Currents: Finding the Words to Forgive Themselves

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — “Bloodshed,” declared the man on the other end of the call. He was panicked. “I don’t know whether this is the end of the road or capitulation or not, but it will be one day of bloodshed or two more — or, or, or, two more days of bloodshed, man.”

The man was not in Misurata or Dara’a or Kabul. The phone call dates to Oct. 6, 2008, a day that was going badly for David Lau. He was a trader at Galleon, the hedge fund of the fallen billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of insider trading this month in New York.

A striking thing about the call between Messrs. Lau and Rajaratnam — and about the latter’s other calls with subordinates, friends and tipsters in the banking-consulting universe — is a certain human need they revealed. In call after call, these characters betrayed a burning desire to give their transactions a martial, bloody quality that they naturally lacked. They were finance nerds who longed to feel like gladiators.

“I’m long 25 and I’m taking the pain, but I’m — you know, I’m a warrior. They can’t kill me,” Mr. Rajaratnam told another associate.

So many of his sentences are like this, taking a profession of virtual buys and sells and breathing an artificial physicality into them: “I wanna blow everything out.” “The only guys who are whipping stocks around are hedge funds.” “It’s very stressful, you know, every day you come in and it’s — I feel like I’m fighting Muhammad Ali.”

Mr. Rajaratnam’s interlocutors do it, too. Instead of saying that they telephoned someone, they say: “I just lobbed a call in to Ronny.” Sports and war metaphors grip them. They talk in the language of “clearing the last sort of big hurdle,” of the “falling knife” of the stock market.

Language is a beautiful thing that makes so many ugly things possible.

Only the most ruthless humans can do bad things and go on with the knowledge of their badness. Language gives the rest of us a way out — a way of rationalizing, explaining, telling ourselves a story about ourselves. We are not terrorists, but martyrs. We are not greedy, we are doing God’s work.

I read through the transcripts of Mr. Rajaratnam’s wiretapped phone calls this week, with a focus on language. I wanted to understand how this crew of rich-people-longing-to-be-richer conceived of themselves, in their own words.

Their need, above all, to inject knives and blood and boxing into their talk was telling. A common criticism of high-flying financiers is that they are increasingly removed from the reality of their deeds — from the cereal and light bulbs and apartment towers that they fund.

Their detachment makes malfeasance easier, the critics say, for they know not what they sell.

The tapes bolstered that impression. Here were men who spoke surprisingly little about the companies they were investing in, the products they made and the like. The companies were nothing but text on the tickers of a triple-screen computer. But in speaking as they did, the ethereality of their work could be grounded by a feeling that they were creators, doers; men who moved things, made things happen.

George Orwell famously worried about the corrosive effect on language of manipulative governments; in later years, adspeak and textspeak have presented themselves as threats. But financespeak is an empire unto itself, and perhaps more influential than is commonly realized.

The tapes were a reminder of how little this particular language of business is tethered to the stuff of real business: inventory and profit and revenue and the like.

That is not what the hopscotching, globe-trotting figures on the tapes speak of. They are ceaseless jumpers from one stock to another, and they have developed a standardized language of “puts” and “holds” and “long” and “short” that lets them smooth the nuances of each business into a strange new whole grasped only by them.

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Well: Share Six Words About Your Mother

 

Can you sum up your mother in just six words?

To celebrate Mother’s Day, the Well blog has teamed up with Smith magazine and the Six Word Memoir Project to create a new set of six-word “Momoirs.”

The challenge is to explain your mother, someone else’s mother or motherhood in general in just six words. Here are some examples:

A sake mom, not soccer mom.

In meeting. Binky in suit pocket.

Channeling June Cleaver without the pearls.

So many socks, so little time.

Fired therapist. One mother is enough.

Sometimes mom needs a time out.

Suffered miscarriage. Daughter offered her doll.

And did we mention this is a contest? We’ll pick six winners to receive a signed copy of “It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.”

Winners will be selected by both the editors and the readers of the Well blog, so be sure to vote for your favorites. Using our interactive module, readers will have the opportunity to “Like” individual entries on Facebook, and share them with their friends.

Larry Smith, editor of Smith magazine, also will pick several favorite Momoirs to be featured during the next Six-Word Memoir Story Slam, “I Am Turning into My Mother,” to be held May 18 at the 92nd Street Y Tribeca Main Stage in New York. Check the Web site for tickets and more details.

And now, tell us about your mom or motherhood with your six-word Momoir by clicking on the link. Your contest entry must be only six words, but if you have more to say, feel free to come back to Well to join the discussion.

See other entries and enter your own six-word Momoir here.

 

For Threats of Terrorism, Two Words Will Warn

 

The color-coded threat level system endured for nearly 10 years despite widespread criticism, if not mockery, of its sometimes perplexing messages to the public. Now the Department of Homeland Security is phasing out the green-blue-yellow-orange-red palette in favor of a system that officials say will convey more information about the threats.

“Say goodbye to orange,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said Wednesday in announcing the replacement system at Grand Central Terminal in New York.

Ms. Napolitano said the new program, called the national terrorism advisory system, would be put into operation Tuesday. “Elevated” alerts will warn of credible terrorism threats; “imminent” will warn of credible, specific and impending terrorism threats.

The alerts will be “based on specific, credible information about potential terrorist activity” and will include “as many details as we can provide in an unclassified form,” Ms. Napolitano said. They will include a concise summary of a potential threat, a description of the area or type of transportation that could be affected, information about steps the authorities are taking to address any threat and suggestions on how people can be prepared and stay informed.

The alerts will be disseminated through announcements to news organizations and social media sites and will appear on a new Web site, www.dhs.gov/alert.

To avoid a series of “cascading alerts” that can confuse the public, Ms. Napolitano said, each alert issued will expire after two weeks, unless intelligence agencies and the homeland security secretary decide otherwise.

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who joined Ms. Napolitano at the news conference Wednesday, said she thought the public had become inured to the color-coded system, “which many people had basically tuned out because it never ended, and you didn’t really know what it meant.”

Ms. Napolitano said that the new system would provide more concrete information to the public and that alerts under the new system would rely on more specific indications of danger.

The color-coded system was established by a presidential directive in March 2002 during the administration of George W. Bush and denoted five threat levels with a range of colors from green (low) to red (severe).

Nearly from the beginning, the system was maligned as being too vague. The fact that alerts were rarely accompanied by any specific explanation led some people to wonder whether they were sometimes used for political purposes.

“It really didn’t make people more aware or less aware,” said Jim Parker, 46, a lawyer from the Upper West Side of Manhattan who was waiting for a train in the Union Square subway station. “It seemed like the government was putting on a show.”

Edward Mackel, 28, a building supplies salesman from Sunnyside, Queens, said he preferred a system that included information about the nature of a potential threat.

“You walk into an airport,” he said. “You see there’s an orange alert and of course you want to know why.”