Magazine Preview: Iceland’s Big Thaw

  Lars Tunbjork for The New York TimesFish Entrepreneur Armann Olafsson, a former member of Parliament and advertising executive, now sells fish products. More Photos ?

If you want to understand what happened in Iceland — the whole story of the crash, the banks failing, the recent signs of recovery — start at the prime minister’s office in downtown Reykjavik and continue east for a bit until you ascend a steep bluff overlooking the icy waters of Faxafloi Bay. There you will arrive at a used-car lot. Ask for the owner of this establishment, who is a short, 61-year-old man with extremely thick glasses named Gudfinnur S. Halldorsson — he goes by the name Guffi (pronounced Goofy) — and have him to tell you the story of the Porsche that kept on giving.

Viking Ethos The "strongmen" of Reykjavik, who claim that Icelanders are predisposed to risk taking. More Photos ?

During Iceland’s boom years, which lasted from 2003 until 2008, a customer showed up at Guffi’s dealership wanting to buy a Porsche on credit, no money down. Guffi didn’t inquire about the man’s line of work; in fact, he didn’t care if the man paid back the loan — that was the bank’s problem, not his. Guffi sold the Porsche, and the customer drove it for a month or so until the first payment was due. The man had no interest in making the payment, and so Guffi, who always aimed to please, helped the man resell the vehicle for a profit. Guffi did the same thing a month later, and again a month after that; all told, Guffi sold the same car five times in six months, amazingly charging a higher price on each successive sale.

To understand how this strategy was even possible, it helps to know a little about banking in Iceland. In 2001, the Icelandic government began relinquishing control of the banking sector to allow for privatization. One consequence, says Gylfi Zoega, a professor of economics at the University of Iceland, was that “ownership of the banks went to a few wealthy businessmen.” These businessmen, Zoega says, hired local bankers, who had very limited experience in international banking, to run things; they issued bonds on the international market, where institutional investors were only too happy to buy them. After all, this wasn’t Argentina — this was Iceland, a Scandinavian country whose national banks had no history of defaulting on their loans. “It appeared to be a sound investment,” Zoega says. Money poured into the country, and the economy boomed. With the help of the banks, investors went on spending sprees, buying large stakes in foreign and domestic businesses; the prices of everything from houses to used cars soared; Iceland’s stock market spiked, rising 900 percent between 2002 and 2008; and, of course, money flowed into the hands of all sorts of Icelanders, like Guffi.

Guffi sold a lot of cars during the boom, but he didn’t save much. When I asked him what he spent his money on, he replied that he traveled widely, skied often and entertained a number of girlfriends from abroad. “Take a look at the beautiful girls from Ukraine and Switzerland,” he told me wistfully. “You’re like a kid in a toy store. Several times, I’ve brought them home so that they can have a vacation here. Then I show them Iceland.” He added, thoughtfully: “What I was doing was good for the tourism business.”

At first, it was all going splendidly for Guffi as he Rollerbladed down Laugavegur Street with voluptuous girlfriends and sold and resold the same luxury cars. Then he became tired — exhausted, really. He was working 13-hour days. “Do you know how much time it takes to bring all those papers to the bank every time someone takes out a loan for a car?” he asked me. The girlfriends also proved enervating. “I found girls on the Internet; that’s heavy work. You’re reading all these stupid letters that they send.” By the time the crash hit, in late 2008, Guffi was relieved. Nowadays he sells fewer cars; he no longer regularly earns more money each time he sells the same car, but he still gets a commission, and his lifestyle is simpler. “I do nothing stupid, and then I have no stress,” he explained happily. “I have no more Ukrainian or Swiss girlfriends. I have an Icelandic woman now.”

Jake Halpern (jakehalpern@yahoo.com) is the author of “Fame Junkies.” His last article for the magazine was about freegans in Buffalo. Editor: Sheila Glaser (s.glaser-maggroup@nytimes.com).

 

Lanny Friedlander, Founder of Reason Magazine, Dies at 63

The cause was a heart attack, his lawyer, George H. Murphy, said.

Perhaps fittingly for a man who was an enigma for so long, Mr. Friedlander’s death commanded little notice outside libertarian circles.

Even within those circles, Mr. Friedlander was a phantom presence. In an obituary posted on March 26 on Reason’s Web site, Nick Gillespie, the editor in chief of reason.com and reason.tv, the magazine’s video arm, wrote that neither he nor anyone else currently at the magazine had ever met him.

In 2007, when Reason opened an office in Washington (its headquarters are in Los Angeles), Mr. Gillespie cast about for a picture of Mr. Friedlander to hang on the wall. None could be found.

Until last year, Mr. Gillespie wrote, no one at Reason was certain whether Mr. Friedlander was dead or alive.

In its dorm room days, Reason never attained a circulation of more than a few hundred copies per issue. Today, the magazine is a glossy publication with a monthly circulation of about 50,000; its Web site receives four million visits a month. Reason.tv broadcasts original and archival video programming online.

As Mr. Friedlander conceived it, Reason was neither strictly right-wing libertarian nor strictly left — in modern parlance, neither red nor blue but a purple amalgam of the two. It was genuinely purple at first, as it was run off on a ditto machine.

“When REASON speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war, studentpower, politics, and other vital issues, it shall be reasons, not slogans, it gives for conclusions,” Mr. Friedlander wrote in the first issue, published in May 1968 and peppered with typographical errors and misspellings. “Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherance, not contradictions. This is our promise: this is the reason for REASON.”

By all accounts Mr. Friedlander was an intuitive genius of design, publishing issues in the magazine’s post-ditto period that had stark, evocative graphics; coolly elegant sans serif typefaces; and layouts that reinforced the editorial content.

He seemed likely to have been headed for a vibrant career had it not been for the schizophrenia that took hold of him in his early 20s.

Lanny Friedlander was born in Boston on Dec. 7, 1947. His mother suffered from mental illness while he was growing up, Mr. Murphy said in a telephone interview on Friday, and his parents eventually divorced. Mr. Friedlander entered Boston University but, experiencing the first signs of his own illness, left before graduating.

In the early 1970s, unable to run Reason effectively, Mr. Friedlander sold it to a consortium of its writers. (It is now owned by the Reason Foundation.) He was retained as an editor there for only a short time.

At some point during these years, Mr. Friedlander, who opposed the draft, enlisted briefly in the Navy amid the Vietnam War. His illness was detected before he could be sent overseas, and he was discharged.

He fetched up in New York, where he worked as a graphic designer and appears to have driven a cab, Mr. Murphy said. In the early 1970s he made a pilgrimage to Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors. There, Mr. Friedlander became agitated and was sent home by the authorities.

He spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals and had lived most recently at a Veterans Affairs halfway house in Lowell. At times he declined to take medication, Mr. Murphy said, because he felt it made the world run painfully slowly, like a 78 r.p.m. record played at 331/3.

Mr. Friedlander’s survivors include his father, Herbert, and a brother, Daniel.

In December, Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent, received a letter from Mr. Friedlander in response to an article he had written on developments in genomics.

Writing by hand in block letters, Mr. Friedlander said, “I think you should take your thinking one step further and write about the prospects of immortality in the foreseeable future.” He continued, “I also wonder if magicians can reverse the effects of old age.”

At the bottom of the letter, he wrote: “P.S. I started Reason magazine in 1968.”

View the original article here

Geoff Miller, Co-Founder of Los Angeles Magazine, Dies at 74

The cause was a degenerative nerve disease, his wife, Kathryn Leigh Scott, said.

Los Angeles magazine — one of the nation’s first city magazines — was started in 1960, eight years before its East Coast counterpart New York magazine was first published. It has outlasted more than half a dozen magazines based in Los Angeles, including New West, started in 1976 by Clay Felker, the founder of New York magazine.

“Los Angeles was to be a magazine celebrating the unruly young city in all its contrary glory,” Mr. Miller wrote in a 30th anniversary issue in 1990. “It would accept the community on its own terms — as the collection of villages it truly was, still looking for an identity.”

Mr. Miller was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1959, designing a prototype urban magazine for his master’s in journalism, when he met David Brown, an advertising executive who shared his vision.

On a start-up budget of $50,000, Mr. Miller and Mr. Brown hand-cut and pasted the first issue in the summer of 1960 after cobbling together freelance articles, some written by reporters moonlighting under pseudonyms from the local Time-Life bureau. Eventually, name writers like Ray Bradbury, Joseph Wambaugh and Budd Schulberg became contributors.

Celebrities posed for the monthly covers, often in spoofs: Alfred Hitchcock carving a Thanksgiving turkey for the November 1974 issue; Christopher Reeve ripping open his shirt and revealing a large Valentine’s Day heart on his T-shirt for the February 1980 issue.

Mr. Miller was editor in chief of Los Angeles from 1974, when Mr. Brown left the magazine, until 1990, when he became publisher. Under his leadership, the magazine expanded service journalism, on topics including where to dine and shop or where to find the best car wash. There was an annual “52 Great Weekends” issue.

Some critics said the magazine was too focused on affluence and celebrity.

But Mary Melton, its current editor in chief, defended Mr. Miller’s work.

“When you go through our past issues, what is often overlooked is how what was inside really captured the era,” she said, “which people sometimes forget because of the covers: critiques of our civic institutions, the need for historic preservation, white flight, the embattled school district in the ’60s.” A 1978 article examined the poor quality of Los Angeles water.

Los Angeles magazine had a circulation of about 17,000 when Mr. Miller became its top editor. By the time he retired in 1994, circulation had surpassed 160,000. It is now about 140,000, Ms. Melton said.

George Geoffrey Miller was born in Salt Lake City on Aug. 1, 1936, to Edward and Rosemary Miller. The family later moved to Los Angeles. Mr. Miller earned his bachelor’s

Magazine Preview: Do Cellphones Cause Brain Cancer?

  Bruce Gilden/Magnum, for The New York Times

On Jan. 21, 1993, the television talk-show host Larry King featured an unexpected guest on his program. It was the evening after Inauguration Day in Washington, and the television audience tuned in expecting political commentary. But King turned, instead, to a young man from Florida, David Reynard, who had filed a tort claim against the cellphone manufacturer NEC and the carrier GTE Mobilnet, claiming that radiation from their phones caused or accelerated the growth of a brain tumor in his wife.

“The tumor was exactly in the pattern of the antenna,” Reynard told King. In 1989, Susan Elen Reynard, then 31, was told she had a malignant astrocytoma, a brain cancer that occurs in about 6,000 adults in America each year. To David Reynard, the shape and size of Susan’s tumor — a hazy line swerving from the left side of her midbrain to the hindbrain — uncannily resembled a malignant shadow of the phone (but tumors, like clouds, can assume the shapes of our imaginations). Suzy, as she was known, held her phone at precisely that angle against her left ear, her husband said. Reynard underwent surgery for her cancer but to little effect. She died in 1992, just short of her 34th birthday. David was convinced that high doses of radiation from the cellphone was the cause.

Reynard v. NEC — the first tort suit in the United States to claim a link between phone radiation and brain cancer — illustrated one of the most complex conceptual problems in cancer epidemiology. In principle, a risk factor and cancer can intersect in three ways. The first is arguably the simplest. When a rare form of cancer is associated with a rare exposure, the link between the risk and the cancer stands out starkly. The juxtaposition of the rare on the rare is like a statistical lunar eclipse, and the association can often be discerned accurately by observation alone. The discipline of cancer epidemiology originated in one such a confluence: in 1775, a London surgeon, Sir Percivall Pott, discovered that scrotal cancer was much more common in chimney sweeps than in the general population. The link between an unusual malignancy and an uncommon profession was so striking that Pott did not even need statistics to prove the association. Pott thus discovered one of the first clear links between an environmental substance — a “carcinogen” — and a particular subtype of cancer.

The opposite phenomenon occurs when a common exposure is associated with a common form of cancer: the association, rather than popping out, disappears into the background, like white noise. This peculiar form of a statistical vanishing act occurred famously with tobacco smoking and lung cancer. In the mid-1930s, smoking was becoming so common and lung cancer so prevalent that it was often impossible to definitively discern a statistical link between the two. Researchers wondered whether the intersection of the two phenomena was causal or accidental. Asked about the strikingly concomitant increases in lung cancer and smoking rates in the 1930s, Evarts Graham, a surgeon, countered dismissively that “the sale of nylon stockings” had also increased. Tobacco thus became the nylon stockings of cancer epidemiology — invisible as a carcinogen to many researchers, until it was later identified as a major cause of cancer through careful clinical studies in the 1950s and 1960s.

But the most complex and most publicly contentious intersection between a risk factor and cancer often occurs in the third instance, when a common exposure is associated with a rare form of cancer. This is cancer epidemiology’s toughest conundrum. The rarity of the cancer provokes a desperate and often corrosive search for a cause (“why, of all people, did I get an astrocytoma?” Susan Reynard must have asked herself). And when patients with brain tumors happen to share a common exposure — in this case, cellphones — the line between cause and coincidence begins to blur. The association does not stand out nor does it disappear into statistical white noise. Instead, it remains suspended, like some sort of peculiar optical illusion that is blurry to some and all too clear to others. (A similarly corrosive intersection of a rare illness, a common exposure and the desperate search for a cause occurred recently in the saga of autism and vaccination. Vaccines are nearly universal, and autism is relatively rare — and many parents, searching to explain why their children became autistic, lunged toward a common culprit: childhood vaccination. An avalanche of panic ensued. It took years of carefully performed clinical trials to finally disprove the link.)

The Florida Circuit Court that heard Reynard v. NEC was quick to discern these complexities. It empathized with David Reynard’s search for a tangible cause for his wife’s cancer. But it acknowledged that too little was known about such cases; “the uncertainty of the evidence . . . the speculative scientific hypotheses and [incomplete] epidemiological studies” made it impossible to untangle cause from coincidence. David Reynard’s claim was rejected in the spring of 1995, three years after it was originally filed. What was needed, the court said, was much deeper and more comprehensive knowledge about cellphones, brain cancer and of the possible intersection of the two.

Allow, then, a thought experiment: what if Susan Reynard was given a diagnosis of astrocytoma in 2011 — but this time, we armed her with the most omniscient of lawyers, the most cutting--edge epidemiological information, the most powerful scientific evidence? Nineteen years and several billion cellphone users later, if Reynard were to reappear in court, what would we now know about a possible link between cellphones and her cancer?

To answer these questions, we need to begin with a more fundamental question: How do we know that anything causes cancer?

The crudest method to capture a carcinogen’s imprint in a real human population is a large-scale population survey. If a cancer-causing agent increases the incidence of a particular cancer in a population, say tobacco smoking and lung cancer, then the overall incidence of that cancer will rise. That statement sounds simple enough — to find a carcinogen’s shadow, follow the trend in cancer incidence — but there are some fundamental factors that make the task complicated.

Siddhartha Mukherjee (smukherj2011@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of medicine in the division of medical oncology at Columbia University. He is the author of “Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.” Editor: Ilena Silverman (i.silverman-MagGroup@nytimes.com).