Wednesday, January 22th 2003, 7:27AM

10:30 p.m. (COM) "Chappelle's Show." Five years ago, in an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show," David Chappelle (l.) played himself in a story about his refusal to sell out and star in a network TV show. Now he's got his own show for real, and the pilot looks edgy enough to suggest he held firm, so that life wouldn't imitate art. But although some of the concepts in this premiere episode are clever - a blind white supremacist who doesn't know he's black, a training film at a Kinko's-type copying business that teaches how to alienate customers - the results aren't as sharp or funny as the ideas.

. 9:00 p.m. (13) "P.O.V.: Two Towns of Jasper." If you watched "Nightline" last night on ABC, you caught a preview of tonight's "P.O.V." presentation, a 90-minute documentary about the 1998 hate-crime murder of James Byrd Jr. The reaction to the black man's murder in his town of Jasper, Tex., is tracked by two film crews: one white, one black, each recording comments of their respective races. The idea doesn't exactly result in a brilliant documentary, but the topic is important.

. 8:00 p.m. (BRAVO) "The Big Chill." You want to feel a big chill? Try this: This prototypical Baby Boomer ensemble comedy-drama is 20 years old this year. Almost a generation has passed since the "Big Chill" generation listened to the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" played on the organ at a funeral. Kevin Kline and Jeff Goldblum are among the stars in this 1983 classic.

Summary: TONIGHT SERIES PREMIERES 10:30 p.m. (COM) "Chappelle's Show."Five years ago, in an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show,"David Chappelle (l.) played himself in a story about his refusal to sell out and star in a network TV show. Now he's got his own show for real, and the pilot looks edgy enough to suggest he held firm, so that life wouldn't imitate art. But


Run Bupa Great North Run

Why are you doing it?

It's an amazing atmosphere, a great sense of achievement and also really humbling. You get a really good feeling about the human race.

What's your longest run to date?

Last Easter I ran 78 miles across the Namibian desert in 24 hours. It was the most horrific thing I've ever done.

My M&S sports bras. I wear two.

If I'm not running I'm. . .

Last year I ran 2:12 so I would love to do it in under two hours.

Who would you like to see waiting for you at the finish line?

My mum, dad and brother. They've never seen me run.

Summary:
Helen Skelton is preparing for the Bupa Great North Run as part of Team
  Telegraph.


Tuesday, June 10th 2003, 8:01AM

Trevor Goddard, the Aussie actor who courted Catherine Bell on the long-running CBS series "JAG," was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his North Hollywood, Calif., home.

Goddard's death appeared to be a likely suicide brought on by an overdose of "illicit, illegal" drugs, Los Angeles County coroner's office spokesman Craig Harvey said.

"So far all we can say is that there were no signs of trauma to the deceased," said Los Angeles Police Department Officer Adriana Sanchez.

On "JAG," a TV drama about military justice, Goddard played Lt. Cmdr. Mic Brumby before he was written out of the show.

Goddard, 37, a married father of two, was born in Perth and earned early fame in Australia as a boxer. His good looks propelled him to Hollywood after an agent cast him in a Budweiser commercial. He appeared in sitcoms like "Silk Stalkings" and "Baywatch" before he won critical acclaim playing a sexually confused boxer in "The Cock 'N Bull Story."

That led to roles playing buff bad guys in movies such as "Mortal Kombat." He appears in the upcoming Johnny Depp film "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Summary: Trevor Goddard, the Aussie actor who courted Catherine Bell on the long-running CBS series "JAG,"was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his North Hollywood, Calif., home. Goddard's death appeared to be a likely suicide brought on by an overdose of "illicit, illegal"drugs, Los Angeles County coroner's office spokesman Craig Harvey said. "So far all we can say is that there were no signs of


rian Dennehy was already well into his run as Willy Loman in the 1999 Broadway revival of "Death of a Salesman" when the play's author, Arthur Miller, approached him with a small note on his performance.

"He said, 'You're leaving out a line,' " Mr. Dennehy recalled yesterday. "And I said: 'I don't think so. What line?' And he said, 'You're leaving out an "Oh" in the bar scene.' "

That eye (or ear) for detail was just one of the many creative traits being celebrated along Broadway yesterday, where Mr. Miller was a force for 60 years - from his debut in 1944 with "The Man Who Had All the Luck" to last year's revival of his autobiographical drama "After the Fall." His unparalleled run touched generations of actors, directors and playwrights.

"I think Arthur was one of the last giants to stride the earth," said Robert Falls, who directed the "Salesman" revival that starred Mr. Dennehy. "With Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill, they created the serious American drama. Broadway has changed, of course, but I think he's one of the three giants, and the last one saying this is serious business and must be taken that way."

Indeed, for those who worked with him, Mr. Miller exemplified the ideal man of the theater: a high-minded, hard-working aesthete blessed with a surprising open-mindedness, especially considering his accomplishments. "He loved talking to actors," said the actress Frances Conroy, who appeared on Broadway in two of Mr. Miller's later plays, "Broken Glass" and "The Ride Down Mount Morgan." "He wrote great notes. They were so clear. He was shy to people he didn't know, but he was always open to an actor that was working with him."

John Guare, whose works include "Six Degrees of Separation" and "The House of Blue Leaves," was a young playwright on the rise when he first met Mr. Miller at the Midtown restaurant La Strada with the legendary producer Robert Whitehead.

"Whitehead was, like, 'Oh, you know Arthur Miller,' and I was, like, 'Er, uh, oh, hi,' " Mr. Guare said. "But Arthur just sat down and did, like, 20 minutes of stand-up comedy about the business. And it was always the best kind of shop talk."

For playwrights like Mr. Guare, Mr. Miller was a hero for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he favored theater over the more lucrative lights of Hollywood. "Arthur made the choice of being a playwright a moral choice," Mr. Guare said. "If you had the ability to write plays, you simply had to."

Mr. Miller's social and political stands - his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his opposition to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy - "took the playwright out of the ivory tower," Mr. Guare added. "Arthur was there - in real life."

"Politically, sexually, whatever," Mr. Guare said, "he was in the front row."

The playwright Tony Kushner, who, like Mr. Miller, has often mixed his art and his politics, echoed that sentiment. "As a political figure, he was a progressive man, but never doctrinaire," Mr. Kushner said. "There was a simplicity, and humbleness, and decency in his work."

He said he was always most impressed by the literary craftsmanship of Mr. Miller's plays. "They are staggeringly well structured," he said. "I've read them over and over again, trying to figure out how the hell he did it."

For actors, even big stars, working with Mr. Miller was considered a badge of honor. Liam Neeson, who appeared in the 2002 Broadway revival of Mr. Miller's "Crucible," described him as "an intellectual and a farmer and a carpenter, too." Mr. Neeson, who wasn't born when "Death of a Salesman" had its premiere in 1949, said he held Mr. Miller in awe and counted working with him as "one experience I keep in the memory bank."

In particular, Mr. Neeson remembered that he and his fellow cast members held their collective breath after an early run-through of "The Crucible."

"The lights came up," he said, "and there was one man sitting in a chair, and it was Arthur." The one thing that pulled us through was that it would never be as tough as that." Daunting as he was, however, Mr. Miller soon smiled and said he approved.

David Richenthal, who produced three of Mr. Miller's plays on Broadway, said that Mr. Miller's children would probably handle his estate. He added that he, Mr. Falls and Mr. Dennehy were planning a London production of "Salesman" in May.

"Arthur was very involved in it," Mr. Richenthal said. "He was very enthusiastic and wanted to make the trip for the opening."

A tall man whose frame seemed to fill any doorway, Mr. Miller was repeatedly described by Mr. Richenthal and others in terms that suggested both his physical and his cultural stature. (Mr. Neeson called him "a big, sexy giant.")

Mr. Dennehy summed up: "He was a planet and there aren't many of those. And his passing affects the gravity of all of our existences."

Summary: For those who worked with Arthur Miller, he  exemplified the ideal man of the theater: a hard-working aesthete blessed with open-mindedness.


Nashville 10 p.m., Channel 5

Want to hear something cute? The girls who play Rayna’s daughters are real-life sisters, Lennon and Maisy Stella (pictured). They perform together as a singing duo, as we saw last week with their sweet version of the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey,” and they had a viral hit last year (more than 15 million views) with a version of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” They were raised on a farm outside of Toronto. By the way, why did the writers bring in Gunnar’s brother to create triangular tension, then kill him off, then bring in Chris Carmack to create triangular tension? Strange.

The Truth About Exercise With Michael Mosley 10 p.m., Channel 2

What, Richard Simmons wasn’t available? British journalist Michael Mosley (pictured) looks at the latest scientific discoveries about working out, and the possibility of customizing our exercise routines to fit our DNA. One scenario has people benefiting from only three minutes of high-intensity exercise a week. Sounds like a perfect plan.

My Crazy Obsession 10 p.m., TLC

Toy Hunter 9 p.m., Travel Channel

Gene Simmons wants Demon dolls.

Criminal Minds 9 p.m., Channel 4

A time capsule is opened, and, well, you know.

Summary: Nashville 10 p.m., Channel 5 Want to hear something cute? The girls who play Rayna’s daughters are real-life sisters, Lennon and Maisy Stella. They perform together as a singing duo, as we saw last week with their sweet version of the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey,” and they had a viral hit last year (more than 15 million views) with a version of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.” They were raised on a farm outside of Toronto.  The Truth About Exercise With Michael Mosley 10 p.m., Channel 2 What, Richard Simmons wasn’t available? British journalist Michael Mosley looks at the latest scientific discoveries about working out, and the possibility of customizing our exercise routines to fit our DNA. One scenario has people benefiting from only three minutes of high-intensity exercise a week. Sounds like a perfect plan.


Stuart emphasised the importance of food intake. "To ensure maximum efficiency you should consume approximately 360 calories every hour on the bike" he said, although 300 should do it.

Andy Schleck tweeted his daily food intake during the 2011 Tour De France.

I had not appreciated how many calories I needed to consume and had only taken in about 400 calories over the seven hours, making a deficit of 1,700, or just over 3 big macs (550 cal in each). This was clearly news to me and a whole new world of spending and research suddenly opened up for Mr Mamil: sports endurance nutrition.

I had always used SIS GO to help hydrate me during the ride, but that was it. Now, after some online research, I am aware of the huge variety of Gels, bars and pastels that any self respecting Mamil should not be without, with flavours ranging from orange to Rhubarb and Custard. Not forgetting, of course, the protein bars and shakes for the ‘recovery’ phase.

Stuart advised me to try all types and then choose the ones that work best for me; something I have jumped into with gusto. It's working, too: I have not bonked since that fateful day and am now finishing the rides feeling strong.

I try to mix the types of foods as well as the flavours, but have found I prefer the Clif Bloks pastels, as I can make them last longer than the quick fix gels. The ultra boost you get from the caffeine shot definitely helps for the end of a ride.

So, since that fateful day when I ‘bonked’ for the first time at the age of 45, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gels and high carb foods to invest in. This reaffirms my status as a fully paid-up Mamil and clearly exposed my inexperience at endurance cycling. One consolation, though: better to bonk before the trip than on it.

Summary: Ahead of his Land's End to John O'Groats ride, Julian Sambles finds out   the hard way what happens when you don’t consume enough calories for a bike   ride.


It is generally assumed that architects have egos as large as their buildings. But what of the man who commissions a collection of these design professionals to complete just one building? Whether Pablo Couto and Antón Iraculis of Grupo Urvasco, who have taken on a total of 23 architects and designers to create a hotel in Madrid, are egomaniacs or boundless dreamers is not entirely clear, but their project, Hotel Puerta América, has not stinted on either the quantity or quality of its architectural players.

"These men are nutters," says the Australian Marc Newson, who has designed one floor of the hotel and a bar area. "Everyone knows that working with one designer is nightmare enough."

Among those greeted by the mayor of Madrid when the project was unveiled yesterday, and pursued by what seemed like the entire Spanish press corps, were London architects David Chipperfield, John Pawson and Ron Arad. The Japanese master Arata Isozaki was seated next to France's Jean Nouvel, who has just completed a sparkling new addition to Madrid's Reina Sofia art gallery. Norman Foster, who couldn't be there, had made a video, and an ailing Zaha Hadid had sent her right-hand man to explain her contribution. I could go on, but suffice it to say, if architecture had Oscars, they would be like this.

The plan is that the hotel will be officially opened at the end of April by King Juan Carlos of Spain. Couto and Iraculis - who have a big and open chequebook, infinite charm and a penchant for conducting meetings over long lunches and well-oiled dinners - seem to seduce all comers.

The longer story, though, is an architectural version of Extreme Makeover. Hotel Puerta América was designed and built as the sort of structure you see lurking around airports everywhere - an uneventful, less-than-elegant block panelled in metal. The architectural fantasy factor came later.

In 2002, as the building rose from the ground, designers were brought on board and given a floor each to beautify. Then Jean Nouvel declared an interest in cladding the building, disguising its workaday facade beneath a covering of PVC blinds that range in colour from brilliant yellow through orange and red to purple. Now in place, they are being decorated with words from a Paul Eluard poem on the subject of freedom. It is the building as billboard in its most extravagant manifestation.

Since then, Nouvel has petitioned to have the hotel's name changed to something pertaining to freedom, criticised the landscaping (by British team B&B UK) and nabbed for himself the design of the prestigious top-floor penthouse suites. He has also brought on board the Japanese photographer Araki, which suggests that the uppermost floor will be best suited to those with a taste for large-scale pornographic imagery.

None of the rooms is complete, and April could still be an ambitious opening date, but at yesterday's presentation the architects talked through their work. What unfolded was a litany of early 21st-century design, with the architects - propelled by this weird hot-house environment, the constraints of the hotel room format and the peculiarity of having no budget or brief - showing work that tended to define rather than expand their repertoire.

Marc Newson's room had the soft-edged furniture for which he has become known, in his trademark orange. Richard Gluckman, an American celebrated for his exquisite white cube art galleries, played with the idea of boxes within boxes within boxes. David Chipperfield sustained the formality and materiality of his work with his emphasis on a black terracotta floor. "It's minimalism with luxury," he says.

Kathryn Findlay, a Scottish architect who spent many years in Japan, concentrated on silence and sensitivity - "so the customer can have a wonderful sleep and a wonderful orgasm". She was inspired by Japan's "love hotels", which, she says, are now mostly used by people who want to watch their favourite television programmes in peace.

And Catalan designer Javier Mariscal rejected high-sheen chic and went for "normal pillows, white towels, taps that run hot when you turn them to the left. Someone had to bring down the budget."

If all goes according to plan, Hotel Puerta América will be a sensational tourist destination, an all-embracing hit parade of early 21st-century design obsessions. Its location does it no favours, however. At a skip and a jump from the airport, the hotel is huddled beside a fast four-lane carriageway in a suburb of little interest. Will design-minded tourists be excited to find themselves in Madrid's answer to Hounslow?

The building is ideally placed for conferences, perhaps, but will those attending them - the great minds of the insurance industry, perhaps, or the doyens of bottletop manufacturing - really want to stay in a seamless swooping Corian structure designed by Zaha Hadid, or sleep in Ron Arad's amusing circular bed, without so much as a trouser press to play with in the morning?

Summary: What happens when you ask 23 of the world's leading architects to work on a single building?  Caroline Roux reports.


'Cultured and sensitive' ... view of Nouvel's Nemausus I, public housing in Nimes, France. Photograph: Deidi Von Schaewen/AP

If President Sarkozy has anything to do with it, Paris might yet join London in its quest to raise its skyline heavenwards - though in the name of Mammon and bling, rather than God and culture. If this does happen, perhaps Paris - in the name of beauty and sanity - will turn to Jean Nouvel to lead the way.

The 62-year old French architect has just won the prestigious $100,000 American Pritzker prize, a fact that makes him a truly big name in the world of global design. And yet, though a prolific and successful architect, Nouvel's work to date has been thoughtful, cultured, sensitive and often very beautiful indeed. He made his name, internationally, with the opening of the exquisite Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 1987. Around the same time, he also published alluring plans for a balletic skyscraper, one as subtle as most contemporary skyscrapers are sledgehammer-crude.

This was the Tour Sans Fin (or Endless Tower), a cylindrical, steel-and-glass edifice as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Ideally, it was to have risen above the Alphaville aesthetic of La Défense, the business quarter of Paris sited at the far-western end of the Champs-Elysées. The tower was to have climbed in ever-changing patterns of coloured light, before appearing to vanish as the lights of the city gave way to those of the skies above.

This was a lovely conceit: a very tall building that would have been paradoxically modest, a daunting work of engineering as ethereal, in architectural terms, as the structure of a snowflake. In the event, nothing came of the project; those who commission skyscrapers tend to want a big, bold statement, not the architectural equivalent of macrame. But the idea of a diaphanous architecture has continued to percolate through Nouvel's designs.

The Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain on Paris's Boulevard Raspail, opened in 1994, is a good example of how Nouvel tried hard to shape a large building that, in certain tricks and plays of light, seems barely there at all. This art gallery, complete with a suite of smart modern offices reached by wall-climbing lifts, comprises a set of subtle, screened spaces gathered around an inviolate 200-year-old cedar of Lebanon (planted by François-René Chateaubriand, the celebrated French Romantic writer, diplomat and politician). The building feels as if it has dropped into its city site as gently as a leaf falling from a tree.

A decade before Frank Gehry's playful Bilbao Guggenheim, Nouvel's Institut du Monde Arabe encouraged a sceptical public to fall for modern architecture. One of the last of President Mitterrand's grands projets, the steel-and-glass building was critically acclaimed from the moment it was unveiled, and the public flocked to see it. The institute itself is a fine machine for promoting an understanding and a love of Arab culture, but visitors are nearly always hooked by the building's shimmering exterior. A hi-tech interpretation of an Arabic screen, the patterns set into the windows open and close like eyes with changes in the light. The exterior, though steely, is also warm and very much alive. Here, Nouvel proved that hi-tech design could adapt to the aesthetics of different world cultures. He also demonstrated that western architects could adopt Arabic influences without resort to the stylistic cliches you come across all too often in Middle Eastern cities overcooked by foreign designers.

The timing of Nouvel's career has been lucky. He was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the time of the 1968 uprising, but bypassed that period's obsession with decidedly cheesy postmodern design. This was an unfortunate stylistic cul-de-sac that made the French profession of the 1970s and 1980s seem heavy-handed and dim-witted, but Nouvel was able to make his mark as postmodernism spluttered to a forgettable end.

As much an artist as an architect (a great French tradition - think of Le Corbusier), Nouvel's work has been unconstrained by a specific visual style. His masterly Cultural and Congress Centre beside the lake at Lucerne, Switzerland (first opened in 2000), might borrow from the rigorous, right-angled architecture of Mies van der Rohe, but his recent Quai Branly museum in Paris is a kind of architectural rattle-bag.

Nouvel is currently busy designing a 75-storey tower beside the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as well as an orchestra hall for the Philharmonie de Paris; he has just completed the new Copenhagen Concert Hall. (There is no Nouvel design in this country, although there have been proposals for a building in the City of London with Norman Foster.) If the call does come, though, for a high-rise Paris, Nouvel will need to revive his scheme for the Tour Sans Fin to remind us that we can reach for the sky, architecturally, without sacrificing art, good manners, lightness and beauty.

Summary: Jean Nouvel has won the Pritzker prize. It's about time his delicate genius got its due, says Jonathan Glancey


You can now read 10 articles each month for free on BostonGlobe.com.

The incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said he would make revamping the federal income tax system a top priority.

US Senator Ron Wyden added that he would also focus on creating jobs for the middle class and strengthening the guaranteed benefits of Medicare while holding down costs.

The Oregon Democrat termed the income tax system a ‘‘dysfunctional, rotten mess.’’ He said he hopes to extend tax breaks that expired in December and use them to bridge comprehensive changes. He made his comments in a phone interview from Los Angeles on Friday.

Wyden is currently chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He is expected to be named Finance Committee chairman next week to replace Senator Max Baucus, who was confirmed Thursday to become US ambassador to China.

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Summary: WASHINGTON — The incoming chairman of the Senate Finance Committee says he would make revamping the federal income tax system a top priority. US Senator Ron Wyden added that he would also focus on creating jobs for the middle class and strengthening the guaranteed benefits of Medicare while holding down costs. The Oregon Democrat termed the income tax system a ‘‘dysfunctional, rotten mess.’’ He sayssaid he hopes to extend tax breaks that expired in December and use them to bridge comprehensive changes. He made his comments during a telephone interview from Los Angeles on Friday. Wyden is currently chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. He’s expected to be named Finance Committee chairman next week to replace Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. The Montana Democrat Baucus was confirmed Thursday to become the US ambassador to China


These are boom times for the innovation economy in Boston and Cambridge. Venture capital firms and big companies are moving from the suburbs to scout deals and reel in young talent. Wannabe entrepreneurs are ditching stable jobs to go the startup route.

The only thing tougher to find than an affordable office — thanks, venture capitalists — is a “full stack” programmer who really understands cloud architecture.

Boston vaulted nine new biotechs onto stock exchanges in 2013, and tech players like Wayfair (home goods), Actifio (data management), and HubSpot (social media for businesses) are hoping to get there in 2014. Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh is trying to duplicate his predecessor’s Innovation District blueprint in Roxbury, while shared workspaces are popping up in Chelsea, Charlestown, and Framingham.

It used to be easy to spot Boston’s power players: They ran mutual fund companies and ad agencies, had breakfast at the Bristol Lounge, and rode the back seat of a town car to work. The emerging entrepreneurial class may also toil in the Financial District — taking advantage of the cheap office space — but they get there on a Hubway bike, stopping for a latte at Thinking Cup on the way.

Here’s my not-totally-serious field guide to these new power players.

Related: Quiz — Which of Boston’s tech clusters suits you best?

Hunting for opportunities to disrupt big, established industries — and then sometimes cash out by selling his company to a big, established player. Can something be done in the cloud, on demand, or as a service? Can corporate accounting be gamified, or a social layer built on top of container shipping? The tech entrepreneur is on it.

Secret worry: Should I be doing this in San Francisco?

Transportation: On-demand car service Uber

Seen at: Voltage Coffee + Art in Kendall Square

Gets the call when companies can’t figure out what their marketing strategy on Pinterest should be, or whether they’re Instagramming enough. Will ghostwrite blog posts or advise you on the best way to get more “likes” on Facebook. Shadier gurus will hook you up with an agency they know in Romania that can get you 100,000 new Twitter followers in 24 hours.

Secret worry: Clients suddenly realizing they can do this themselves

Proudest of: Nabbing his first name as a username on every new social service

Reads: “Twitter is my window on the world, but I’m also getting into Jelly and Medium.”

Seen at: Events organized by MITX, an online marketing trade group

May not have been asked to the high school prom, but now every recruiter trying to fill a key technical position is practically stalking her. Can bang out bug-free Python or Java code while also bantering on several simultaneous Skype chats.

Secret worry: Should I have gotten more equity?

T-shirts with coder jokes that no one but a coder will get

Reads: “Social news” site Reddit

Seen at: Meadhall, a Kendall Square bar

Everyone pays fealty to the keeper of the checkbook, who gets to decide which ideas have a future. Meets with entrepreneurs over breakfast, coffee, and lunch — but things aren’t really serious until he brings you back to his office to meet the other partners at the firm. Nothing makes him move faster than hearing someone else is about to beat him in

a deal. Laments the dearth of women in the venture capital business, but somehow can’t find one to join the firm.

Too often starts sentences with: “Keep me in the loop about your progress . . . ”

Attire: Freshly pressed blue jeans

Reads: Fortune magazine’s “Term Sheet”

Seen at: Henrietta’s Table in Harvard Square’s Charles Hotel

Driven by the desire to bring new medicines to patients who need them. But you also have to be a bit batty to bother with an industry where developing a successful new drug costs north of $1 billion. You’ve got to get good results from several phases of clinical trials, a federal agency has to approve it, and doctors have to be persuaded to prescribe it. . . . And that ignores the fickleness of investors, who fall in love with biotech one year, but won’t reply to your e-mails the next.

Secret worry: Running out of cash midway through the clinical trial

Proudest of: MD, PhD, and MBA

Reads: Nature Biotechnology, a scientific journal

Seen at: Catalyst, a Kendall Square restaurant

Every entrepreneur needs some sage advice, and mentors serve it up in spades (even if they’re sometimes a little too stingy when it comes to actually investing in a promising venture). Some of their wisdom is timeless, but some has gotten a little musty since the heyday of Lotus and Wang. What were Lotus and Wang? Exactly.

Drives: 1988 Porsche Carrera, bought with proceeds from successful IPO that year

Too often starts sentences with: “When I was running my company . . . ”

Seen at: MassChallenge, the Boston accelerator program

In the world of cleantech, it seems like founders can either raise $50 million or $100 million for their new battery, wind turbine, or waste-to-energy startup — or zilch. Conferences and blogs are eager to celebrate their fuel-saving, wave-harvesting breakthroughs, but getting a company to survive past the seedling stage is insanely hard. If only the US government would put a price on carbon emissions . . .

Proudest of: Speaking at the TEDxJamaicaPlain conference

Seen at: Greentown Labs, the Somerville incubator

• Quiz: Which of Boston’s tech clusters suits you best?

Summary: Boston’s old power players ran mutual fund companies and ad agencies and rode to work in a town car. The new entrepreneurial class also toils downtown, but they get there by bike.


Just weeks after cyber-security and other Internet organizations patched a vital piece of software to repair the Heartbleed security bug, another major flaw has turned up in the same program.

The new bug, discovered by a researcher in Japan, compromises the security of software called OpenSSL. Used by websites worldwide, this program scrambles the data traveling between two computers so that the information can’t be intercepted by online criminals. But the researcher found a way to intercept and decode those OpenSSL messages. It was the worst of five new OpenSSL flaws announced on Thursday.

“Anybody on the planet who has OpenSSL on its systems has to update,” said Nick Percoco, vice president of strategic services at Boston-based Internet security firm Rapid7 LLC.

But Percoco added that the new bug isn’t as dangerous as Heartbleed, which made it relatively easy to extract private information, such as bank account numbers, from millions of computer servers. “I don’t think it’s at that level right now,” said Percoco. “It’s not as easy to exploit.”

The new bug may have been discovered because OpenSSL has come under intense scrutiny since Heartbleed was discovered in April. That security flaw was caused two years earlier, when a German computer programmer, working on OpenSSL in his spare time, wrote a faulty upgrade to the program.

OpenSSL is an “open-source” program, meaning that its raw code is accessible to anyone, at no charge. The software is maintained and upgraded by volunteers working for free. Many supporters of open-source software say it should be more secure than traditional commercial software from companies such as Microsoft Corp., because the inner workings of the software are accessible to anybody. This means any knowledgeable person can scour the program looking for bugs and fixing them.

But Percoco said it doesn’t always work that way. “The assumption that open-source code is more secure than closed-source code is really rather false,” he said, because few open-source programs are actually inspected for bugs. Percoco noted that the new OpenSSL bug dates back to 1998; it took 16 years for someone to find it.

The discovery of two major flaws in such a commonly-used program ensures that OpenSSL code is now getting plenty of critical scrutiny. As a result, said Percoco, many more flaws will probably turn up soon.

Summary: Just weeks after cyber security and other Internet organizations patched a vital piece of software to repair the Heartbleed security bug, another major flaw has turned up in the same program.


06/25/2014 at 09:45 AM EDT

David Muir and Diane Sawyer

is stepping down as its evening news anchor, to be replaced by David Muir.

The network said Sawyer will concentrate on interviews and specials. During her tenure, ABC's

was a steady second to Brian Williams at NBC, although the ABC broadcast has made gains among younger viewers.

viewers as a substitute for Sawyer and has traveled around the country for his "Made in America" series.

ABC said George Stephanopoulos will take on a new role as chief anchor for live news events.

Summary: ABC says she will focus on interviews and in-depth reporting and David Muir will replace her


07/04/2014 at 01:00 PM EDT

knows how to live like a local when in New England.

The "Just the Way You Are" singer, who was in Boston to perform a concert at the TD Garden on Wednesday night, headed to the Union Oyster House, part of the Freedom Trail, for a traditional seafood feast with two friends.

The group even sat in the coveted Kennedy booth in the upstairs dining room, which was dedicated in

because his family loved to dine on seafood there.

Bruno and a friend ate the Shore Dinner, which includes lobsters, steamers and corn, while a third friend ate fried seafood, a specialty at the House, which bills itself as the oldest restaurant in America.

But Mars didn't exit the eatery without leaving his mark. In the restaurant's autograph book, he signed, "Thanks for da lobsta â¦ Love, Bruno Mars," and the Union Oyster House posted a pic of the autograph on

"He was a very nice guy," said general manager Jim Malinn. "Rather quiet. He was very gracious, and didn't make a lot of fanfare."

Summary: The singer dined at the Union Oyster House on Wednesday


Online video streaming service Netflix recently reported that profits more than doubled during the last quarter. This not only says a lot about how the company managed to turned itself around, it also reveals a profound truth about the overall tech industry: When a company builds and dominates a big new market, customers want it to succeed and will rally behind it even when it screws up.

Just three years ago, Netflix monumentally muffed up when it tried to split off DVD rentals from streaming and raise prices. But by then, Netflix had created a strong new market category and ecosystem around streaming movies – a new form of entertainment delivery that had never existed before.

What happened next is a story of forgiveness and redemption; a love story between the customers of a whole new service that Netflix dominated.

In the late ‘90s, the company did what legendary tech startups do. It stormed incumbent kingdoms with compelling new technology and a new business model. It used the Web versus physical stores as its channel to customers and transformed video rentals into a monthly service. With no late fees. As a result, Netflix changed the way customers perceived value with a different approach to media consumption. This original strategy created a new market for DVD subscriptions. This simple and powerful idea crushed Blockbuster Video.

This is a stark contrast from only a few years ago. In 2011, customers revolted as the company raised prices and announced plans to spin off the DVD-by-mail business. Netflix stock tanked as 800,000 subscribers fled.

Then something legendary happened. Hastings said publicly “I messed up” and “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.” This is a stunning admission. Especially when you consider how easily CEOs can slip into becoming the “Chief Ego Officer.” Hastings didn’t. He listened. He took swift action. Netflix fixed its pricing policy.

When Netflix stumbled, it was savvy of them to ask for the market’s forgiveness. Consumers wanted Netflix to bounce back. The market had come to depend on Netflix.

Better yet, once forgiven, Netflix rewarded its customers – by innovating and making its services even better.

Netflix used the big data they have on what, when, where and how their customers watch video to start creating its own content. It made a big and bold bet that proprietary entertainment – purpose built for Internet streaming – would drive revenue and expand their market ever further. Man, did it work. As a result Netflix caught their digital competitors Apple AAPL and Amazon AMZN

napping and smashed the legacy content business paradigm. At least for now.

All with another simple, powerful idea – give people great entertainment, the way they want to consume it, at anytime, on any device. Academy award winner and House of Cards co-creator Kevin Spacey gave a seminal speech on this topic that rocked the media world last year.

In 2013, Netflix became the first non-TV network to win an Emmy for the series House of Cards. This quarter’s results were in part driven by the second season success of Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. Both were eagerly awaited, critically acclaimed and combined have 31 Emmy nominations.

Now Netflix stands on the precipice of greatness. As it stares down threats from Hollywood, Amazon.com, and grapples with Internet distribution problems, the question is can they be the defining digital media company or not?

Netflix is positioning to dominate the media landscape of the future. Now they will have to summon even more moxie as the battle to create, deliver, and monetize content in ways that delight consumers and slay competitors, while playing hardball to secure premier Internet distribution. All at the same time. It’s a tall order. And the company is likely to face an escalating war with Amazon, more pressure from Apple and many others. Now the question is will Netflix continue to innovate or slip back into arrogance and rest on its Emmys? Time will tell, but we wouldn’t bet against them.

Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan and Christopher Lochhead are co-founding partners at Play Bigger Advisors, a San Francisco-based firm that coaches technology executives to build market-leading companies. Follow @playbiggerad

Summary: Just three years ago, customers were miffed when the company raised prices and split DVD rentals from streaming services.


Stories from Russia: Melanie Manchot and The David King Collection Photographers' Gallery, London WC2

It would be hard to imagine two more disparate visual explorations of Russian history and culture than the pairing of Melanie Manchot, a young German conceptualist with sharp eye for the mundane, and the portraits taken by Alexander Rodchenko, the great Soviet artist and designer of the Thirties, many of which he was later forced by the authorities to deface.

Where Manchot deals in irony and detachment, still the dominant aesthetic responses of our time, entering Rodchenko's room is like being bludgeoned by the full force of history. Where Manchot teases and often tests the viewer's patience, Rodchenko's images are stark and brutal, still imbued with the violence of the moment that produced them.

Best known for Love Is a Stranger, her book of photographs of couples kissing on the street and a series of portraits of her mother, Manchot's work, like that of Sam Taylor-Wood, but in an altogether more subtle and subversive way, is about stage-managing moments of intimacy. In a series called 'Groups and Locations', she has set up her camera in front of historic buildings and posed groups of passers-by in front of them.

The results are as flat and deadpan as you might imagine, but that may be part of the point. Manchot has chosen her backgrounds carefully: the elaborately domed cathedrals of old pre-revolutionary Russia, the faceless universities and theme parks of pre-glasnost Russia. Some images echo the old propaganda photographs beloved of Stalin, wherein loyal citizens were placed against towering statues or foregrounded in vast agrarian landscapes.

Because Putin's Russia is still uneasy with both photography and protest, there are currently bills going though its parliament restricting public access to historic sites. Manchot has cleverly grouped her passers-by in one and twos, spreading them out in odd conglomerations so they look partly like tourists, partly like citizens bored into impassiveness. It is oddly disconcerting to be faced with so many blank faces staring patiently back at you. An uneasy peace prevails in these photographs, the sense of the state still at odds with the individual.

In the back room, Manchot has arranged six televisions in a semicircle. On each screen, an ordinary Muscovite tells his or her version of the building of the famous Hotel Moscow, commissioned by Stalin in the Thirties for foreign VIPs.

The story goes that Stalin rubber-stamped the designs of two competing architects, unaware he had been presented with two separate sets of drawings. His lackeys, fearful of pointing out his mistake, insisted the hotel be constructed from an amalgam of both designs.

The weirdly asymmetrical hotel remains a metaphor for the absurdities that attended Stalin's court and, as one of Manchot's storytellers points out, its silhouette has since travelled the world as the trademark of Stolichnaya vodka. Manchot's video installation concludes with all six anecdotalists speaking at once in a cacophony of voices and conflicting histories. It is worth sitting through the entire sequence to appreciate fully the finale.

A few doors along, the coffee-shop gallery has become an oppressive and ominous environment, courtesy of a selection of works from the vast David King collection of Russian photography, prints, and posters, to tie in with the imminent reissue of King's illuminating book, The Commissar Vanishes, a study of the falsification of photographic portraits in Stalinist Russia.

This small but powerful show focuses on the portraits Rodchenko took of eminent Uzbek leaders in 1935. Originally collected in a state-sponsored celebration of 10 years of Russian rule in Uzbekistan, the photographs soon became outdated, as one by one, the subjects were liquidated in Stalin's Great Purges.

By 1937, Rodchenko's once-celebratory album had become a forbidden book and citizens had to deface or destroy their copies or face arrest and incarceration, or worse. Rodchenko was forced to vandalise his own work. He did so with considerable violence, using swaths and blotches of thick black ink to render some faces invisible behind blocks of blackness and others only vaguely discernible.

Whether his aggressive approach betokened self-disgust or self-preservation, the end result is curiously - and accidentally - artistic. Yakov Peters, an infamously cruel Latvian who became chief of internal defence, looks wild-eyed and fanatical in his official portrait, but becomes a square of Rothko-like blackness in Rodchenko's obliteration. Akmal Ikramov, a prominent party member, is turned into something approaching a photographic negative through Rodchenko's application of swirls of ink.

Printed large scale, these faces and non-faces tower over the surroundings, making the Photographers' Gallery cafe perhaps the least likely place one would go for a soothing cup of coffee and a slice of carrot cake in London in the coming weeks.

· Runs until 21 Feb (admission free); 020 7831 1772

Summary: Photography: Sean O'Hagan on Stories from Russia: Melanie Manchot and The David King Collection.


There's a striking moment when you step into the second room of this playful collaboration between artist Graham Fagen and theatre director Graham Eatough of Suspect Culture. You have just been watching a series of video projections in which actor Paul Thomas Hickey steps in and out of the sets of classic plays, bringing some momentary activity into the inert lives of the characters he finds. Each video recalls a famous play - Look Back in Anger, The Dumb Waiter, Waiting For Godot and The Cherry Orchard - and Hickey passes from one to the other in a cleverly timed journey around the room.

This is brightly entertaining: there's a droll irony in seeing characters from plays about waiting doing even less than they do in the theatre. Osborne's Alison gets on with the ironing in Jimmy Porter's bedsit; Pinter's Ben stares into space from a bare mattress; Beckett's Estragon empties his boot of a stone; and Chekhov's Yepikhodov endlessly strums his guitar.

But this pleasure takes tangible form when you enter the next room and find yourself centre stage in Look Back in Anger. Porter's jazz LP has run its course on the record player to your left. The ironing board is ahead and, to the right, like a scene from Goldilocks, Alison is asleep in the bed - for real.

The eight actors from the videos are doing four-hour stints in the gallery, killing time on the various sets. Returning later in the day - recommended to get the full time-bending effect - I find Jimmy Porter reading the paper and one of Chekhov's old boys doing the same. If Waiting For Godot is a play in which nothing happens twice, Killing Time is an exhibition in which nothing happens for two months.

It's funny and a tad voyeuristic and, even if the artists' concerns with cold war politics and society's current fears don't come across, it's very much worth the wait.

· Until November 5. Details: 01382 909900.

Summary: Dundee Contemporary Arts


FORTUNE — Approximately 271 million shares of Facebook FB stock were “unlocked” yesterday, under a provision that had prevented certain investors from selling shares until 90 days after the company went public. And, as happens after most lockup expirations, Facebook took a tumble – down 6.27% to finish trading at $19.87 per share. For context, the IPO price on May 18 had been $38 per share.

Fortune has learned that venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners were among those that distributed shares to limited partners. The only one of those that had been previously reported was Accel, with CNBC saying that it had distributed a total of 50 million shares from various funds (which still represented less than half of its holdings).

We’ve also learned that several unlocked shareholders decided to retain their entire positions, including Andreessen Horowitz and Microsoft MSFT . So did tiny shareholder Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, perhaps because it’s hoping for a rally that helps salvage its underwater investment.

I heard some people yesterday suggest that Accel’s distribution was a signal that Facebook stock would continue to sink. Don’t count me among them. Proper portfolio management, particularly for an LP base that has been looking to lock in more of these distributions for several years.

But, that said, I’m not thrilled with the way Accel went about it. That also goes for Greylock (I don’t have the Meritech details).

Here’s what I mean: Both Accel and Greylock priced their shares at over $21 a piece, for the purpose of calculating carried interest (i.e., the profit VC firms receive from successful investments). Greylock’s was a couple of cents higher because it used a 10-day trailing average — $21.05 compared to $21.03 — but both firms charged LPs significantly more than was actually available yesterday for Facebook shares on the open market.

Let’s imagine that an LP received 100,000 shares of Facebook stock from Accel or Greylock. And let’s also imagine that each fund has a premium carry of 25% (which I believe to be true, but have not been able to confirm). In that case, Accel or Greylock would receive the equivalent of $525,750 or $526,250, respectively, in carried interest (minus the cost basis). But had carry been marked at the market open price of $20.44 per share – the price closer to which many LPs were forced to sell — the carry only would have been $511,000 (again, minus the cost basis).

[UPDATE: If both the Accel and Greylock funds already had paid back 100% of their principle (which they likely have), then the distribution would have been a straight stock split of 75/25 minus a possible repayment of the cost basis. If the cost basis needed to be repaid and was calculated in shares, then that is where the slight pricing discrepancy could lie. The firms also get to use the higher price for calculating total fund returns, which get used in future fund marketing efforts.]

This is yet another example of why VC firms either should distribute cash to their LPs, or give LPs the option of cash or stock. Remember, many LPs don’t have in-house equity trading desks. That means that they are effectively forced to liquidate shares immediately via a third-party broker, thus receiving less for their positions than “charged” by Accel or Greylock.

And the VC firms have to know that the shares will trade down upon lock-up expiration, because it happens almost every single time!

If general partners insist on stock distributions, then they should use both a pre and post average for carry, in order to better balance out the volatility (apply the recalculation to a future distribution). It’s still not perfect for those liquidating upon receipt, but it should be a bit more representative (and also would discourage a VC from flooding the market via a single distribution).

To be clear, limited partners of Accel and Greylock have made oodles of money off of Facebook. For example, Greylock bought in at a $500 million valuation. So my complaint is largely a rounding error on that massive multiple. And it also is true that some of the LPs may hold the shares and ultimately sell at a price far higher than the carry marks.

But when you’ve managed to hit a grand slam in Game 7 of the World Series, there’s no reason to deny the fans a tip of your cap. The hit is what matters most, but the modicum of added respect is also remembered.

Sign up for Dan’s daily email newsletter on deals and deal-makers: GetTermSheet.com

Summary: Facebook is unlocked. So who held, and who sold?


FORTUNE — First you have to find which of the Smithsonian’s 19 museums houses the Steve Jobs’ exhibit that opened last week — not an easy task for someone unfamiliar with the monumental geography of Washington D.C.

Then, once you locate the Ripley Center — a tiny circular building, just to the right of the Institute’s big red castle — and subject your backpack to the usual weapons search, you still have to ask (because there is no sign) where you can find The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World.

Then it’s a subterranean voyage four stories below ground into a space that is deceptively, suspiciously large. A space deep enough to hide a vice president or two.

Finally, next to the MathAlive experience where all the middle-school-age kids seem to be headed, there it is: A blow-up of Steve Jobs’ face on the cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography. And behind it, row after row of framed documents representing every patent ever signed by Apple’s late co-founder.

Some are simple icons — the iPhone’s map icon, the air ballon for Messages. Some are objects so familiar they have become icons in their own right. The original Mac. That silly, circular mouse. The flying-saucer shaped AirPort base station. The Apple Store’s glass stairway.

The first patent, filed on Nov. 3, 1980 and illustrated with the case of the Apple II, is described simply as “Personal Computer.” The last patent, filed on Oct. 4, 2011, the day before Jobs died, is for “User Interface for Providing Consolidation and Access.”

After a search of several minutes I was able to locate design patent 504,889, unhelpfully named “Electronic Device.”

It’s on the strength of that patent, according to FOSS Patents‘ Florian Mueller, that Apple AAPL on Friday asked the U.S. government to ban Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.

I snapped a photo and sent it to Mueller.

Summary: If you didn't already know about the Smithsonian's exhibit, you'd never find it


FORTUNE — Just a couple of years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made few public appearances. When he did appear before a crowd, he often drew snarky criticism for his difficulty expressing himself. As an ubergeek, he’s still an unlikely public speaker. And yet his keynote at Thursday’s f8 conference shows how far he’s come and — more to the point — how much more willing people are to accept and even idolize him. It’s amazing what a little time and a few billion dollars can do.

Now that Steve Jobs has handed over the reins to another, can Mark Zuckerberg take his place as the tech world’s, forgive me, rock star? It seems unlikely that he’ll ever match Jobs in terms of delivering the mystery and gravitas that made Apple AAPL keynotes appointment viewing. There may still be too much Professor Frink in him. Indeed, as a public speaker, Zuckerberg is often still too much like the character Frink was based on: The Nutty Professor. Not the Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor — the Jerry Lewis Nutty Professor. The funny one. The brainiac lacking in social skills.

Steve Jobs has never been a particularly good public speaker himself. He electrified audiences not with oratory, but with pacing and a slowly building sense of drama. He’s as big a geek as Zuckerberg, but of a different type: the hypercritical, even sometimes nasty type. With his dark eyes and mane of dark hair, he was sort of bad-boy dreamy in the ’70s and ’80s when he was establishing himself. His uncompromising dedication to quality and his reputation for being something of a tyrant shot through like electricity.

As he grew into himself, he got much better at public speaking until he became downright inspirational, and indisputably the tech industry’s (really, please forgive me) rock star. He became Nutty Professor alter-ego Buddy Love. Not the Eddie Murphy Buddy Love — the Jerry Lewis Buddy Love. The cocky one who we nevertheless felt compelled to watch and admire.

Zuckerberg, who reportedly has some of his own jerky qualities, might well be the one to take Jobs’ place as Top Geek. But it won’t be the same. Besides the differences between the two men, there’s also this: Apple’s products are things of beauty. They’re objects that we can handle and admire. Facebook’s great and all but nobody’s ever going to refer to it as “beautiful.” Apple’s products, along with Jobs’ personality traits, are what gave him the gravitas that made his keynotes Momentous Events, with all eyes on Steve. (Not to mention, Apple’s announcements tend to wow, whereas Facebook’s tend to rile.)

Zuckerberg doesn’t have that advantage. Still, no other candidates seem likely to take Jobs’ place. Zuckerberg might never be Buddy Love, but he might be able to become an inspirational figure in his own right. He’s on his way already. He’s still prosaic where Jobs is poetic, but he’s starting to learn to appeal to people’s aspirations, not just their pedestrian desires for convenience.

At the end of his f8 speech Zuckerberg said: “We exist at the intersection of technology and social issues.” Slightly clunky, but on the right track. Maybe in another year or two, he’ll be able to manage something like what Jobs said in wrapping up his speech introducing the iPad 2 in March: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities that yields the results that makes our hearts sing.”

He may never be able to pull off saying something like that. But, we’ll take what we can get.

Summary: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg showed marked improvement at his keynote during this week’s f8 conference. With Jobs retired, could this social networking confab take the spotlight away from Apple?


11/23/2014 AT 08:20 PM EST

's half-brother) chose an interesting shirt for the American Music Awards red carpet Sunday night.

That is to say, the YouTube personality,

contestant and Broadway star chose to

a shirt on his naked torso.

Frankie, 31, paired baby-pink skinny jeans with some black high-tops, and his shirt and pink bow tie matched the fit of his pants: They're quite literally painted on.

, where he plays Franz in the musical

"Good luck hosting the red carpet tonight, you're gonna kill it," Ariana – who will be performing"Bang Bang" with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj at the show –

"I love u & remember to breathe," the singer, 21, added. Somehow, we don't think that's going to be a problem with that shirt.

Summary: "Don't forget to breathe," Ariana Grande Tweeted at her brother, who was hosting the red carpet


FORTUNE — In your new book How to Create a Mind, you say you’ve unlocked the secret of human thought. How long before we can build a functioning artificial brain?

On that question I’ve consistently said 2029. Both hardware and software are progressing exponentially. If logical thinking were the essence of intelligence, then computers are already superior to us. The areas where humans still have an edge are in our emotional intelligence. Emotion is not some sideshow or distraction to intelligence. Being funny, being sexy, expressing love in a convincing way — those are the cutting edges of human intelligence.

In the book you introduce your “pattern recognition theory of mind.” What does it tell us about how the brain works?

The main focus is on the neocortex, which evolved with mammals. It now comprises 80% of the brain in humans. One of the key themes of the book is that neocortex is neocortex. It all runs the same algorithm. This runs counter to the spirit of a lot of neuroscience, which is based on the idea that different regions of the brain run different algorithms for different functions. The neocortex is actually a module of roughly 100 neurons, and it’s repeated over and over again. We have a total of about 300 million modules, and they are pattern recognizers. They learn to recognize a pattern, and they’re organized in a hierarchy. That hierarchy is built from our own thoughts. So it’s true that you are what you eat, but it’s even more true that you are what you think.

When will the average person have his or her brain connected to and supplemented by computers?

One answer is that we have brain extenders already, even though the vast majority are not physically connected. Humans have always built tools to compensate for our limitations. We now have mental tools to extend our reach. So I can access all of human knowledge in sense with a few keystrokes and so can the kid in Africa with a smartphone. So these are very literally brain extenders.

To answer your actual question, I would say the 2030s. We will have intelligent computerized devices the size of blood cells, and we’ll put them in our blood stream. They’ll go inside our brain and provide gateways to the cloud directly from our brain. And one of the things we’ll do will be to extend the neocortex so that we’re not limited to just 300 million pattern recognizers. Consider the last time we added more neocortex, which is when homo sapiens evolved. That was the enabling factor that permitted the evolution of language and art and science and music and literature. It really came from this additional quantity, which made this qualitative leap possible. So 300 million is a lot in terms of the fact that it made this qualitative leap possible, but it’s also very limiting, and we struggle with that limitation every day. Just confront how long it takes to read a book, let alone how long it takes to learn a new language.

Suppose you want a billion or 10 billion pattern recognizers for a few seconds because you’re doing some kind of complex search. What happens now is it goes out to the cloud. The interesting things that happen on your cellphone or notebook are not happening in that rectangle, they’re taking place in the cloud. And the cloud itself is growing exponentially.

Will increased processing power change the way we think, or just increase our memory and the amount of information we can access?

As adults, we’ve filled up our neocortexes. We’re constantly needing to forget things to free up neocortex to learn new things of any magnitude just because of that physical limitation. Just imagine what the next expansion of neocortex capacity will permit qualitatively. But there are other advantages of a non-biological neocortex. It’s not just additional quantity. Computations can be done faster. Also, information stored biologically is not backed up. We routinely back up everything on our non-biological devices. And you can download new knowledge to it. So we will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence. We’re not going to be plugged in a la the Matrix. It’s going to be WiFi. And it’s not going to be one thing. You’re not going to get a form: Check here, I want to be enhanced, Yes or No. There’s going to be a million choices. There’s a million choices now just of iPad apps. Go out to the late 2030s and there’ll be some nano-bot software combinations that are very conservative that enhance your immune system and your memory that everyone uses. And there’ll be some more cutting edge things that only certain people use. How many people today opt out of this whole connectedness? Maybe the Amish. So people generally don’t opt out, and there’s going to be different choices.

Is technology changing our brains now in an evolutionary way?

Not biologically. What does happen though is that our neocortex isn’t going to bother using up a lot of its capacity learning things that it knows it can get through its brain extenders. There was a controversy when I went to college about these little devices called calculators. People said, ‘Oh, kids aren’t going to learn arithmetic.’ That turned out to be true. They could probably still add and subtract, but doing long division became a lost skill. But the calculators didn’t go away and Google GOOG isn’t going away. And we don’t need to fill up our precious neocortical real estate with lots of facts. The idea of rote learning is obsolete because we carry access to all of these facts and knowledge around with us. We do need to teach people how to use knowledge, how to solve problems and so on. But the brain extenders are not going way. People say, “These things are making us stupider.” If you define intelligence as the ability to remember random facts that might be true. But in fact we are much more intelligent with our brain extenders. These powerful tools are making us smarter, but you have to include them as part of who we are. And in my view they are part of who we are.

A shorter version of this interview appeared in the January 14, 2013 issue of Fortune.

More from The Future Issue

Summary: In his book How to Create a Mind, futurist Ray Kurzweil explores the secrets of human thought.


Americans have corruption on the mind.

According to a survey conducted last year by Transparency International, 60% of Americans think that corruption has increased over the past two years. Meanwhile the issue of corruption has been an issue in high-profile campaigns like the New York Democratic Party gubernatorial primaries this year.

Wrongdoing has also been on the mind of Fortune readers, as evidenced by a piece we published in June that ranked the most corrupt states in the nation, and went on to become one the most read pieces on Fortune.com this year. The article also inspired many readers to email us, complaining that their states weren’t mentioned.

The list, however, wasn’t actually compiled by Fortune editors, but was instead pulled based on a study conducted by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Indiana University, which ranked the states based on the number of convictions of public officials for federal corruption offenses in each state. And as researchers Oguzhan Dincer and Michael Johnston point out in a paper published by Harvard University’s Center for Ethics, these readers have reason to quibble with what the original story reported.

Dincer and Johnston aren’t arguing that the most corrupt states list we published is necessarily inaccurate. Instead, they argue that measuring corruption in any precise way is extremely difficult. They have several qualms with simply using federal conviction data to measure corruption levels across states. Here are a few:

Dincer and Jonston address the problems with using federal conviction data by trying to measure expert impressions of corruption, rather than using objective numbers. They write:

To be able to know where in state government to push for reform and to be able to measure the effectiveness of these reforms, we need to have an . . . index measuring different forms of corruption in different branches of government. To construct such a disaggregated index, we surveyed the news reporters covering state politics in addition to the investigative reporters covering issues related to corruption during the first half of 2014.

This approach gave the researchers the ability to ask detailed questions about state and local corruption levels and an ability to understand what specific branch of government was suffering most from corruption and whether that corruption was the legal or illegal variety.

The University of Hong Kong/Indiana University paper did not specifically address legal corruption. Dincer and Johnston define such corruption as “political gains in the form of campaign contributions or endorsements by a government official, in exchange for providing specific benefits to private individuals or groups, be it by explicit or implicit understanding.” They point out that surveys show that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are increasingly concerned about this type of behavior.

Using these methods, Dincer and Johnston paint a much different picture of which states are most corrupt. Check out their full report for a detailed look at the states with the most corruption across legislative, executive, and judicial branches, as well as breakdowns for which states ranked highest in legal and illegal corruption. In total, seven states ranked in the top 10 for both legal and illegal corruption. Here they are in no particular order:

Of these seven, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Kentucky also appeared on the list Fortune published in June.

Summary: A new analysis offers a nuanced view of the different kinds of corruption within branches of America's state governments and where such behavior is most prevalent.


On its Friday, January 23rd debut, Box Inc BOX did what Wall Street keeps telling us IPOs are supposed to do: Its stock soared.

Box’s underwriters pre-sold the shares at $14, mainly to mutual funds and other institutional investors. By the end of its first day of trading—defying a sharp drop in the S&P—the stock finished at $23.15, a gain of $9.15 or 68%.

Folks who aren’t steeped in Wall Street-think might wonder how any stock that didn’t just receive a sumptuous, totally unexpected takeover offer could jump 70% in a single day. They might also question why big powerful investors got most of the shares at a fabulous insider price, and the great unwashed are mainly relegated to buying Box at a marked-up, post IPO price. As a CEO who went through the process once told me, “In IPOs, the fat cats get the rich cream.”

This is the blueprint that investment banks keep selling to companies that want to go public: Let the stock make a big, big pop. It’s the way to go. You’ll generate great publicity and secure the loyalty of the funds that pocket gigantic, guaranteed gains in a single day. Out of gratitude, they’ll hold your shares through good times and bad. That “loyalty” is mostly ephemeral, but the issuer’s belief in those assurances seems eternal.

Here’s the price Box paid for pre-selling its stock at far less than what investors were paying virtually from the opening bell to the end of the trading day. Box sold 12.5 million shares; so the total gross proceeds were $175 million. Fees and expenses amounted to $17 million, so it will collect $158 million in cash ($175 million less $17 million) from the offering.

But what if Box had resisted the Wall Street pitch and auctioned its shares to the highest bidders? Or what if it had prodded underwriters to pay full price, as Facebook FB did? If Box had gotten total value for those 12.5 million shares, it would have put around $280 million—an additional $120 million or so than it actually collected—on its balance sheet. So it really “cost” Box around $120 million in underpricing, to raise $157 million. It “paid” 76 cents in foregone proceeds for every dollar it collected.

The $120 million Box left on the table equals over 70% of its cash holdings prior to the IPO. An extra $120 million in assets would have raised its net worth by over 40% after the offering.

Those are big numbers. So why do brilliant venture capitalists and brainiac founding teams keep falling for the investment banks’ assurances that raising less money is actually good for them? Hint: It’s usually good for employees, especially the top managers, who are able to secure options and other stock grants at the super-bargain IPO grant price. They then get to take part in the same guaranteed windfall as the institutional investors.

IPOs are one of the great, mysterious Wall Street spectacles. The praise is overwhelming, the definition of “success” is baffling, and anyone who questions the system is taken for a dullard.

Summary: Call it the Wall Street IPO blueprint. Big powerful investors got most of Box’s shares at a fabulous bargain price.


Whatever else it accomplishes, “The Boy Next Door,” in which Jennifer Lopez plays a high school teacher who falls for the title character, will probably make people forget “Gigli” (2003).

It will also make them laugh. Intentionally or not, director Rob Cohen (“Alex Cross”) has put together the most hilarious camp classic since “White House Down” (2013).

“The Boy Next Door” also teaches a lesson. Not that a married woman (OK, she’s been separated for nine months) sleeping with a 19-year-old stud deserves whatever she gets. Everybody knows that. More important, it teaches the pernicious effect that Greek literature has on a young person’s behavior. Forget violent video games — have you read the “Iliad”?

Noah (Ryan Guzman) has. He’s the boy next door. He appears out of nowhere, his brawny arm jutting into the frame to help Lopez’s Claire open a balky garage door. When he learns that Claire teaches “the classics” at the local high school, he wants to sign up. “Homer is my favorite!” he says. “Achilles is a total badass!”

He befriends Kevin (Ian Nelson), Claire’s noodle of a son, teaching him how to pick up girls, repair an alternator, throw a punch, and shoot a .45. He warns him not to believe the lies of his adulterous father, Garrett (John Corbett), when dad tries to wheedle back into the family. Claire, meanwhile, has taken to looking at Noah at night when stands by the window and takes his shirt off. . .

Well, nine months is a long time. And Noah is persistent. Everybody makes mistakes, right? Like her husband. But when she tries to let Noah off easy, she awakens the wrath of Achilles.

That’s 20 minutes into the film. For over an hour Noah just gets crazier and crazier, stalking Claire, hacking her computer, turning her son against her, fracturing somebody’s skull, assaulting the assistant principal. In his mind, he believes that he’s a hero — not like Garrett, an old fart who cheats on a beautiful woman like Claire. A woman Noah adores. Whom he will never leave.

You’d think at some point they’d call the police. Or do a Google search on the kid. Find out why he is 19 and still in high school and what really happened to his parents. They might find out that he is what they call in the psychology business a crazy person. A narcissist with lethal martial arts skills. In possession of handguns. A walking, oedipal time bomb.

Ah yes, “Oedipus the King,” another of Noah’s favorites. He writes a quote from the play in giant letters on the blackboard after he has decorated Claire’s classroom with hundreds of Xeroxed copies of pictures he secretly took while they engaged in their extracurricular activities.

Keep Oedipus in mind [SPOILERS!] when this tragi-comedy reaches its catastrophe in a stable full of sharp metal objects, ropes, and a can of gasoline. It makes “Fatal Attraction” look like Ingmar Bergman.

Is Rob Cohen, a Hollywood veteran with 40 years of experience, serious? Maybe he’s in on the joke. He does include an off-color, winking reference to “The Wiz, which he produced, in 1978. It doesn’t matter. “The Boy Next Door” may end up as one of the worst movies of 2015, but it is also one of the most entertaining.

Summary: Jennifer Lopez stars in “The Boy Next Door.”


NEW YORK — More than two dozen attorneys general sent letters Sunday to five of the country’s largest retailers, encouraging them to stop selling tobacco products in stores that have pharmacies, which would follow the example CVS Caremark set with its announcement this year that it would stop selling such products in its drugstores.

The letters were sent to Rite Aid, Walgreen, Kroger, Safeway, and Walmart, companies that are among the biggest US pharmacy retailers.

“There is a contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs,” the letters said.

Stopping the sale of tobacco products, they continued, “would effectively bring us full circle, back from the time when a tobacco manufacturer could advertise that ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette’ to a time when cigarettes simply cannot be purchased from a business that sells products prescribed by doctors.”

In February, Larry J. Merlo, chief executive of CVS Caremark, said selling tobacco products was “inconsistent with our purpose.” The company, the largest drugstore chain in the country in overall sales, has been moving increasingly toward becoming a health care provider, offering more mini-clinics, for example, rather than just pills and toiletries.

The attorneys general, led by Eric T. Schneiderman of New York and Mike DeWine of Ohio, represent 28 states and territories, including New Hampshire and Rhode Island.

The letters did not address the sale of electronic cigarettes, nicotine products that are expanding rapidly in sales.

Summary: More than two dozen attorneys general sent letters Sunday to five of the country’s largest retailers, encouraging them to stop selling tobacco products in stores that also have pharmacies, which would follow the example CVS Caremark set with its announcement this year that it would stop selling such products in its drugstores. The letters were sent to Rite Aid, Walgreen, Kroger, Safeway and Wal-Mart, five companies that are among the biggest pharmacy retailers in the country. “There is a contradiction in having these dangerous and devastating tobacco products on the shelves of a retail chain that services health care needs,” the letters sai


02/24/2015 AT 01:50 PM EST

showed off her abs of steel in a shimmery gold two-piece bathing suit in Miami, Florida, on Monday.

star escaped the New York cold and soaked up some sun in another

and an oversized floppy hat.

Frankel doesn't leave much to the imagination when it comes to her svelte figure. (Remember that time she squeezed into her daughter's

But the frequently bikini-clad reality star is proud of her body and deems it a requirement for promoting her

"It would be bad if I were overweight and had a brand called Skinnygirl, could you imagine?" the 44-year-old

"I feel like who cares, they are always going to say something," she said on the show.

Summary: The Skinnygirl entrepreneur heated up the beach in Florida on Monday


03/26/2015 AT 08:35 AM EDT

. Let's talk about booze, sex and cats on leashes.

That was Australian journalist Jonathan Hyla's approach to interviewing

about the film this week. And she hilariously played along, faux-ridiculing the Channel Ten reporter for his apparent incompetence, and even letting an F-bomb fly when he asked a particularly dumb question about the fantasy film.

"How were you able to get that cat to do what you wanted [it] to do on a leash?" Hyla asked with a grin. "I tried to put my girlfriend's cat on a leash, and it just never works for me."

"That's your question? That's your f–ing question?" the two-time Oscar winner, 45, replied.

Many media outlets, having seen only the tail end of the interview, falsely reported that Blanchett had actually lost her cool with Hyla. But as you can see from the full interview below, she was only having fun – and lots of it.

For those misrepresenting my #CateBlanchett interview, here it is uncut https://t.co/xNtObSNgSh #IStillNeedKnowHowTheyGotThatCatOnALeash

Summary: The actress toys with an Australian journalist as he asks flippant questions about Cinderella


04/06/2015 AT 03:25 PM EDT

is under fire for her new role as the face of a major United Arab Emirates airline.

addressed an open letter to the Australian actress, 47, asking her to end her involvement in a new ad campaign for Etihad Airways, which has been singled out by the APFA for gender-discriminatory labor practices.

dated April 2, the national president of the association, Laura R. Glading, asked Kidman to terminate her association with the "abusive" company, citing claims that the airline has fired women over pregnancy and has forced flight attendants to "live in confinement in secure compounds."

"We urge you, on behalf of the women and girls that you spoke of so eloquently,

to play a part in promoting Etihad Airways, a company that imposes abusive labor practices on its female employees and whose sole owner is a government that stands against the very world that you imagine," Glading wrote in the letter.

Glading also notes that the organization admires the

actress for her efforts to advance women's rights around the world as a U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador. Kidman was

to that role in January 2006.

"Using your profile and stature for such a noble endeavor is commendable," Glading said. "However, we believe those efforts are at odds with your prominent role in an advertising campaign for Etihad Airways."

Etihad Airways – the second-largest airline of the United Arab Emirates – fired back at the accusations Friday, urging its brand ambassador to continue her participation in its campaigns.

"Our commitment to the welfare, safety, and well-being of the diverse group of men and women who have worked so hard to make Etihad Airways great is one of our airlineâs top priorities," the company announced in a statement obtained by

Etihad Airways also addressed the claims surrounding mistreatment of pregnant employees, stating, "When a cabin crew member informs Etihad of a pregnancy, she is provided with appropriate ground duties for the duration of their pregnancy. During this time, she remains fully compensated and fully engaged on the ground."

A rep for Kidman did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Summary: The national president of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants requested that the actress stop lending 'your voice, your image, and your good name to Etihad Airways'


At the biggest maritime technology expo in the U.S., defense contractors quite literally bring out their big guns. BAE Systems is hyping its electromagnetic railgun, a massive naval artillery piece that would use electricity (rather than a controlled explosion) to hurl projectiles at targets more than 100 nautical miles away. General Atomics showed off a high-energy laser cannon. Boeing BA displayed nearly every navy-relevant missile and aircraft it makes. Nearly everyone, it seems, brought robots.

But here, at the U.S. Navy’s annual Sea-Air-Space industry confab just outside of Washington D.C., the overall mood among industry is probably best described as apprehensive. Taking the temperature of various representatives from a smattering of major names in defense, one gets a general sense of uncertainty—an unscientific indicator of what the defense industry expects (or doesn’t expect) in the months ahead as both Congress and the Department of Defense make some key decisions on how much money the service branches will receive and how that money will be spent.

“The industry, the DoD—they’re almost holding their breath in terms of budgets, in terms of sequestration,” says Bob Ruszkowski, director of strategy and business development for advanced air dominance and unmanned systems at Lockheed Martin. “The services and the industry have a pretty good picture of the challenges ahead, but also an understanding of where recapitalization is happening.”

Those recapitalization programs include the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program aimed at replacing the iconic troop-moving Humvee; a future Navy fighter jet that (along with the F-35) would replace its aging F/18 fleet; a program that would replace the current fleet of nuclear-missile packing Ohio class submarines; and the U.S. Air Force’s new $100 billion Long Range Strike Bomber program, which will shape U.S. combat air priorities and programs for decades to come (more on that here). These major procurement programs—collectively worth hundreds of billions of dollars—are all in some degree of limbo all at the same time, touching nearly every major defense prime (and a whole lot of subcontractors).

This broad uncertainty is likely to persist into the summer and perhaps as late as October, when Congress will be forced to deal with the sequestration question one way or another. A decision on the Long Range Strike Bomber is expected this summer as well, likely setting off a tectonic restructuring of the defense-aerospace industry, Ruszkowski says.

But it’s not all anxious waiting at Sea-Air-Space. The unmanned systems space has been and remains quite hot for research and development, even if the Navy’s own blockbuster unmanned aircraft initiative, the Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike program remains bogged in internal and congressional indecision. While waiting to see how the major procurement programs shake out, defense primes are looking past current platforms to the ones that will augment future naval fleets. That means drone airplanes, drone boats, drone helicopters, drone ship systems—basically robots all around.

“I think the Navy is committed to unmanned systems for a variety of applications,” says Jay McConville, Lockheed Martin’s director of business development for unmanned integrated systems. Pointing across the expo floor to competitor Northrop Grumman’s NOC exhibition booth, he adds “Look at Northrop Grumman. They only have three of their products on display, and they’re all unmanned systems.”

That’s a good indicator of where the maritime defense industry thinks Navy priorities are heading, McConville says. Lockheed Martin’s LMT own booth showcases a few as well. And while a lot of ink is dedicated to drone applications in the commercial realm these days, the military services are still great customers to have in this space. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may be global technology titans, but they’re still trying to figure out how to best use drones to their advantage. The military branches know exactly what they want from unmanned systems and know how to communicate that to industry.

“The commercial space wants to know what to use these for,” McConnville says, gesturing at one of Lockheed’s own unmanned aircraft models. “But these guys, the Navy—they know exactly what they’re doing.”

Summary: With sequestration and some big Pentagon decisions looming, the defense industry digs in and waits.


WASHINGTON, July 6— The United States and the Soviet Union may be ready to begin talks on a possible new grain agreement within two or three weeks, Agriculture Secretary John R. Block said today.

''I hope that arrangements could be made somewhere toward the end of the month, but there's no date established,'' Mr. Block told a group of reporters.

He said that the Soviet Union had been given ''some options, in terms of dates'' for a meeting but no single specific date on when the conference might begin.

In a related matter, Mr. Block said that for the third consecutive year there would be no acreage controls on American wheat production in 1982.

A five-year agreement under which the Russians have bought eight million metric tons of wheat and corn expires on Sept. 30. A metric ton is about 2,205 pounds and is equal to 36.7 bushels of wheat or 39.4 bushels of corn.

Last month, at a meeting with Soviet representatives in London, the United States agreed to sell up to six million metric tons of additional wheat and corn to the Soviet Union in the current agreement's final year. The United States also agreed to sell ''reasonable quantities'' of grain to the Soviet Union after Sept. 30 if a new agreement had not been reached by then.

So far, however, there has been no public disclosure of grain sales to the Soviet Union above the eight million metric tons provided in the final year of the agreement.

''I think they'll buy some from us,'' Mr. Block said, ''but I have to concede I'm also convinced that they can get their supplies elsewhere if they're forced to.''


STUART, Fla.— Stuart is a tough little town, tough on developers who would make it a big town, tough on anyone with visions of towering modernity. That resolve has given the place a problem: people, especially South Floridians fed up with crime, find Stuart attractive and move here.

Joan Jefferson, a City Commissioner who will be the Mayor next month after an election in which she is unopposed, calls it ''the boomerang.''

''Our no-growth attracts people,'' she says, ''and we grow.'' Moreover, Mrs. Jefferson says, every time folks from Miami, say, move to town, they immediately announce: ''O.K., that's it. Shut the door.''

The population of Stuart doubled from 1970 to 1980, to about 12,000. The population of Martin County more than doubled, to about 65,000. There are no hard figures on it, but most people around here seem to think most of the newcomers came from counties to the south. So appealing is Stuart that native Floridians come here to retire, residents contend. 'Fun to Be a Policeman Here'

''It may sound facetious to say it,'' says the Police Chief, Charles E. White, ''but it's still fun to be a policeman here. You don't feel like you always have to be hiding behind something. When we go through our less-than-affluent neighborhoods and people raise their hands, they're waving at you - they're not throwing something at you.''

The chief moved here from Fort Lauderdale in 1979. He remarked that Stuart ''reminds me of the Fort Lauderdale I moved to in the 50's.'' ''Like Miami,'' he went on, Fort Lauderdale ''became a maze of concrete jungles, high crime rates, high taxes.'' ''I didn't like what was happening in the schools, either,'' he added. ''I've got five kids.''

Peter Jefferson, the Commissioner's husband, is an architect. They moved here in 1969 from Coconut Grove, a fairly fashionable section of Miami. Joan Jefferson says they moved because they walked out their door one morning and were greeted by a high rise, ''some big ugly thing with precast concrete balconies hanging off it - it must have been 12, 13 stories.'' Mr. Jefferson says it was a cumulation of things that prompted them to leave; there was no single emotional leap.

In any event, they turned up in Stuart with long hair and beads and, in the trunk of their car, the skeleton of a manatee they had found on the beach. Their looks made the police suspicious, and while they slept in a motel the police impounded the car, searched it, found the skeleton and questioned them about cattle rustling. That resolved, they asked a local pharmacist about a house they had heard about, and he said the owner ''wouldn't rent it to you - she wouldn't sell it to you, and three years ago you wouldn't have been allowed in here.'' Fighting Tooth and Nail

For 14 years, Mr. Jefferson warned over and over that the danger existed that there would be a ''linear city stretching from Miami to Jacksonville unless we put the brakes on.'' Now Mrs. Jefferson is about to take the leadership of a five-member City Commission that will fight developers tooth and nail. ''We enjoy the developers and the lawyers in their three-piece suits,'' she says. ''They come from Miami and they think we're really not all that astute. Sometimes they even snub our questions, saying all we have to do is go look at such and such a project they threw up elsewhere.''

''The more flagrant they are,'' Mrs. Jefferson went on, ''the more we dot the I's and cross the T's. I like it.'' Stuart has a four-story limit on the height of buildings, among other tight restrictions. The height limits are imposed for fire protection purposes, and because four stories tends to be the height of the trees, so one does not see much bald-faced concrete shining in the sky. Also, more than four stories, in Mr. Jefferson's view, is inhumane. ''A mother should be able to read the expression on a child's face out the back door,'' he says.

Another thing Stuart does is demand thousands of dollars in ''impact fees'' when any development is approved. The developers of a condominium, for example, must pay for the new traffic light their project will require, the portion of a cost of a new policeman, a new patrol car, and so on. This is to keep present residents from having to pay to accommodate newcomers. High Rises End at Border

''We have a slide we like to show people,'' said Eileen Levine, an anesthesiologist who moved here from Miami last June. ''It's taken from an airplane over the beach and it shows the county line between Martin and St. Lucie. The way you can tell the county line is the high-rise condominiums stop at the southern end of St. Lucie, and then all you have are these miles of Martin County beaches. It's amazing.''

Mrs. Levine's husband is a pathologist working through his residency in a Miami hospital. He commutes on weekends for the time being, and will move here next June when his residency is completed. Mrs. Levine moved early because, working in a Miami operating room, ''I was on the receiving end of a lot of what was going on down there. The gunshots, the stabbings, the craziness.''

''Miami,'' she said, ''is trying to adjust - but I just don't want to be a part of the transition.'' This Thanksgiving, as always, the Jeffersons will have their Miami friends up for a party. The Jeffersons haven't been back in Miami in five years and don't contemplate ever going back again. ''They've all been robbed,'' Mrs. Jefferson says. ''They send their kids to school with Mace. The men carry revolvers. The women carry those little pretty things like Nancy Reagan. Some people we know were watching TV, and burglars came in and said 'excuse me,' and took it.''

That sort of thing does not happen in Stuart, but the Jeffersons, Mrs. Levine, the Police Chief and a handful of other people interviewed feel that Miami's problems are marching north, and that they are likely to arrive here before the century is out.

''About five years ago,'' said Mrs. Jefferson, ''we took out a map, in case Martin County was destroyed. For one reason or another, we rejected all the world. There comes a point when there's no place left to run to. That's why you take a position and fight.''

Illustrations: Photo of a beach in Fla. Map of Southern Florida Photo of Peter and Joan Jefferson


Even in his 80s he still claims that "all I want to do is make better sushi," according to a review of the film in the New Yorker.

The restaurant, which has three Michelin stars, was rated by the dining website eater.com as the world's second toughest place in which to land a reservation, beaten only by the world famous Noma, in Denmark's capital Copenhagen.

"What makes it nearly impossible to pull off, though, is that no one on staff speaks English, and that they tend to not welcome foreigners without a Japanese host," Eater said.

Obama is in Japan at the start of a five-day tour to Asia, in which he will also visit South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines. It is part of a wider effort by the U.S. to shift its focus to the Pacific.

Summary: President Obama ate with Shinzo Abe at Tokyo's exclusive Sukiyabashi Jiro—the subject of the film "Jiro Dreams of Sushi"—on a state visit to Japan.


Gold bugs take heart: One of the biggest bullion bears is suddenly bullish.

"I think for the first time in a while, you can actually say the lows may have been in dollar-dominated gold," Dennis Gartman told CNBC's "Fast Money" this week.

Typically, the editor of The Gartman Letter likes to buy gold in weaker currencies like the euro or the yen, but the recent turmoil in the currency markets has Gartman bullish on gold in more traditional dollar terms.

"Maybe the dollar has seen its best levels, certainly looks that way against the Canadian, Aussie and the kiwi, and that's going to bode well for gold," Gartman said.

Read MoreChart: Gold looks headed for $980 per ounce

Gold has fallen 14 percent this year, but has made a comeback recently. This week, bullion closed up 2 percent, its best showing since June.

"It could be a turning point," added Gartman, who noted the reversal in a number of soft commodities as well.

"For the first time literally in years I'm at least no longer bearish of gold in U.S. dollar terms, and might even be coaxed into being an outright buyer," he added.

Summary: One of the biggest gold bears in the market is suddenly bullish.


The English cricket team gives Australia captain MIchael Clarke a guard of honour as he walks to the crease at the Oval.

Australia's future leaders stood up in the Ashes finale as Michael Clarke took potentially his final bow as a batsman.

Clarke's men reached 3-287 at stumps on day one of the fifth Test after being sent in by Alastair Cook.

It was a day of dreary weather and dour batting, led by stubborn knocks from Steve Smith and David Warner.

Clarke was out for 15 and unable to wind the clock back in his 115th and final Test.

The 34-year-old received a standing ovation at the start and end of his knock, while England formed a guard of honour when he walked onto the field.

Clarke reviewed his caught-behind dismissal.

The edge was so faint that HotSpot failed to pick it up but Snicko confirmed the retiring skipper was on his way.

Smith and Adam Voges then dug in to ensure there was no repeat of the side's calamitous collapses in Cardiff, Birmingham and Nottingham.

Batting in poor light after a late rain delay, Smith finished 78 not out in his captain-elect's knock.

Cook reviewed a confident lbw shout when Smith was on 71 but replays confirmed the ball was going down the leg side.

Voges was 47no when bad light ended play in the middle of Steve Finn's 21st over.

Finn has two more deliveries to bowl on Friday morning then the second new ball is due.

Smith and Warner both showed the sort of grit that was so sorely lacking at Trent Bridge, where Australia meekly ceded the urn after being skittled for 60.

Warner becomes vice-captain at the conclusion of the dead rubber.

The pugnacious opener batted like a man with great responsibility, demonstrating uncharacteristic restraint of his great power not scoring a boundary until the 15th over.

Warner fell for 85 in the second session, ending his 131-ball stay at the crease by prodding forward to offspinner Moeen Ali and Adam Lyth snaffled the regulation catch at slip.

Chris Rogers, who shared a 110-run stand with Warner, was also out edging in the middle session.

Clarke played with a sense of freedom and there was one hallmark of his best, a lofted one-bounce four off the bowling of Ali.

His 42-minute knock ended with a ball on an awkward length from Ben Stokes.

Do you have any news photos or videos?

Summary: Michael Clarke has fallen for 15 in his second last Test innings on day one of the fifth Ashes Test.


"This location will allow us to serve fans who have been asking us to come to New York and to earn the opportunity to serve new customers, as it will be the first of many locations in the city," said Carrie Kurlander, VP of Public Relations, Chick-fil-A, in an emailed statement.

Crain's New York Business first reported the story.

Read MoreMcDonald's next bet? McKale

The move is part of a broader expansion strategy for the chain, which is rapidly moving into new markets in the Midwest, West and Northeast.

Privately-held Chick-fil-A has rapidly grown to be the top chicken chain in the U.S. ranked by U.S. sales, eclipsing Yum Brands' Kentucky Fried Chicken and Popeye's Louisiana Kitchen, according to Technomic's latest report on the top 500 chain restaurants.

Summary: Chicken chain Chick-fil-A is continuing its nationwide expansion with its first full-menu location in the Big Apple.


All the presidential candidates post their news interviews online. That's not original, nor is it a media strategy. But I haven't seen any of the candidates do a compare-and-contrast video with their interviews. Imagine a 2-minute video where you see this exchange, comparing Fiorina versus one of her opponents.

Take Scott Walker's interview with NBC's Kasie Hunt:

And compare it with Carly Fiorina's exchange with Chuck Todd on NBC's "Meet the Press":

Viewers will be able to watch these videos and see how Fiorina contrasts with the other candidates.

So, does she have a shot at winning the nomination? There are a couple of things working against her: Historically, the nomination comes after the second run for president, though President Obama broke those rules in 2008. And, the GOP has also historically gone with the establishment candidate. If she can't get on the next prime time debate, her ability to become the GOP nominee becomes even more challenging.

But, she is clawing ahead. And, even if she doesn't get the nomination, she will make a strong No. 2.

Commentary by Mark Macias, head of Macias PR, a global public-relations firm, that has run media and branding campaigns for politicians, tech start-ups, financial firms, nonprofits and companies. He's also author of the book, "Beat the Press: Your Guide to Managing the Media." Follow him on Twitter @markmacias.

Summary: Carly Fiorina is impressive in interviews and debates. Here's how she can get closer to the GOP nomination, says media strategist Mark Macias.