some of the world's most technologically advanced criminals. Although Ulbricht's arrest is a victory for the FBI, cops know that the Internet is a hydra: cut off one head and others will take its place. A handful of replacement sites have already rushed to fill the void left by Silk Road.

And if the Web has become a safe harbor for drug dealers, arms traders and human traffickers, there is no agreement about how to police it. Together with state and local officials, the FBI this spring recommended an overhaul of federal cybersecurity laws to help law enforcement better monitor the Internet. But the revelations made possible by Edward Snowden have led Congress to move, if anything, in the opposite direction, looking to limit the government's ability to tap digital communications. In the face of a public outcry, the Obama Administration has tabled the FBI's proposal. Which means the deep Web remains mostly impervious to oversight. "There is a lot of crime online--it's a real worry," says House intelligence-panel chairman Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican. "If we don't do more to stop it, it's going to come back and bite us."

Rocket Man
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk is shaking up four industries at once

MUSK: IMEH AKPANUDOSEN--GETTY IMAGES

Noah Rayman | 425 words

It's a testament to the sheer scale of Elon Musk Inc. that five days after launching one of his flagship products, the Falcon 9 rocket, into space on Sept. 29, Musk was explaining why another--the Model S electric car--had burst into flames on the ground. Then again, the intrepid CEO of SpaceX, a commercial space-exploration firm, and Tesla, an electric-car maker (he also advises other companies), is no stranger to risky business.

Musk, 42 and a member of the 2013 Time 100, first rose to fame after acquiring an early version of PayPal in 2000--way before consumers readily bought stuff online. Since selling the company to eBay in 2002, he's fashioned himself into an inventor-at-large with the audacity (and money) to change the way we travel, power homes and more. As prominent venture capitalist Andrew Chung puts it, Musk is "really about inventing what he sees as the greatest future."

Sometimes there are stumbles: after a video of that Model S fire went viral, Tesla's market value dropped more than $2 billion. (No one was injured during the incident, however, and Musk responded with a lengthy explanation on the company blog.) But they're often paired with success: the recently tested SpaceX rocket, for example, will help Musk make good on a $1.6 billion contract with NASA.

Here, a look at his empire of influence.

HOW ELON MUSK IS CHANGING THE WAY WE ...

DRIVE

The Tesla Model S is the highest-rated car ever tested by Consumer Reports. And it ought to be: the $70,000 all-electric vehicle has energized the wan electric-car movement. Now major automakers are trying to adopt the model's innovations, and Tesla has a larger car--the Model X--due in 2014.

COMMUTE

A startup is already trying to raise funds to begin construction of Musk's Hyperloop, a $6 billion alternative to high-speed rail in California. The system would send passengers through a reduced-pressure tube at 760 m.p.h. (1,220 km/h). That's L.A. to San Francisco in roughly 30 minutes.

GENERATE POWER

Musk is chairman of SolarCity, the leading provider of residential solar power in the U.S. The firm has a $1 billion project under way to add panels to U.S. military housing communities and has a goal of reaching 1 million customers by 2018.

EXPLORE SPACE

SpaceX, a private company that Musk founded in 2002, has roughly $5 billion in contracts to complete an array of missions, including launching satellites for businesses and resupplying the International Space Station. Soon to come: reusable rockets.

Janet Yellen

YELLEN: MARY F. CALVERT--THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

Rana Foroohar | 202 words

The second most powerful job in the U.S. will likely soon be held, for the first time, by a woman. On Oct. 9, President Obama nominated Federal Reserve vice chair Janet Yellen to head the central bank, a promotion that would make her the most important figure in the global economy.

Yellen, who is arguably the most experienced nominee ever, should have no problem getting through the Senate confirmation process. A Ph.D. in economics, she began her career with groundbreaking research about things like how lower wages can lead to higher unemployment. She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, ran the Council of Economic Advisers and steered the Fed's San Francisco bank successfully through the subprime crisis, about which she raised concerns as early as 2005. "She's an economist of great intellect, with a strong ability to forge consensus," says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

She'll need both qualities over the next couple of years as she navigates the Fed's tricky exit from its massive program of asset buying. No doubt she'll be spending time on the phone with the second most important person in the global economy, who also happens to be a woman: managing director of the International Monetary Fund Christine Lagarde.

LightBox

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla--Getty Images

46 words

Catch Me if You Can

Members of the media approach House Speaker John Boehner at the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 7. President Obama has urged Boehner to take the lead in ending the government shutdown that began on Oct. 1.

FOR PICTURES OF THE WEEK, GO TO lightbox.time.com

Hair America
Women are increasingly outsourcing their beauty routines. Now Drybar is turning the simple blowout into a pampering ritual

Photograph by Therese + Joel for TIME

Streaming, flaxen, waxen Blowout chains offer $40, 40-minute hairstyling

Stacy Perman | 1686 words

While much of Manhattan is slowly coming to life on a recent Sunday morning, the Drybar in the Flatiron district is already humming. Actually it's throbbing to an orchestra of blow dryers, pop music, even the occasional squeal. Inside, more than a dozen women are at various stages of Drybar's trademark blowout routine: the style consultation (from a menu of five sleek looks, each named after a cocktail), the wash (finished off with a tightly coiled towel) and the product discussion ("How do you feel about hair spray?"). And then the coiffing commences. Drybar is strictly no cuts, no colors; stylists only wash and blow-dry. The Drybar way is a system of sectioning, pulling, pinning and curling, followed by a few adjustments and the final unveiling--a quick spin toward the mirror to behold a flawless head of hair.

At Drybar, a hair makeover like this is performed approximately every 45 minutes. One tall redhead walks in with frizzy and color-treated hair only to walk out with Kate Middleton's silky tresses--and there's nary a scissor in sight. By noon, the salon has served about 60 customers. "There's nothing like a good blowout," one stylist offered after finishing with a customer. "It gives you a real confidence boost."

At a time when the country's economic woes have depressed consumer confidence and the recovery in spending remains anemic, Drybar and its ilk are finding success by offering styling at a fraction of the price of full salon service--charging $40 compared with the $150 to $400 that a traditional cut can cost. In February celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe and her partner Robin Moraetes, a veteran of talent agency CAA, opened the first of two DreamDry salons in Manhattan. Other competitors include Boston's Be Styled and Haute Air in New York. In Las Vegas these salons have begun popping up like so many Cher impersonators.

But Drybar is at the forefront of the quickly growing niche. Each month 70,000 customers walk into one of the firm's 30 salons in six states. The chain's 2,000 stylists perform 1.2 million blowouts a year. In 2012 it generated $19 million in revenue. This year, with 10 additional stores and a new line of hairstyling products, the privately held company will reach $40 million in sales, Drybar executives estimate.

Driving this trend is a shift in women's grooming behavior and a greater emphasis on professional everyday styling over infrequent splurging. Styling--long the final step of the salon experience and time-consuming to pull off at home--has become more important, especially in the age of Instagram. In part, the shift is an extension of women's outsourcing their beauty routines--getting manicures and waxes the same way they might send out laundry. (From 2008 to 2012, for instance, the manicure business grew nearly 20% to $7.47 billion in sales, according to industry publication Nails magazine.) "It has a lot to do with a change in habits," explains Linda Wells, editor in chief of beauty bible Allure magazine. "Women are washing their hair less, and a blowout is relatively inexpensive compared to a salon."

Empire of Air

Drybar's creator is 38-year-old Alli Webb. In 2008 the former hairstylist launched a mobile salon, driving around her Santa Monica, Calif., neighborhood giving blowouts to her "mommy friends" in their kitchens and living rooms. She had been staying home with her two young sons and wanted to dip a toe into working again. Not long after, her husband Cameron designed a simple website to promote what was then called Straight-at-Home--a play on Webb's specialty of taming curly hair. Inundated with requests, Webb realized her clientele was, like her, busy yet desiring professional-looking hair. But many upscale salons and discount chains left styling as something of an afterthought, focusing instead on big-ticket cuts and coloring or speedy service. "I realized there was a big hole in the market," says Webb.

She approached her brother Michael Landau, a former Yahoo marketing executive, who was initially skeptical but put $250,000 into the venture. (Webb claims "women just got it" but says her male investors took some convincing.) Webb and her husband rounded out the seed money with $50,000--"everything we had," she says. Even the landlord of Drybar's inaugural shop in Brentwood, Calif., had doubts about the business's viability. "He made me and my brother personally guarantee the lease," she recalls.

Webb set out to design what she dubs the antisalon. "I wanted it to be fun, not a factory, and clean with pops of color," she says. She and her partners tapped architect Josh Heitler, a friend, to create Drybar's aesthetic in exchange for a 5% equity stake in the business. (Heitler's designs include the W Hotel in Las Vegas as well as the Grand Central Terminal renovations in New York City.) The result was a look that mimicked a cocktail lounge, with each shop anchored by a central white marble "bar." Behind, products line the shelves, and cords and hardware are hidden from view. Receptionists are called bartenders. Mirrors hang behind clients, adding a theatrical element to the final reveal. And chandeliers made from sunflower-yellow blow dryers grace the ceiling.

The experience mimics the perks of high-end salons. When a client enters a Drybar, she is offered a tray of cookies and complimentary champagne. "I wanted a space where everyone was nice," Webb says. "I didn't want women to come in and think they had to be fashionable or edgy to enter." Webb geared the details to woo her core clientele--women like her. These so-called touch points include phone chargers at each chair (a convenience for on-the-go clients), discreet under-counter hooks to hold purses (to avoid having to drop a bag on the floor) and custom-made footstools at the shampoo station (affording comfort at the sink to women of all heights).

Drybar offers membership packages and e-mail follow-ups asking customers to rate the service, a tactic drawn from online shopping sites. "If someone has a bad experience, we want to hear about it," she explains. "I want to make it right." But the real innovation may be the firm's business model. Because blowouts take much less time to perform than a traditional cut and color--about 40 minutes instead of 90 minutes or longer--each location can handle much higher volumes every day. Not stocking coloring supplies also cuts down on expenses. As a result, Drybar's profit margins range from 15% to 35% per store. By comparison, the average for a full-service salon last year was 9.2%, according to Sageworks, a provider of private-business financial analysis.

Liftoff

Drybar's debut wasn't exactly smooth. The team initially franchised the concept in several cities in a bid to satisfy demand. Webb acknowledges that move was a mistake. "It's tough to maintain consistency and control," she says. (The energetic founder has been known to straighten picture frames and sconces when she visits shops.) In June, Drybar bought out its San Francisco franchise, but seven others remain. Webb says there will be no more Drybar franchises in the future. To help fund more company-owned stores, last year the chain sold a stake to Castanea Partners, a Boston private-equity firm, for $21 million. (Drybar declined to reveal what valuation that gives the overall business.) Landau, now the company's CEO, says it should become profitable next year, just as Drybar mulls an international expansion.

It was Castanea partner Janet Gurwitch, a former CEO of Laura Mercier cosmetics and skin care, who nudged Webb to create Drybar's line of shampoos, styling creams and styling tools. Introduced in April, those products are now sold at 140 Sephora stores and on shopping channel QVC. That line of business is expected to add $10 million to Drybar's revenue this year.

While Webb did not invent the blowout--or for that matter, the blowout bar--she's grown Drybar on the basis of women's willingness to spend on hair care. According to market researcher NPD Group, women in the U.S. spent $103.8 million on hair-care products at upscale department stores alone last year. IBISWorld, a market-research company, estimates that U.S. salons will generate almost $50 billion in revenue by 2017.

Carolyn Hoffman, a high school principal, maintains a monthly membership at competitor Blo-Out Lounge in Valencia, Calif., where she gets her hair done five times a month. "My husband laughs when I go in on Sundays," she says. "He calls it my happy time. But I can spend hours doing it myself and still look terrible. I feel more professional when my hair is looking good." Allure's Wells says, "It's no accident that the term bad-hair day has come to mean more than just hair."

Drybar and similar startups have not gone unnoticed by larger firms. The simplicity of the model makes it easy to copy. Higher-end salons have already tried to go after the nascent blowout market. Last summer Frédéric Fekkai (famous for introducing the $200 haircut) opened a pop-up blowout salon at his eponymous Fifth Avenue hair mecca. He later opened Fekkai Blow Out Bar--offering his take on the trend for $50. The shop closed when the novelty apparently wore off, but there are plenty waiting to take its place. Similar services have popped up around the country, some undercutting Drybar in price by more than half.

At a downtown Manhattan Drybar, Amber Roberts, a corporate-bond broker, is having her long swirls of blond transformed into a bouncy coif. After trouble getting an appointment at her regular salon, she began dropping in here. Now she comes in twice a week. "I walk out clean and fresh and not like the mom of a 2-year-old," she says. She notes that she's lucky to be able to afford what she calls "this kind of luxury" before quickly adding, "For me, it's essential."

FOR MORE STORIES ABOUT ENTREPRENEURS, GO TO time.com/smallbusiness

Apocalypse Now
The U.S. can lay the blame for its current political mess at the feet of the baby-boomer generation

NIXON: AP

Joe Klein | 841 words

A woman crashes her car into the White House barricades and then careers off toward the Capitol, where she is shot and killed--in an unnecessary fusillade--by Capitol police, who are working without pay because of the government shutdown. The next day, a man incinerates himself on the Mall. Is it just me, or is there a whiff of the apocalypse in the air? It isn't hard to locate the immediate cause of the shutdown and impending debt-ceiling debacle: the radical nihilist minority of the Republican Party and the GOP's craven leadership. Words should not be minced here. These radicals--it is wildly inaccurate to call them conservatives--are a pestilence feeding on ignorance and cynicism, preying on fear as a period of unprecedented prosperity wanes. They are not the apocalypse but represent the desperate last gasp of the white majority and of an era. My generation's era.

My work in journalism began almost exactly 44 years ago at a suburban newspaper just north of Boston; very quickly, I found my true niche in Boston's vibrant underground press. The memories of that time have overwhelmed me during the current crisis, helped along by a rising tide of articles comparing today's Tea Party to the left-wing radicals of my youth. There is some facile merit to this, but also important substantive differences. The old New Left featured a moral absolutism that didn't wear very well over time, but was based in a dream of justice. We opposed a criminally foolish war; we marched for racial equality. But by the time I started work, righteousness was beginning to curdle into self-righteousness and then devolve into nihilism. The weekly newspaper I worked for ran a photo of Richard Nixon--oh, for a Republican like Nixon now!--with a shark's mouth. Nixon drove liberals nuts, turned moderates into extremists, much the same way Barack Obama affects conservatives today. But there is no equivalency here: Nixon was a moderate politician, except for the carnage he sponsored in Vietnam, but a palpable crook. Obama is also a moderate politician--the individual mandate and health care exchanges that are at the heart of Obamacare were Republican ideas--but he has been pilloried and calumniated by extremists like Senator Ted Cruz's father, who recently said the President was "likely to side with the Muslims" and called Obamacare "suicide counseling." No doubt many of the more lunatic anti-Obama excretions have a basis in racism.

The real similarity between the Tea Party and the New Left is a matter of style: a politics of confrontation rather than of compromise. Indeed, our generational tendency toward public melodrama provided the script for the inevitable backlash. The pro-life movement came first, after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973: suddenly it was opponents of abortion who were filling the Mall with placards and protests. Eventually, the Tea Party's don't tread on me flag--a brilliant piece of choreography--joined the peace symbol as an icon. The left was never able to elect a President as ideological as Ronald Reagan--though he, too, was a moderate compared with today's bullyraggers--or to hijack the government, as the Tea Party has, but it was every bit as solipsistic. It was all about street theater, bombast, showtime. "Bread and circuses is not the policy of a republic," William Galston wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, "but rather of an empire entering moral senescence."

I am not saying the baby-boom generation caused the government shutdown, but we've presided over an era during which public trust in government has been demolished. We allowed the influence of concentrated money to corrupt our democracy. We allowed the gerrymandering of congressional districts, especially the racial gerrymandering that became legal after the 1965 Voting Rights Act, to make it less likely that politicians would run in districts with a centrist majority. We were brilliant at marketing, which plays to our niche differences. All of which conspired to make the political parties ideologically coherent rather than confusing regional coalitions. Those coalitions allowed a system where compromise was easier than confrontation. There would have been no New Deal without Southern Democrats, no Medicare without Northern Republicans.

We are far from that now. My generation has done wonderful things--increased equality across racial, gender and orientation lines; rock 'n' roll; The Sopranos; Whole Foods--but we have made a hash of government. We failed to bring our democracy into the information age; instead we brought it to a precipice. We allowed lobbyists to fester, turning every major piece of legislation into an encyclopedia of contradictions. There is some polling evidence that the millennial generation will be different, more collegial. I certainly hope so. Our sell-by date has passed.

TO READ JOE'S BLOG POSTS, GO TO time.com/swampland

The Gridlock-Economy Blues
Get ready for markets in which blue-chip stocks trump government bonds and politics trumps prosperity

LAGARDE: ANDREW HARRER--BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Rana Foroohar | 823 words

The crisis in Washington has kept us all on tenterhooks--watching for signs of a deal on federal spending and the debt ceiling amid ever more dire prognostications. We've now heard plenty about the consequences, perceived or real, of the U.S.'s defaulting on its debt: a plummeting S&P 500 index, a Chinese sell-off of U.S. T-bills and even a new global recession. All those things are possible. But ultimately, resolving the debt ceiling is unavoidable; the only issue is how much pain and loss we incur along the way. A more interesting--and answerable--question is what Washington's on-and-off gridlock tells us about the economic milieu we're already in. Here are three key market trends under way regardless of any D.C. deals.

Interest rates will rise. After all, they can't go down any further.

In fact, rates on short-term T-bills already spiked amid the uncertainty over the U.S.'s ability to pay its obligations. The question is when and how we'll see a longer-term rate increase. The best-case scenario has the Federal Reserve able to slowly but surely end its $85-billion-a-month asset-buying program, "taper" back on the money dump and gradually raise rates over the next year or two. Getting the timing of that right will be the key challenge for incoming Fed Chair Janet Yellen, whose confirmation will likely go through. Already, there are worries that low rates are causing market bubbles, which are always a risk when you have an easy-money environment for years on end. (Think Iceland, Argentina and subprime debt.)

But gridlock has made smart and timely tapering more complicated. Since Congress has been unwilling to boost the economy, the Fed has been forced into the role of stimulator of last resort. Part of the Fed's mandate involves keeping unemployment low, which requires higher growth than what we currently have. It's very likely that the shutdown will shave half a percentage point of growth from our already weak economy, meaning we may not expand by even 2% this year.

Political uncertainty creates a scenario in which interest rates can rise suddenly and unpredictably, as we've already seen in the bond markets in recent weeks. Market anxieties are evident in the recent boom in U.S. sovereign credit-default swaps. In snapping up swaps, investors are effectively purchasing insurance against the U.S.'s defaulting on its debts. Even if short-term rates and risk perceptions go back down, with so much Fed-generated money floating around in the market, "interest rates must eventually rise," said hedge funder Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, at a recent presentation at the Japan Society in New York City. "That means that the cost of debt will rise too."

As anyone who's been trying to get a mortgage lately knows, that ship has already begun to sail. As rates go up, the price of everything from homes to cars to consumer goods rises too. Returns on investments of all sorts will fall, since higher interest payments erode profit margins. "The future return on nearly all asset classes is going down," says Dalio. That's what some investors call the New Normal.

Stocks could displace bonds as the safety asset of choice.

In the New Normal of lower returns and higher volatility, investors are looking to beat inflation by a point or two without taking on too much risk. Some blue-chip companies now look less risky than the countries in which they are headquartered. After all, what would you rather be invested in over the long haul--globally diversified stocks of cash-rich companies that are hedged across many nations and pay a predictable 3% dividend, or the relatively low-interest-paying sovereign debt of a country with a totally dysfunctional political system? (I'm looking at you, Washington! And you too, Europe!) As I've been saying for some time, it's now a legitimate investment question. The debt-ceiling face-off has only brought the trend into starker relief. In recent days we've seen the rate on one-month T-bills exceed that on interbank loans--which means that the markets believed that companies' ability to pay each other back was a safer bet than the trust and faith of the U.S. government.

Both the economy and politics will become more volatile.

Over the past few years, the U.S. has sadly been following a story line more typical of emerging-market nations. Politicians play chicken with the country's credit, borrowing rates eventually go up, growth goes down, and politics becomes more polarized and extreme as a result. It's a vicious cycle, and it's happening as we speak. Given Washington's willingness to take America to the brink over and over, it's difficult to imagine how any deal can break that cycle. This is the real New Normal, and we will all pay the price.

What You Said About ...

588 words

The end of majority rule The cover illustrating TIME's Oct. 14 story by Michael Scherer and Alex Altman was a hit on Twitter, where readers called the image "haunting," "stark" and "right on." Many expressed anger at Tea Party politicians, comparing them to elected ideologues in Germany in the 1930s--and, in at least one case, suggesting their intransigence was criminal. "I don't see at which point the tactic of destroying the American economy ceases to be an infantile tantrum and enters the realm of treason," wrote David Friedenberg of Manchester, N.H. Others, like Bonnie O'Neil of Newport Beach, Calif., felt the President needed to try harder to negotiate across the aisle by "putting his own feelings aside and seriously listening to those who see problems with nationalizing a controversial health care system."

Twitter's all-male board of directors Corporate strategist Nilofer Merchant's TIME.com essay criticizing the paucity of women at the helm of the social-media giant--and calling it a recipe for failure--brought out vastly divergent views. "Getting women on the board just to check a box is sexist and shortsighted," wrote Azrimgiab on TIME.com. Many female readers, like @stephaniekays, strongly disagreed. "Ugh. Dumb & disappointing," she wrote. Commented tech executive Alison Munn: "Ironic for a diverse social network?"

Newt Gingrich's defense of the shutdown The ex-Speaker's post on TIME.com, which argued that shutdowns are just part of the negotiation process that the Founding Fathers envisioned, prompted colorful exchanges on our website. "With all due respect, the founders were afraid of tyranny," commented tsvskibum. "They wanted it difficult to pass laws and shape policy, but they didn't want it impossible." Wrote billcody: "The Republicans don't want negotiation. They want capitulation. Completely different."

BEHIND THE COVER

On the first day of shooting for this week's cover story, written by TIME's Michael Scherer (above right, with Michael Bloomberg and his deputy Howard Wolfson, left), photographer Charles Ommanney badly injured his knee. Still, he managed to keep up with the New York City mayor in London and Paris and left with a positive impression: "Here was this 71-year-old man, full of energy ... and he managed to fit in two art galleries between meetings" in Paris.

NOW ON LIGHTBOX

Scott Andrews, along with his son Philip and ex--Apple engineer Stan Jirman, shot 500 hours of footage for an exclusive time-lapse video of the space shuttle Endeavor's final trip from Cape Canaveral to Los Angeles, during which it wound its way through 12 miles of L.A. streets. Watch it all at lightbox.time.com.

NOW ON TIME.COM

Chicago Ideas Week--the annual summit for thought leaders in politics, business, entertainment and more--starts Oct. 14. This year's event touts some 200 speakers, including TIME's Bobby Ghosh and Rana Foroohar (plus the three below). Daily postings at time.com/ciw2013.

CAT CORA

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN

DAVID GREGORY

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

Return of the Singleton
With Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding created a new female archetype. Now she's brought Bridget back to conquer the 21st century. (Rule No. 1: No texting while drunk)

Photograph by Spencer Murphy for TIME

Radhika Jones | 2322 words

In March 2012, Helen Fielding made a note in her diary. She had been writing up comic scenes of London life in random files on her computer--"Just little moments," she says, "the funny things that happen"--and she suddenly wondered if she could turn them into a book. This is the kind of thing that could happen to any writer, but the next thing could happen only to Fielding. "I realized the voice was Bridget's," she says. "And I thought, That's going to raise the stakes a bit."

Bridget, of course, is Bridget Jones, Fielding's archetypal late-20th-century single woman, whom we last saw as a calorie-counting, career-addled 30-something with an overbearing mother, a circle of boozy friends and a library of ineffective self-help books. With plots loosely based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Bridget Jones's Diary and the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, rode the wave of the '90s Austen boom (alongside Amy Heckerling's Clueless and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, among many other updates) while making giant waves of their own, selling 15 million copies worldwide and launching two successful films. Fans related to Bridget's anxieties about her diet and love life, while feminist critics deplored her for obsessing about the same. A 2007 Guardian poll declared Bridget Jones's Diary one of the 10 books that best defined the 20th century, along with Catch-22, The Great Gatsby and 1984.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (out Oct. 15) picks up in 2012 with Bridget at 51, a single mother back on the dating scene, still seeking inner poise and her ideal weight. At first, Fielding kept mum about reviving her heroine for the 21st century. She wasn't being coy; she was reliving a time of no expectations. Bridget Jones began life in 1995 as the fictitious byline of a weekly newspaper column about the madcap life of a single girl. Even Fielding's best friends didn't know she was writing it. With the new book, she says, "I could be very honest in the way that I was when I first started writing Bridget, because no one was interested." It may sound like a paradoxical desire from a writer, but then, this is the year that J.K. Rowling was outed for publishing detective fiction under a pseudonym. And what Rowling is to young-adult fantasy, Fielding is to thinking-woman's comedy.

The Mill Maiden's Tale

Fielding grew up in Morley, Yorkshire, a textile town with dozens of mills, one of which was managed by her father. At 15, during school holidays, she worked in the weaving shack, pulling leftover wool from bobbins. (She is aware that this sounds absurdly Dickensian.) She went to university at St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she fell in with a creative set including actor Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Mr. Bean) and Richard Curtis, who went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. "She was performing in a play," Curtis recalls about their first meeting. "She was dressed as Marlene Dietrich. She was very, very pretty and not very good at acting."

He was struck, though, by her self-deprecating sense of humor. "That contradiction was so extraordinary," Curtis says--this sharp, attractive woman who looked on herself as a figure of fun. He immediately asked her to be his girlfriend. Instead they became friends. A few years later, when Curtis launched the pilot program of Comic Relief, his fundraising effort for famine victims in East Africa, he called on Fielding to help produce and host satellite segments from Sudan. Her voice, with its appealing directness, set the project apart from a traditional news documentary. "She kicked off the style and informal personal nature of these fundraising films, through which we've raised about $1.5 billion over the years," Curtis says.

Fielding's first novel, Cause Celeb--a cynical take on celebrity involvement in global tragedies--was inspired by those events. It earned good reviews but sold poorly. She worked jobs in television and journalism and started a second, "unreadable" novel set in the Caribbean. In the meantime, she began secretly writing her Bridget Jones columns for the Independent: vignettes from the wine-sloshed nights and hungover mornings of an unmarried Londoner, with the texture of true life exaggerated to hilarious effect. In the not-so-distant past, Bridget would have been called a spinster. Fielding, sick of women being written off if they hadn't settled down by their 30s, called her a singleton.

She didn't claim authorship at first. Fielding was used to amusing her friends in private, not in public. But about six weeks after the column debuted, her good friend Tracey MacLeod mentioned that she thought it was funny. Happy and relieved, Fielding took credit. "I don't think I would have dared write Bridget if I thought anyone was going to read it," she says. "And I don't think anyone would have let me if they thought anyone was going to read it. Someone would have come in with a pen and said, 'Well, that doesn't make sense, and that's not a sentence, and who cares why it takes three hours between getting up in the morning and leaving the house?'" But nobody ordered Fielding to stick verbs after Bridget's infectious exclamations ("Gaaah!") or transform her into a morning person. The column gained traction, and Fielding turned it into her second book, which became a word-of-mouth hit.

Between the Diary's Lines

Bridget Jones's Diary was published in 1996, one year before the debut of Ally McBeal and two years before Sex and the City. In cultural terms, it harks back a generation, when the royal wedding you'd woken up early to watch on TV was Princess Diana's. In technological terms, it is a relic from the Analog Age. No one texts or e-mails; they sit by plugged-in phones and listen to messages on answering machines. (At one point Bridget expresses NSA-surveillance-level horror at that invasive American invention, caller ID.) But if Bridget's world feels archaeological, she also cuts a prescient figure for today's urban women, deferring choices about marriage and childbearing, seesawing between professional ambition and ambivalence, and trying to have it all while also feeling free to drink quite a lot of chardonnay.

The diary, too, was prescient. With its time-stamped bursts of self-effacing updates it suggests a proto-Twitter feed. Bridget's cigarette and calorie counts read as precursors to the quantified self. Through Bridget's voice Fielding introduced a new vernacular. "She coins brilliant expressions," says MacLeod, a journalist and talent agent who, together with director Sharon Maguire, provided inspiration for Bridget's best friends Jude and Shazzer. "I'd never heard the expression 'minibreak' before she used it. 'Singleton.' 'Smug married.'" The original serial form had helped Fielding keep current. "It was like Girls," MacLeod says. "She was making comedy every week." And Fielding's brand of humor could sustain a book-length work without sacrificing its empathetic nature. "So often comedy is condescending about the people it's about, and Bridget is never like that," says Curtis.

Carrie Fisher, a friend of Fielding's for more than 20 years, remembers a dinner party Fielding attended at her home with a bunch of comedy writers, mostly male, one of whom advanced the theory that all comedy is based on cruelty. "That shocked her," Fisher says. "The reason she didn't see it is that the humor is aimed at herself." To critics of Bridget (lately reborn as critics of Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath) who wish she would get her act together, Fielding argues that humor couched in vulnerability is an expression of confidence. "If we can't laugh at ourselves, we haven't got very far," she says. "To say we're like this fragile minority--it's nonsense."

Fans were horrified to learn through an excerpt published in the Sunday Times on Sept. 29 that in the new novel--spoiler alert for those unacquainted with the Internet--the author had killed off Bridget's love interest, Mark Darcy. Those already in the know were Fielding's small circle of early readers: Knopf's editor in chief Sonny Mehta, her editor Jennifer Jackson and the author Maile Meloy, who has been friends with Fielding for over a decade. (They met at a party in Los Angeles, when Fielding was introduced to Meloy, in an act of inebriated cultural conflation, as the author of "Bridget Potter's Diary.") "I was as attached to Darcy as anyone was, but Bridget moving on without him is a far more interesting story," Meloy says. "I don't need to read that never-written novel about married life with Mr. Darcy, in which he gets the kids to school on time."

Fielding says Mark's death was "absolutely inherent from the start." As a woman in her 50s, Bridget would naturally have suffered losses. "The jokes in Bridget do come from something real," Fielding says. "Pain and confusion and those quite serious things." She got some fun out of it in real life when breaking the news to Colin Firth, who played Mark in both films. She tried to see him in person, but the scheduling didn't work out. "So I ended up telling him he died on the phone," she says, laughing. "I had to ask him if he had someone with him and if he was sitting down."

By casting Bridget as a widow and single mother, Mad About the Boy emphasizes a quality frequently missed by critics of the first two novels, which is that their heroine, for all her apparent insecurities, is a tough nut. Diaries tend to function as dumps for self-loathing and despair, but even in the most humiliating of scenarios, Bridget almost always manages a clever comeback. As Elizabeth Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice, "My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me." Bridget tends not to notice the points she scores against her horrible bosses, dates and rivals, but her instinctive wit puts her in the Bennet tradition. D.A. Miller, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, who has taught Bridget Jones's Diary in courses on Austen, notes that the diary form itself pays homage to Austen, lifting Fielding's work above many pale imitations. Austen's heroines aren't writers, but Fielding's is. Bridget's storytelling, he says, is a "way of taking control of her situation."

Texts, Twitter and Tattoos

Fielding has spent the past dozen years writing, including a fourth novel, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003), which fell rather flat, plus work on the Bridget Jones screenplays and a Bridget musical (a long percolating project that she maintains will happen someday). All this, she says, has made her better at plot, so for Mad About the Boy she didn't borrow from Austen. Bridget does invoke the author, though, while trying to justify to her older friend Talitha (new to the franchise) her amorous plans with a younger man she's met through social media:

"We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?"

"Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day.'"

Texting and Twitter play an outsize role in the new novel, which finds Bridget solo-parenting two young children and seeking romance after a decade under Mark Darcy's chivalric guard. Readers can find biographical parallels here if they choose. Fielding is 55, with two children: Dash, 9, and Romy, 7. She separated from their father, American comedy writer Kevin Curran, a few years ago and moved back to London after nearly a decade in L.A.

But Fielding tries to keep the Bridget Jones phenomenon separate from what she calls the "normal little tram routes of life." Parenthood grounds her, with all its mystifying choices (mainly, in her telling, having to do with determining proper access to video games). So does her family, including her mother, sister and two brothers, all of whom, she says, share her sense of fun. Her brother Richard remembers the time Helen pointed out a review of one of her books. "It had equated her writing ability to that of a hamster," he says. For her next birthday, he sent a set of toy hamsters.

As the author of diaries, even fictional ones, Fielding invites all sorts of intimacies. The charm that transfixed Richard Curtis at Oxford still operates. At a lunch celebrating Fielding at BookExpo America this summer, two guests whisked her aside to show her their identical Bridget Jones tattoos featuring a wine bottle festooned with a banner that reads no emotional f---wittage (a Bridget-ism fit for the Oxford English Dictionary). One of the tattooed pair, book blogger and librarian Stephanie Anderson, sums up what Fielding's work has meant to many women over the years: "It's like an old friend. The older I get, the funnier the books get."

Austen's plots are marriage plots, and ultimately so are Bridget's. But Fielding's novels (like Austen's, and like Sex and the City and Girls) also revolve around friendship--something at which Bridget excels. Nor is the character's staying power an accident. Fielding may have become a celebrity, but she is still very much a writer. "She has an amazing ear for rhythm in dialogue," says Meloy. Fielding loves 19th century novelists because their chief goal was to make you turn the page. (She likes Jonathan Franzen because he does that too.) She reminisces about being alone with her laptop, the weaving of threads through a novel, the craft of composition. She's a fan of Susan Cain's book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.

And as someone whose first reaction to literary success was to "pretend it hadn't happened" and run off to a country cottage for six months, Fielding is attuned to the pitfalls of fame. "I think if I ever did do another one, I'd do Bridget Jones Becomes a Celebrity, because it is pretty funny," she says. "But I won't do that." So she says, but she can't know for certain when Bridget's voice might return.

How the Zapruder Film Came to Life
Fifty years after JFK's assassination, a LIFE editor recalls his chase to secure the tragic images

ZAPRUDER FILM © 1967 (RENEWED 1995) THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM AT DEALEY PLAZA

Frames from the sequence, including the moment a bullet struck the President's head

Richard B. Stolley | 1555 words

'Dick, Kennedy's been shot in Dallas!' I was in my office as Los Angeles bureau chief for LIFE magazine. The shouter was a LIFE correspondent who had wandered over to the Associated Press Teletype to find out (pre-Internet) what was happening in the world.

The AP machine was spitting out bulletins and flashes, with accompanying alarm bells, that gave the first news of the tragedy in Dealey Plaza. I ran to see for myself, then back to my desk to call my editor in New York City and ask what we could do. "How fast can you get to Dallas?" was the answer. An hour later, four of us were on a National Airlines plane.

About 6 p.m. I got a call from Patsy Swank, a part-time LIFE correspondent in Dallas who had spent the afternoon at police headquarters. Her news was astounding. She said another reporter had told her that a cop had told him that a local businessman had been at Dealey Plaza with a movie camera and had photographed the assassination.

Anticipating my next question, she said, "My friend couldn't spell the name, only pronounce it. Za-proo-dur."

I picked up the phone book and ran my finger down the Z's--and there it was, just as Patsy had pronounced it: Zapruder, Abraham. I began calling; I kept on calling every 15 minutes. No one answered. Zapruder, the garment-factory co-owner and 8-mm enthusiast who had unexpectedly captured the President's assassination on camera, was out trying to get his film developed, as I later learned.

Finally, at 11 p.m., a weary voice answered. I asked if this was Mr. Zapruder, and then identified myself and LIFE. I asked if it was true that he had photographed the assassination that morning. "Yes." Did he photograph the whole sequence? "Yes." Had he actually seen the film himself? "Yes." Could I please come to his home now and see the film? "No."

He politely explained that he was exhausted and overcome by what he had witnessed. The decision I made next turned out to be quite possibly the most important of my career. In the news business, sometimes you push people hard, unsympathetically, without obvious remorse (even while you may be squirming inside). Sometimes, you don't. This, I felt intuitively, was one of those times you don't push. I reminded myself: This man had watched a murder. I said I understood. Clearly relieved, Zapruder asked me to come to his office at 9 the next morning.

Saturday Morning

Back in at least a semi-push-hard mood, and being reasonably sure that Zapruder would have talked to other reporters after me on the previous night, I got there at 8. Zapruder looked a little surprised to see me but said he was about to show the film to two Secret Service agents and agreed to let me join. The projector was set up in a small, windowless room, with a white wall serving as the screen.

The first few frames showed some of his employees, who had turned out to see the President. Then the motorcade appeared. There was no sound except for the whirring of the projector. We watched transfixed, knowing what was going to happen yet not having a clue as to what it would look like. The limousine was briefly obscured by the road sign, then for a couple of seconds Kennedy clutched his throat, Texas Governor John Connally tipped over, their wives looked puzzled.

The film advanced to infamous frame 313, and Oswald's bullet struck the President's head. The two agents and I responded precisely the same, with an explosive ugh!, as if we had been simultaneously gut-punched. It was the single most dramatic moment of my 70 years in journalism. The fact that we were watching the assassination only hours after it had occurred was nothing short of remarkable. I decided instantly: There is no way I am going to leave this office without that film.

Zapruder ran the 26-second film for us three times. After that, we could hear a commotion starting in the hall outside. As I had suspected, other reporters were showing up, told (like me) to be there at 9 a.m. In all, two dozen or so arrived, representing the Associated Press, the Saturday Evening Post magazine, a newsreel maker and two or three major out-of-town newspapers. It seems impossible now, but network television never appeared. TV news had only recently gone from 15 minutes in the evening to half an hour, and the three major networks were concentrating their forces on the funeral in Washington, not the crime in Dallas.

Zapruder explained to us that he was going to show his film to these newcomers. The Secret Service agents left, and I asked Zapruder if I could sit in his office and thus be spared mingling with these potential competitors.

During the next hour or so, I introduced myself to and chatted with members of his staff, particularly Lillian Rogers, Zapruder's assistant. She turned out to be from southern Illinois; I was from central Illinois, and a surefire subject of interest to anyone from that state was high school basketball. I had been sports editor of my hometown newspaper, the Pekin Daily Times, and knew that her favorite team, Taylorville High School, was consistently one of the best in Illinois, and said so. We hit it off like old friends--something Zapruder noticed when he came into the office between screenings of the film.

After Zapruder had shown the film to the last reporter, he asked me to join the others in the hall. He said he realized that we all wanted to talk to him about print or broadcast rights, but "because Mr. Stolley of LIFE was the first to contact me, I feel obliged to speak to him first." In my mind, I pumped a fist. The others erupted, shouting, "No, no!" "Don't sign anything!" "Promise you will speak to us before you make up your mind!"

Zapruder agreed, and we walked into his office and closed the door. He looked very tired, but I quickly had to determine whether he realized the value of his film. I said that it was "very interesting" and that when LIFE encountered "unusual" pictures like these, we were inclined to pay higher-than-normal space rates. For example, we would be willing to offer "as much as $5,000" for the film.

He smiled. Yes, he knew what he had. From then on, I would raise the bid, and we would talk, mostly about the tragic weekend. He described a nightmare he had had only a few hours earlier. In it, a man wearing "a sharp double-breasted suit" stood in front of a sleazy Times Square movie theater--midtown Manhattan's Times Square was a porn mecca back then--shouting for people to come in and see the President assassinated on the big screen. He said he woke up shuddering.

Zapruder's message was clear. I promised him LIFE would not exploit the film, a verb he used repeatedly during our session. Meanwhile, the other journalists in the hall were behaving badly. They pounded on the door, shouting, "Remember, you promised!" and slipped pleading notes under it. A few went out to the street to a phone booth and called the office, demanding to speak to Zapruder.

He was visibly becoming more and more upset. I had reached $50,000 for the print rights, an amount authorized by my editors in New York when we had talked at midnight. I told him, truthfully, that I could go no higher without making a phone call. At that moment, there was a particularly violent bang on the door. Zapruder looked stricken, then said to me quietly, "Let's do it." I typed out a contract, got the original film and sneaked out the back door of the factory. Zapruder returned to the hall, where angry and abusive reporters had no choice but to return to covering this ever changing story.

The Days After

On Monday, life purchased the film and TV rights from Zapruder for an additional $100,000. Long after Zapruder's death in 1970, I called Erwin Schwartz, his business partner, to clear up some questions about that day. Schwartz suddenly asked, "Do you know why you, and not one of the other reporters, got that film?"

Surprised, I answered, "The money." Schwartz said someone would have matched or exceeded that. Our promise not to exploit the film? He agreed that was very important. Then he asked the question again, and went on to answer it himself: "Because you were a gentleman."

He cited my not badgering Zapruder to come to his house on Friday night, my treating him with respect during our negotiations and, finally, my friendly dealings with fellow Midwesterner Lillian Rogers. Some of the other reporters had treated her harshly, he said, accusing her of preventing them access to her boss. Schwartz's explanation floored me then, and still does today.

In the months after the assassination, Zapruder received bags and bags of mail. Most of the letters were simply addressed to his name, Dallas, Texas. In later years, when he and his wife traveled, especially in Europe, the name Zapruder was often recognized on hotel registers. Abe Zapruder was never able to escape his unique and haunting role in the Kennedy assassination story.

Nor was I.

Stolley is a former editor of LIFE and the founding editor of PEOPLE, both sister publications of TIME. This story is excerpted from The Day Kennedy Died (Life Books).

Obama's Asia Problem
In the contest for the future of asia, Obama's canceled trip opens the door for China's increasing influence

Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday for TIME PHOTO REFERENCE: XI AND OBAMA: EVAN VUCCI--AP

Michael Crowley | 2547 words

He was supposed to be on the island paradise of Bali, rubbing elbows with Asian heads of state and showing China that America is serious about being a Pacific power. Instead, on Oct. 8, Barack Obama was in the White House's cramped briefing room, embarrassed and apologetic. Managing the shutdown of the U.S. government had forced Obama to scratch his long-planned trip to a pair of Asian summits that he'd been touting as critical venues for a display of renewed American leadership in the region. Now he was telling reporters at a White House press conference that his grounding was a setback for the country. "It creates a sense of concern on the part of other leaders," Obama said. "It's almost like me not showing up for my own party."

Happy to console the disappointed heads of state in Bali was China's President, Xi Jinping, who was the unchallenged heavyweight among the gathered Asian leaders. Xi, gloated the Hong Kong--based Communist Party newspaper Ta Kung Pao, "has become the brightest political star on the Asian diplomatic platform. In contrast, America has lost an important chance to perform ... The influence of the U.S. is questioned more and more."

A potshot, perhaps. But Obama's no-show fueled doubts about whether America has the will and the resources to meet the challenge of a rising and potentially aggressive China. Obama officials have even given the policy for doing so a name--the "rebalance" to Asia, or as insiders call it, the Asia "pivot," conveying a crisp turn of direction for U.S. foreign policy.

Pivoting has been easier to say than do, however. Problems like Egypt, Syria, al-Qaeda and Iran have kept Obama mired in the sands of the Middle East at a time when his team hoped to be leading the way to a new era of Pacific engagement. Obama's planned six-day trip to the region was a chance to convince doubters with one of Obama's most valuable commodities: face time. In the end, though, his aides concluded that the President simply couldn't afford to be 10,000 miles from Washington at events like the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit while the Tea Party had the U.S. government on lockdown. Once again, Asia would have to wait.

Panda Power

Obama didn't talk much about China when he first ran for President in 2008. When he did, he often raised simplistic alarms about Washington's borrowing from Beijing to finance the nation's deficit. But early in his first term, his national-security advisers concluded that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the global hunt for terrorists had distracted the U.S. from East Asia--and that China was quickly filling the vacuum. Having largely weathered the global recession and continued its rapid growth, China was codifying economic practices opposed by the West--and which the U.S. says give China an unfair advantage--like investments by state-owned enterprises that ignore human rights and environmental factors. More ominously, Beijing was making ever more assertive territorial claims in the crowded waters around its borders and intimidating its smaller neighbors.

Treating China's rising power as an afterthought, Obama's advisers concluded, would be a dangerous mistake. As the world's fastest-growing region, Asia represents the future of much of the American economy. The Middle East still presents security threats, but the global order will be decided by the behavior of China and its neighbors, which include India and Russia. A peaceful and cooperative China could lead to a global boom in prosperity. An insular and hostile one could prompt a superpower competition with the U.S. not seen since the Cold War. "We came into office and tried to take a broad look at the world and ask where we were underinvested--and we were underinvested in Asia," says Tom Donilon, who stepped down as Obama's National Security Adviser in June. "The same time that the U.S. was overwhelmingly focused, and for good reason, on Iraq in the mid-2000s was the same time that Asia was experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history."

The result was a strategy first unveiled publicly in a 2011 Foreign Policy article by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Titled "America's Pacific Century," the article declared that the U.S. stood "at a pivot point" as it wound down its post-9/11 conflicts, and it called for "substantially increased investment" in diplomacy, trade and military power in the region.

With the new vision came a flurry of diplomatic actions. Clinton attended every summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) during her tenure, a first for a U.S. Secretary of State, and Obama has attended three of them; his canceled trip would have included his fourth. (George W. Bush, by contrast, never attended one.) At the same time, the U.S. reaffirmed ties with nations such as Japan and Singapore that had struggled to get a call returned from Bush officials fixated on al-Qaeda and Iraq. Obama and Clinton thawed relations with long-isolated Burma and struck a deal to assist Vietnam with a civilian nuclear program. Obama's team also cranked up its pursuit of a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal--a potentially massive pact involving 12 countries, including five Asian nations, that would create a new, NAFTA-like free-trade zone that the U.S. hopes can help draw China into a more Western-oriented trade system. Obama is so eager to pass it quickly that some business groups have warned against rushing an imperfect deal.

The pivot is about more than handshakes and free trade, however. It's also a muscle flex. The Pentagon is deploying more aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines in the region and says it will deploy 60% of its overseas forces in Asia, up from the current 50%. Officials have said those forces will be exempt from upcoming Pentagon budget cuts. The Air Force recently announced plans to move more fighter jets to Singapore, Thailand and India, and one U.S. official said bombers could eventually be stationed in Australia. Talks are under way with the Philippines about a substantial U.S. presence there. A new force of 2,500 Marines is planned to be based on Australia's northern coast. And in April the U.S.S. Freedom sailed into Singapore--the first of four new littoral-combat ships that will operate continuously out of the country's Changi Naval Base. Though Washington officials play down their significance, these military moves delivered a clear message to China: Asia pivot targets Beijing, declared a 2012 headline in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party--linked newspaper.

What alarms Beijing brings some comfort to other Asian states, which see the U.S. providing a reassuring counterweight against Chinese assertiveness, especially over its claims to contested waters and territories. The Chinese have patrolled shoals near the Philippines and arrested Vietnamese fishermen who strayed into supposed Chinese territorial waters. In March, Vietnam claimed that a Chinese ship pursued and fired on a Vietnamese fishing vessel. China has amplified its claims to a long-disputed array of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea--which Japan calls the Senkaku and China calls the Diaoyu and which are located in waters thought to be rich in oil and gas. Japan says a Chinese ship locked its fire-control radar onto a ship and a helicopter belonging to Japan's Self-Defense Forces near the islands in January.

China isn't the only Pacific nation picking fights: Japan and others have made aggressive maritime claims. But for many, China's new attitude was all too neatly symbolized last year when Beijing unveiled new passports bearing a map of the People's Republic that draws China's borders around disputed territories from India to Southeast Asia. India's Foreign Minister deemed the new borders "unacceptable," and a Vietnamese official described the move as "one very poisonous step by Beijing among their thousands of malevolent actions."

Now countries that once rejected American influence are open to it. Take the Philippines. In 1991 the former American colony shuttered the Pentagon's largest Asian military base, at Subic Bay. Currently it is talking to Washington about a new influx of U.S. troops and naval vessels to rotate through the country "for the protection of our West Philippine Sea"--the Filipino name for part of South China Sea.

Counterweight or Cold War?

American officials and experts believe that a stronger U.S. presence can provide vital stability through a strategic balancing of powers. "We have a region where the countries clearly don't like each other," Gordon Chang, director of Stanford University's Center for East Asian Studies, told the Aspen Security Forum in July. "Some of them want to go to war. We need to be there to maintain the peace."

Top officials in Beijing regard the pivot as something more sinister: a containment strategy reminiscent of the one the U.S. practiced against the Soviets during the Cold War, which featured a major military buildup and efforts to pry away satellite states from the Soviet sphere of influence. China's Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan, hinted at this view during a summer visit to Washington. "We hope the rebalancing strategy can bring peace to the Pacific region instead of seeking to weaken China," Chang said.

The Chinese have a point. "I do not know how one reassures our allies that we are responding to China's assertiveness and then tries to reassure China that it is not about them," says Daniel Blumenthal, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. "China should expect a reaction to its 20-year peacetime buildup of forces. It's very destabilizing." After years of Chinese muscle flexing, Blumenthal argues, "We had to respond to remain credible to our allies and reassure them that we are reliable partners."

The Obama team itself is divided on whether China represents an opportunity--a growing economic giant and lucrative trade partner--or a challenge to U.S. power and interests. In the first term, for instance, Secretary of State Clinton took a warier view of China's intentions than did Donilon, whom one official jokingly calls a "panda hugger." Whatever their private views, Obama officials determined to avoid Chinese hostility have worked hard to explain that the pivot is about cooperation. "We welcome China's peaceful rise ... [We] believe that a strong and prosperous China is one that can help bring stability and prosperity to the region and to the world," Obama said before a 2012 meeting with Xi, who was then China's Vice President. U.S. officials argue that U.S.-backed security has enabled Asia's post--World War II boom.

And behind the scenes, top U.S. national-security officials have spent hours assuring the Chinese that the pivot has nothing in common with America's Cold War strategy of containment, whose goal was the total collapse of the Soviet Union. "When we have these conversations with the Chinese, we make it very clear that we know what containment looks like," Donilon says. "We know how to do it. We did it. This doesn't look anything like it."

To drive home the point, then Deputy Defense Secretary Michèle Flournoy visited Beijing in December 2011 to meet with the Chinese military's then deputy chief of the general staff, General Ma Xiaotian. Ma and his colleagues had been complaining about American air and sea information-gathering missions, known as strategic-reconnaissance operations. Flournoy treated him to a short slide show that featured declassified data about equivalent surveillance missions the U.S. had conducted around the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. At the time, Soviet-oriented reconnaissance amounted to "something like 80% to 90%" of all U.S. missions, Flournoy recalls. "And we told the Chinese that if you look at the percentage today around China, it is a single-digit percentage."

What came next was revealing. "Don't you see the difference?" Flournoy asked her Chinese hosts, who initially nodded in understanding. "I think for a couple of minutes, I had some cognitive dissonance going," she says with a chuckle. "Then they snapped back into, No, no, this must be disinformation--of course you're containing us."

Easier Said Than Done

Ultimately, what may reassure China more than any words or slides is skepticism about whether Obama's footing is sure enough to execute a pivot. Despite his ambition to step back from Middle Eastern entanglements, the region continues to serve as the geopolitical equivalent of a screaming newborn. Obama's foreign policy agenda has been consumed by the Arab Spring, Egypt, Syria, al-Qaeda and now Iran. His Sept. 24 address to the U.N. General Assembly was almost exclusively about the Middle East: in his more than 40-minute speech, Obama mentioned Syria, Egypt, Iran or Israel 68 times. China? Just once. His only other nod to Asia was a mention of North Korea's nuclear weapons.

"Even before the government shutdown, there was a lot of anxiety in Asia that, because of all the turmoil in the Middle East, the pivot was dying," says a former Senate foreign policy aide who visits the region regularly.

The pivot could also suffer from the departure of some of its key architects, including Donilon and Clinton. Donilon's replacement, Susan Rice, lacks his well-known passion for the pivot. Fixated on Syria and Arab-Israeli peace, John Kerry has traveled to the Middle East seven times as Secretary of State but to Asia just twice. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has visited the region three times, although a late-August tour was dominated by a seemingly imminent military strike on Syria, forcing Hagel to join an emergency White House meeting via video conference from Kuala Lumpur.

Restoring the pivot's credibility will take many more visits by the likes of Kerry and Hagel. "It's important that we keep showing up," says Kurt Campbell, who recently served as the U.S. State Department's top Asia hand. In his Oct. 8 news conference, Obama offered an analogy to corporate CEOs--who, he said, "if they want to close a deal, aren't gonna do it by phone."

China's President certainly didn't. In Jakarta, Xi became the first foreign leader to address the parliament of Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, and announced a slew of trade deals worth more than $30 billion. In Malaysia, he spoke of better trade relations with that country and of strategic cooperation in the South China Sea.

Back home in Beijing, his government was warning the U.S. not to endanger the world economy with a debt default. At a time when America hopes to teach China about economic rules of the road, Beijing is lecturing Washington about its responsibilities. It was another embarrassing reminder for Obama that managing Asia will have to wait until he's managed his problems at home.

--With reporting by Hannah Beech/Beijing

The Expendables
The government thinks it knows who's essential--but the government hasn't met me

ILLUSTRATION BY TOMASZ WALENTA FOR TIME; GETTY IMAGES (3)

Joel Stein | 748 words

Though I have never been anyone's boss, from what I gather from those motivational posters, management is all about teamwork, attitude and wishing you were outside. So it can't be great for your organization when the government shutdown forces you to declare some employees nonessential and others essential. When the shutdown is over and everyone has to work together again, not a lot of employees are going to want to pair up with nonessentials when they do those trust-building exercises where you fall backward into one another's arms.

It's so awkward at government agencies right now that many are ditching the term nonessential, instead using nonexcepted, nonemergency and, in the case of the guy who ran the panda cam at the National Zoo, nonappreciated. Some U.S. Representatives, like Wisconsin Democrat Gwen Moore, simply declared everyone on their staff essential. I predict that Moore's staff will work extra hard and accomplish a lot until they notice that their paychecks have bounced.

But in most federal government offices, where staffers were allowed to talk to me only off the record, things are tense. Essentials strut around half-empty offices, bragging about how much easier it is to get work done without nonessentials stopping in their offices to chat about girlfriend problems and other things that aren't food, water and oxygen. Even families are being divided. Beverly Viands was sent home even though she is an administrative contracting officer for the Defense Contract Management Agency, which is a title that I have to believe contains at least one essential word. Even if contract is considered only semiessential, it appears twice. Meanwhile, her niece and nephew, who are in a nonmilitary department, went to work. "It was certainly alarming to think that Social Security was still operating," she said. Yes, Viands knows that many people depend on their Social Security checks, but she has the "authority to warrant government," which I'm pretty sure is exactly what most Americans want done to our government right now.

After five days of doing nonessential stuff at home, Viands got a call telling her that upon further reflection, she is in fact essential. Those five days of nonessentialness won't linger in Viands' mind, since she deals with tanks, planes and, though I can't know for sure since it's a military secret, tankplanes.

For the rest of our federal government, however, there's a danger in having turned the subtext into text. Because while we don't like to admit it, we all know who's essential and who isn't. That's why doctors have so much attitude, farmers get free Willie Nelson concerts and your contractor shows up whenever he wants. If TIME had to furlough employees--which is a hilarious impossibility--I know how I'd be labeled. The journalists who cover politics and world events would continue to work, while those of us who write about ourselves would be sent home. Which actually wouldn't be that big of a deal since we already write from home. And honestly, we talk about writing way more than we actually write.

But I believe that 99.9% of the time, when there's no government shutdown or apocalypse or cold serious enough to require a doctor's visit, the nonessential is the essential. In a specialized economy, essentials are replaceable. One farmer is the same as another to everyone except waiters at high-end restaurants. We value entertainers, tech entrepreneurs and guys who run hedge funds that make a little under the average return of the S&P 500. There are lots of places to go for hard news but only one place to learn what I'm thinking, as long as you don't count Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and my website.

So I hope essentials are enjoying their moment, for it will not last long. Essentials didn't start Google. Essentials never made art or literature. Essentials don't create entire new coffee drinks by adding just a tiny bit more or less milk. Life without nonessentials looks as gray and bleak as the postapocalyptic world in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, if those people had essentials. To put it even more starkly: postal workers have been considered essential.

After this shutdown is over, the nonessentials should all ask for a raise, from the person who maintains the animatronic joke-telling LBJ at the presidential museum in Austin to the Smithsonian employee who procured the Laugh-In lunch box to the chef who makes the high tea at Acadia National Park. Not only are those jobs what makes America exceptional, but complaining about their existence fuels our most robust industry, conservative talk radio.

Laptop Louvre.

RAFAËL ROZENDAAL

Alexandra Sifferlin | 700 words

Rafaël Rozendaal, a 33-year-old New Yorker with Internet tattooed on his inner lip, has a knack for turning screensavers into art. As the online king of digital art, he builds interactive websites that draw as many as 40 million viewers a year. And unlike a gallery with paintings or sculpture, his websites allow you to play with works like ifnoyes.com, changing the way they look by moving your cursor across the screen. Visiting the site is free, but the auction house Phillips is certain that cutting-edge collectors are ready to shell out as much as $6,000 for the right to call the site their own.

Digital artists have made it to the block before, but never as they have in Paddles ON!, a collaboration between the social-media platform Tumblr and Phillips, the world's third largest art-auction house. The sale, scheduled for Oct. 10, showcases 17 digital-art pioneers with works that include websites, YouTube videos, software and an animated GIF, the digital version of a flip book, which was estimated to sell for $1,800.

"We're presenting these artists as part of a new wave of artmaking, from a generation where using technology isn't radical or experimental but a given and an essential part of their creativity," says Megan Newcome, Phillips' director of digital strategy. Collectors are curious about this new genre, she says, although there's always skepticism about work that can't be hung on a wall. It's the latest in a century-long tradition of boundary-bursting art, from Marcel Duchamp's urinal to James Turrell's ephemeral lighting schemes.

For artists, the appeal of digital work is obvious: it's an ever changing medium with untethered potential for viewers. And it's economical. Many of the artists featured in Paddles ON! first gained momentum in 2008, on the heels of the recession. "People are going to look back and see that as a turning point for digital art, because young artists could no longer afford studio space or paint. A laptop is expensive, but over the life of your creative process, it's the gift that keeps on giving," says Lindsay Howard, the auction's curator.

"I'm empowered by the Web because you do things that have never been done before, and there's no politics. You can show what you want," says Rozendaal. "Companies, museums, individuals--we are all on the same Web, and there's huge audience potential." The millions of people who visit Rozendaal's sites give him a level of exposure unfathomable in a gallery, although sheer popularity has rarely been a gauge of quality in the fine-art world. (Consider Thomas Kinkade and Norman Rockwell.)

The digital generation is creating new models of pricing and patronage. After all, how do you own a website or a GIF? Owners of Rozendaal's work take over the site's domain name--one of the few things on the Internet that he believes are both unique and tradable. His art-website sales contract requires the owner to renew the domain each year and keep the art accessible to the public. The contract is shared online for other artists to modify for their work.

Assigning value to, say, a YouTube video is another challenge. "Pricing always makes me uncomfortable," says Petra Cortright, whose webcam video RGB, D-LAY is up for auction. Cortright markets her work with an equation: video's current view count x amount per view = total current price. That encourages collectors to keep circulating the artwork online to increase its value.

While this is the first auction devoted solely to digital art, other artists working in the medium have already scored big. Wade Guyton sold one of his black monochromes, made with an Epson ink-jet printer, for nearly $1.2 million at a Christie's auction earlier this year. Phillips says its auction is intended to encourage a greater prevalence of digital works in the contemporary market. "We don't want to silo this type of work into its own corner," says Annie Werner, Tumblr's arts evangelist. "We want it to be a larger part of the zeitgeist."

Pop Chart

JUST A REFLEKTOR: CAROLINE ROBERT

A behind-the-scenes look at Just a Reflektor, directed by Vincent Morisset. Read more at lightbox.time.com

Nick Carbone, Kelly Conniff, Nate Rawlings, Lily Rothman, Courtney Subramanian, Richard Corliss | 845 words

POP-STAR EDITION

GOOD WEEK/BAD WEEK

Miley Cyrus

Got rave reviews for her SNL hosting gig; new album, Bangerz, topped iTunes chart

Britney Spears

New video for "Work Bitch" hasn't done much for the single's chart performance

TV

Snooze News

This is no yarn: next month a Norwegian TV channel will devote five-plus hours of airtime to people knitting. In fairness, the subjects are attempting to break a world record (longest nonstop knitting session). Question is, Will any viewers be awake if they succeed?

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU

The band Arcade Fire has reimagined music videos before--in 2010 it linked a clip to Google Maps--but the one for "Reflektor," the title track for its Oct. 29 album, ups the ante. Once viewers sync their mobile phones to their webcams and browsers, they can become de facto cinematographers--shifting the filters and focus of the clip, which follows a young woman around a city in Haiti.

MOVIES

$55.6 MILLION

U.S. opening-weekend gross for Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity, which follows two astronauts (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) struggling to survive in space after their shuttle is destroyed; that haul is a record for October premieres

VERBATIM

'My style icon is Batman.'

ADAM LEVINE, on his sartorial inspiration, after launching his fashion line for Kmart

QUICK TALK

Danai Gurira

When The Walking Dead returns on Oct. 13 (AMC), all eyes will be on Michonne, the stoic, sword-wielding zombie slayer played by Gurira, 35, who's also an award-winning playwright. Here, she talks to TIME.

--LILY ROTHMAN

As a writer, is it frustrating to play a character who doesn't use a lot of words?

No, it's actually fascinating. I was a jock when I was a kid, so I'd always wanted to physically live through a character, one of those really tough chicks.

Which sports did you play?

I was a swimmer, I was a sprinter, and I played field hockey. I was in Zimbabwe, so there wasn't much ice.

And now you play with swords. Know any tricks?

We're trying to keep everyone alive--Michonne isn't, but Danai is--so I keep the tricks to a minimum. I do have some dings on my apartment wall from tricks I was attempting at home. I don't advise that.

Which other action heroines do you admire?

If I tell you, you're going to realize what a wretched geek I am, and then my cover's blown.

So what?

Honestly, growing up, I thought that Grace Van Owen from L.A. Law was really, really cool.

Michonne has owned zombies, and she's about to get a horse. Which makes a better pet?

The horse is prettier, but he does require feeding.

And everyone loves zombies, right?

Some fans are diehard, like the apocalypse is actually coming. We get the question, "Are you ready?"

So do you have a zombie-apocalypse plan?

Well, after doing the show I guess I do. I've got a couple of swords in my closet now.

CHROMATIC CONQUEST

The pursuit of color photography is as old as the camera. Still, even after rich hues were possible, gray scale was seen as more artistic. Vibrant images, like Patrick Nagatani and Andrée Tracey's Alamogordo Blues (1986), above, now adorn museum walls, but as recently as the 1960s, that wouldn't have been the case. "Color!," a new exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas--on view through Jan. 5, 2014--puts that journey into context.

ROUNDUP

Burger Blunders

Chicago heavy-metal-themed bar Kuma's Corner has sparked controversy with its October special: a burger topped with an unconsecrated Communion wafer. But the Ghost--it's named after Swedish metal band Ghost B.C.--is hardly the first patty to cause a stir.

1 THE BK SUPER SEVEN INCHER

Burger King, Singapore

This short-lived, extra-long burger was marketed with sexual undertones. One ad featured an open-mouthed woman facing the sandwich and the tagline "It'll blow your mind away."

2 THE BLACK AND WHITE BURGERS

McDonald's, China

Bloggers alleged the pairing was meant to poke fun at China's corruption problem (black bun = bad; white bun = good), a major issue for the middle class.

3 THE COAT-OF-ARMS BURGER

Grill'd, Sydney

Some Aussies blasted the sandwich--made with kangaroo and emu meat--for making a mockery of their national pride.

4 THE LAB-GROWN BURGER

London

This patty--grown from stem cells harvested from a dead cow--is either a miracle or a monstrosity, depending on whom you ask. It also cost $300,000-plus to make.

5 THE QUADRUPLE BYPASS BURGER

Heart Attack Grill, Las Vegas

Creators of the world-famous 9,982-calorie burger are unapologetic about the fact that it may have contributed to two deaths and multiple heart attacks at the restaurant.

CONTROVERSY-O-METER

REVIEW

Captain Phillips

Tom Hanks' ordeal in Cast Away was a stroll on the beach next to his stint with Somali pirates in Paul Greengrass's Captain Phillips. The more-or-less true-life adventure finds the freighter skipper using wiles and Yankee sense to confront a quartet of desperate teens. Until the end, when the star reveals a strong man's frailty, this is overmuscled docudrama, more pounding than gripping.

--RICHARD CORLISS

3 THINGS YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS WEEK

1. Kim Kardashian's making bank off of baby photos.

She uploaded a second pic of infant North West to Instagram.

2. The shutdown's shutting down love.

A couple got married on The Colbert Report after their Jefferson Memorial wedding was thwarted.

3. Albuquerque's sense of humor.

A city newspaper published an obituary for Breaking Bad's Walter White.

FOR TIME'S COMPLETE TV AND FILM COVERAGE, VISIT entertainment .time.com

The Jungle Cook.
How Brazil's Alex Atala braised his inner beast

EDU SIMÕES--THE GUARDIAN

A man, a machete, a meal In the rain forest outside São Paulo, Atala harvests the tuber manioc

Lisa Abend/São Paulo | 2146 words

On a recent summer day, the chef of the best restaurant in South America went to tour the pepper fields of a group of female farmers. No culinary idyll, the journey required a two-hour trek through dense jungle and a stop to dig up a bucket of ants for lunch. Halfway there, the roar of a jetliner penetrated the canopy. But this was no plane; it was rain so thoroughly drenching of clothes, shoes and earth that the chef's small group gave up trying to cross over the now raging streams and simply waded through them, boots and all. This, in other words, was rain-forest rain. And for Alex Atala, 45, who at one point during the cascade spread his arms and let the water come down on him like an embrace, it was also part of a regular day's work.

It is commonplace these days for chefs to grow their own vegetables, slaughter their own pigs and forage for ramps in the name of sustainability and terroir. Atala takes those notions to the extreme. In the course of his work, he has been stung by a poisonous ant and spent the night in a monsoon with an overturned canoe his only protection. He has drunk a hallucinogen prepared from tree bark, been threatened at gunpoint by tribesmen and kidnapped twice--once by Slovenian bear hunters. If all that makes him sound more like a superhero than a fine-dining chef, his feats are not the only grounds for comparison. Like Batman/Bruce Wayne or Spider-Man/Peter Parker, Alex Atala has two identities. And he's only recently learned how to unite them peaceably into a force for good.

The better-known Atala spends most evenings tweezing ingredients onto beautifully arranged plates in a gleaming kitchen where absolute silence rules. That Atala is a celebrity in his native Brazil, unable to walk through an airport or market without an eager fan asking for a photograph, and was given the place of honor next to Princess Caroline of Monaco at a dinner to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Monte Carlo's elite restaurant Le Louis XV last November. A brief stint on television and his undeniable good looks have surely contributed to his fame, but mostly his outsize reputation comes from cooking. Not only has Atala taken his elegant little São Paulo restaurant D.O.M. to the upper echelons of the World's 50 Best Restaurants list (it's currently No. 6), but he has also put Brazilian food--a refined, creative version of it--on the culinary map.

Yet beneath the pressed white chef's jacket, there is another Atala. That one channeled childhood mischief into punk rebellion and then, years later, swapped urban jungle for the real thing. With a new English-language cookbook by Atala just out and a book tour that will take him through the U.S. and U.K., the rest of the world is about to learn about the power of the action-figure chef.

When he was a toddler, Atala's first word was land, a clue to what would be a lifelong fascination with nature. "He would go out in the backyard and play with ants," his mother Otavia Mack da Silva recalls. "He would carry them around in his hands, crying because they were biting him, but he wouldn't let them go." Fishing and hunting trips with his father and grandfather cemented his love of the outdoors. A teacher once instructed his class to make gifts for their parents but nixed his idea for a collection of live insects. He handed his mom a jar of bugs anyway.

It wouldn't be the last time he resisted authority. At 12 he spiked the mulled wine at a Christmas party with psychedelic mushrooms. By 15 he'd left his suburban home for the city, where he worked first in a dive shop and later as a DJ and janitor at a nightclub, squatting in an abandoned building with friends. He cut his red hair in a mohawk, got the first of what would become a pelt's worth of tattoos covering his body from the neck down and started in with illegal substances. "Any kind of trouble a young punk rocker could get into, I got into," he says.

So much trouble that he realized he had to change or risk the self-destruction to which some of his friends had already succumbed. After a brief stint in a European culinary school, he began working in the hidebound kitchens of Belgium, France and Italy, where he felt his peers looking down upon him for his poor French, his unfamiliarity with the finer points of béchamel, his roots in a country unheralded for its cuisine. Despite the kitchens' soaring temperatures, he kept his arms covered; he didn't want anyone to see his tattoos.

Eventually he returned to Brazil and took a job as a sous-chef in an Italian restaurant in São Paulo. It was there that he had his first inkling of how he might come to really love cooking. "I was making traditional Italian food, the same as I had made in Italy," he recalls. "But it wasn't as good because in Brazil you couldn't get the same products. So I started substituting Brazilian ingredients for Italian ones. And that's when I realized I could make these dishes my own."

By 1999 he had opened D.O.M. and was trying to do just that. But critics scoffed at early efforts like a grilled tomato with mango sauce. "People were saying it was crazy, and I was always in doubt, wondering if they were right. I was listening to my heart, but I wasn't sure if that was the right thing to do." Gradually, though, he grew more confident, creating dishes that were profoundly Brazilian but also modern. Josimar Melo, a restaurant critic for the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, sees parallels between Atala's cooking and one of Brazil's most famous exports. "I call it bossa nova cuisine," Melo says. "Because what middle-class musicians did with bossa nova--which was to take the samba of Brazil's poor and marry it to jazz to create something new and sophisticated--Atala was the first to do with food."

For a while, Atala lived a divided life, spending working hours serving elegant recipes to his well-heeled clientele and his time off in the jungles and on the rivers of the Amazon, finding relief in hunting and fishing. Then he found a way to bring the two worlds together.

Early in the 2000s, he bought 62,000 acres of Amazon land with the notion that he could grow produce for his restaurants and improve the lives of local people. "I had this idea that I would make everything better for the people who lived there," he says. "I'd farm sustainably, and they'd be happy to work for me because I would pay more." To demonstrate his goodwill, he had cartons of staples sent to the villagers. But when he arrived at the farm to visit, piles of trash confronted him; the locals had simply dumped the packaging that the food came in. "I was so mad," Atala recalls. "Here I was trying to do something good for people, and they were turning around and polluting the land." He called a meeting of residents and laid into them about littering but soon realized they had no idea what he was talking about. As he writes in his book, D.O.M.: Rediscovering Brazilian Ingredients, they said, "'For us, the packaging of a fruit is its skin, a fish's are its scales, an ox's is its hide, and these things can all be thrown on the ground. You should not have sent us these things wrapped in plastic.' I grew silent as I realized that playing God is not simple at all."

So he got help, both from field anthropologists and from Amerindian leaders working to protect their people's heritage. He helped launch ATA (the word means fire in Guarani), an institute dedicated to providing sustainable opportunities to Amazonian peoples through food. It now markets chilis grown by communities along the Rio Negro. Small jars of the dried and ground peppers are sold in gourmet shops in São Paulo and Rio, where they fetch a high price.

"The Baniwa have always grown chilis," says anthropologist Renato Martelli Soares. "But through ATA they're getting 45 reals [$20] per kilo. They use the money to improve the community. Plus, they get a sense of pride. They want to be inserted into the modern world and see themselves producing a high-value product."

It doesn't hurt that those chilis come with the endorsement of Brazil's best chef. But Atala is determined not to be just a figurehead at ATA, which is why he spends more and more time in the Amazon. On a recent trip, stirring a pot over an open fire, he helped prepare the tuber manioc with Dona Brasi, a lithe woman in her 60s with a reputation for being the best cook in São Gabriel. She was one of Atala's first guides to Amazon food: the tambaqui fish, so large that its ribs are served whole like a pig's; the priprioca root with its subtle flavors of wood and patchouli; the fermented, umami-rich manioc juice tucupi, a common seasoning. In fact it was she, Atala reminds her, who first taught him to cook with ants. "Ah, but you first taught me about--what do you call it?--foam," she responds with a laugh. "You served me a dish with that on it, and I thought it was spit."

Dona Brasi may not agree, but Atala now sees his food as powerful persuasion. By basing his dishes on Amazonian ingredients, he is teaching upscale diners in São Paulo about the bounty that lies to the north and why it's worth protecting. At the restaurant, river fish shows up swimming with tapioca in a tucupi-scented broth. A ceviche made from indigenous flowers is lightly sweetened with native honey, intensely floral and impossibly delicate. And there are ants, of course, carefully placed atop chunks of pineapple so that they add a citric jolt to the fruit.

Atala isn't influencing only his fellow Brazilians. He burst into the consciousness of world chefs with a presentation at the first MAD symposium--a two-day conference for chefs, held in Copenhagen--in 2011. He handed out small cubes of gelatin, each containing a single ant, and urged the audience to pop them in their mouths. A murmur went through the gathered 300, first of nervousness and then of relieved surprise. "It tastes like lemongrass, right?" he asked, before explaining that in the Amazon, ants are also considered an important seasoning. "We eat an ant and say, 'Oh, it tastes like lemongrass.' But you give lemongrass to the Baniwa, and they say, 'Oh, it tastes like ants.'"

Like Peter Parker, Atala still sometimes seems uncertain of his own power. At this year's MAD, he spoke about the death that lies behind every act of eating. To make his point, he brought a live chicken onstage and asked whether he should kill it. He expected ambivalence and in fact had a farmer waiting to take the bird home should the group spare its life. Instead the response looked and sounded disturbingly like bloodlust. He broke the bird's neck smoothly and cooked and served it at a party that night, but remained discomfited. "I wanted everyone to feel a stake in the bird's death, which is why I asked the audience to vote," he says. "But I was a bit troubled by how insistent they were."

Mostly, though, Atala is a man at peace. He still rocks out to the Ramones and Stiff Little Fingers, and his favorite photographic pose includes a raised middle finger. But these days he rolls up his sleeves in the kitchen and wears his ever expanding map of tattoos, including two of Baniwa deities, proudly. He has learned to channel his childhood energy and punk anger into his work protecting the people and ecologies of the Amazon.

Dried off after the jungle downpour and seated in a hammock overlooking the Rio Negro with a beer in his hand, he reflects on the day spent with the Baniwa women. "They're proof that food is the bridge between nature and culture," he says. "It took me a while to realize that, but I've been superhappy ever since I did. It gave me the power to unite my two worlds." Spoken like a true superhero.

Unfair and Balanced.
When blaming both sides isn't accurate news

ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW FOR TIME; GETTY IMAGES (2)

James Poniewozik | 758 words

"Reality," Stephen Colbert once said, "has a well-known liberal bias." He was joking--or "joking"--but he identified a serious problem for political reporters in a polarized era. What do you do when the actual reality of a news story is not balanced between two sides? What do you do when the facts of a situation are such that to describe them accurately will make you sound biased?

This month's fiscal crisis is one such situation. One party (in fact, one wing of the Republican Party), seeking the elimination or delay of Obamacare, precipitated a government shutdown and threatened a default on U.S. debt. Period. There was no corresponding threat or demand on the Democratic or White House side; having passed the Affordable Care Act into law three years ago, they are not in the position of saying, "Pass Obamacare or we shut 'er down."

That's the situation. To describe it accurately, as the news should, is not to endorse an ideology. It's not to say that Obamacare is good or bad. It's not to say that Republicans do or don't have good reasons to oppose it. It's not to say that Democrats have or haven't sought political benefit in the aftermath. It's to correctly place the impetus where it belongs.

Much of the big-picture news coverage has been clear on this. But as the crisis dragged on, more news stories framed it as old-fashioned gridlock between two equally culpable, stubborn, useless sides. It's become boehner, White House harden stances (Washington Post); Congress plays chicken (CNN); "each side trying to blame the other" (Politico).

"Both sides are to blame; the truth is somewhere in between"--that has always been the political media's happy, safe place. Some of the reasons for this are noble: journalists genuinely want to give both sides a hard, fair look. Some reasons are less proud: wanting to keep access to pols in each party; not wanting to alienate readers or viewers, because subscription and advertising dollars know no party. Seeming fair becomes more important than being fair.

At worst, a legitimate impulse ("Let's make sure we've checked out the other side") becomes skewing reality for the sake of appearances ("We have to put in an example of the other side's doing this"). It's a way of ingratiating yourself, having a populist point of view divorced from a political one: Those bums in Congress won't do their jobs, but we're on your side, America! If all else fails, you can always quote ideologues in each party and make your lead, "Congress points fingers."

Ah, saved by the magic fingers again. Media critics, especially on the left, call this kind of thumb-on-the-blame-scales balance "false equivalence." That charge itself can be used as a crowbar to leverage coverage in one direction or to obscure issues in a dust cloud of "But they started it!" Not every criticism of two parties needs to come with a numerical assessment of who did it first and worse; that can make every politics story as recrimination- and second-guess-filled an exercise as trying to slice the last brownie in half for a pair of 5-year-olds.

But in a case like the fiscal crisis, false equivalence matters. It's the difference between reporting an extraordinary event and an ordinary one, which in this case is crucial to how the story plays out politically. It's a matter of whether "not changing current law" becomes redefined as "getting 100% of what you want." If this is just one more case of those knuckleheads in Washington "digging in their heels," "playing the blame game" and so on, it normalizes the situation for the news audience. It sends the tacit message that it is entirely ordinary, every so often, to have a forced national-debt crisis that reasonable people resolve by renegotiating major pieces of law.

Is the situation ordinary? It's true that legislators of both parties--like Senator Obama in 2006--have made grandstanding votes against raising the debt limit many times in the past. But those were stage-managed protests in which votes were carefully counted and there was no serious fear that the U.S. would actually default, unlike what took place in 2011, when the crisis resulted in a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating. That's another case where "The other side did it too" does not an equivalence make.

So here, "Both sides created this mess" sounds neutral, but it's actually taking a side--or at least adopting the framing that one side is counting on using to a political end. Reality doesn't always have a bias--liberal, conservative or otherwise. But when it does, it's not journalism's job to rebalance reality.