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Last month, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter wrapped up its two-year primary science phase, and Mars geologists are wallowing in a bounty of data.
“Technically and scientifically, it has certainly met our expectations,” said Alfred McEwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and principal investigator for the orbiter's high-resolution camera.
Images taken by the camera, able to see features down to about a yard in size, have revealed details like rippled textures in what had looked like bland dusty regions, and researchers can now count tiny craters, enabling them to better estimate the age of terrains.
A sensitive spectrometer discovered rocks made of carbonate minerals, which may have formed when young Mars possessed a more benign environment: wet and maybe warm.
“That's telling us something about the early history of Mars,” said Scott Murchie of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and principal investigator for the spectrometer.
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Most of the carbonates were washed away by acidic waters in later epochs.
The orbiter will continue its observations, which will allow places to be photographed more than once to capture changes in the landscape.
Meanwhile, the two Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, mark their fifth anniversary this month, far outliving their original three-month mission. Spirit has recently begun moving again after sitting still through the winter while Opportunity is crossing the plains en route to a 13.7-mile-wide crater named Endeavour, a journey that could take at least another two years.
Steven Squyres, the principal investigator of the rovers, said it struck him as an odd milestone for people to mark. “It's kind of like celebrating your birthday in Mars years,” he said. “Of course, I'd be younger that way.” (In Mars years, Squyres is 28.)
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A year ago, I bought an elliptical trainer — a gym-quality machine that I felt certain would get a daily workout.
Today, my top-of-the-line exercise machine sits idle most of the time. But I'm not alone. Every year, consumers spend an estimated $4 billion on home treadmills, stationary bikes, Stairmasters and other equipment that ends up gathering dust. A Consumer Reports survey last year found that nearly 40 percent of those who buy home exercise machines say they use them less than they expected.
This may be discouraging to people like me, but it is a source of fascination for behavioral scientists. The hope is that by better understanding the behavior, they can help people make better buying decisions — and help them start exercising and stick with it.
Buying an exercise machine does seem to influence whether people start working out. But some research suggests that the same people are less likely to stick with exercise over time than people who don't own home equipment.
In October, the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine reported on a study of 205 sedentary adults who were encouraged to begin an exercise program. At 6 months, about half had done so, but by 12 months, about a third of those people had stopped.
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People with a home exercise machine were 73 percent more likely to start exercising. But by the end of the year, they were also 12 percent more likely to have quit than people in the study who did not have home equipment.
This doesn't mean a home exercise machine leads to less exercise. It just means that having home equipment is not the most important factor. What matters more is “self-efficacy” — a deep-seated belief that we really do have the power to achieve our goals. In the Annals study, those who scored high on psychological measures of self-efficacy were nearly three times as likely to be exercising after a year as those with lower self-efficacy scores, whether or not they owned an exercise machine.
Meeting your own expectations also influences whether you stick with exercise. Study participants who were satisfied with the results of their exercise plan were twice as likely to keep it up as those who were not.
While believing that you can do it and being happy with your results may seem to be obvious parts of success, researchers say that people often fail to take these psychological issues into account when they start an exercise plan.
“What is your confidence in your ability to stick to your exercise program when you're on vacation, when you're not feeling well, when you're busy?” asked David Williams, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University, who led the exercise study. “The message isn't that home exercise equipment doesn't work. It's just one very small piece of the puzzle, because it might make it easier to exercise, but they still have to motivate themselves to do it.”
Williams said there were simple ways to increase the likelihood that you will keep exercising. Working out with friends or family members, mastering an exercise (like the proper way to use gym equipment), and working with someone who motivates you, like a personal trainer, all build confidence and bolster the chances of sticking with it.
But consumers need to distinguish between real motivation to exercise and the unrealistic optimism that often takes over when they are shopping for a new exercise machine.
“Most goals we set for ourselves tend to be unrealistically high,” said Ravi Dhar, director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights and a professor of marketing and psychology. “When you buy these machines, you probably end up focusing on one or two attributes, like how easy it is to use or having it in your home. You're not thinking about the barriers, what you're giving up, like the time with friends or the Internet.”
In experiments to be published next month in The Journal of Consumer Research, scientists at Duke and the University of Wisconsin studied ways to help people make more realistic buying decisions.
In one group, undergraduate students were asked how often they would exercise in a two-week period. They estimated five times, and then indicated they would pay about $610 for a treadmill.
In a second group, students were asked how often they would exercise under ideal conditions, with no constraints on their time, motivation and physical ability. The answer: 10 times. Then they were asked how often they would really exercise. They scaled it back to fewer than four times. Rooted in reality, this group was willing to pay just $480 for a treadmill.

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My mother, when she still cooked, always added a dash of sugar to the vegetables she stir-fried. She said it preserved the bright green of the greens. I always thought that was hooey.
Shirley Corriher, a biochemist turned folksy food scientist who was sitting at my dining table, said she had not heard of this — but added that sugar does do more to fruits and vegetables than add sweetness.
It also helps preserve their shape. Heat shrinks the plant cells and transforms molecules in the cell walls into pectin, which dissolves. “The cells are falling apart and leaking,” said Corriher, who dissected the science of recipes in her books “Cookwise” and “Bakewise.”
“It's mass death and destruction when you heat a fruit or vegetable,” she said.
Adding sugar helps keep the glue between the cells intact, she said. “It's preventing the leaking of the acid.”
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I had invited Corriher and her husband, Arch, who were in New York from Atlanta for a visit, to dinner to help answer some kitchen curiosities. Cookbooks bark out instructions like boot camp orders — Add oil to pasta water! Salt the eggplant! Brown meat to seal in juices! — and legions of home cooks obediently follow them.
I wondered how many of these truisms had a scientific underpinning and how many were but myths. Browning meat, for instance, does not seal in juices. The char adds flavor, though.
On that evening, I cooked and Corriher critiqued, telling me why I was doing what I was doing or telling me that what I was doing was silly.
For a second opinion, I later called Harold McGee, who is the author of the food science bible “On Food and Cooking” and who writes “The Curious Cook” column in The Times's dining section.
Corriher's answer about sugar and vegetables hasa factual basis. “Beans are a wonderful example of this,” she said. “If you take beans, like Navy beans, cook them for four to six hours, they're mush refried beans. But if you add sugar and molasses, you can cook them for days. They're Boston baked beans.”
Molasses has calcium, and Boston baked beans call for prodigious quantities of sugar and molasses. The sugar absorbs some of the water, slowing how fast the beans dissolve, and the calcium molecules reinforce the cell walls by linking together with the pectin.
As I grilled shrimp and garlic in a hot cast-iron pan, I asked: should one heat the cooking oil and pan at the same time or heat the pan before adding oil?
Heat the empty pan and then add oil, Corriher said. And whatever you do, she said, do not add the food when both the pan and oil are cold. That came from her attempts to scramble eggs at a boarding school that she and her first husband ran in the 1960s. “That liquid protein was going down in any nook and cranny in the pan and then you turned on the heat and literally you cooked the food into the pan,” she said. “But if you got a hot surface, the food cooks on the surface, not in the surface.”
Next dish: roasted brussels sprouts with bacon, browned on the stove in a cast-iron skillet and then roasted in the oven. The dish turned out fine, but I had unknowingly and luckily avoided producing a rotten egg stink. Brussels sprouts — and other vegetables of the Brassica family, including cabbage — release hydrogen sulfide as they cook, particularly when boiled for too long.
“Between five and seven minutes, they double in stinky hydrogen sulfide gas formed,” Corriher said. My browning of the brussels sprouts on the stovetop was shorter than that. In the oven, the transfer of heat from hot air to vegetable occurs more slowly than immersion in boiling water.
A duck leg basted with a soy sauce-rice wine-garlic-ginger-honey sauce provided another lesson in browning.
In addition to adding sweetness, the honey helped brown the duck skin, taking advantage of chemical reactions described by Louis-Camille Maillard a century ago. In the Maillard reaction, at high temperatures, fructose and glucose in the honey reacts with amino acids in the duck, producing a variety of new molecules that add flavor and color.
Corriher offers this advice for imbuing roast turkey with a rich golden hue: baste it with honey or corn syrup, which is also full of fructose and glucose. These are so-called reducing sugars, which means they have a structure — “a funny tail,” Corriher called it — known as a carbonyl group that takes part in the Maillard reaction. (Sucrose is not a reducing sugar, which is why sugar water does not brown the same way.)

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: Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and his orchestra of Arab and Israeli musicians have canceled performances in the Middle East this weekend because of fighting between Israel and Hamas, he said Tuesday.
Instead, they will play in the German capital.
Two concerts were scheduled for this weekend — one each in Doha, Qatar and Cairo — but Barenboim said organizers in those countries called off the shows amid security concerns.
“Officially, the concerts are postponed and we hope to reschedule,” Barenboim said. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will perform works by Beethoven and Brahms at the Staatsoper on Monday, and the remainder of the group's 10th anniversary tour of other cities — including Moscow, Vienna and Milan — will continue.
Argentinean-born Barenboim has advocated peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and heavily criticized a military solution. He started the orchestra together with the late Palestinian-American intellectual and activist Edward Said.
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The orchestra consists of about 85 musicians, most of them from across the Middle East. Many of the members have friends or relatives on opposing sides.
“Of course, we are all very affected by the events of the past few days,” Barenboim said. “We are all upset and it will not be easy.”
Barenboim said his group is often described as an “orchestra for peace.”
“Peace needs things other than just orchestras,” he said. “But maybe it's a model of a society that can learn to work with the so-called enemy.”

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Cuba began accepting requests this week for electronic access to more than 3,000 documents from Ernest Hemingway's home on the island, including the unpublished epilogue of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and coded messages the author sent when using his yacht to hunt for German submarines during World War II. Unedited manuscripts, a screenplay for the “The Old Man and the Sea” and letters to the Nobel Laureate are among other papers at Finca Vigia, the hillside hideaway near Havana where Hemingway lived from 1939 until 1960. Ada Rosa Alfonso, director of the museum at Finca Vigia, said the collection does not include any previously unreleased literary works because the author's widow, Mary Welsh, took most of those back to the United States following his suicide in 1961. (AP)
The summer blockbuster “The Dark Knight,” directed by Christopher Nolan, was among the five movies nominated for best motion picture of the year by the Producers Guild of America, the organization announced Monday. Other best-picture nominees were the romantic fantasy “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” starring Brad Pitt; Ron Howard's Richard Nixon saga “Frost/Nixon;” the Harvey Milk film biography “Milk,” starring Sean Penn; and Danny Boyle's rags-to-riches tale “Slumdog Millionaire.” The winner will be announced Jan. 24. (NYT, AP)
Patricia Arquette has filed for divorce from her actor-husband Thomas Jane in Los Angeles, citing irreconcilable differences. The couple, who were married in May 2006, have a 5-year-old daughter, Harlow Olivia Calliope Jane. Arquette, the star of the NBC show “Medium,” is seeking custody of their daughter, with visitation rights for Jane. Jane, who appeared in the 2007 film “The Mist” and the 2004 film “The Punisher,” was placed on a year's probation in September after pleading no contest to a drunken driving count. (AP)
A court order has forced Fisk University to reopen the gallery displaying a collection donated by Georgia O'Keeffe, but the Nashville, Tennessee, school isn't giving up its legal fight for the right to sell the artworks. The state Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments this week over last year's ruling that Fisk can't sell any of the donated artwork, and that it would lose the entire collection if it wasn't retrieved from storage and put back on display. O'Keeffe donated the collection - including her own 1927 oil painting “Radiator Building - Night, New York” and works by Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne and Diego Rivera - to the historically black university in 1949, when segregation prevented Southern blacks from visiting many museums. The works were part of a collection that belonged to her late husband, the photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz. (AP)
Sebastian Barry has won the Costa Book Awards' best novel prize for “The Secret Scripture,” and Diana Athill, 91, became the oldest ever category winner with her memoir “Somewhere Towards the End.” The best debut novel category was awarded to Sadie Jones for “The Outcast,” the poetry section went to Adam Foulds for “The Broken Word” and Michelle Magorian was named the children's book winner with “Just Henry.” The five authors each receive £5,000, or about $7,250, and are eligible for the overall 2008 Costa Book of the Year prize, which will be awarded on Jan. 27. (Reuters)
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Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O'Connell are parents. A publicist for the “Ugly Betty” actress said the couple's twin daughters, Dolly Rebecca Rose and Charlie Tamara Tulip, were born on Dec. 28. Romijn and O'Connell were married in 2007. O'Connell starred in the TV series “Crossing Jordan” and the film “Jerry Maguire.” (AP)
The publisher Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, said in a release that it had acquired the rights to Laura Bush's memoirs and planned to publish the book in 2010. The release follows weeks of speculation that the first lady had been meeting with editors in New York to discuss the project. Scribner said in its announcement that the memoir would offer “an intimate account of Mrs. Bush's life experiences.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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: It is has been hard to watch “The Hills” without developing at least a tepid affection for the person-character of Whitney Port. Her fixed expression of feigned surprise suggests she is willing to risk everything - even wrinkles by the time she is 26 - all for the art of pseudo-improvised reality television.
“The Hills,” which recently concluded its fourth season, is MTV's ethnography of young people with enviable dentistry living in Hollywood and aspiring to careers that sociologists 50 years ago would have ascribed to the world of science fiction. Whitney had been courtier to Lauren Conrad's queen of the canyons until she decided to leave Los Angeles and a job at a company called People's Revolution, where she wore headsets and helped produce fashion shows.
She was moving to New York to take up an offer to work as a publicity assistant at Diane von Furstenberg, a job Whitney describes early on in “The City,” a new series about her acclimatizing to Manhattan, as “an opportunity of a lifetime.”
On “The Hills,” Whitney's private life was largely conducted off camera, allowing her to pass as the show's pre-eminent careerist. It wasn't all that long into her internship at Teen Vogue that she knew she wanted more out of life: She wanted to become a stylist. During her interview at People's Revolution, she didn't cower when her new boss explained that she would essentially be giving up every waking moment of her life. “Like you're basically making a deal with the devil,” her boss warns her. Whitney's work ethic was rivaled only briefly by Heidi Montag's, during a period when Heidi was refusing to submit to her boyfriend's oppressive authority and aiming to become the Carly Fiorina of event planning.
Paradoxically Whitney now finds herself in the great city of ambition doing little more than dating a jerky Australian rock singer named Jay. He thinks she should believe him when he tells her he isn't sleeping with his ex-girlfriend because of the “energy” he displays when he's trying to convince her. Whitney's job seems to require only that she show up in good shoes, so she's got lots of time to deal with Jay's arrogance, and Jay's got lots of time to deal with a head of hair so voluminous it could house a groundhog.
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In the show's phony anthropological characterization, he is meant to be emblematic of “downtown” New York, because he doesn't care what people think, and he doesn't comb. Sharing the burden of symbolism is Whitney's roommate, Erin, who is meant to suggest a bohemian vibe by dint of her odd-color nail polish and wacky hats.
Uptown is represented by a fantastically detestable office rival of Whitney's, Olivia Palermo, who has provided the show's single greatest contribution to the nomenclature of reality TV by referring to herself not as a socialite but as a “social.” If you ask me, Olivia is the only reason the cameras ever ought to be in the DVF headquarters, given how little appears to go on there.
Olivia is the uptown not of Brearley and Yale but of ostentatious dressing and dumb luck. She transmits her ding-dong thoughts in imperious glares, and reeks of the insecurities of entitlement. She wants to make sure Whitney understands who she is, though we are given no idea of where in the world the Palermo name is supposed to resonate. At a press event for Manolo Blahnik, she tells Whitney she got her first pair of the designer's heels for her coming-out party, then says it again after she has claimed that Manolo himself is a family friend even as he barely appears to recognize her.
“The City” is not the advertisement for New York that “The Hills,” with its dreamily shot opening-credit sequence, is for Los Angeles. There seems to be West Coast bias because Manhattan is made to look boxy and claustrophobic and, so far at least, is evoked primarily by images of the meatpacking district.
In only one shot, of Whitney and Jay together, does New York seem like a place of possibility and does “The City” look as it should, like a Woody Allen movie for people who might stumble on a copy of The New York Review of Books and wonder why there are no ads for Chanel.

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This article is taken from Stanley Fish's blog
It's Top Ten time again, and like everyone else I have a list, in my case a list of the 10 best American movies ever. Here it is, with brief descriptions and no justifications. Only the first two films are in order. The others are all tied for third.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), directed by William Wyler. Regarded as producer Sam Goldwyn's masterpiece, this deeply felt study of soldiers coming home after World War II boasts career-best performances by Fredric March (who won an Oscar), Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael and the amazing Harold Russell (two Oscars), a double amputee and first- and last-time (non)actor who played a double amputee.
The movie is filled with thrilling and affecting scenes – the moment when Milly Stephenson (Loy) realizes that the person at the door is her husband, Al (March), who has come back a day before he was supposed to; the moment when Homer Parrish (Russell) waves goodbye to his two new friends and his parents see the hooks that are now his hands for the first time; the moment when Fred Derry (Andrews) hoists himself into a military plane like the one he flew in so many times and hears in his mind the engines of the other dead planes surrounding him in rows. The three intertwined stories are resolved with a measure of optimism, but with more than a residue of disappointment and bitterness. Al Stephenson is still a drunk. Fred Derry is still poor and without skills. Homer Parrish still has no hands.
Sunset Blvd. (1950), directed by Billy Wilder. Notable for Gloria Swanson's triumphant comeback performance in a movie that denies her character a comeback, the film also has William Holden doing his “morally-flawed-person-in-an-attractive-package” act to perfection, not to mention the ancillary pleasures of a young, boyish and humorous (world you believe it?) Jack Webb, a self-parodying turn as a director/husband-turned-factotum by Erich von Stroheim, a silent appearance by silent star Buster Keaton and a cameo performance by Cecil B. DeMille playing himself.
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The voice-over narration of the story by a dead man floating in a swimming pool seems not bizarre but exactly right; Joe Gillis (Holden) was morally dead before he hit the water. When the movie begins, Gillis comes across as a nice guy, somewhat down on his luck, and Norma Desmond (Swanson) comes across as an egomaniacal monster who pressures him into becoming her boy-toy. But even before the final incredible scene of Desmond descending a staircase while the camera, empty of film, rolls, she has earned the sympathy we extend to the terribly needy, and he has revealed himself to be the true monster, a betrayer of Desmond, of the young girl (Nancy Olson) who sees more in him than there is, and of himself.
Double Indemnity (1944), also directed by Billy Wilder. This time Wilder's anti-hero — played by Fred MacMurray, who could do tall but weak with the best of them (see “The Apartment,” “The Caine Mutiny” and “Pushover”) — is not dead but dying as he narrates the story into a tape-recorder destined for the ears of his boss, Barton Keyes (the incomparably great Edward G. Robinson).
You know what's going to happen the moment Barbara Stanwyck — you see just her legs — slinks down the staircase of her house, and Walter Neff (MacMurray) probably knows it, too; but he, like us, is compelled to see the plot through the inevitable downward spiral to its ending. Phyllis (Stanwyck) predicts it all when she says, “It's straight down the line for both of us.” Keyes, the indefatigable unlocker of puzzles, is even more precise: “They're stuck with each other. They've got to ride all the way to the end of the line. And it's a one-way trip; and the last stop is the cemetery.” Just before that stop, the true love story of the film announces itself when, in response to Keyes's acknowledgment of the depth of his feelings for his protege, Neff says “I love you, too,” and dies.
Shane (1953), directed by George Stevens. In this beautifully photographed western, a laconic, stoic stranger rides in out of nowhere and rides out again ( perhaps mortally wounded) in the same direction, as Joey Starrett ( Brandon De Wilde) implores him to “come back, Shane.” In between, Shane (Alan Ladd, in the performance of his life), a man at once steely and sentimental, hard-edged and effeminate, becomes the love object of almost everyone in the movie. Joey loves Shane; his father (a tree-like Van Heflin) loves Shane; his mother (Jean Arthur, luminous in a role she disliked) loves Shane; the cowhand played by Ben Johnson learns to love Shane; and even Wilson, the gunman portrayed so memorably by Jack Palance in a breakthrough role, loves Shane in the way one can love one's mirror image.

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: Bill Condon's father was a New York City police detective, the scrupulous kind who mostly kept an eye on other cops. His mother, meanwhile, was a Queens housewife who loved movies and took her son, then 11, to see “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” because her husband wouldn't go.
Laurence Mark is the son of a New York talent agent who helped inspire those street-smart, deli-eating show business types in Woody Allen's “Broadway Danny Rose.” As for his mother, the club singer Marion Carter - she was hauling Mark off to see “Mame,” the stage musical, in 1966, even as Condon was coping with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Somewhere in all that history lie the roots of next month's Oscar telecast.
Mark, 59, is the producer, and Condon, 53, the executive producer, of the 81st Academy Awards ceremony, set for Feb. 22 on ABC.
They are New York-raised Hollywood transplants, each bitten long ago by the movie bug. And to talk with them now, weeks before Oscar night, is to come away with the sense that Mark and Condon are out not so much to produce the event as to find it again - for the sake of both the viewers and those who have made an industry of the show.
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Nostalgia for entertainment's livelier times also has a little bit to do with it.
Mark is fairly certain he was conceived during a romantic interlude in an Atlantic City dressing room. “I was born in a trunk,” he said recently over a joint lunch with Condon in the commissary of the Sony Pictures lot here, where his film production company is based. They were prepping for a first meeting that afternoon with Hugh Jackman, just named the Oscar host.
Condon, starting from the outside, more or less scratched his way into a movie career. He worked briefly as a film journalist, was a writer for a science fiction thriller called “Strange Invaders” and then made his mark in New York cinema circles, at the age of 26, as winner of “the world's most difficult film trivia quiz” in The Village Voice. He made it to the Oscar stage in 1999, when he won for the best adapted screenplay, for “Gods and Monsters.”
That year Condon was hustled out of the bathroom by a publicist just as the award was being announced. The presenter, Steve Martin, then addled him slightly by backing into the big moment. “And the loser isn't,” Martin said as he opened the envelope.
The two agreed that they found a lesson in that unanticipated sort of thing.
“Mistakes are our friends,” said Mark, who would not be sorry to see his show deliver a few shocks and shivers, intended or otherwise.
He has been watching a tape from 1977, when the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Network,” was supposed to accept a posthumous Oscar for the star of that film, Peter Finch. Chayefsky, who had wrangled with Finch, insisted onstage that Finch's wife, Eletha, in the audience, had more right to receive the award. (She ended up accepting it for her husband.)
Their impromptu threw the production off track. But emotionally it worked. “It's in the nature of television to restrain the spontaneity of a live event,” Condon said.
“Once upon a time, if I'm not mistaken, it was a party,” Mark said of the Oscar ceremony. “We'd like to bring back a little bit of party flavor.”
As of late December the two had yet to settle on the details of a telecast that typically becomes a full-time job for its producers in the final six or eight weeks preceding its airdate.
Professionally Mark still needed to prepare for the release later this year of “Julie & Julia,” which is written and directed by Nora Ephron, and pairs Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in a story about a young woman's culinary obsession with Julia Child.
Condon, for his part, has been writing a film about the comedian Richard Pryor. Like “Dreamgirls,” “Gods and Monsters” and the Academy Awards, it is a project that lets show business look in on itself.
Both have said publicly they expect to popularize this year's Oscar ceremony by making room for films that moved the audience, whether or not they receive nominations. That could help boost ratings for the telecast, which dipped to an all-time low of about 32 million domestic viewers last year.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences depends on the Oscar show for almost all of its revenue of more than $70 million a year. If ratings keep slipping, big fees from ABC and the Walt Disney Co.'s international television distribution unit could be harder to justify when long-term contracts come up for renewal in future years.

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: Classical music has always produced superstar performers who thrill the public and claim widespread attention. But there has also always been those dedicated artists with lower profiles who influence the field from within and enjoy productive and important careers. The pianist Nadia Reisenberg is a good example.
When Reisenberg died at 78 in 1983, she was best known as a respected teacher at the Juilliard School, the Mannes College of Music (now Mannes College The New School for Music) and other institutions, who nurtured students like the pianist Richard Goode and the conductors Myung-Whun Chung and Andrew Litton. But in her prime, Reisenberg had a busy concert career as well, winning acclaim for her musically sensitive and technically effortless artistry.
For a while Reisenberg was a familiar name to music lovers in America, especially during the 1939-40 concert season, when she played the 27 Mozart piano concertos in a series of weekly radio broadcasts with the WOR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alfred Wallenstein, an impressive feat. During that period she was a regular soloist with the New York Philharmonic, though conductors generally turned to her for contemporary fare ignored by big-name pianists on the touring circuit: works like Vincent d'Indy's “Symphony on a French Mountain Air,” a charming piece that remains a rarity; the concertos of Kabalevsky and Rimsky-Korsakov; and Prokofiev's daunting Third Piano Concerto, a piece seldom heard in the 1940s but a staple today.
Thanks to a remarkable new four-CD set from the Bridge label, “Nadia Reisenberg: A Chopin Treasury,” Reisenberg may come to the attention of a generation of listeners who have heard little if anything about her. This reissue of recordings made by Westminster Records in the mid-1950s includes Chopin's complete nocturnes and mazurkas, the “Barcarolle,” the “Berceuse” and the “Allegro de Concert.” It also offers a live recording of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3, taken from a 1947 recital at Carnegie Hall and issued here for the first time.
In all these Chopin works, Reisenberg's playing is exceptionally beautiful, distinguished by warm tone, impressive clarity, unostentatious virtuosity and unerring musical insight. The set contains charmingly personal liner notes by Robert Sherman, the radio announcer and producer of classical music programs. Sherman is something of a Reisenberg expert; she was his mother.
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Sherman's essay gives an overview of Reisenberg's life and career.
Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1904, she studied piano at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia and toured Eastern Europe and Germany before coming to New York in 1922. She made her American debut playing Paderewski's “Fantasie Polonaise” with the New York City Symphony Orchestra, with Paderewski in attendance.
At first she developed a reputation as a contemporary music specialist, giving the first American performances of works by Schoenberg and Stravinsky. When for a New York Philharmonic concert the conductor John Barbirolli asked her to play the premiere of a difficult concerto by Mischa Portnoff, a composer who also worked in Hollywood, Reisenberg readily accepted the challenge.
She played chamber music, her first love, with the Budapest String Quartet, the principal players of the Philharmonic and other leading musicians, including Benny Goodman, with whom she made her first LP recording: Brahms's E flat Clarinet Sonata.
Though she never considered herself a Chopin specialist, her performances here are masterly. There is an affecting directness to her playing. She conveys the jerky rhythmic tugs and pulls of the mazurkas, Chopin's boldly inventive evocations of the Polish dance form. Yet for all the rhythmic freedom of the playing, there is an utterly natural lilt and flow.
The performances of the nocturnes are particularly fine, played with pearly sound, melting lyricism and textural clarity. For some listeners the honesty and deference Reisenberg brings to these pensive yet moody works may be a little too self-effacing. In a 1957 review of the original Westminster recordings of the Chopin nocturnes, Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times, while praising Reisenberg for her accuracy, clarity, musicianship and style, nevertheless found the performances “too perfect and hence lifeless.”
“Seldom does one feel that the pianist is being carried away,” Schonberg wrote, adding that he almost longed “for a touch of disarray.”
Though I can understand why Schonberg, a great admirer of pianists with Romantic approaches, might have found Reisenberg's playing self-contained, I disagree. Her affecting deference conveys her total respect for the music. There is nothing showy in her pianism, nothing cloying about her expressivity. The performances are direct, sensitive and elegant.
She must have been an ideal mentor to Goode because his playing, like hers, has long been admired for its clarity and integrity. And like his teacher, Goode is taken for granted among some segments of the audience, especially piano buffs who are wowed by white-hot virtuosity.

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There are seven weeks to go before the Academy Awards ceremony, and for those who claim to follow such things — would-be experts who pontificate about which movie will win best picture or who seems like a lock for best supporting actor — peer pressure is mounting to have seen all the movies that could be in contention. But Hollywood and the people who show its films to the world seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that it's difficult. Seeing all the films that may receive Oscar nods this season requires a single-mindedness bordering on mania, while getting a seat in the front of a theater is akin to an assault of Tora Bora.
And then there's the talking, and the menace of those who dislike it. At a Christmas Day screening of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week, a man became so enraged at a fellow audience member who was talking to his son that he pulled out a pistol and shot him in the arm. As patrons fled the theater, the newspaper reported, the gunman settled back into his seat to watch Brad Pitt in, well, peace.
But we should begin with the glut of movies that open in December. Where is it written that nearly every serious, good film should come crashing into one another in the last few days of the year? And really, how can that be good for business?
Nonetheless Hollywood executives with visions of golden statues dancing in their heads, husband their best stuff for the end of year, leaving the likes of the rest of us to drink from a fire hose of prestige movies that star Cate and Kate, romantically enmeshed with Brad and Leo. It is shocking to those who spend the rest of the year scanning the newspaper in search of something, anything, to reach December and find all sorts of laurel-bedecked ads shouting at us about the must-see film of the year. Where were you back in August, pal?
Each year the mountain is steeper to climb. The Film Experience blog, thefilmexperience.net, did the homework and found that the December glut is even glut-tier than usual. Thirty years ago 15 movies destined for Oscar involvement opened in the last month of the year — in 2007, that number ballooned to 24. If you started now, you would almost have to see a movie every other day to remain in the awards narrative.
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Producers looking for Oscar's fickle attention have become superstitious about a December release, so a trip to the modern multiplex has become a cinematic smorgasbord, a groaning board. Will it be the technically wondrous charms of “Benjamin Button” or the actorly accomplishments of “Milk”? Are you in the mood for Mumbai romance (”Slumdog Millionaire”) or a history lesson (”Frost/Nixon”)? (Maybe it's “Marley & Me,” surely not an Oscar contender, but a movie the Bagger was dumb to slag sight unseen. A person could do far worse than to stare at Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston for a couple hours, not to mention their blond, house-wrecking co-star.)
Somehow the dutiful, hopeful viewer chooses a movie. But the dogfight has only begun. In order to pump up a movie's per-screen average — an important metric of consumer enthusiasm — studios limit the number of theaters into which the movies are released. That means fewer screens with more people clamoring to get into the theaters.
For those of us who live in or near New York that can mean hunting online for precious tickets hours or even days in advance of a screening, and once the tickets are procured, for that extra online convenience fee, schlepping to the theater an hour before show time to ensure you get a decent seat. It could be worse — many filmgoers live out in those middle places where many of this year's contenders have not even made an appearance.
Getting a ticket is one thing, finding a suitable place from which to enjoy the cinematic splendors can be quite another. Heaven help you if you have more than a single companion; spreading some coats out while the rest of the tribe hits the concession stand is scant defense against the invading hordes. And even the lone moviegoer is up against tall odds.
A few days ago this columnist was having some issues of adjustment at work — after a little vacation, he didn't want to be there — and sneaked out to see a movie under the guise of research. He was literally chased around the theater by wave after wave of people who view a movie as companion media, something to be taken in while doing other things like chatting up a pal next to them or updating their friends and relatives with texts or calls during the course of the matinee.

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On Halloween night in a suburb of Albany, a group of children dressed as vampires and witches ran past a middle-aged woman in plain clothes. She gripped a leather harness — like the kind used for Seeing Eye dogs — which was attached to a small, fuzzy black-and-white horse barely tall enough to reach the woman's hip.
“Cool costume,” one of the kids said, nodding toward her.
But she wasn't dressed up. The woman, Ann Edie, was simply blind and out for an evening walk with Panda, her guide miniature horse.
There are no sidewalks in Edie's neighborhood, so Panda led her along the street's edge, maneuvering around drainage ditches, mailboxes and bags of raked leaves. At one point, Panda paused, waited for a car to pass, then veered into the road to avoid a group of children running toward them swinging glow sticks. She led Edie onto a lawn so she wouldn't hit her head on the side mirror of a parked van, then to a traffic pole at a busy intersection, where she stopped and tapped her hoof. “Find the button,” Edie said. Panda raised her head inches from the pole so Edie could run her hand along Panda's nose to find and press the “walk” signal button.
Edie isn't the only blind person who uses a guide horse instead of a dog — there's actually a Guide Horse Foundation that's been around nearly a decade. The obvious question is, Why? In fact, Edie says, there are many reasons: miniature horses are mild-mannered, trainable and less threatening than large dogs. They're naturally cautious and have exceptional vision, with eyes set far apart for nearly 360-degree range. Plus, they're herd animals, so they instinctively synchronize their movements with others. But the biggest reason is age: miniature horses can live and work for more than 30 years. In that time, a blind person typically goes through five to seven guide dogs. That can be draining both emotionally and economically, because each one can cost up to $60,000 to breed, train and place in a home.
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“Panda is almost 8 years old,” her trainer, Alexandra Kurland, told me. “If Panda were a dog, Ann would be thinking about retiring her soon and starting over, but their relationship is just getting started. They're still improving their communication and learning to read each other's bodies. It's the difference between dating for a few years and being married so long you can finish each other's sentences.”
Edie has nothing against service dogs — she has had several. One worked beautifully. Two didn't — they dragged her across lawns chasing cats and squirrels, even pulled her into the street chasing dogs in passing cars. Edie doesn't worry about those sorts of things with Panda because miniature horses are less aggressive. Still, she says, “I would never say to a blind person, 'Run out and get yourself a guide horse,' because there are definite limitations.” They eat far more often than dogs, and go to the bathroom about every two or three hours. (Yes, Panda is house-trained.) Plus, they can't curl up in small places, which makes going to the movies or riding in airplanes a challenge. (When miniature horses fly, they stand in first class or bulkhead because they don't fit in standard coach.)
What's most striking about Edie and Panda is that after the initial shock of seeing a horse walk into a café, or ride in a car, watching them work together makes the idea of guide miniature horses seem utterly logical. Even normal. So normal, in fact, that people often find it hard to believe that the United States government is considering a proposal that would force Edie and many others like her to stop using their service animals. But that's precisely what's happening, because a growing number of people believe the world of service animals has gotten out of control: first it was guide dogs for the blind; now it's monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck. They're all showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly legal because the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that service animals be allowed wherever their owners want to go.
Some people enjoy running into an occasional primate or farm animal while shopping. Many others don't. This has resulted in a growing debate over how to handle these animals, as well as widespread suspicion that people are abusing the law to get special privileges for their pets. Increasingly, business owners, landlords and city officials are challenging the legitimacy of noncanine service animals and refusing to accommodate them. Animal owners are responding with lawsuits and complaints to the Department of Justice. This August, the Arizona Game and Fish Department ordered a woman to get rid of her chimpanzee, claiming that she brought it into the state illegally — she disputed this and sued for discrimination, arguing that it was a diabetes-assistance chimp trained to fetch sugar during hypoglycemic episodes.

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Amalia Dominguez was 18 and desperate and knew exactly what to ask for at the small, family-run pharmacy in the heart of Washington Heights, the thriving Dominican enclave in northern Manhattan. “I need to bring down my period,” she recalled saying in Spanish, using a euphemism that the pharmacist understood instantly.
It was 12 years ago, but the memory remains vivid: She was handed a packet of pills. They were small and white, $30 for 12. Dominguez, two or three months pregnant, went to a friend's apartment and swallowed the pills one by one, washing them down with malta, a molasseslike extract sold in nearly every bodega in the neighborhood.
The cramps began several hours later, doubling Dominguez over, building and building until, eight and a half hours later, she locked herself in the bathroom and passed a lifeless fetus, which she flushed.
The pills were misoprostol, a prescription drug that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for reducing gastric ulcers and that researchers say is commonly, though illegally, used within the Dominican community to induce abortion. Two new studies by reproductive-health providers suggest that improper use of such drugs is one of myriad methods, including questionable homemade potions, frequently employed in attempts to end pregnancies by women from fervently anti-abortion cultures despite the widespread availability of safe, legal and inexpensive abortions in clinics and hospitals.
One study surveyed 1,200 women, mostly Latinas, in New York, Boston and San Francisco and is expected to be released in the spring; the other, by Planned Parenthood, involved a series of focus groups with 32 Dominican women in New York and Santo Domingo. Together, they found reports of women mixing malted beverages with aspirin, salt or nutmeg; throwing themselves down stairs or having people punch them in the stomach; and drinking teas of avocado leaf, pine wood, oak bark and mamon fruit peel.
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Interviews with several community leaders and individual women in Washington Heights echoed the findings, and revealed even more unconventional methods like “juice de jeans,” a noxious brew made by boiling denim hems.
“Some women prefer to have a more private experience with their abortion, which is certainly understandable,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an obstetrician with Ibis Reproductive Health in San Francisco, which joined Gynuity Health Projects in New York in conducting the larger study. “The things they mention are, 'It is easier.' It was recommended to them by a friend or a family member.”
Dr. Carolyn Westhoff, an obstetrician at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, said the trend fits into a larger context of Dominicans seeking home remedies rather than the care of doctors or hospitals, partly because of a lack of insurance but mostly because of a lack of trust in the health care system. “This is not just a culture of self-inducted abortion,” she said. “This is a culture of going to the pharmacy and getting the medicine you need.”
Physicians say that women can obtain the pills either through pharmacies that are willing to bend the rules and provide the medicine without a prescription or by having the drugs shipped from overseas.
It is impossible to know how many women in New York or nationwide try to end their pregnancies themselves, but in the vibrant, socially conservative Dominican neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, the various methods are passed like ancient cultural secrets. In a study of 610 women at three New York clinics in largely Dominican neighborhoods conducted eight years ago, 5 percent said they had taken misoprostol themselves, and 37 percent said they knew it was an abortion-inducing drug. Doctors and community leaders say they have not seen any signs of the phenomenon disappearing, which they find worrisome because of concerns about the drug's effectiveness and potential side effects.
Sold under the brand name Cytotec, misoprostol is approved to induce abortion when taken with mifepristone, or RU-486; doctors also sometimes use it to induce labor, though it is not approved for that use. A spokesman for Pfizer, which manufacturers Cytotec, declined to comment beyond saying that the company does not support the off-label use of its products and noting that the label includes “F.D.A.'s strongest warning against use in women who are pregnant.”
That warning, in capital letters, also notes that the drug “can cause abortion.”
But it does not always do so, not least because notions of how best to use it vary from inserting several pills into the vagina to letting them dissolve under the tongue. The side effects can be serious, and include rupture of the uterus, severe bleeding and shock.

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Those who want to bring the wide world of Web video to their television screens usually need a separate device — a video-game console, DVD player or set-top box with Internet access.
Now they will be able to take a more direct route. LG Electronics, the third-largest television manufacturer in terms of U.S. sales, will announce Monday a line of televisions that can directly receive Internet video in addition to satellite and cable signals.
LG's line of LCD and plasma televisions will be called Broadband HDTVs and are expected to cost around $300 more than comparable models without Internet access, said Tim Alessi, director of product development at LG Electronics.
Owners of the televisions will not be able to browse the Web freely — the TVs' processors and memory chips are not up to that task. But the Broadband HDTVs will have access to a variety of specific video sites, and on Monday, LG will announce one in particular: Netflix.
The televisions will be able to stream any of the 12,000 films and television shows in Netflix's Watch Instantly library, many of which are provided by Starz, the premium cable television service.
Today in Technology & Media
“It's hugely symbolic,” said Netflix's chief executive, Reed Hastings. “The holy grail has always been to give the TV an Internet jack in addition to the cable jack. It's an early glimpse of the long-term future.”
Hastings, who runs the lucrative Netflix DVD-by-mail business, does not think the revolution will happen soon. People keep their televisions for a decade or longer on average, he said, so it will take years for broadband-capable TVs to filter into most American homes. Buying a video-game console or Blu-ray disc player with Internet capabilities may still be a better short-term solution for many people.
Regardless, more television makers like Samsung and Panasonic are sure to introduce similar devices, perhaps even at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Sony's Bravia televisions can use the Internet with the addition of a separate module, but analysts expect the company to build this capability into its sets.
For its part, Netflix, based in Los Gatos, California, is continuing to expand its Watch Instantly offerings. Also on Monday, the company will announce that it will add several Showtime programs to its library of streaming video, including the season premieres of “United States of Tara,” “The L Word” and “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.”
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: In its latest concession to the worst revenue slide since the Depression, The New York Times has begun selling display advertising on its front page, a step that has become increasingly common in the  industry.
The first such ad, which appeared Monday in color, was bought by CBS. The ad, 2½ inches, or 6.4 centimeters, high, lies horizontally across the bottom of the front page, below the news articles and a summary of some articles in the paper. In a statement, the paper said such ads would be placed “below the fold” - that is, on the lower half of the page.
The Times already had printed an occasional front-page classified ad - two or three lines of text at the bottom of the page. A few years ago it began selling display ads - which are larger and can combine images and text - on the front pages of sections inside the paper.
But The Times did not sell displays on the first page of the first section, a move regarded by traditionalists as a commercial incursion into the most important news space in the paper.
Most major American papers sell front-page display ads, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Los Angeles Times, but some others, including The Washington Post, do not.
Today in Technology & Media
The Times would not disclose the rates it charged. Ordinarily, such space would be coveted for its prominence, but it remains to be seen how well it will sell in the current climate, in which ad spending is plummeting.
The company recently reported that in November revenue from continuing operations fell 13.9 percent from a year earlier; from January through November, it was down 7.6 percent. Advertising revenue at The New York Times Media Group, consisting of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the radio station WQXR-FM and Baseline StudioSystems, an online database, declined 21.2 percent in November from the same period a year earlier.
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: Venture capitalists make their fortunes, or lose them, on the strength of their predictions. As they hunt for barely hatched ideas and nurture them with money and advice, they are hoping that one grows into the next Google.
On Sand Hill Road, the wide boulevard here where investors study ideas in offices tucked behind palm trees and redwoods, the recession has tempered optimism with caution.
Conversations with some of the leading venture capitalists about the types of companies that will receive some of the estimated $31 billion that venture capital firms raised in 2008 offer a glimpse of the future of technology.
Web 2.0 heyday is over Venture capitalists once poured money into Web sites that were free to users and that made money selling advertisements. If the site involved social networking, so much the better.
But as growth in ad spending online cools and social networking becomes commonplace, the days of trying to be the next YouTube, Facebook or Yelp are over, said Jeremy Liew, managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Today in Technology & Media
“In 2005, Yelp could say, 'I'm going to unseat Citysearch,”' Liew said. “Today, someone has to say, 'I'll be more viral and user-generated than Yelp.”'
Even Accel, an early investor in Facebook, might turn that company away if it approached the firm today, said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, an Accel partner.
For Web sites that do not already have large audiences, “your business model may be just as plausible as it was 18 months ago, but we're all more cautious about giving you a slug of money,” she said.
Instead, investors are looking for sites that make money in ways other than selling ads, like selling subscriptions or virtual goods. Selling 50-cent costumes for online avatars, for example, might not seem to be much of a revenue model, but pennies add up.
Enterprise is back Though investors are shifting their focus from the consumer to businesses, they are still reluctant to back makers of expensive software that manages data for companies.
“Big-ticket enterprise ideas that take $50 million to $100 million to get to market are going to be few and far between,” said Dana Stalder, a general partner at Matrix Partners. Instead, venture capitalists will invest in open-source software, Web-based software, Internet-based cloud computing and virtualization software that lets companies use less hardware to run applications.
“Oracle, Microsoft and all of that will shift to the cloud. It will be a transformational megashift in technology,” Stalder said.
The year of mobile? The iPhone and Apple App Store caught on with consumers in 2008, but investors are not convinced that selling ads or content like applications for mobile phones can make much money. More skeptical venture capitalists are sticking with what they know makes money in telecommunications, like carriers and makers of phones and accessories.
“Pure mobile content is overinvested, but hardware is underhyped,” said David Weiden, a partner at Khosla Ventures. Revenue from sales of the iPhone and the BlackBerry exceeds that of the entire mobile content market, he said.
Roger Lee, at Battery Ventures, is focusing on carriers like Pocket Communications, a wireless carrier in Texas that is expanding to the U.S. northeast.
Clean tech gets realistic Venture capitalists are still chasing clean technology. Through September, $3 billion had been invested in technologies that created alternative energy and conserved electricity, up from $1.9 billion the year before, according to the National Venture Capital Association. But big, expensive projects like building factories to manufacture solar panels or biofuels are falling out of favor.
“The economic arguments for those businesses literally went upside down in a year,” said Paul Holland, the partner in charge of the clean tech practice at Foundation Capital.
Instead, some venture capitalists are looking at technologies that monitor energy demand, like software that tracks and regulates a building's energy use.
Personalized health care Venture capitalists say one sector of the economy that technology has not yet transformed is personalized health care.
Jennifer Fonstad, a managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is looking at companies that use information about a person's genetic code to offer predictive medical advice or preventive health services or devices.
Internet companies that help patients, banks and insurance companies manage health savings accounts or help people find assisted-living homes for aging parents are other likely recipients of investors' largess.
“Cisco was founded two weeks before a stock market crash. Oracle was founded during the Reagan recession,” Holland said. “In bad times, that's when the best opportunities come up.”
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The biggest news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January was not the birth of a new product but the death of one.
A decision by Warner Brothers to withdraw support for the HD DVD video disc format sent shock waves through the electronics industry and appeared to hand the future of home entertainment to Blu-ray, a rival format.
The move set the stage for the Consumer Electronics Show this year, which starts Wednesday under the dark cloud of a recession and a sharp downturn in consumer spending. Nearly two million square feet of convention hall will be stocked with the latest mobile phones, portable music players, digital cameras and expensive flat-screen televisions.
But many eyes will be on Blu-ray, which for the first time has the floor largely to itself as the heir apparent to the DVD. Over the last decade, DVD players and discs have generated tens of billions of dollars for Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry, so the pressure for a blockbuster sequel is high.
This year will be crucial for the new format. Heavy holiday discounting and the natural decline in electronics prices over time have pushed prices for some Blu-ray players under $200, a drop of well more than half in the last few years — and into the realm of affordability for many. At the same time, Blu-ray's backers, including Sony and the Walt Disney Co., face a growing chorus of skeptics that says the window for a high-definition disc format may be closing fast.
Today in Technology & Media
One reason is that discs of all kinds may become obsolete as a new wave of digital media services starts to flow into the living room. On Monday, for example, the South Korean television maker LG Electronics will announced a new line of high-definition televisions that connect directly to the Internet with no set-top box required. The televisions will be able to play movies and television shows from online video-on-demand services, including Netflix.
“The Blu-ray format is in jeopardy simply because the advent of downloadable HD movies is so close,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates. a research and consulting company. “Streaming video from the Internet and other means of direct digital delivery are going to put optical formats out of business entirely over the next few years.”
Blu-ray's supporters have another view. They say the technology had a breakout year, crowned by the holiday success of “The Dark Knight,” which sold 600,000 Blu-ray copies in one day. They also say that Blu-ray players are selling faster than DVD players did at a comparable time in their emergence.
“What we saw in 2008 was increasing adoption of Blu-ray along with decreasing hardware prices,” said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, which has persuaded more than half a million members to pay an extra dollar a month to rent Blu-ray discs. “The window of opportunity for DVD and Blu-ray discs is longer than most people think. But it's not going to last forever.”
The Consumer Electronics Association predicts that North American consumers will spend $1.3 billion on Blu-ray players in 2009, outpacing the projected $1.2 billion that will be spent on regular DVD players, although Blu-ray players are two to three times more expensive.
Last year “was a launching pad, and 2009 is going to be our growth year,” said Andy Parsons, the chairman of the Blu-ray Disc Association, a consortium of the format's backers. “We think this year we'll start to see the format really take off into the mass market.”
But evidence exists that many people either do not know enough about Blu-ray to buy or do not think the more expensive players and discs are worth the extra investment.
Going from the whirring VCRs of yore to a DVD player was a big leap in picture quality and convenience, while the jump from DVD to Blu-ray is subtler, at least for those who do not have the latest and largest high-definition televisions.
Americans are still expected to buy more standard DVD players next year than Blu-ray players, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. People like Erik Swenson, a 37-year-old interior designer in San Francisco, represent one reason. “I've heard of Blu-ray, but I don't know much about it,” he said, shopping last week at a Best Buy for a DVD player. “I'm a little behind with this tech stuff.”
Blu-ray's backers acknowledge that they have a tougher sell with Blu-ray than they did with DVD, particularly in light of the sour economy.

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The second-ranking editor at The Washington Post announced on Monday that he would step down, leaving the paper and its newly arrived top editor to fill vacancies in two of the highest newsroom positions, during a period of acute change at the paper.
Philip Bennett, the managing editor for the last four years, said that he would leave at the end of the week. Recently, Jim Brady said he would soon step down as executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, the newspaper's Web site.
The departures create a challenge for Marcus Brauchli, who became executive editor of The Post in September after leaving the top editor's job at The Wall Street Journal, and an opportunity for him to put his stamp on the upper ranks of The Post. This could also accelerate the merger of its print and online newsrooms, operations that have remained unusually separate by industry standards, leading to duplication and turf wars.
As newspapers struggle to cope with falling advertising revenue, The Post has downsized its newsroom by about one-third from its peak early in this decade. In 2008, a new publisher, Katharine Weymouth, took over and made clear that she wanted to shake up the paper. Several months later, the longtime executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., who had promoted Bennett, announced his retirement.
Bennett agreed to stay on as managing editor after he was passed over for Downie's job, but that was widely seen as a transitional arrangement.
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“I wasn't pushed,” Bennett said of his decision to leave. “There was a process that unfolded here over the last year, where the person who named me the managing editor left and someone else came in, and so my future was somewhere in play in all that.”
He added: “The main thing I wanted to do was stick around for the presidential campaign and the election. I think Marcus has made fast work of getting a picture of what he wants to do.”
In discussing his departure, Bennett, 49, indicated that he could end up working for a competing news organization. “I wouldn't have felt comfortable going out and looking for jobs, especially among competitors, while doing this job,” he said.
For the immediate future, he said, he will work for Donald Graham, chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, on a research project about the future of the news media — an assignment that he said would last months, not years.
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For decades, the New York publishing world promised a romantic life of fancy lunches, sparkling parties, sophisticated banter and trips to spots like the Caribbean to pitch books to sales representatives. If the salaries were not exactly Wall Street caliber, well, they came with a milieu that mixed cultural swagger with pure Manhattan high life.
But that cushy schmoozefest seems to be winding down.
Amid a relentless string of layoffs and pay-freeze announcements, book publishers are clamping down on some of the industry's most glittery and cozy traditions. Austerity measures are rippling throughout the publishing world as it confronts the worst retailing landscape in memory.
“This business was never meant to sustain limousines,” said Amanda Urban, a literary agent who represents authors including Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison.
Urban said she believed that Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House, once said something to that very effect. “At best, you can get a Town Car now and then,” she said. “It's gotten out of scale, like a lot of businesses in this country.”
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Venerable houses including HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin Group, Random House and Simon & Schuster have all announced salary freezes or layoffs, or both. Simon & Schuster canceled its annual holiday party. One division of Random House had pizza, beer and wine in a room off the cafeteria for its holiday lunch instead of going out for pricey cocktails. Across the city, editors with Four Seasons tastes are being asked to scale back on their lunch tabs.
Random House has postponed its spring sales conference and has yet to choose a location. Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman, said one thing was certain: After holding a meeting in Bermuda this year, the company “will not be returning there in 2009.”
Book sales have deteriorated since the beginning of October, falling about 7 percent from a year earlier, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales. That slide is driving many of the immediate cutbacks. But the publishing industry is also being convulsed by longer-term trends, including a shift toward digital reading and competition from an array of entertainment options like video games and online social networking.
Urban said some of the more lavish practices could not be sustained by a slow-growth, low-margin industry that cannot charge luxury prices.
“Books can only support a certain retail price,” she said. Referring to the shoe industry, Urban added: “It's not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”
Industry veterans said bloated expense accounts were the least of publishing's problems. “I don't think the dire situation of the publishing world is going to be solved by tightening that particular belt,” said Robert Gottlieb, who has shepherded authors like Doris Lessing, Robert Caro and Joseph Heller.
It is not just publishing's flashy customs that are getting a tough look. Other sacred cows, like the distribution of advance print galleys of coming titles and the costly practice of permitting retailers to return unsold book, are being examined. Cash advances for authors, which have risen in recent years, are being reviewed. “Everybody is trying to look at acquisitions in the prism of a reduced and a hurting retail market,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “You used to buy some books and you paid X because you figured it would sell 100,000 copies. Now you have to do the math saying this book may sell only 50,000 copies.”
At HarperCollins, a new unit is experimenting with a model that substitutes profit sharing with authors for cash advances and eliminates returns of unsold copies from booksellers.
Jonathan Galassi, publisher of the literary powerhouse Farrar, Straus & Giroux, said the custom of accepting returns from booksellers was created during the Great Depression to persuade bookstores to take more copies. “In a moment where getting people to put stock in a store of anything, not just books, is harder because of the money it costs to front them,” Galassi said. “I think it might be counterproductive to have a return-free business at this point.”
Booksellers hope that the publishing industry can use the current downturn as an opportunity to publish fewer books. “They need to have some sense of what is going on in the country and what the readers are really looking for,” said Vivien Jennings, owner of Rainy Day Books, an independent bookstore in Fairway, Kansas. Of course longtime industry insiders have seen it all before.
Michael Korda, former editor in chief of Simon & Schuster, recalled a period in the 1970s when his bosses prohibited editors from dining at certain restaurants. “And then after a while business got better,” he said. “And everybody went back to doing what they were doing before.”
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: The Chinese government broadened its recent effort to limit pornography on the Internet by criticizing 19 Internet companies by name Monday, including Google and Baidu, the providers of the two most popular search engines in the country.
A statement posted by early Monday afternoon on a government-run news site said the Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies would work together “to purify the Internet's cultural environment and protect the healthy development of minors.”
A similar statement had been issued Dec. 5 but attracted little attention.
The statement Monday went a step further, saying that 19 companies had failed to do enough to stop the spread of pornography. By Monday evening, the names of the companies were posted on the same official Web site along with a terse statement explaining why each company was on the list.
The entry for Google simply said: “Searching for images results in an enormous number of vulgar, pornographic sites. Google, receiving notice, did not undertake any effective measures.”
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A Google spokeswoman for China, Jin Cui, said the company had no immediate reaction to the criticism and was unaware of any new regulations or restrictions on the Internet in China.
The government list of offending Internet companies had a similarly phrased criticism of Baidu, the market leader among Internet search engines in China.
A spokeswoman answering the phones at Baidu's press office Monday afternoon said that only one of her colleagues was authorized to discuss the issue, adding that the person was unavailable.
In issuing its warning, China appeared to be focusing on large companies that provide search engines, blog hosting and chat forums.
Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor of media studies at Hong Kong University who specializes on Internet controls in China, said the criticism issued Monday represented the latest in a long series of measures to limit the Internet in China, and did not appear to represent a long-term policy shift.
The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, which has separate authority in China to regulate video on the Internet, conducted its own campaign in March against businesses that made pornographic videos available.
That campaign included shutting down the Internet operations of one of the most popular video-sharing services, Tudou, for a full day as a warning.
Many Chinese, particularly young adults, have become much less conservative about public discussions of sex and the commercialization of sex over the past three decades, as the country has opened up to the West and shifted toward a more market-oriented economy. The authorities have periodically tried to limit the spread of prostitution and pornography, with little sign of success.
MacKinnon said that while restrictions on Internet pornography have fluctuated, political expression was consistently limited on the Internet.
“The same mechanisms used to censor porn are used to censor anything else people want to censor,” she said.
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: Acting not unlike many New Year's Eve partygoers who pushed the revelry a little too far, CNN woke up Jan. 1 with a tinge of regret.
Not that it was not worth it. CNN got the buzz it was seeking.
Resembling the programming on MTV more than that of a cable news network, CNN's two-hour live countdown included eyebrow-raising performances by the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, and by the rapper Lil Wayne, whose backup dancer put on a risque pole-dancing show.
Most notable were its colorful and sometimes cringe-worthy jokes from the comedian Kathy Griffin, including one vulgarity that was edited from later rebroadcasts. Her comments quickly became a viral hit on YouTube and prompted criticism from one of CNN's competitors.
Griffin was paired with the CNN news personality Anderson Cooper for the 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. broadcast on the media platform in Times Square in New York. The show was an attention-grabbing example of CNN's continuing effort to draw younger viewers with the help of Cooper, the blue-eyed 41-year-old anchor. His 10 p.m. program, “Anderson Cooper 360,” was higher-rated than the same hour on Fox News Channel last year among younger viewers, representing a rare victory for the normally second-place CNN.
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But it was Griffin, not Cooper, who attracted most of the attention on New Year's Eve. Near the end of the show she shouted a vulgarity at a nearby heckler while Cooper tried to go to a commercial break. CNN later said that the comment had been  inappropriate.
“She did not know she was on the air at the time, and we removed it from the rebroadcast,” Christa Robinson, a spokeswoman for the network, said in a statement.
Epithets are uttered on occasion in the live world of cable news.
Because the decency rules that govern broadcast stations do not apply to cable channels, the incident is not expected to cause any lasting harm for CNN. Griffin's presence may have had the opposite effect by drawing a youthful audience for the broadcast, said Tom Petner, the editor of the TV newsletter ShopTalk.
“Everyone is reaching to put a youth patina on their programming,” he said, especially cable news channels that tend to draw viewers in their 50s, 60s and 70s. Petner said that ABC, with the host Dick Clark, had dominated the evening's ratings with a preliminary average of 8.5 million viewers. “But I think CNN won the water cooler crowd and a lot of the Internet buzz,” he said.
Among 25- to 54-year-old viewers, CNN's audience was almost twice as large as Fox's for the two hours Cooper and Griffin were on.
Griffin was also co-host of CNN's New Year's special with Cooper a year ago. Production on the fifth season of her Bravo show, which showcases her publicity-seeking antics and is titled “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” begins this month.
Bowing to the network's New Year's tradition, musical acts were interspersed with the co-host banter. Robinson, the CNN spokeswoman, said she was unaware of any complaints received by the network about Griffin or the Confederate flag tied to a microphone stand when Lynyrd Skynyrd sang “Sweet Home Alabama.” The flag is a mainstay of the band's live performance.
As for the pole-dancing, CNN quickly cut away from the scene when it was shown live early Thursday morning and pixelated part of the dancer's body when it rebroadcast the scene the next night in a highlight reel of the special. “You know it's a problem when you want to show a musical act on TV, and yet you can't actually show the musical act,” Cooper remarked immediately after the performance.
On Friday “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, questioned whether Griffin should have been booked on what one of the hosts called a “family program.” An on-screen graphic during the segment labeled it “poor judgment” by CNN.
In another segment two hours later, the Fox co-host, Dave Briggs, said CNN had needed a five-second delay, but added that “on New Year's Eve unfortunately you can't have it.”
Fox News broadcast what was, for some, its own cringe-inducing moment in the early hours of 2009. Among the text messages from viewers that scrolled along the bottom of the screen was one saying, “let's hope the magic negro does a good job.” The message was an apparent reference to a parody song, “Barack the Magic Negro,” that was broadcast on Rush Limbaugh's radio show in 2007. A Fox executive told the blog TVNewser that the message had been “inadvertently cleared for air.”
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