New is not new

Bits and pieces collected over a few weeks from the New York Times, compiled while listening to Sunday in the Park with George.

What happened to King Midas?
Finding Comfort (and New Friends) in Gold : It's a splendid spring day in Connecticut's horse country and James E. Sinclair, perhaps the best-known gold speculator of his era, is sitting before his trading terminal, contemplating the upward thrust of gold on his trader's chart.

The sun, bursting through the bay windows, catches the glint of gold that is everywhere in Mr. Sinclair's home office: on the coins near his computer, on his chunky Rolex watch, on the rings on three of his fingers, on the cuff links on his monogrammed shirt, and — could it be? — a hint of it in his one working eye.

"I love gold, O.K.?" he said, his voice rising in excitement. "Gold has made me wealthy. It feels nice. It's exchangeable. It's money."

NYC myopia
New York Times correction: A map last Sunday showing how states are divided on several social issues misidentified New Mexico, which has no laws on gay marriage. The state that was labeled is Arizona; New Mexico is its neighbor to the east.

Yes, it does
Boeing Bets the House on Its 787 Dreamliner The Times: ALL work had stopped at the cavernous Boeing assembly plant in Everett, Wash., just north of here. Five thousand rank-and-file workers and others stood idly, some eating airplane-shaped cookies, as they awaited the guest of honor, President Hu Jintao of China.

On a screen above their heads, images of Boeing planes painted in the colors of various Chinese airlines soared to uplifting music that swelled in the background. Then, a series of inspirational words flashed on the screen — Exploration! Optimism! Brilliant! Vision! — as Chinese pilots, speaking in Mandarin (with English subtitles), said how much they loved to fly Boeing planes.

As the testimonials ended, Mr. Hu made his entrance, and he did not disappoint. Donning a Boeing baseball cap, he became the best salesman the company could have asked for. He talked about how many Boeing planes China has bought since 1972 — 678, for a total of $37 billion. He noted that he had flown to the United States on a Boeing 747 and said that the Chinese people love Boeing.

"Boeing is a household name in my country," he said, as the crowed cheered. "When Chinese people fly, it is mostly with Boeing."

Caught up in the spirit of Mr. Hu's enthusiasm, the chief executive of Boeing's commercial aviation division, Alan R. Mulally, ended the event by pumping his fist into the air and shouting: "China rocks!"

Have some self-confidence
Deborah Solomon Q&A with Cesar Millan: Q: As the founder of the Dog Psychology Center in Los Angeles, you claim that Americans are driving their pets to the brink of insanity by smothering them with affection.

The U.S. is a very assertive society with people, but not when it comes to dogs. People are soft and kissy with dogs. That is why dogs take over. All dogs in America are suffering from the same problem — lack of exercise and lack of leadership. ...

Yet in your book you insist that many Americans and especially New Yorkers don't know how to walk a dog properly.

Every time I go to New York, I see dogs in front of people. Oh, brother. The dog should be behind the person. In the natural dog world, the dog is always behind the pack leader. Pack leaders never, ever tell the dog to go in front.

But what if a person is a schlepper by temperament? Not everyone can be a pack leader.

Not everyone is a pack leader with humans. But anyone can be a pack leader with animals. ...

You're not actually a psychologist, are you?

No. Not by a school. There is no college that teaches you how to control a pack of dogs.

But how can you justify running a dog-psychology center when your whole approach is based on the idea that we're already too dog-obsessed in this country?

The dog doesn't have to know that. Only the dog owner knows.

A good birthday present
A Star Is Made , Freakonomics authors Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: [Anders] Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

For the Times, 'American', 'people', 'we' and 'us' doesn't include immigrants
The Other Immigration, Christopher Caldwell: If you were to set out to design a story that would inflame populist rage, it might involve immigrants from poor countries, living in the United States without permission to work, hiring powerful Washington lobbyists to press their case. In late April, The Washington Post reported just such a development. The immigrants in question were highly skilled — the programmers and doctors and investment analysts that American business seeks out through so-called H-1B visas, and who are eligible for tens of thousands of "green cards," or permanent work permits, each year. But bureaucracy and an affirmative-action-style system of national-origin quotas have created a mess. India and China account for almost 40 percent of the world's population, yet neither can claim much more than 7 percent of the green cards. Hence a half-million-person backlog and a new political pressure group, which calls itself Immigration Voice.

The group's efforts will be a test of the commonly expressed view that Americans are not opposed to immigration, only to illegal immigration. Immigration Voice represents the kind of immigrants whose economic contributions are obvious. It is not a coincidence that the land of the H-1B is also the land of the iPod. Such immigrants are not "cutting in line" — they're petitioning for pre-job documentation, not for post-job amnesty. And people who have undergone 18 years of schooling to learn how to manipulate advanced technology come pre-Americanized, in a way that agricultural workers may not.

But Immigration Voice could still wind up crying in the wilderness. As the Boston College political scientist Peter Skerry has noted, many of the things that bug people about undocumented workers are also true of documented ones. Legal immigrants, too, increase crowding, compete for jobs and government services and create an atmosphere of transience and disruption. Indeed, it may be harder for foreign-born engineers to win the same grip on the sympathies of native-born Americans that undocumented farm laborers and political refugees have. Skilled immigrants can't be understood through the usual paradigms of victimhood. ...

So how are we supposed to address the special needs of this class of migrant? For the most part, we don't. The differences between skilled and unskilled immigrants are important, but that doesn't mean that they are always readily comprehensible either to politicians or to public opinion. When high-skilled immigrants who are already like us show themselves willing to become even more so, jumping every hoop to join us on a legal footing, it dissolves a lot of resistance. But it doesn't dissolve everything. It doesn't dissolve our sense that people like them are different and potentially even threatening.

A great second paragraph
Celebrex Ads Are Back, Dire Warnings and All, Alex Berenson: The ads for the Pfizer painkiller Celebrex feature a man holding a boy's hand as they walk up a stadium staircase. "52 steps won't keep you from taking him out to the ballgame," they say.

But a heart attack would.

Each ad includes a boldface warning that begins, "Important Information: Celebrex may increase the chance of a heart attack or stroke that can lead to death."

As it resumes ads for the controversial medicine, Pfizer, the world's biggest drug maker, is offering consumers a decidedly mixed message. But 16 months after the company stopped advertising Celebrex over concerns about its heart risks, Pfizer has returned to the consumer ad market in hopes of reviving sales of the drug, which plunged last year during the ad moratorium.

James E. Sinclair says he loves gold. And with gold prices on the rise, Wall Street is taking notice, too. Alan S. Orling photo and caption from The New York Times.

Saul Steinberg's New Yorker "View from 9th Avenue" cover in various places online.

Image of Boeing 787 from Boeing's Newairplane.com website.