Tuesday, April 15th 2003, 1:03AM

It should have been a moment that shook the city, but it wasn't. Sixty-one in '61 will forever be a part of baseball lore, but on that day - the first day of October - there wasn't even a sellout at Yankee Stadium.

If you could somehow recreate that moment today - put Roger Maris at the plate on the last day of the season just one homer shy of the record for most home runs

in a season - the lines would go up and down River Ave. The tickets would be like gold. Everybody who's anybody would be there.

Instead, Maris' 61st homer lives mostly in our memories, perhaps improperly, as a day filled with drama and wonder. His accomplishment, of course, now stands on its own merit, and occupies its own place in history, but the day that he smacked the ball into the stands for the 61st time, rounded the bases and crossed home plate wasn't unlike a lot of others that season.

Maris never liked taking curtain calls, but his teammates insisted. Four bows later, the 23,154 fans sat

back down and so did the game's new home run king. Sal Durante, a 19-year-old from Coney Island caught the ball, and those fans who recently battled in court over one of Barry Bonds' historic home run balls could probably learn a lesson from him.

"The boy is planning to get married and he can use the money, but he still wanted to give the ball back to me for nothing," Maris said. "It shows there's some good people left in the world after all."

Maris was a winner, just like all the Yankees back then. He came to the Bombers in a trade (from Kansas City) and played right field, just like the previous home-run champ Babe Ruth did. He won his second straight AL MVP in 1961, a testament to his all-around game. He was the consummate five-tool player, a description that Casey Stengel once used to describe the humble man from Fargo, N.D.

But he wasn't colorful, which is to say that he wasn't Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio. Even if there hadn't been the controversy over how many games it took Maris to break Ruth's mark (Babe hit 60 in a 154-game season; Maris had the brand new 162-game schedule), there's no reason to think he would have been lauded all over the country.

Newspaper writers didn't jump to embrace Maris, and commissioner Ford Frick made it his

personal mission to make sure that there was always a differentiation in the record books between Maris' accomplishment and Ruth's - the asterisk that accompanied Maris' record.

None of that really matters. The fans at the Stadium that day witnessed history, and the rest of us who weren't imagine it as perfection.

Maris died in 1985. In 1991, Major League Baseball made it official: Roger Maris was the game's home run king. The rest of us had known it for years.

Summary: Maris Beats Babe Mark & Asterisk I t should have been a moment that shook the city, but it wasn't. Sixty-one in '61 will forever be a part of baseball lore, but on that day - the first day of October - there wasn't even a sellout at Yankee Stadium. If you could somehow recreate that moment today - put Roger Maris at the plate on the last day of the season just one homer shy of the record


David Letterman unveiled a new billboard in Times Square in New York City last night.

But it wasn't for his show. It was for Sports Ilustrated.

The late night talk show host pulled the curtain on Sports Illustrated's 2009 Swimsuit Issue cover, revealing Leonardo DiCaprio's main squeeze, Bar Refaeli, as this year's lucky supermodel.

PHOTO EXCLUSIVE: Click for 3 exclusive photos of Bar's SI spread!

(For those keeping score, this is DiCaprio's second Sports Illustrated sueprmodel girlfriend, the first being Gisele Bundchen. Grrr.)

So why all the hoopla?

MORE PHOTOS: 10 years of Swimsuit Issue cover girls.

Over 10 percent of Sports Illustrated's annual income comes from its swimsuit issue. And this year, with magazines closing left and right due to contracting advertising dollars, the magazine is trying to wring its venerable swimsuit issue for everything its worth.

In addition to the annual issue itself, Sports Illustrated is launching a "24/7 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Experience" at the Luxor casino in Las Vegas, a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Vegas emblazoned with Refaeli's likeness, and an online component complete with additional photos and behind the scenes videos of each of the swimsuit models.

RELATED: Check out SportsIllustrated.com for the all of the 2009 Swimsuit Issue's online bells and whistles.

What's next, Swimsuit Issue credit cards? Swimsuit Issue cereal? Swimsuit Issue on Broadway?

Oh yeah, they did that last night.

Summary: Leonardo DiCaprio's main squeeze Bar Refaeli is this year's lucky supermodel


Watford, England -- For a team starving for another wide receiver, Mario Manningham's catch that didn't count this week counted as big news.

During the 49ers' practice Wednesday, Manningham scored a touchdown while running with the first-string offense.

Big deal? Yeah, it kind of was to right guard Alex Boone and his teammates.

"Boone and everybody else decided that it was time to have an eruption," offensive coordinator Greg Roman said. "And we all had a celebration on the field welcoming him back."

The 49ers are clearly happy for Manningham that he's healthy after he tore two knee ligaments Dec. 23, and they also are hoping his catch is a harbinger of help to come. San Francisco reportedly has looked into trading for Cleveland wide receiver Josh Gordon and the Giants' Hakeem Nicks, but it's possible Manningham could help remedy a glaring offensive shortcoming: the lack of a productive pass-catcher beyond wide receiver Anquan Boldin and tight end Vernon Davis.

After seven games, quarterback Colin Kaepernick has 961 yards, eight touchdowns, two interceptions and a 111.6 passer rating when targeting Boldin and Davis. When targeting others, Kaepernick has 459 yards, no touchdowns, three interceptions and a 54.5 rating.

Manningham began practicing last week. He is not expected to be moved to the 53-man roster for Sunday's game against the Jaguars but is likely to return after next week's bye and could make his 2013 debut Nov. 10, when the 49ers host Carolina.

The 49ers hope Michael Crabtree (torn Achilles) can follow Manningham onto the field soon. Head coach Jim Harbaugh recently said Crabtree might be back by mid- to late-November.

Manningham, 6-0 and 185 pounds, is known for his speed and quickness. Inside linebacker Patrick Willis noted Manningham has logged extra time in the weight room as part of his recovery.

"When he had the injury, he was able to rehab and put on some muscle mass," Willis said. "I still tell him he's got a ways to go. In his mind, he feels big."

In comparison to the majority of San Francisco's receiving corps, Manningham's career numbers - 202 receptions, 2,674 yards and 19 touchdowns - are huge. Boldin is the only wide receiver on the roster with more than 45 catches, 749 yards or five touchdowns in his career.

"Mario's a guy that's got really, really good understanding of football," Roman said. "He's a guy that we would probably use the word 'savvy' to describe. Really like how he runs routes. How he understands leverage as the play develops. And he's looking good, working hard."

Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick has had most of his success this season when targeting wide receiver Anquan Boldin and tight end Vernon Davis. Kaepernick's passer rating when targeting the 49ers' pass-catchers:

Others: WR Jon Baldwin: (3-for-6, 28 yards); WR Marlon Moore (1-for-4, 6 yards); RB Kendall Hunter: (2-for-3, 13 yards); TE Garrett Celek (1-for-2, 30 yards); WR Quinton Patton (1-for-2, 0 yards); RB Anthony Dixon (1-for-1, 3 yards).

Eric Branch is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: ebranch@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Eric_Branch

Summary: San Francisco reportedly has looked into trading for Cleveland wide receiver Josh Gordon and the Giants' Hakeem Nicks, but it's possible Manningham could help remedy a glaring offensive shortcoming: the lack of a productive pass-catcher beyond wide receiver Anquan Boldin and tight end Vernon Davis.  After seven games, quarterback Colin Kaepernick has 961 yards, eight touchdowns, two interceptions and a 111.6 passer rating when targeting Boldin and Davis.  [...] to the majority of San Francisco's receiving corps, Manningham's career numbers - 202 receptions, 2,674 yards and 19 touchdowns - are huge.  Boldin is the only wide receiver on the roster with more than 45 catches, 749 yards or five touchdowns in his career.  2-man show Niners quarterback Colin Kaepernick has had most of his success this season when targeting wide receiver Anquan Boldin and tight end Vernon Davis.


Among them: the importance of understanding and using data as an executive, the value of eschewing mentors in favour of finding champions and why communication skills will be more important than technical acumen.

Here’s what three Influencers had to say on the topics.

Jordy Leiser, co-founder and chief executive officer at StellaService

With data playing an ever-larger role in everything executives and managers do, what’s the key to success? “As the Chinese proverb says, when winds bring change some will build walls, and others will build windmills,” wrote Leiser in his post Big Idea 2014: You’ll be Replaced by a Moneyball Executive (Unless You’re One). “The people building windmills are the Moneyball Executives, the future all-stars of 2014.”

In the book Moneyball, a baseball manager navigates his team to success using untapped data and analytics, not gut instincts. “Every industry has its own set of metrics, ripe for the Moneyball Executive,” Leiser wrote.

“New tools and technologies have led to the explosion of new data sets around both consumer behaviour and business performance. Data-driven insight is rapidly finding its way into the hands of hungry executives looking to make smarter, more informed decisions on everything from advertising to patient care optimisation,” he wrote.

But, executives needn’t look at data blindly. Rather, the key is to find the right way to work data into strategy. “Every organisation will reap massive benefits from incorporating empirical analysis into its decision making,” Leiser wrote. The upshot, he added, is that doing so “will unlock even greater creativity by allowing individuals to attack old problems with light from new angles.”

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of Center for Talent Innovation & Hewlett Chivee Partners LLC

“Talented women, people of colour and gays too often stall before they reach the top. What can help them break free of the ‘marzipan layer,’ that talent-rich tranche just below senior management?,” asked Hewlett in her post Big Idea 2014: Find a Sponsor Who Believes in Your Potential.

The answer, Hewlett wrote, is “sponsorship — a strategic workplace partnership between those with power and those with potential.”

Sponsors are not mentors. Mentors are more like counsellors who act as a sounding board, offer advice and “can help you understand the unwritten rules, provide a map for the uncharted corridors to power and reveal ‘the business behind the business’,” she wrote.

“Sponsors, on the other hand, are people in positions of power who work on their protege’s behalf to clear obstacles, foster connections, assign higher-profile work to ease the move up the ranks and provide air-cover and support in case of stumbles,” Hewlett wrote. “Mentors advise, sponsors act.”

Why does it matter? Without such sponsorship, Hewlett wrote, talented and ambitious professionals can “languish in the lower echelons — no matter how hard they work, no matter how well they perform.”

Of course, it isn’t east to find a sponsor. “For starters, sponsorship must be earned — by delivering outstanding performance, die-hard loyalty, and a distinct personal brand,” Hewlett wrote. Another challenge: finding a sponsor willing to go out of their comfort zone to help someone unlike themselves.

But finding a sponsor is worth it, she wrote. “Women with sponsors are 22% more likely to request getting assigned to a high-visibility team or plum project. And fully 68% of sponsored women feel they are progressing through the ranks at a satisfactory pace, compared to 57% of their unsponsored peers.”

Geni Whitehouse, countess of communication at Brotemarkle, Davis & Co LLP

The next year may be the year of the communicator, wrote Whitehouse in her post Big Idea 2014: Poor Communicators Need Not Apply.

“Technical skills matter. Doctors need to know the difference between an appendix and a kidney... Lawyers should be able to spout rules and regulations… Coders need to know their way around HTML5,” she wrote. “But in 2014, we are going to find those all-important technical skills sliding to second position in evaluating members of a profession. Communication, the skill that is often mentioned but rarely evaluated, is going to rise to the top of the list.”

But that skill goes beyond an ability to express yourself well. In 2014, the need for good communication will go much deeper, wrote Whitehouse. “As professionals, we have to get better at making information relevant — at explaining why the medical procedure is needed, how the tax law applies and why the judge ruled the way he did,” she wrote. “Information is everywhere. Data is piling up. Global transactions are moving at the speed of light. People who can make sense of the information are going to be more valuable than ever.”

Even beyond that core knowledge, argued Whitehouse, will be a need for nuance. That is, professionals who can act as “skilled translators who can tailor their message to meet the needs of different audiences.”

Developing this, wrote Whitehouse, could be the key to future career success. “People will be promoted based not on how smart they sound, but on how well they can rel

Summary: Three big thinkers weigh in on the keys to career success in the new year, from communication, to eschewing mentors and more.


Fallout from the news of state Sen. Leland Yee's arrest was swift and severe in his home district this week, with many of his constituents expressing shock that a man whom many considered to be one of the "good guys" could be implicated in such a far-reaching scandal.

Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco and most of San Mateo County, was one of 26 people ensnared in a five-year federal investigation that also targeted notorious Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow.

An outspoken advocate of gun control and open government, Yee was arrested Wednesday and charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms as well as scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. While Yee has yet to comment on the allegations, people who live in his district were quick to offer their opinions.

"You tend to think of the Sunset District as this quiet, sleepy little backwater," said Charles Burch, a 63-year-old dispatcher for an alarm company who has lived in Yee's district since 1979. "And then to hear that he could be involved with Chinatown gangs and the sale of guns overseas - it's hard to believe."

For some, Yee's troubles were just another black eye for a political system that they feel increasingly fails to represent them.

"It's like, who can you trust?" said Christopher Mei, 62.

Mei, who works at the California Public Utilities Commission and lives in the Sunset, thought Yee should resign immediately.

"He has completely violated the public trust," he said. "In his case, he should quit while he's behind."

While many expressed shock at the extent of the allegations leveled against Yee, some weren't surprised to hear of yet another politician implicated in scandal. Two high-profile state Democratic state senators from Southern California - Ron Calderon of Montebello and Roderick Wright of Inglewood, both in Los Angeles County - recently also found themselves embroiled in legal troubles.

"It's horrible, but it's not that surprising," Ed Kanoti said from behind the counter of Eddy's Liquors in the Sunset District. "Politicians tell you one thing when they're running for office, but then once they're elected, they tell you something completely different."

Others took Wednesday's revelations more personally.

"It's a slap in the face to the Asian community," said Billy Shen, a 53-year-old graphic designer who also calls the Sunset home.

The dismay felt by Shen extends beyond Yee's district. Breanne Winfield lives in the Bayview, outside Yee's senate district, but works in the Sunset at a boutique near Ninth Avenue and Judah Street. As the mother of a young child, Winfield said she wonders more than ever where her kids are supposed to find role models.

"Who is our younger generation supposed to look up to?" she asked.

Amid the avalanche of criticism, at least one Sunset resident was skeptical of the case against the senator.

"To me, it smells like entrapment," said Ron Robinson, who has lived around the corner from Yee's residence for roughly 30 years. "If it is true, I don't think he was taking the money for himself - it was all for his campaign. We all need to wait and see how this thing shakes out."

One consistent theme in the reactions of Yee's constituents was frustration with the role that money plays in politics.

"It's amazing the actions people can rationalize when they're trying to retire these massive amounts of debt," Burch said in reference to the roughly $70,000 that Yee owed after an unsuccessful run for San Francisco mayor in 2011.

"I'd love to see this lead to some kind of campaign finance reform. The amount of money it takes to run for office these days means that some people are going to reach out to questionable sources. When you have to constantly be raising funds instead of doing the work of the people, this type of thing is bound to happen."

Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale

Summary: Fallout from the news of state Sen. Leland Yee's arrest was swift and severe in his home district this week, with many of his constituents expressing shock that a man whom many considered to be one of the "good guys" could be implicated in such a far-reaching scandal.  Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco and most of San Mateo County, was one of 26 people ensnared in a five-year federal investigation that also targeted notorious Chinatown gangster Raymond "Shrimp Boy" Chow.  An outspoken advocate of gun control and open government, Yee was arrested Wednesday and charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms as well as scheming to defraud citizens of honest services.  For some, Yee's troubles were just another black eye for a political system that they feel increasingly fails to represent them.  Two high-profile state Democratic state senators from Southern California - Ron Calderon of Montebello and Roderick Wright of Inglewood, both in Los Angeles County - recently also found themselves embroiled in legal troubles.


1. Even Cliven Bundy’s staunchest supporters are up in arms over the Nevada rancher’s racist remarks:

“I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?” Bundy said in remarks first reported by the New York Times. “They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston and MSNBC Political Analyst and Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson join us.

2. Next up: The Great Cliven Bundy Walk-Back of 2014. Sens. Dean Heller, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Texas gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott are changing their tune in light of Bundy’s comments. Karen Finney, host of MSNBC’s ”Disrupt” and former Director of Communications for the DNC, joins us.

3. Then: Actor Tim Simons, star of “VEEP,” talks politics and satire with Chris Hayes.

4. Plus: Race in the Obama era. We’re taking a close look at the link between racism and the anti-government rhetoric we’ve been seeing around the country. Christina Greer, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Fordham University, MSNBC Contributor Sam Seder, Host of “Majority Report,” and Robert George, Editorial Writer for the New York Post join us to discuss.

Summary: All In Agenda for Thursday, April 24, 2014.


05/27/2014 at 10:00 AM EDT

has legs that don't quit, particularly on Instagram!

The star posted two more photos online late Monday in which she again shows off her impressively muscular gams – the result of the

she's been committed to lately.

"If I'm in a bathing suit I should pose proudly," she

as she is seen in dark sunglasses, leaning against a white column and holding one of fiancé Eric Johnson's golf clubs.

"Eric's driver," she wrote alongside

Simpson, 33, mom to daughter Maxwell, 2, and son Ace, 11 months, has been on a quite public

over the past year, celebrating regular milestones with lots of sexy selfies.

Summary: The star poses with one of her fiancé's golf clubs in a pair of Memorial Day photos


05/29/2014 at 11:15 AM EDT

In a word, it was "amazing."

That is Kylie Jenner's short and sweet assessment of big sister

Kylie, 16, and sister Kendall, 18, gave their first remarks about the nuptials to Canadian entertainment show

in an interview set to air Thursday night. And while they didn't reveal a lot, they both spoke about how wonderful the event was.

"We can't say much, but it was amazing," said Kylie.

"It was beautiful. It was filled with a lot of love," added Kendall.

Kendall and Kylie arrived together back in Los Angeles on Monday, after being spotted a day earlier arriving at the Paris airport – with Jaden Smith – for the flight home.

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West

Summary: The sisters "can't say much" but thought it was a beautiful event


UPDATED 06/17/2014 at 04:10 PM EDT • Originally published 06/17/2014 at 03:30 PM EDT

John Brooks of the United States celebrates his goal in the 2014 FIFA World Cup game against Ghana

When it comes to game-winning strategies, 21-year-old defender John Brooks knows how to get his head in the game.

during Team USA's opening match of the World Cup against longtime rivals Ghana

– and instantly made the 6'4" substitute-turned-superstar one of the most famous members of the United States Men's National Team.

For Brooks, the goal was a literal dream come true.

"I told some teammates that I dreamed that I scored in the 80th minute and we won the game," Brooks

. "And now it was the 86th minute, and we won."

To supplement his overnight promotion from second string to an American household name, here are five things you need to know about the man of the hour, John Brooks.

While Brooks has U.S. citizenship, he grew up in Berlin, Germany, where his father, an American military serviceman and Chicago native, was stationed. His mother, whom he

as "the most important person in my life," is German, and brought Brooks up bilingual. Brooks is one of five German-American players on Team USA; a quick look at his

accounts showcases his interchangeable use of both languages.

Brooks started playing soccer when he was five years old. What began as a way to connect with his friends in the Hertha BSC youth academy turned into a professional contract and rank as a

in the second league of the Bundesliga during the 2012-2013 season. Despite his German roots,

his choice to take his loyalties overseas was "not a hard decision."

Not only is he the acclaimed hero – the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln,

– who brought the U.S.'s string of World Cup defeats by Ghana to a dramatic end, he's the

to ever score a goal in all 84 years of World Cup history. Did we mention he's only 21 years old?

The record-setting defender is also a trendsetter in the tattoo department. He

– the one on the left an outline of Berlin with a star on his childhood neighborhood, the one on the right an outline of Illinois with a star on Chicago, his father's hometown.

Back in April of this year, in the middle of Hertha BSC's debut season in the Bundesliga, Brooks

by coach Jos Luhukay for a "large-scale back tattoo," which Luhukay was worried might lead to inflammation or infection at the site of stitching. Brooks was not even allowed to travel with the team during this event – a punishment that must have stayed with him as a propellant toward success.

Soccer fans in Kansas City

For more inspiring stories about real-life heroes and can't miss articles found only in PEOPLE

Summary: Get to know the 21-year-old behind Team USAâs World Cup success


07/07/2014 at 08:50 AM EDT

in front of their friends and family on July 5, the couple told PEOPLE it was "the happiest moment of our lives."Â Â

For Simpson, who turns 34 on July 10, it proved be one of the most beautiful moments as well. As seen in PEOPLE's photo exclusive, the bride chose a wedding day look that was "sexy, easy and ethereal,"Â says Simpson's hair stylist Roque Jimenez. "Nothing too contrived."

, Simpson's makeup artist Karan Mitchell chose a romantic palette for her makeup. And to add some simple sparkle, Simpson's longtime friend and stylist Nicole Chavez added Neil Lane diamond earrings.Â

"It was a labor of love," says Chavez of putting together Simpson's wedding day look.Â

Same could be said for the event itself. "The whole weekend was magical for us," Simpson tells PEOPLE. "We feel complete."

Summary: "The whole weekend was magical for us," the bride tells PEOPLE


Mary-Anne Jackson (left) at a ceremony to remember those lost in the CTV building (Facebook/CTV families trust) .

The sole CTV worker to escape the broadcaster’s collapsing building during the Christchurch earthquake has told 9 Stories she takes strength from the knowledge her departed friends and colleagues are watching over her.

Receptionist Mary-Anne Jackson was on the first floor of the Canterbury Television (CTV) building in Christchurch’s CBD when the earthquake hit on February 22, 2011.

She immediately ran into the street. Her quick thinking made her the only member of the CTV team to escape the building where 16 of her colleagues and 99 other people perished – the worst concentration of casualties on a day which claimed 185 lives.

"It's been a full-on three-and-a-half years. It's been very exhausting," she told 9 Stories. "[My colleagues] all had so much to offer.”

Ms Jackson said the months immediately after the disaster were the worst but she drew strength from the thought her friends and co-workers were looking down on her.

"We had two weeks of going to funerals – sometimes two a day," Ms Jackson said. "I'm spiritual and I was brought up with religion. I think there's another life after this. They are there, and they are watching over us.”

"They're pleased with what we've done and they're thankful. I believe in that, and it's helped me get through it."

By April the station was up and running from temporary premises and Ms Jackson continues to work with CTV to this day.

"It's what they would have wanted," she said. "We did it for the ones who lost their lives, good people. We owed it to them."

Along with retired network engineer Peter Brown the pair form part of an extended group of bereaved families and friends who meet to remember those they lost.

July 29, 2014: New Zealand emergency services spent days searching for survivors at the headquarters of Canterbury Television in Christchurch, after the building collapsed during the 2011 earthquake.

That network became a central support structure in the time after the disaster, Mr Brown said.

"They saw the building come down right in front of their eyes. So I ended up really looking after a lot of the CTV people, and shielding them from the media," he told 9 Stories. "We just carried each other along and supported each other. Being so busy probably helped us cope."

These days, in the new CTV premises, there are pictures of the staff members who were killed in the departments where they used to work.

The station's staff gathers each year on the anniversary of the collapse to remember those they lost.

But there are still some things the survivors don't talk about.

"For a lot of people, we knew the bodies were crushed. There were some families who got no remains back at all," Mr Brown said.

"People know it, but they've just kind of left it alone, and it's probably good to."

For some survivors, like Ms Jackson, justice is a priority. The people who built the CTV building need to be held accountable, she says.

"You don't just get away with things like that," she says.

For Peter Brown, seeking justice is secondary to making sure no-one has to endure what those in the CTV building have been through.

"We want to know that it will never happen again,” he said.

A wreath left by families and friends of those lost in the CTV building on the first anniversary of the earthquake (Facebook/CTV families trust).

Author: Lachlan Williams; Approving Editor: Simon Black

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“Frank” dances a hipster’s shimmy around the idea of creative madness, but it never comes close enough to get burned by the flames. As you may or may not have heard, the movie features Michael Fassbender in a giant papier-mache head as the title character, a mystical, mercurial rock ’n’ roll guru whose tiny cult — the other members of his band, basically — worship him as a demi-god. Walking a line between droll comedy and a darker, more unsettling drama that the filmmakers aren’t quite up to, “Frank” is an entertaining curio with flashes of inspiration. That’s also a pretty good description of Frank’s music.

The movie’s main character — the normal in this house of weird — isn’t Frank but Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, Brendan’s up-and-coming kid), a woebegone wannabe songwriter in Dublin who broadcasts his blah life to all six of his Twitter followers. A chance encounter on a windy beach gives Jon a valuable connection to a passing rock group with the inscrutable name of Soronprfb; like drummers in “Spinal Tap,” keyboard players exit Frank’s band at an alarming rate, and the latest is currently trying to drown himself. After Jon subsequently proves himself at a gig, he’s then invited — kidnapped, really — to a rural island for months of communal living and, hopefully, recording.

If Jon is our blank canvas, Frank and the other bandmembers supply the paint splatters. The most terrifying is Clara, a multi-instrumentalist played by Maggie Gyllenhaal at her most hilariously gloomy. “Stay away from my [expletive] theremin,” she tells Jon by way of introduction and soon the two are wrestling for control of Frank’s soul and career. The other two band members, a testy French guitarist (Francois Civil) and a monosyllabic lady drummer (Carla Azar), watch from the sidelines, as does the group’s manager, Don (Scoot McNairy), a scruffy lost boy who apparently has done time with Frank in the vales of institutionalization.

Fassbender takes an interesting gamble here. One of our most physically commanding film actors — he has a classic movie star profile and a ferocious air of commitment — he hides his features inside a wide-eyed generic parade head. With airholes. Frank sings in a powerful baritone that calls to mind Ian Curtis, the late Joy Division leader, but when not singing he speaks in shy, sincere tones. Eager to please, he tells the perplexed Jon that he’ll verbalize his facial expressions to make communication easier. (“Welcoming smile,” for instance.) But the head stays on, even in the shower.

The character is based on a true-life rock eccentric named Chris Sievey, a.k.a. Frank Sidebottom, whose 1980s British punk band the Freshies featured a keyboardist, Jon Ronson, who went on to co-write the screenplay for “Frank” with Peter Straughan. (Sievey himself died in 2010.) But “Frank” taps into an entire mythos of damaged pop geniuses, from Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys to the schizophrenic Texas troubadour Daniel Johnston. The movie meanders idly through a few worthwhile questions, too. When does the protective adoration of fans and fellow musicians become harmful enablement? Is the romance of the bonkers artist more important than the reality of mental anguish?

“Frank” flirts but doesn’t commit, in part because it never lets us into Frank’s head, figuratively or literally. The band rehearsals are played for whimsical comedy, and the emphasis on the keyboard player’s point of view keeps us on the outside of events. An unexpected invitation to Austin’s SXSW festival — Jon’s video blog of the recording sessions has amassed followers on both sides of the Atlantic — brings the band to the States and the expected collision between the kid’s ambitions (massive success) and the rest of the band’s expectations (let Frank be Frank). Director Leonard Abrahamson lets things fall apart in ways that are amusing but not terribly involving.

Toward the end, we do get to see Frank with the head removed, and the scene is as weirdly touching as the rest of the movie should have been. That’s partly a tribute to Fassbender’s natural charisma even when the actor looks like a shipwreck. It’s also the moment when the darker, more discomfiting themes of “Frank” slip gracefully to the surface, as the title character sings a declaration of love for our unkind world that sticks in both your ear and your heart. “Frank” might be a less cute movie without the mask but it would probably be a better one.

Summary: “Frank” review: Michael Fassbender plays a mysterious rock guru with a giant papier-mache head: Think Syd Barrett or Brian Wilson as a parade float.


Thinking out of the lot ... the Salvatorplatz car park in Munich.

There was a golden age of motoring when the multi-storey car park was considered a symbol of pride and progress. But car parks are fast becoming symbols of our congested cities, our heavy carbon footprint, our dependency on oil; a civilisation that once embraced the motor car as an agent of liberation now feels a little sheepish about the whole affair.

The most architecturally significant car park in Britain is probably the supreme expression of this sentiment: the Trinity in Gateshead, designed by Owen Luder and featured in the film Get Carter. The film was shot just a year after the building's completion, in 1969, and in it, the brutalist seven-storey edifice has already become a symbol of the decline of modernist optimism.

In more recent times, the only British architect to bring something new to this uninspiring genre has been, surprisingly, Zaha Hadid. Back in 2001, she produced a striking reinterpretation of a park-and-ride scheme in Strasbourg. It was essentially your bog-standard Tarmac lot, plus a sheltered tram stop, but in Hadid's hands, it became a piece of landscape art, with patterns of short lines and shaded zones sweeping across the site in wide curves.

For serious, cutting-edge, multi-storey action, though, the place to go is Germany. Not content with manufacturing quality cars and writing songs in praise of their autobahns, the Germans seem to pride themselves on the quality of their traffic infrastructure, too. The Burda Car Park in Offenburg so inspired the Royal Institute of British Architects that they gave it an award in 2004, praising the gossamer-like lightness of its cladding - a translucent lattice made up of horizontal strips of Oregon pine, suspended on cables "like a duvet thrown over a bed". Designed by Ingenhoven Overdiek & Partners, it's the type of structure you could shoot car adverts in.

More recently, a new extension to an existing car park in Munich actually enhanced its sensitive environment. Because of its location in Salvatorplatz, close to the ancient city walls, this car park had to be good-looking to get planning permission, architect Peter Haimerl explains. Its facades, which sit on top of a 1960s brick building, he describes as a "two-dimensional matrix" of galvanised steel, composed of 20,000 identical lengths.

The design was generated by a computer program Haimerl developed to simulate traffic patterns in an imaginary future city. The steel was then cut by computer-controlled equipment, directly from the program. "It's not random at all," he says. "It's the result of a long design process, and it opens up a range of possibilities. In principle, this could be done on existing car parks anywhere."

These schemes prove that it's possible to turn the very banality of car parks into an asset. The functional requirements are so painfully simple to satisfy, there is plenty of scope to do something sculptural or decorative or simply more useful with their facades.

An extreme example of thinking out of the lot was offered two years ago by British mavericks FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), and their snappily titled Custom Car Rococo project. It was designed as a public art project - for a Wal-Mart car park in Munich, coincidentally - but was sadly never built. "The things we liked most around Munich were the palaces, like Nymphenburg, which is a low-key version of Versailles," says FAT's Sam Jacob. "So the idea was to transform this car park using the language of traffic mixed with the language of grand landscape design."

The result was a sort of hallucinogenic traffic playground - the antidote to all that spirit-crushing functionalism: parking bay and zebra crossing graphics arranged into baroque patterns augmented by ornate curlicues, and clusters of Belisha beacons and road signs dotted across rolling hills of Tarmac, like trees in a landscape. "The intention was to draw attention to the fact that car parks take up vast amounts of space and they're very public," says Jacob, "but you don't actually do anything in them. They're simply space planning. There is a serious issue about what you do with cars in the city, especially when you don't want them there."

Our collective response to the issue appears to be denial. We celebrate good design in train stations, art galleries and even energy-efficient airports, not to mention grandstanding projects for automotive corporations, such as Hadid's BMW plant. But to even address, let alone celebrate, the issues of the everyday roadscape is somehow unseemly. Even if psychologically we've moved on to a sustainable, post-oil utopian mindset, the truth is cars are not going to go away any time soon.

Even when the oil does run out, the chances are we'll have alternatively powered versions of the same cars; and unless someone works out a way of folding them up into small cubes, we're still going to have to work out where to put them. Perhaps if architects considered car parks more, we'd get more car parks we could call architecture.

Summary: Must a multi-storey be an architectural disaster? Not if we learn from Germany, says Steve Rose.


FORTUNE — To her credit, the remedies U.S. DIstrict Judge Denise Cote proposed last week to prevent Apple AAPL from ever again conspiring to fix e-book prices were far less draconian (and frankly bizarre) than the ones the Department of Justice had requested. See DOJ remedies.

But the air of unreality that permeated her earlier decision in the case — in which Amazon AMZN , a monopolist engaged in the predatory pricing of e-books, escaped untouched, and Apple, the new entrant in the market, was found liable for violating antitrust law — carried over into Friday’s hearing. (Transcript.)

One of the strangest moments came in a set speech Judge Cote gave just before she made her remedy proposals.

After describing Apple and the five so-called publisher defendants as playing “hard ball” in a “rough and tumble game … for high stakes,” she added this complaint:

None of the publisher defendants — and this is true for Apple, as well — have expressed any remorse over their actions, made any public statements admitting wrongdoing, undertaken any voluntary program to prevent a recurrence. They are, in a word, unrepentant.

She may have been playing to the press box — and indeed, the news that the judge had “scolded” Apple for being “unrepentant” showed up in dozens of headlines.

But the passage was also unintentionally revealing.

For as Harper Collins lawyer Shep Goldfein took pains to point out “with all due respect,” his company — like Apple — does in fact have an antitrust compliance department to prevent a recurrence. And as for admitting wrongdoing, Goldfein reminded the judge that “It’s routine in any settlement agreement, for a whole host of reasons, including some tax law reasons, that you don’t admit liability.”

Judge Cote knew — or should have known — about the antitrust compliance programs. And after 19 years on the federal bench, she must have known that having settled, none of the publishers were going to make public statements admitting wrongdoing.

If the attorneys for Apple and the publishers took objection to the tone of her remarks — which seemed more appropriate for a crusading prosecutor than a fair-minded judge — they would not be the first. Many of the 21 reviews she received in The Robing Room — a kind of Rate My Professors for judges — described her as hard-working and meticulous. But more than half complained that she was “biased” and pre-judged cases before she heard the evidence.

Here’s a sample of what lawyers who have appeared before her — writing anonymously for obvious reasons — have posted:

For more, go to The Robing Room.

Summary: Lawyers have complained for years that she pre-judges cases before she enters the courtroom.


The eruption of popular protests in Thailand and Ukraine over the weekend shouldn’t be taken so lightly by emerging markets investors. The two seemingly unrelated disturbances both revolve around deep-seated and unresolved political issues, which have been simmering for years. Should either of them actually blow, the resulting toxic fallout could have dire economic consequences for their neighbors and deliver yet another pelting to investors.

The emerging markets have been particularly volatile this year with growth stalling in China and political upheavals disrupting Brazil and Egypt. Worries that the U.S. was set to curb its bond buying program earlier this year sent the MSCI Emerging Market Index plummeting in the summer, only to rebound quickly thereafter when the Federal Reserve unexpectedly decided to keep the program running at full blast. Despite the pullback by the Fed, the MSCI is still down 5.3% on the year. That compares with the S&P 500 SPX , which has shot up a bubbly 27% during the same time period.

But the quest for yield has led investors back into the emerging markets, with billions of dollars pouring in from investors in the U.S. and Europe. Argentina’s Merval stock market has jumped nearly 70% since July, for example, while EM companies have sold a whopping $71 billion worth in bonds from June to November, according to Dealogic. Clearly, EM is back — or that is what investors have been led to believe.

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Take what is going on currently in the Ukraine and Thailand, emerging market darlings for their respective orbits in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Protests in both countries have quickly consumed the political and economic hearts of both countries and threaten to throw EM investors yet another curve ball.

In Thailand, corruption at the highest levels of power has stunted the peaceful nation’s economic growth prospects for nearly a decade. The people have grown tired of it and this weekend, after weeks of protests, were able to push the Prime Minister to dissolve parliament and call for new elections. Disruption continues in Bangkok as the Prime Minister has refused to step down before the elections.

In Ukraine, years of political infighting between those loyal to their former Russian overlords and those who want to forge closer ties with the European Union has left the country in economic limbo. But protests there went into overdrive this weekend after the government scrapped a trade agreement with the European Union at the behest of Russia, who wants Ukraine to remain in their orbit. Ukrainian patriots want new elections so that they can purge their corrupt government of officials who they believe put the interests of Moscow over that of the Ukrainian people. Fighting there intensified Tuesday night as protestors occupied the central square in Kiev.

But investors seemed to shrug off these two worrisome developments, indeed, the MSCI EM index actually strengthened on Monday. The Market Vectors Russia index RSX , the largest dedicated Russian ETF, was up 0.75% on Monday, even though Ukrainian protesters tore down a statue of Lenin in central Kiev over the weekend. Thailand’s SET stock index also gained on Monday, up 0.43%.

The stronger numbers would seem to suggest that all is well, even though that is clearly not the case. It appears that some investors have developed “protest fatigue” and are choosing to simply ignore the conflagrations in Ukraine and Thailand. The fatigue emanates from the deluge of “people power” uprisings in a number of emerging markets this year, many of which simply fizzled out. Apparently, the markets believe that will be the case in these two incidents as well.

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For example, in Egypt, the toppling of the government in a military coup didn’t send the Egyptian economy into a tailspin; indeed, it seemed to have brought order to what was a chaotic political vacuum following the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Meanwhile, in Brazil, the so-called “Salad Revolution” this summer failed to disrupt the nation’s economic development plans in any significant way. Shortly after the protests calmed down in July, Brazil issued $3.5 billion worth of bonds to a pack of yield-hungry EM investors without a hitch.

The lull in protests in Egypt and Brazil seem to be giving EM investors a false sense of security. Indeed nothing was resolved in either country, and opposition groups remain organized. It is tempting to assume that things will just work themselves out, but the root of both protests revolve around two growing and troublesome issues — income inequality and political corruption — both of which plague a number of EM countries, including Thailand and Ukraine.

“Over the past two years, India, Russia, Brazil, Egypt, Turkey, and Indonesia have all seen their largest political protests in decades,” Citibank analysts wrote in a note to their clients Monday. “Protests often beget protests, and they become more common in the run-up to elections, which in many of these countries will occur over the next year.”

Unless there is some resolution of the core issues behind a revolt, they will simply resurface again and again until things explode. Ukraine and Thailand have been wrestling with their issues for years, and it seems that the people have finally had it. New elections in Thailand will mean weeks of further protests. Meanwhile, it seems that the Ukrainian people are determined to force an election. Elections due in Egypt to replace the military government will surely sprout new revolts there while elections in Brazil next October should make for an interesting summer.

If anything, the EM looks more politically unstable than ever.

Summary: So far, emerging markets investors have shrugged off protests in the Ukraine and Thailand, but they do so at their own peril.


The growth of mobile devices in the last couple of years has been undeniably staggering. It is worth remembering that at the start of 2010 the iPad had not even been released and the word tablet was confined to the medical industry. nVision reported that at the start of the year ownership of smartphones and tablets among the British population stood at 70% and 41% respectively. Simply put, there are more eyes gazing into glowing screens than ever before.But it is more than just eyes; Millward Brown's Ad Reaction 2014 research reveals that on an average day in the UK, combined screen usage of smartphone and tablet now exceed that of laptop and even TV. It is this combination of high ownership and usage which means mobile devices will soon become the primary platform for online transactions.

The Google Search Trend for "mobile banking" reveals that levels of search interest have been consistently increasing since 2007 and are forecast to carry on growing.The British Banking Association report 'Banking on the Move' highlighted that over 12.4m banking apps have been downloaded, and in 2013 there were on average 18.6m banking app uses a week, double the 9.1m seen in 2012. This indicates an uptake much quicker than traditional online banking saw in the last decade.One reason for this increased uptake is that banks have embraced mobile much quicker than they did online banking, with banks learning from past experiences to give their customers a much simpler mobile banking platform. Additional data shows that app usage to check accounts and make payments is outstripping that of mobile browser access too.

Another interesting revelation from Google Search Trends is that the some of the highest interest for the term "mobile banking" comes from Africa.Nigerian company Paga, which was founded in 2009, offers a simple way to transfer money to anyone in the country using just their mobile number. In a country where 80% of the population do not have access to a bank account (Source: KPMG) the importance of mobile services like Paga become all too clear. As of this month the company is approaching 2m users and during 2013 it processed 15 transactions a minute which were worth $300m.

Research from Accenture recently revealed that 1 in 4 UK consumers would consider using a purely digital bank – a bank with no branches or call centres that is only accessible via laptops and mobile devices.There are several examples of this trend starting to emerge. US company GoBank gives its customers a mobile-first banking experience allowing users to pay bills and send money via their smartphone, or even pay in a cheque by taking a photo of it.Financial startup Number26 is offering an interesting take on modern banking. Besides a simplified sign-up process which includes an ID check over webcam, Number26 focuses a lot of attention on its mobile app. Along with the usual functionality of a banking app it also supplies customers with real-time transaction data and the ability to block or unblock a debit card at the touch of a button directly within the app.

New research from Unique Digital and YouGov shows that 42% of UK online consumers have used a mobile device to search and purchase travel and financial goods online, suggesting we are starting to emerge from a time where mobile was only used as a research device. This is backed up further by Hitachi Personal Finance who recently reported that 44% of loans were taken out using a mobile device.Actual mobile payments were given a boost this week by the launch of Apple Pay. Utilising Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, owners of the iPhone 6 can now make purchases by holding their phone near a contactless reader. Even though Android phones have had this technology for some time the power of Apple will surely boost awareness among consumers and sway retailers to provide the option to use this technology. However the biggest barrier to success for NFC payments could be convincing users the technology is private and secure.

Summary: In the week Apple Pay launches we take a look at why mobile is the ideal platform for finance


It’s hard to say exactly when I first decided that everyone in business should study the art of copywriting, but it was probably upon being presented with yet another PowerPoint deck four times as long as it needed to be and wholly unpersuasive. The rhetorical power of these documents are typically so underwhelming that I began to wonder if anyone had plotted sales of Microsoft Office against the Dow Jones.

Browsing through The Copy Book: How Some of the Best Advertising Writers in the World Write Their Advertising convinced me. Released by art book publisher Taschen late last year, The Copy Book is an inadvertent how-to for crafting business communications. Lesson one: Keep it short.

This premium placed on brevity seems hypocritical when you first glance at the ads reproduced in the book. Many hark back to the age of long copy, when a full-page magazine ad might run to 400 words, or just over half the length of an average op-ed column. A great deal longer than a Tweet, in other words. But the copywriters’ process for arriving at 400 words was so rigorous that one could argue it represented a higher valuation of the reader’s time. (And by the time someone has Tweeted 18 times a day, well, there goes concision.)

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To a person, the copywriters quoted in the book stress that the process emerged because they lived in perpetual fear of losing their reader. Steve Hayden, creator of Apple’s AAPL “1984” ad, remarked that the truth of an easily distracted, borderline hostile audience was drilled into him from his earliest days in the business: “Four percent of the readership will slog through 70% of body copy no matter how bad it is. Your job is to beat those odds.”

They subjected the words to intense scrutiny and imagined an audience predisposed more toward contempt than admiration. Tony Brignull, former head of copywriting at Collett Dickenson Pearce, claims that if he had doubts about copy he was working on, he’d ask himself “would I walk up to a stranger at a drinks party and say these words to her? If she’s interested, amused, engaged, I write on. If she starts looking over my shoulder or reaching for the peanuts I start again.” Steve Harrison remarks in the book that a background in direct mail helped him understand the importance of hooking people from word one: “We set out to write headlines that elicited the response ‘bloody hell, that’s interesting, tell me more.'” (Lesson two: Be interesting.)

Surprisingly, many of these copywriters are remarkably unsentimental about language. “In a sense I am not interested in words,” comments David Abbott. “Words, for me, are the servants of the argument and on the whole I like them to be plain, simple and familiar.” Alfredo Marcantonio put his distrust of flourishes more succinctly: “Beware of adjectives,” he warns. “They don’t always do what you think.”

The typical Microsoft Office document is less cluttered with adjectives than abstractions and Unnecessary Capitalizations placed there out of fear that the work won’t be taken seriously without them. But the reliance on jargon and catchphrases — move the needle is my current favorite — betrays a different insecurity than that of the copywriter worried over losing his reader to a bowl of peanuts. The authors of overlong PowerPoint decks seem to worry most that they won’t be considered smart, and so they have to keep typing, in increasingly puffed-up language.

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The ad man would say they should worry more about not being boring. There’s some strategic insight in the excess length, however. If you extract the jargon and corporate-speak abstractions, what’s left may not be all that impressive. If the basic idea is fatuous, its stupidity has nowhere to hide once phrased in plain language.

But if the point sounds unremarkable once put in plain English, maybe that’s a signal to keep working and reworking. Not just the text, but also the idea — because there’s no separating the two.

How many times they go over a text is a theme the contributors to The Copy Book keep coming back to. Says David Abbott: “I might rework a headline 50 or 60 times to get the thought and balance exactly right.” They took a chopping block to any portion of the work that wasn’t accomplishing much.

So why is a similar process not in place in most workplaces? Some blame the disappearance of secretaries and the revision process they enabled along with it. “Used to be that you’d dictate a letter to your secretary and she’d type it up and show you a copy, and you’d look it over and mark it with changes,” one longtime litigation attorney I spoke to said. “Maybe in that interim you reconsidered some things you thought you wanted to say but on further reflection didn’t. Now everyone just fires off an email.”

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Others blame the increasing amounts of time spent reporting on what we’ve been doing all day at the expense of actually doing it.

So it’s refreshing, in this era of swollen documents, to come across such strong endorsements of saying less. “When you get your copy to the point where you’re really, really happy with it,” Jim Durfee advised, “cut it by a third.” Tony Cox edits his copy down “until I end up with the nub of the thing.” Adrian Holmes suggested looking at a page as a visual object and asking if any paragraphs looked excessively heavy, in which case, words got deleted.

Which points to a paradox at the heart of copywriting: A copywriter knows how limited the chances are of anyone reading his or her work, let alone read it all the way to the end. But the fact that the work was likely to be disrespected only spurred them to improve it.

Today, a great deal of media attention is paid to people whose indiscreet post or impolitic YouTube video makes life difficult for them. It’s news because it’s the exception. The majority of content produced today is ignored. There’s too much of it and not enough time. We’re left with an argument for more process, fewer pages. Concludes The Copy Book’s John Bevins: “Copywriting has taught me that [our work] enriches or impoverishes not just us, but society itself.” When we borrow someone’s attention, “we should strive to give something more valuable back.”

Summary: Put something in plain language and if the basic idea is fatuous, its stupidity has nowhere to hide.


Updated NOV 10, 2014 3:14p ET

PHOENIX -- Let's tick off a few boxes on the checklist:

-- Relentlessly cold-blooded foe in any game of H-O-R-S-E that excludes trick shots.

-- A rising star in the NBA coaching stable.

-- Presides over one of the most exciting teams in the Western Conference.

But Steve Kerr, who completed his sixth game as an NBA coach Sunday at US Airways Center, is happy to embrace any comparisons to the Phoenix coach.

"I think Jeff and I are pretty similar personalities," Kerr said before his Golden State Warriors hit sloppy mode and blew the game. "There's a lot of fire inside, but pretty calm and laid back at the same time.

"I think players appreciate that. You don't want a huge emotional rollercoaster ride every day, but you gotta have some direction and some fire, so I looked at Jeff, the job he did last year and the success he had and drew inspiration from that. I still watch him and his team with respect. They do a lot of innovative things offensively and they play hard and they're obviously really well coached."

The well-coached evidence wasn't very obvious on Sunday for either team, but that's what can happen during an 82-game season. Looking pragmatically, the Warriors at 5-1 and Suns at 4-3 seem to be in very good, strategic hands.

"I just learned so much just trying to guard him in practice every day," Kerr said referring to his rookie season (1988-89). "Once he went to Utah, he was one of the guys I tried to emulate.

"I wasn't nearly as good as him, but he inspired me to get better. The guy's a basketball savant. You feel it as a teammate and playing against him, I knew it was only a matter of time before he got into the coaching ranks."

And it was inevitable that Kerr, a standout at the University of Arizona and serial NBA champion (three in Chicago, two in San Antonio), would make the transition.

"This suits me well," he said of coaching. "I really love to be on the floor with the players. I love being part of the group every day and trying to help our team get better. But to be part of it every single minute is really exciting for me.

"To be honest, I didn't ever think I'd play in the NBA, so I thought I would coach right out of college. The NBA career kinda happened, didn't expect it, but it happened. Once I was done playing, my kids were sort of junior-high age and I knew the toll that coaching can take, family-wise ... so I chose the TV route to balance out my life, which worked great. Now my kids don't care where I am every day, so I might as well coach."

The more Hornacek implores his team to play at a faster tempo, the more the tempo remains about the same.

Although the Suns moved up to sixth in possessions per 48 minutes, the 95.7 mark is about where they were last season.

As usual, the issue is walking the ball into the frontcourt after an opponent score. The other transition variables, however, are rising into place.

Phoenix ranks 14th in the league in defensive efficiency (relatively high for this franchise) and ninth in defensive-rebounding efficiency. Those upgrades help generate more transition opportunities.

But after leading the league in fast-break points per game last season (18.7), the statistical defensive improvements haven't prevented a slip to third (16.6) this season.

Fast-break efficiency is a bit higher, so the trigger that isn't being pulled seems to be in the players' overall approach.

"We weren't getting into our offense quick enough," Hornacek said when asked about the pace of his team's first five games. "We're only hitting our first option and then the second option we were breaking it off because the shot clock was at five.

"Even if we call a half-court set, we need to run down the court and get to our spots quicker and start the play at 20 (seconds on the shot clock). If we can start the play at 19 or 20, we have time to run the different options. It's gotta be that mindset. Sometimes when the other team makes it, makes a shot, we're thinking 'ah, we let the guy score.' You gotta forget about it and always be on the attack. If we can keep that in our heads, we'll try to do a better job of continuing that, waving and saying, 'let's go, let's go.'

"We've got to take it out and go and kind of see if we can get the other teams to play in our pace sometimes."

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With only two starters working the fourth quarter of Sunday's come-from-behind party against the Warriors, you might think chemistry issues are due.

This wasn't the first time Isaiah Thomas and Gerald Green dominated down the stretch of a game with Eric Bledsoe and Goran Dragic spectating. But anyone keeping an eye on the bench could see Bledsoe popping off his seat to lead the cheers and Dragic high-fiving his teammates when Golden State called a string of time outs.

"Those guys were fine with it," Hornacek said. "Again, that will help us as the season goes on -- not wearing those guys out. Goran played great, got us going and making 3s and looking like the normal Goran."

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Summary: Suns still not running as fast as coach Jeff Hornacek would like; rotation cohesion.


October 2013 was Banksy month in New York City. The subversive British street artist announced that he’d unveil a new work of art somewhere in the five boroughs for each day of the month. So New York, New York, would become an even more of a helluva town. The Bronx is up, and the Battery down, with the people finding Banksy’s handiwork all around.

Chris Moukarbel’s energetic-to-the-point-of-hectic “Banksy Does New York” looks at those people searching for the art, looking at and reacting to it, and, in several instances, walking away with it. That emphasis makes sense. Banksy’s art without an audience (and its surprise, delight, outrage, and not-infrequent obliviousness) is a much-diminished thing, like a statue without a plinth.

The documentary airs Monday on HBO at 9 p.m.

“Banksy Does New York” is much more about New York than about Banksy. He maintains the guerrilla-prankster anonymity that has been central to his career; and though he’s thanked in the credits, he wasn’t involved in making the film. “Banksy Does New York” isn’t at all like “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” the hilarious and shrewd Banksy-directed documentary from 2010.

Each morning Banksy would post on Instagram a photograph of that day’s work, along with a mock-serious “audioguide” intoned by a pompous-sounding expert. The guides can be very funny. The first one called the artist “Bansky.” That makes him sound like a Russian anarchist, which isn’t that much of a reach.

Banksy would post image and audio, but not location. Finding the art was up to a growing population of Banksy hunters. Like art-world storm chasers, they’d rush off to track down the works. “It was like a giant scavenger hunt in New York,” one of them says. The hunters provided a bit of street theater to go along with the street art.

Banksys showed up in every borough, even Staten Island (on Oct. 19, with an, ahem, ant hill vagina). There was a stone Sphinx, in Queens. A poster design for “Occupy! The Musical,” in Bushwick. A robot spray-painting a bar code, in Coney Island. A panel truck delivering “calm” (there was a tropical diorama inside). Another truck, called “Sirens of the Lambs,” carried a load of toy sheep, driven along a route of meat packers and butchers.

A Banksy backlash set in. Recurring news footage of bemused TV anchors is rather enchanting. An art critic for The New York Observer dismisses Banksy as kitschy and obvious. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, famously supportive of public art, is heard tut-tutting over vandalism. True enough, as someone else points out, Banksy’s a category of one. “When he vandalizes your property, the value goes up.”

The real issue here is money, and that’s where Banksy’s art is at its most subversive. A nondescript landscape painting he buys for $50 at a charity thrift shop returns as a donation a few days later. The canvas now has Banksy’s signature and a painted addition (of a figure in a Nazi uniform, no less). A few days later it’s auctioned off for $615,000. Another delayed-reaction Banksy takes the form of a cart selling souvenir art on upper Fifth Avenue, outside Central Park. The artworks, which go for $60 each, are by Banksy — though not billed as such. The first buyer, a woman who wants a couple for her children, negotiates a 50 percent discount. In the end, $420 worth are sold. Once Banksy reveals their provenance, each is estimated to be worth $250,000.

The documentary has its flaws: the flashiness of the editing, an overly insistent score, the sheer annoyingness of many of the talking heads. What is it about the contemporary art world that attracts such maddening people? There’s only one weak sequence. Moukarbel visits an art show in the Hamptons from last summer that includes the Banksy Sphinx (it’s one of the works that was grabbed by passersby). A grating cover version of “It’s My Party” plays on the soundtrack, and we see rich art consumers appraise the works on display. Banksy has already made the point multiple times about wealth, inequality, and economic/cultural grotesqueness, doing so with far more wit and imagination.

Banksy’s being British is an important part of both his art and his persona. It’s there in the furtiveness, the eccentric behavior, the often-acidulous humor. His taking up “residency” in New York makes absolute sense on one level. New York gave birth to graffiti, and where else is the street such a daily arena? Anonymous superheroes originated in New York. Really, isn’t Banksy an art-world equivalent of Spider-Man or Batman? Like them, he’s known only by his public-confounding deeds. Yet there’s also a sense in which Banksy fits in too well. He’s a classic New Yorker, all attitude and nose-thumbing. Instead of inciting a mob, he’s joining it. “Banksy Does New York” doubles as documentary and spiritual homecoming.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the person who said, “When he vandalizes your property, the value goes up” as a real estate developer.

Summary: The HBO documentary “Banksy Does New York” looks at the celebrated street artist’s October 2013 “residency” in the Big Apple.


“I was at a gas station in the Dominican Republic and this couple got out the car and started dancing,” Mikhail Baryshnikov, 66, says. “I was lucky they didn’t pay attention to me. People said: ‘Oh you manipulated the shot,’ but I swear to God, I didn’t.”

One of the greatest classical ballet dancers of our time is telling me about his new calling – photography. This month a show of his digital prints opens in London, featuring every type of dance from Brazilian hip-hop and Hawaiian hula to dancers with the Merce Cunningham company.

Baryshnikov has always taken black and white photos of family and friends (he has a daughter, Alexandra, from his relationship with the actor Jessica Lange, and three children in their 20s with his wife, the ex-dancer Lisa Rinehart) but he was never drawn to contemporary dance photography: “They’re set up in the studio with lights, they’re very slick.” However, inspired by masters such as Alexey Brodovitch and Irving Penn, Baryshnikov began to see how you could capture movement and fluidity in a more painterly way. He uses a technique known as, using long exposures to create a blur of bodies. “This one is my little nod to Picasso,” he says, showing me a picture of a flamenco dancer in Madrid.

Born in Riga, Latvia, the young Misha started ballet at the age of nine. His father was a soldier and after military parades there would often be semi-drunken dancing. “People applauded. The ham in me woke up,” he says. He moved to Leningrad, graduating from student to principal dancer of the Kirov Ballet in 1969. When he defected to the west in 1974 he joined American Ballet Theatre before co-founding modern dance company White Oak and in 2005 opening his own arts centre in New York.

Although he was nominated for an Oscar for his role in 1977’s The Turning Point, he thinks dance is treated as a “sidekick” by Hollywood. Theatre is his first love; he has performed Beckett and Chekhov, and more recently starred alongside Willem Dafoe in The Old Woman for Manchester international festival.

At 5ft 7in, Baryshnikov insists he’s no sex symbol but exudes a powerful charisma. He still dances but never in “a white tights way”. Playing Carrie’s Russian lover in the HBO series Sex and the City brought him a whole new fanclub (Sarah Jessica Parker says she cast him because he was the only man who could match Big). He is full of praise for his co-stars: “For six years those girls lived their characters. And the writers changed the text right before the takes. For me it was not my language, so at first I was worried they would think I was a total dyslexic egomaniac because I couldn’t do a simple phrase in the right way,” he laughs.

And he’s never been back to Russia. “I love Russian people and culture. I don’t like their government, that’s obvious, and I don’t think the country is going in the right direction in many ways, but it’s not my concern, I’m 40 years out of it. [Well] it is my emotional concern,” he adds, “I still have a brother and sister there… It’s kind of awful.”

The compensation for ageing is working with new people. “I’m afraid to get bored with myself. Because time is ticking and I’m in my 60s. Let’s face it, the thought of mortality, especially in men, gets stupidly inflamed. Women at least know they will outlive men.”

Baryshnikov’s wife, Lisa Rinehart, has also carved out a post-dance career, retraining as a video journalist. How exciting to see a partner change. “Well, it’s sometimes annoying,” he deadpans. “You arrive home and want to have a nice drink and chat, but you open the refrigerator and grab what’s left from last night’s dinner!”

Dancing Away is at ContiniArtUK gallery, 105 New Bond Street, London W1 from Saturday to 31 January

Summary: The dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov tells Liz Hoggard about his past in Riga and Russia, Sex and the City and a new exhibition of his photography


Nancy Kaye/ap file photo 1983

Even deep connoisseurs of classic soul music may have missed this one.

“I didn’t know it,” says producer and arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.

“A friend of mine played it for me. I had never heard these versions before,” says impresario Meghan Stabile, founder of New York-based Revive Music.

“I wasn’t even aware that it existed, and I grew up listening to Marvin,” says Skip Smith, Berklee College of Music professor and head of the school’s Neo-Soul Ensemble.

“Vulnerable,” the most obscure of Marvin Gaye’s albums, came out only in 1997, 13 years after the great singer’s tragic gunshot death at the hands of his father. The short collection of orchestral ballads had sat in a record company’s vaults since 1977, when Gaye recorded the songs for a planned album, “The Ballads,” that got shelved.

Among the R&B releases of 1997 — a year that brought Erykah Badu’s debut “Baduizm,” Mary J. Blige’s magisterial “Share My World,” and Usher’s hit-laden “My Way” — a 27-minute set of 20-year-old jazz-oriented arrangements from Gaye attracted little notice, even from those who consider his work a touchstone.

Now, at Stabile’s instigation and with Atwood-Ferguson’s arrangements, Smith’s band, and a host of co-conspirators including three of today’s most soulful vocalists, “Vulnerable” is getting its due. It’s the centerpiece of the Marvin Gaye tribute concert and celebration being held on Thursday night at Berklee.

The Neo-Soul Ensemble and the Berklee Contemporary Orchestra will together back singers Bilal, Aloe Blacc, and Chris Turner as they interpret “Vulnerable” in full, plus a range of better-known songs from different phases in Gaye’s career.

“It’s going to be a massive production,” says Smith.

“Vulnerable” was to be Gaye’s jazz album, and the songs are standards, the likes of “The Shadow of Your Smile” and “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So.” Gaye first took a crack at them in 1968 with arranger Bobby Scott. But the singer wasn’t happy with the work, and set it aside. When he returned to the material nearly a decade later, he was a more complete artist, at once liberated from Motown’s conventions and scarred in his personal life — and perhaps able, as a result, to infuse the songs with all-too-genuine pathos and pain.

“It wasn’t until after ‘What’s Going On’ and ‘Live at the London Palladium’ and more experience that he came back to finish things up,” Smith says. “He was also going through his messy divorce with [ex-wife] Anna at the time. He has all these emotions, and they come through.”

The album was also a musical statement for Gaye, says Atwood-Ferguson.

“Marvin said at various times that he would have rather been a jazz ballad singer than a pop star. And often it will happen that way that artists will make a huge name and become a legend but it’s not necessarily what they set out to do, or love the most.”

An omnivorous composer and producer who has worked with an extravagant list of pop, jazz, and classical stars, Atwood-Ferguson says he detects something special in the sound of “Vulnerable.”

“The arrangements are really elegant and essential,” he says. “Every note you hear has a purpose. There’s not a lot of fat — not that there’s anything wrong with fat, but there is a sobriety and subtlety to these arrangements.”

Stabile, whose Revive Music production company has helped bring attention to a new wave of artists at the crossroads of jazz and experimental R&B — the likes of Robert Glasper, José James, Otis Brown III, and many more — says that hearing “Vulnerable,” with its jazz sensibility, immediately made her want to bring the little-known gem to life.

“I felt really inspired musically, and wanted to reimagine the album in a live format,” Stabile says. “And if we’re going to do a Marvin tribute, then also incorporate some of his more notable works, with an orchestra. We’re bringing it full circle: This is the Marvin you know, and this is the Marvin you may not know so much about, and here’s what that would sound like today.”

The concert at Berklee — where Stabile, an alumna, studied with Smith and sang in his ensemble — is the project’s premiere, and the pinnacle of three nights Revive Music is holding around the school, including one at the inimitable South End club Wally’s. (For details about all three shows, visit www.revive-music.com.)

And this is only the first of a series of projects around classic soul artists that Stabile and Atwood-Ferguson say they are cooking up. They hope to bridge the gap between an older audience that isn’t familiar with today’s soul innovators, and a younger crowd that can no longer be automatically assumed to know the work of Gaye and his illustrious peers.

“I still feel like Marvin’s a household name,” says Stabile. “But the generation coming up now has so many different kinds of music on so many platforms, the market has become super diluted and extremely saturated. Reintroducing his music this way can open a door for people to explore.”

Summary: Influential New York jazz/soul hothouse Revive Music resurrects a long-shelved Marvin Gaye jazz-ballads project with a clutch of starry guests in a concert at Berklee on Thursday.


In 2014, Sears Holdings SHLD has closed some 200 of the 1,900 Sears and Kmart stores it had at the start of year to stanch big losses stemming from chronic sales declines.

Many observers see the shrinking of the store fleet, which followed closings in previous years and that looks set to continue, as indicative of a declining retailer that has lost billions of dollars in recent years (and according to Bloomberg, reported 31 quarters in a row of sales declines) and that this year, raised $2.2 billion in liquidity by selling off assets such as the Lands’ End activewear brand to bolster its financial cushion.

But Sears CEO Eddie Lampert, also its top shareholder with a 48.5% stake in the company, has been arguing that the company is in the process of funding Sears’ transformation of itself into a membership-based, e-commerce-centric retailer anchored on its Shop Your Way program and far less reliant on brick-and-mortar stores.

Still, closing more than one-tenth of a retailer’s stores in a single year does not exactly scream out “booming business.”

The press-shy Lampert took to his blog on Monday to explain why Sears Holdings has closed so many stores: Sears gave those locations a chance, and the changing face of retail means the company doesn’t really need them anyway.

“Most of these stores were losing money, some for a long time,” Lampert wrote. “We have experimented with different formats, different levels of investment and different processes to bring about a better result. Given changing circumstances, both in the retail industry and in our company, we can no longer afford, nor justify keeping these stores open.”

Stripping out weak stores is also a key way retailers can improve their comparable sales numbers: Indeed, Sears Holdings recently reported quarterly results that showed a narrower loss and comparable sales actually up at Kmart and only slightly down at Sears. (Macy’s M and Kohl’s KSS each reported a decline last quarter as well.)

While some analysts will quibble with how much effort Sears really put in in recent years to improve its stores, the fact is that the retailer will likely continue to shrink physically.

Sears has been trying to extract the value of its real estate this year. Last month, it revealed an idea for shoring up its pressured finances: possibly forming a real estate investment trust (REIT) for 200 to 300 of the stores it owns that it said could generate “substantial proceeds.”

And in October, it said it was leasing space at seven of its most desirable locations to up-and-coming British retailer Primark, a strategy Sears has pursued in the last five years, and is likely to continue to.

“In some places mall owners and developers have approached us with the opportunity to reposition our stores for other uses and are willing to compensate us. When they’ve offered us more money to take over a location than our store there could earn over many, many years, we’ve accepted offers.”

(Sears has done similar deals with chains such as Whole Foods Market WFM , Dick’s Sporting Goods DKS , Nordstrom Rack JWN , Forever 21, Corner Bakery, West Elm (which is owned by Williams-Sonoma WMS ), and German grocer Aldi.)

“We have a very flexible real estate portfolio which gives us time to try to turn around underperforming locations, without the potential burden of long-term losses that would otherwise prevent us from taking these risks.”

Summary: Sears has closed 200 or so stores this year because they were still not viable after years of efforts by the retailer, CEO Lampert said on his blog.


FORTUNE — Over the past four years income inequality has worsened, particularly among minority groups. Continuing a long-term trend, the gap between rich and poor is the widest it has been in 40 years. Wealth inequality is even more skewed, with the upper classes enjoying increases in the prices of stocks and bonds, courtesy of the Fed’s quantitative easing, while housing — the main source of wealth for middle- and lower-income families — has been slower to recover. Credit availability is similarly lopsided, swinging from one extreme to the other: It is virtually impossible for those in minority neighborhoods to get a home loan these days.

Under Obama the lower classes have fallen behind, yet Romney garnered only 27% of the Latino vote and 7% of the African-American. His support among those making less than $50,000 a year was a paltry 38%. Apparently, these constituencies feared they would do even worse under Romney. No doubt his gaffe about writing off 47% of the electorate didn’t help. But it was more about the GOP’s take-no-prisoners, antigovernment message.

MORE: What to expect after we fall off the cliff

The Republicans — and I’m one — lost an opportunity to redefine themselves as the party of effective government. The Reagan/Thatcher vision of limited but competent government regressed to the notion that any government is bad except when it comes to defense spending or regulating social conduct. But Reagan always recognized a role for government in protecting society’s most vulnerable.

The GOP’s inability to see beyond its antigovernment dogma blinded it to the biggest failure of the Obama administration’s economic policies. Indeed, the damage done to those on the lowest rungs of America’s economic ladder was hardly discussed during the campaign. The President wanted to help America’s disadvantaged, yet his economic team pursued policies that, while stabilizing the banking system, created wealth primarily for those who own financial assets. To be sure, the Obama administration has tried to make the structural changes our economy needs, but those efforts have been incremental and poorly executed. Witness ineffective programs it has launched for job retraining and foreclosure prevention. They were designed with good hearts but lacked hard-headed planning and execution.

Even after its electoral thumping, the GOP continues to sound like the Christmas Grinch, hammering away at entitlement spending while rubbing its hands together over protecting the rich from higher taxes. The U.S. must put its fiscal house in order, but that shouldn’t preclude cost-effective programs to help those in need. The GOP should help retrain our workforce, restructure our distressed mortgages, rebuild our public education system, and repair our infrastructure. But in return it should demand hard metrics for success and accountability if the programs don’t meet their goals. Some programs will cost new money. Others can be financed by redirecting funds from inefficient programs. But much like a corporation with a broken business model, we must make investments now to ensure our future competitiveness.

MORE: Will Obama and Congress punt on real tax reform?

Let’s marry the President’s desire to help the less fortunate with the green-eyeshade discipline of the Grand Old Party. Yes, let’s help this President succeed. But that in turn will mean more lower- and middle-income households climbing the economic ladder into traditional Republican territory and more minorities viewing the GOP as supporters of opportunity and inclusiveness, not as miserly defenders of the rich.

As the popular culture rediscovers Lincoln with the release of a new blockbuster movie, Republicans, too, should reacquaint themselves with the father of our party. Lincoln understood that a stable democracy and a healthy economy rely on everyone having an equal opportunity to participate. Let’s return to those noble roots.

This story is from the December 24, 2012 issue of Fortune.

Summary: A little Democratic idealism mixed with some old-fashioned fiscal discipline could be what Republicans need to get Americans back on their side.


When Kellie Krueger's 3-year-old son started coughing and became feverish in January, she thought he had a cold.

"We took him to the doctor for that at first," says Krueger, 31, of Huntington Beach, California. "She diagnosed him with croup because that's all he was showing at the time."

But the following night, Uriah started getting a rash on his face that had spread to the rest of his body by the time he woke up Thursday morning, Jan. 15.

"We brought him back to the doctor and she took one look at him and said, 'I can't treat him here. You have to go to the hospital,' " says Krueger.

She and her husband Andrew, 31, quickly took him to a local hospital, where he was immediately placed in an isolation unit and put on intravenous saline since he hadn't eaten anything for about two-and-a-half days.

"It was a bit confusing and surprising at first," Kellie tells PEOPLE. "It was like, 'What? My kid can't get the measles. He got his shot. We came to find out that that's not always true."

at 12 months old and a booster between ages 4 and 6. If your child has both vaccines, they should be 97% protected against measles, but if they had only the first, like Uriah, they're only 93% protected.

"He was one of the unlucky ones," says Kellie, who is director of children's ministry at a local church.

Next they tried to figure out where he could have caught the disease. So far this year,

, 85 percent of them linked to

in Anaheim, California, in December. The majority were not vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Doctors and specialists told them that they think Uriah caught it at a New Year's Eve party for kids at the Discovery Cube Science Center in Santa Ana, California.

"The specialists were pretty sure that a kid got it from Disneyland and then came to the science museum and that's where Uriah got it," says Kellie.

"Measles has a 10-day incubation period before you see symptoms and if you count back from when his symptoms started it's right around that date," she says.

Surprisingly, Kellie is not mad that her child may have caught measles because some parents are deciding not to vaccinate their kids, but the CDC says responsible parents should indeed vaccinate their kids.

"The MMR vaccine is proven to be very safe and effective," Sharon Hoskins, a CDC spokesperson, tells PEOPLE.

The Kruegers had to notify Uriah's preschool of his diagnosis, which sent out a letter to all of the families of the school. Lucky for them, he had only been to two places while he was contagious – school and church, where he attended a small service with very few kids.

After a three day, two-night hospital stay, Uriah was able to go home.

"He was extremely tired for about a week or two after he got out of the hospital," says Kellie. "He was sleeping 13, 14 hours a night plus a two to three hour nap during the day. He was just kinda clingy."

Now, though, he's "fully recovered, normal, happy, fine," she says. "He hated the whole experience and I couldn't blame him. It's pretty traumatic for a little kid."

Summary: Uriah Krueger had received his first dose of the measles vaccine but was still too young for the second booster


A decade ago this month, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman showed up for an interview at former candy factory not far from Harvard Square to pitch their idea for a startup called My Mobile Menu, which would allow diners to order food with their phones and skip the line at restaurants.

The roommates from the University of Virginia hoped to be accepted into a new program called Y Combinator , which was described in an online announcement as “like a summer job, except that instead of salary, we give you seed funding to start your own company with your friends.” Ohanian and Huffman got rejected.

But the next day, Y Combinator called back, telling the two friends they’d get a spot in the summer program if they came up with a better idea. They did, conceiving of a “front page for the Internet.” They called it Reddit. Today, the site attracts 174 million visitors each month and hosts Q&As with the likes of President Obama, Bill Gates, and Buzz Aldrin.

Neither Reddit nor Y Combinator stayed in Boston, nor did most of the other founders who participated in the entrepreneurship program’s first cohort in 2005. But another initiative for startups that hatched that year in Cambridge, Web Innovators Group, did stay, and it developed into a central fixture of the local startup scene.

How these initiatives progressed over the past 10 years says a lot about the cultures and attitudes of the innovation communities on opposite coasts. Between YC and WebInno, as the programs are known, they have helped launch companies such as Dropbox, Birchbox, Airbnb, RunKeeper, FlipKey, Twitch, and CustomMade.

Their alumni have raised hundreds of millions in capital, and one company, the privately held lodging site Airbnb, might be worth as much as $20 billion. But the most successful and fastest-growing of the bunch are, such as Facebook, Airbnb, and Y Combinator, no longer headquartered in Boston, hiring people and minting new millionaires somewhere else.

So can Boston somehow become stickier?

Y Combinator created a model since mimicked by hundreds of other “accelerators” around the world — a 12-week program that supports founders with small amounts of funding as they turn rough ideas into working prototypes, test them with customers, and present them to an audience of investors at a “demo day.”

In 2005, Ohanian says, “starting a startup wasn’t as cool as it is today, and there were far fewer resources for total novices like us.” They got access to the tech-savvy founders of Y Combinator. The young entrepreneurs ate together and compared notes on Tuesday nights, when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham would make a crockpot of chili.

At the first demo day in 2005, Reddit raised $70,000; the following year, it was acquired by the publishing company Conde Nast. Today, Reddit, of San Francisco, operates independently, with investors such as the rapper Snoop Dogg and Peter Thiel, the original backer of Facebook.

Until 2009, Y Combinator ran a summer program in Cambridge and a winter one in Silicon Valley. I went to demo days in 2007 and 2008, and I saw companies present to an audience of about 60 “angel” investors and venture capitalists. Most of the investors seemed to be window shopping and kept their wallets in their pockets.

When I interviewed him in 2008, Graham was frustrated with the passivity of the local investors. “What happens when you’re conservative in the technology business?” he asked. “You lose. That’s what the implication is for the future. They’re gonna lose.”

The following January, Graham announced that he and his wife, Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston, were expecting their first child, and the program would move to the Valley year-round.

“Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does,” Graham wrote in a blog post.

Last month, 115 startups attended YC's demo day in Mountain View — so many that the “demo day” stretched over two days, with about 500 investors in the crowd. YC has become the Harvard of technology entrepreneurship — albeit tougher to get into, with an acceptance rate under 3 percent.

“Given their past track record, the most promising companies will apply to Y Combinator first,” says Nick Tommarello, chief executive of WeFunder, an online fund-raising site that was born in Cambridge, participated in YC in 2013, and is now in San Francisco. After graduating YC, Tommarello adds, entrepreneurs can tap into a network of alumni — much like Harvard.

Web Innovators Group, also founded 10 years ago, stayed in Boston. It has become one of the central networking events for the tech set. Those events, held quarterly at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, fill the largest ballroom. WebInnoIt offers young companies an audience for what is often their first public product demo, but unlike YC, it doesn’t provide seed funding. There don’t tend to be many investors in the crowd, either.

But it fills a big void, giving the startup set a place to gather, and a way to build buzz, recruit employees, and connect with prospective customers. Presenting at WebInno “directly led to a few key early customers signing up,” says Raj Aggarwal, chief executive of Localytics, a company that helps creators of mobile apps better understand their users. Late last month, the Boston company raised $35 million.

Another entrepreneur, TJ Mahony, says audience feedback and online mentions of his startup, FlipKey, helped “put the wind in our sails.” The year after Mahony presented FlipKey, which focused on reviews of vacation rental homes, Newton-based TripAdvisor acquired the company for an undisclosed amount.

In Boston, “people are more supportive today of these first-time entrepreneurs than they were in 2005,” Jo Tango of the Waltham investment firm Kepha Partners says. “But change comes slowly.”

For entrepreneurs focusing on mobile apps, social sites, and whatever comes next, the pull of New York or Silicon Valley is intense — especially when they want partnerships with big tech or media players. They also want access to investors willing to pour gasoline on the fire when things get going.

Can we get these consumer tech companies to stick here? Some say Boston should build on its strengths — and nurture biotech, robotics, business software, and infrastructure companies. “Instead of focusing on what we’re not good at,” says Bill Warner, a Cambridge entrepreneur and angel investor, “I’d understand what we are good at.”

I’m not ready to wave the white flag on all the rest. We’ve seen initiatives founded in the last five years such as Bolt, Blade, Launch, and Harvard’s Innovation Lab that all try to provide office space, guidance, and initial funding to nascent businesses, many of which are developing products for consumers. We can do more — especially when it comes to helping startups build awareness and hire more quickly. It only takes one big success to start the flywheel spinning, creating wealth that can fund the next generation of companies.

In the decade since YC and WebInno got started, Boston has become a more hospitable place for starting Web, social, and mobile businesses. But as they grow, startups want to see the equivalent of a well-paved superhighway — a route that lots of others have traveled before. Boston’s is still under construction.

Summary: Y Combinator moved to Silicon Valley. Web Innovators Group stayed in Boston. How they progressed says a lot about the cultures of the innovation communities on opposite coasts.


updated 04/07/2015 AT 12:00 PM EDT

•originally published 04/07/2015 AT 11:30 AM EDT

, the NFL's first openly gay player, was eliminated from

on Monday following his best, most emotional performance yet.

"my most memorable year," and, like

, Sam's most memorable year was 2014. It was the year he

, and the year he and his father stopped speaking for the second time in their tumultuous relationship.

Sam's dance, a rumba performed with

to "I'm Not My Father's Son," was not met well by the judges from a technical standpoint – the pair received a 30 out of 40. However, judge

praised Sam, 25, for his "guts": "Your voice is very important, and I guarantee you, it's helped a lot of people."

echoed the sentiment, telling Sam that "Dance is so much more than movement."

"I don't want my grandkids raised in that kind of environment," Michael Sam Sr. was quoted as saying in a

profile of the football player after he came out as gay. "I'm old-school," he added. "I'm a man-and-a-woman kind of guy."

Sam Sr. had once abandoned the family, according to his son, but on

, the football player revealed that he was the one to cut off communication this time following his father's reaction to the news. "You lost a son again," he told his father, adding that he hadn't talked to him since.

Following the release of the

profile, Sam Sr. insisted that he had been "terribly misquoted. â¦ My son did the right thing, and I am not against him at all," he told Galveston County's

. "He has made a great statement in coming out. â¦ I love him unconditionally," he said, adding that "Once [Sam] gets on the field and hits [someone] once, they won't think he's gay."

responded to Sam Sr.'s claims, according to

, insisting that they quoted Sam Sr. "accurately and fairly."

Murky familial circumstances aside, Sam told

following his elimination, "I thought my last dance was my best dance, and I would like to leave on my best dance instead of my horrible dance."

10 Years of Dancing with the Stars

PEOPLE's 10 Years of Dancing with the Stars

Summary: Sam opened up about his estranged father, who he claims does not accept him for being gay