Lens Blog: Lynsey Addario's Photographs of Women in Combat

Lynsey Addario, a  photographer for The New York Times, has extensively covered the war in Afghanistan, often focusing on female soldiers. She spoke with James Estrin about the Pentagon’s recent lifting of the ban on women in combat. The conversation, which took place via Skype from her home in London has been edited.

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When I heard about the lifting of the ban on women in combat, I thought about your coverage of female soldiers for The Times, and also about the interview we did about women covering conflict after you were freed from captivity in Libya. What was your reaction to the announcement?

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Lynsey Addario

Lynsey Addario, who freelances for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine and others, has previously appeared on Lens Blog.

It is a huge step historically, of course, but it’s actually just stating publicly what has been happening little by little over the past decade. Women have been fighting this war more and more, whether we acknowledge it or not.

They’re at bases all across Afghanistan, and they’re playing different roles – from black ops pilots to doing triage in forward-operating medical centers. They’re engaging women in villages of Helmand that are covered with landmines. They are getting shot at. They are dying, and they are getting injured.

Everyone can fight about whether women should be on the front lines, but the fact is that they are out there. So, at some point, you have to acknowledge it and compensate them for it or at least give them the dignity of saying “O.K., you’re out there, and thank you for it.” Instead of saying, “No, they’re not allowed,” but really, they are.

You’ve often focused on female soldiers.

Mostly in 2009 and 2010. Most of the work I shot on assignment for The New York Times when I was doing a series with Elisabeth Bumiller. And then when I was doing the big National Geographic story on women in Afghanistan, I did a few embeds focusing on female soldiers who would meet Afghan women. That work is so dear to me, and I loved shooting it.

Who are these women joining the military and wanting to be in combat?

They’re women who don’t feel inhibited by their sex, by their gender. I mean, they’re women who don’t feel limited by the fact that they were born women. They believe in fighting for their country. They want to be doing something to help fight the wars that we’ve been fighting for over a decade. And they want to be out there.

They’re no different than any of us. They have a goal, and they want to accomplish it. And they don’t want to be told they can’t do it because they’re women.

A lot of them are extremely ambitious, very dedicated. They work out all the time, very intelligent.

What made you want to do this story to pursue it so deeply?

One of the biggest challenges as a photographer is to take a subject that’s been covered for decades and to try to bring something new to it. I’ve been going on these embeds for years, and it’s very hard to make a compelling picture or something new that the reader hasn’t seen before.

When I started seeing women on the front line, I was intrigued.  It felt so strange to me, and I immediately got pulled in. I also had access to them because I was often put in the same tent or made to sleep in the room with all the women. I was always sort of pushed off with the women because on military bases, there’s a real separation. You know, you have to have separate sleeping quarters for women.

What is that you learned as you pursued this story?

I think the longer these wars go on, and the more women are inserted in these nontraditional roles in the military, the more we have to accept the fact that there are actually women on the front lines.

I myself am a woman, and I’ve been embedding for years with the military. And granted, I’m not carrying thousands of rounds of ammunition and the packs that they carry. But I do go on the same patrols that the men go on and I am able to keep up.

There are great differences between men and women in terms of strength and what we can carry and what we can keep up with, but I don’t think it’s necessary for men and women to be equal. I think that women can play a role on the front line without having to hold up the same amount of weight as men.

You said that you don’t have to look at men and women as being equal for women to contribute on the front line. What exactly did you mean?

Well, I think one of the arguments a lot of people have is that women can’t hold their own the way men can. For example, if you have a fellow soldier who’s been shot, can you carry his body alone back to a safe place? And one of the arguments is that a woman couldn’t do that. So therefore, she shouldn’t be out there.

I don’t know how you work around that. I’m not really sure what the answer is. The fact is that women are not as strong as a lot of men. There are some women who are, but I think, over all, it’s going to be a challenge to find women who can keep up with the physical endurance tests that men can. That said, I’m not sure how important that is anymore because the war is changing. The war we fight now is not the same war that was fought 40 years ago.

This is a war on terror, this is a war where the front lines are nebulous.

When we talked about your being on the front lines shortly after you were freed from Libya, you pointed to specific things you thought a woman could bring to the table. A woman may not have the same access to men, but they’re going to have much stronger access to women. And different perspectives. Is there a similar situation for female soldiers on the front line?

This gets back into the discussion about what is the front line. The female engagement teams were created to engage with Afghan women — 50 percent of the population — that we didn’t have access to before. That’s part of the whole counterinsurgency project. So, if you’re trying to win over a population and you don’t have access to 50 percent of the people, it’s going to be very hard.

You can’t do that with men because, traditionally in Afghanistan, men cannot go into a house and sit down with Afghan women. The female engagement teams went in, and they were able to sit down, drink tea and talk to Afghan women.

How much was accomplished is obviously up for discussion. Some people say not that much was accomplished and that they just went and drank tea. Some people say, “Well, they were able to gain trust of families that didn’t before believe that Americans were good people.”

If your doctrine is counterinsurgency, if you’re trying to win over the population, it’s probably worth the effort to go out and try to engage in a country that’s very segregated by the sexes.

I’m older than you, and I remember when there weren’t many women in the military. And there were heated discussions about how women can’t be in the military, how women can’t be captured, how it would harm the other soldiers and it would hurt morale.

Well, I remember when Elizabeth Rubin and I went to the Korengal Valley to embed with the 173rd Airborne. This was for The New York Times Magazine. And Elizabeth wanted to do a story about why, with all the firepower that we had, we weren’t winning the war? And how come there was so much collateral damage? And so basically, we lived on the side of a mountain for two months of the Korengal Outpost.

But when we first asked the press guys with the military to go to that base, they said, “It is not a place fit for women. You cannot go.” And Elizabeth and I said that’s exactly where we want to go. Now we really want to go.

And so finally, we fought so much that they sent us to the Korengal, and we were the only two women there for months. This was before the female engagement teams, and that particular outpost saw heavy fighting all the time. I mean, we were basically shot at or mortared almost on a daily basis.

We kept up with all the patrols. We went on six, seven hour a day patrols. We carried our own stuff. We were out there getting shot at as well. Now, were we carrying guns and ammunition? No. So it’s a very different thing. But we were able to keep up and we were able to live out there.

I think when you start challenging the norms and when you start pushing the boundaries a little, you realize that the boundaries can really be pushed.

Is there anything that you can think of that is a realistic boundary between male and female soldiers?

Yes. I mean, there are times where you need someone who can carry the soldier if he gets shot. Or you need someone who physically can carry a certain amount of rounds of ammunition. I’m not a commander in the military, so there’s a lot I don’t understand.

There are situations where women aren’t really fit to be in certain roles. Special Forces, for example. Do I think women can be in Special Forces? I’m not sure. The demand on the body and spending extended periods of time in the middle of nowhere, I don’t know if that’s O.K. for women.

But I do think there is space for women on the front lines, but it is always going to be defined by what exactly is that front line. Because it’s not Vietnam, we’re in a very different war.  It’s different from 30 years ago, or 20 years ago.

Is the situation of a female foreign correspondent or photojournalist on the front lines similar to that of female soldiers?

It’s different, because the military has layers and layers and layers of command. And so they take decisions as a group.

You know, when you’re dealing with the military, those are decisions that are made at a very high level and passed down. Me, I’m in charge of my own destiny. So I can decide, to a certain extent, how much I want to be in the middle of combat.

One time, we were shot at as I was walking around with one of the female engagement teams. Just because legally, they weren’t allowed to be on the front lines, they were still being shot at on the front lines.

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Follow @lynseyaddario, @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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DealBook Column: Mary Jo White, Nominee for S.E.C.'s 'New Sherrif,' Has Worn Banks' Hat

“You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo.”

That’s what President Obama said about his pick to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White. The nomination of Ms. White, a former prosecutor who took on the terrorists behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Mafia boss John Gotti, was meant to signal that the S.E.C. would be getting tough on Wall Street. CBS called her “Wall Street’s new sheriff.” The Wall Street Journal said she would be “putting a tougher face on an agency still tainted by embarrassing enforcement missteps in the run-up to the financial crisis.” The New York Times said her appointment represented a “renewed resolve to hold Wall Street accountable.”

Hold on.

While Ms. White is a decorated prosecutor, she has spent the last decade vigorously defending — and billing by the hour — Wall Street’s biggest banks, as a rainmaking partner at the white-shoe law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. The average partner at the firm was paid $2.1 million a year, according to American Lawyer; but she was no average partner, very likely being paid at least double that. Her husband, John W. White, is a corporate partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He counts JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse and UBS as clients. The average partner at Cravath makes $3.1 million. He, too, was a former official at the S.E.C. — he left Cravath to run the corporate division of the S.E.C. starting in 2006 just in time for the run-up to the financial crisis. He left in November 2008, a month after the bank bailouts, to return to Cravath.

It seems Mr. and Ms. White have made a fine art of the revolving door between government and private practice.

So how conflicted is Ms. White? Let’s count the ways.

They are well documented: she was JPMorgan Chase’s go-to lawyer for many of the cases brought against it relating to the financial crisis. She was arm-in-arm with Kenneth D. Lewis, Bank of America’s former chief executive, keeping him out of trouble when the New York attorney general accused Mr. Lewis of defrauding investors by not disclosing the losses at Merrill Lynch before completing Bank of America’s acquisition of the firm. (And empirically, Mr. Lewis did keep crucial information about the deal from investors.)

This is what she had to say about Mr. Lewis, in a court filing submitted on his behalf: “Some have looked to assign blame for every aspect of the financial crisis, even where there is no evidence of misconduct. This case is a product of that dynamic and does not withstand either legal or factual scrutiny.” It was a refrain she often made about her clients related to the financial crisis.

And then there was Senator Bill Frist, the Republican from Tennessee, whom she successfully represented when the S.E.C. and the Justice Department started an investigation into whether he was involved in insider trading in shares of HCA, the hospital chain. She persuaded them to shut down the investigation.

She also worked with Siemens, the German industrial giant, when it pleaded guilty to charges of bribery, paying a record $1.6 billion penalty.

And then, of course, there was John Mack. She worked for the board of Morgan Stanley during a now well-publicized 2005 investigation into insider trading that ended soon after she made a phone call to the S.E.C. Using her connections at the top of the agency, she dialed up Linda Thomsen, then the commission’s head of enforcement, to find out whether Mr. Mack, who was being considered for Morgan Stanley’s chief executive position, was being implicated. He ultimately wasn’t. As the Huffington Post pointed out in a recent article about Ms. White, Robert Hanson, an S.E.C. supervisor, later testified, “It is a little out of the ordinary for Mary Jo White to contact Linda Thomsen directly, but that White is very prestigious and it isn’t uncommon for someone prominent to have someone intervene on their behalf.”

All of Ms. White’s previous engagements create not only an “optics” problem, but a practical, on-the-job problem. She will most likely need to recuse herself from just about anything related to her previous work.

“I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts,” is the language in an ethics pledge that she will have to agree to follow.

Some appointees, including Mary L. Schapiro, the former chairwoman of the S.E.C., recused themselves from any involvement in work that was related to a previous employer even after the two-year moratorium. Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, recused himself from the investigation into MF Global because of his previous employment at Goldman Sachs, where Jon Corzine was the firm’s head, even though it had been years since the two had worked together.

And then there is the issue of Mr. White’s husband, who will have a continuing role at Cravath, one of the most pre-eminent firms in the country, whose clients include some of the nation’s largest corporations.

“This president has adopted the toughest ethics rules of any administration in history,” said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman, “and this nominee is no exception. As S.E.C. chair, Mary Jo White will be in complete compliance with all ethics rules.”

None of these conflicts gets at another potential problem for Ms. White. The job of chairwoman of S.E.C. isn’t simply about enforcement; she has a deputy for that. The biggest challenge anyone who takes the job will have to confront over the next several years will be executing and enforcing provisions of Dodd-Frank and working to regulate electronic trading — something that even the most sophisticated financial professionals, let alone a lawyer, often have a tough time understanding. She has zero experience in this area.

Of course, there can always be a value to inviting a onetime rival onto the team.

“I believe she is one of those people who will understand that her public role will be very, very different than her role as a defense lawyer,” Dennis M. Kelleher of Better Markets, a watchdog group, told me. “I don’t think she’s going to be like so many others who don’t get that they have a very different role when they hold high public office.

“No question, she’s said some things that are controversial and questionable,” Mr. Kelleher said. “Moreover, I hope and expect that she will be asked publicly about them in the confirmation process and that she will have convincing answers.”

Of course, if she is confirmed, we must all hope that she can put her previous client relationships behind her and work for her new client — us.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan south of Houston Street, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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Rescuer Appears for New York Downtown Hospital

Manhattan’s only remaining hospital south of 14th Street, New York Downtown, has found a white knight willing to take over its debt and return it to good health, hospital officials said Monday.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, one of New York City’s largest academic medical centers, has proposed to take over New York Downtown in a “certificate of need” filed with the State Health Department. The three-page proposal argues that though New York Downtown is projected to have a significant operating loss in 2013, it is vital to Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, Chinatown and the Lower East Side, especially since the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital after it declared bankruptcy in 2010.

The rescue proposal, which would need the Health Department’s approval, comes at a precarious time for hospitals in the city. Long Island College Hospital, just across the river in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has been threatened with closing after a failed merger with SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and several other Brooklyn hospitals are considering mergers to stem losses.

New York Downtown has been affiliated with the NewYork-Presbyterian health care system while maintaining separate operations.

“We are looking forward to having them become a sixth campus so the people in that community can continue to have a community hospital that continues to serve them,” Myrna Manners, a spokeswoman for NewYork-Presbyterian, said.

Fred Winters, a spokesman for New York Downtown, declined to comment.

Presbyterian’s proposal emphasized that it would acquire New York Downtown’s debt at no cost to the state, a critical point at a time when the state has shown little interest in bailing out failing hospitals.

The proposal said that if New York Downtown were to close, it would leave more than 300,000 residents of Lower Manhattan south of Houston Street, including the financial district, Greenwich Village, SoHo, the Lower East Side and Chinatown, without a community hospital. In addition, it said, 750,000 people work and visit in the area every day, a number that is expected to grow with the construction of 1 World Trade Center and related buildings.

The proposal argues that New York Downtown is essential partly because of its long history of responding to disasters in the city. One of its predecessors was founded as a direct result of the 1920 terrorist bombing outside the J. P. Morgan Building, and the hospital has responded to the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern, the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, and, this month, the crash of a commuter ferry from New Jersey.

Like other fragile hospitals in the city, New York Downtown has shrunk, going to 180 beds, down from the 254 beds it was certified for in 2006, partly because the more affluent residents of Lower Manhattan often go to bigger hospitals for elective care.

The proposal says that half of the emergency department patients at New York Downtown either are on Medicaid, the program for the poor, or are uninsured.

NewYork-Presbyterian would absorb the cost of the hospital’s maternity and neonatal intensive care units, which have been expanding because of demand, but have been operating at a deficit of more than $1 million a year, the proposal said.

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Dispute With Antigua and Barbuda Threatens U.S. Copyrights

WASHINGTON — A long-simmering trade conflict between the United States and Antigua and Barbuda appears to be boiling over.

Antigua and Barbuda, which has a $1 billion economy, is planning on getting legal retribution from the United States’ $15 trillion economy over its refusal to let Americans gamble at online sites based in the Caribbean nation — perhaps by offering downloads of American intellectual property, like Hollywood films, network television shows or hit pop songs. On Monday, the World Trade Organization gave its go-ahead for Antigua and Barbuda’s tentative plan.

“The economy of Antigua and Barbuda has been devastated by the United States government’s long campaign to prevent American consumers from gambling,” Harold Lovell, Antigua’s finance minister, said in a statement. “These aggressive efforts to shut down the remote gaming industry in Antigua have resulted in the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs and seizure by the Americans of billions of dollars belonging to gaming operators and their customers.”

The conflict’s roots are a decade old. The World Trade Organization said that the United States had violated its trade agreements by preventing Americans from betting at sites based in Antigua and Barbuda. Because Washington is unwilling to make the betting legal, the countries have been locked in a dispute over what constitutes fair trade practices and fair compensation.

The online gambling industry was at one point the second-largest employer in the Caribbean country, its government has said, and economists estimated its worth at $3.4 billion. Gambling employment has dropped to fewer than 500 people from more than 4,000 as a result of the United States’ trade policy, it said.

On Monday, a dispute settlement body in Geneva gave Antigua and Barbuda the nod to, in essence, violate American intellectual property rights to make up its losses, calculated at $21 million a year.

It remains murky just how the Antigua and Barbuda government might go about it. But trade watchers suggested it might set up a site where viewers could pay a pittance to watch a film or television show with an American copyright. The United States might not be able to shut the site down under international law.

“We are disappointed with Antigua and Barbuda’s decision to abandon constructive settlement discussions,” Nkenge Harmon, a spokeswoman for the United States trade representative, said in an e-mail. “As recently as Friday, our two countries held high-level discussions on possible settlement options that would have brought real benefits to Antigua’s businesses and people.”

The Obama administration said that the proposed plan might further hurt trade relations between the two countries.

“If Antigua does proceed with the unprecedented plan for its government to authorize the theft of intellectual property, it would only serve to hurt Antigua’s own interests,” Ms. Harmon said. “Government-authorized piracy would undermine chances for a settlement. It also would serve as a major impediment to foreign investment in the Antiguan economy, particularly in high-tech industries.”

Trade experts said that Antigua and Barbuda’s plan for retribution seemed designed to provoke American filmmakers and recording artists into pushing for Congress to allow foreign Internet gambling sites to serve American customers.

They also noted that it was the United States that had pushed for the unusual “cross-retaliation” mechanism at the W.T.O., where trade violations that hurt one industry could be countered with trade actions against a completely different industry.

“The irony is rich, rich, rich,” said Lori Wallach, the director of Global Trade Watch at Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group.

“The practical question is, Is there a majority in the House and Senate to vote to revoke the ban, and would Congress do it because the W.T.O. told them?” she said, saying it was unclear how the two countries would proceed.

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Hiroshi Nakajima, Leader of World Health Organization, Dies at 84

Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, a Japanese physician who as leader of the World Health Organization started campaigns to fight malaria and other infectious diseases but whose tenure, from 1988 to 1998, was marred by repeated accusations of mismanagement, died on Saturday in Poitiers, France. He was 84.

He died after a short illness, the organization said.

Besides his efforts to fight infectious diseases, including AIDS, tuberculosis and dengue fever, Dr. Nakajima enlarged the organization’s focus on preventive medicine and vaccinations for children, and tried to rally international support to end ritual female genital mutilation. In a statement on Monday, Dr. Margaret Chan, the current W.H.O. director general, praised his efforts to defeat polio.

But he came under frequent criticism. The United States and other Western nations twice opposed his election as director general of the agency, which is part of the United Nations. They argued that he had not infused the agency with a clear sense of direction and had let its budget and bureaucracy balloon.

In 1992, when Washington was fighting Dr. Nakajima’s re-election, Louis W. Sullivan, the secretary of health and human services, wrote, “It appears that W.H.O. is losing its reputation as the world’s leader in health matters at a time when serious global health problems present daunting challenges to us all.”

Dr. Nakajima was again cast in a harsh light when Dr. Jonathan Mann, the widely respected commander of the United Nations’s fight against AIDS, resigned in 1990. In an interview with The New York Times, Dr. Mann said he resigned over “issues of principle” and “major disagreements” with Dr. Nakajima, who wanted to de-emphasize AIDS prevention and put more effort into other diseases, like malaria.

Dr. June Osborn, chairwoman of the National Commission on AIDS, called the resignation of Dr. Mann, who died in 1998, “a world tragedy.”

In the 1992 director general election, the United States accused Japan of overly aggressive tactics in promoting Dr. Nakajima’s candidacy. The State Department said Japan had threatened to cut off fish imports from the Maldives and coffee imports from Jamaica if those countries did not support Dr. Nakajima. A spokesman for Japan’s Foreign Ministry denied the accusations.

There were also allegations that Japan had awarded research contracts to 23 of the 31 W.H.O executive board members who recommended Dr. Nakajima’s re-election. A W.H.O. audit found that the contracts — the largest of which was $150,000 — were technically legal but presented “a problem of ethics,” in the words of the board chairman, Jean-François Girard of France.

Dr. Nakajima defeated Dr. Mohammed Abdelmoumene of Algeria, who had been his deputy, in a 93-58 vote. It was the first time in the organization’s history that an incumbent director had been challenged by another W.H.O. official.

In 1997, Dr. Nakajima announced that he would not seek a third term, in part because he had lost support from African nations after he had explained the relative scarcity of Africans in executive positions at the agency by suggesting that Africans had difficulty conceptualizing and writing reports.

The Economist magazine said the remark “was particularly odd coming from Dr. Nakajima, who has himself been accused of quasi-incomprehensibility, even when he speaks Japanese.”

Dr. Nakajima was born in Chiba-shi, Japan, on May 16, 1928. He graduated from Tokyo Medical University in 1955, representing the 10th generation of his family to produce a doctor. After studying psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Paris, he returned to Tokyo Medical University to earn a Ph.D. in medical sciences. He then became research director for Nippon Roche, the Japanese subsidiary of Hoffmann-LaRoche.

Dr. Nakajima joined the W.H.O. in 1974, and worked to improve getting medical supplies to the third world. He helped develop the concept of “essential medicines,” drugs that satisfy the health care needs of most of a population. In 1979, the Western Pacific nations elected him regional director, and he served two terms.

Dr. Nakajima is survived by his wife, the former Martha Ann DeWitt, and two sons.

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DealBook: Beneath the Calm, SAC Works to Contain Fallout From an Inquiry

At last month’s Hurricane Sandy benefit concert, Steven A. Cohen sat near the Madison Square Garden stage, grooving to performances by Bon Jovi and Billy Joel.

Last week, he flew a private jet to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, rubbing shoulders with world leaders and Fortune 500 chieftains. And on Monday, he will show up at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for one of the year’s biggest hedge fund conferences and, if he can squeeze it in, a round of golf.

For a man who has emerged as the Justice Department’s great white whale in its insider trading investigation — a Wall Street version of Captain Ahab pursuing Moby-Dick — Mr. Cohen, the billionaire owner of the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, does not appear concerned.

But inside the offices of SAC’s Stamford, Conn., headquarters, and at Midtown Manhattan law firms, Mr. Cohen’s employees and lawyers are working hard to contain the fallout from the investigation.

His executives have offered financial incentives to Mr. Cohen’s staff members to stay with SAC. Marketing officers are trying to persuade investors to keep their money at the fund. And defense lawyers are working furiously to persuade federal securities regulators not to file a civil fraud lawsuit against the firm.

“This has always been a stressful place to work,” said an SAC employee who requested anonymity because he was unauthorized to speak publicly about the fund. “Now it’s just more stressful.”

Neither SAC nor Mr. Cohen has been accused of any wrongdoing.

The main question now looming over the firm is whether its clients will stand by the fund, or its legal and regulatory problems will cause investors to head for the exits. Under the firm’s rules, SAC clients have until Feb. 15 to ask for their money back, and then cannot make another so-called redemption request for another three months.

Mr. Cohen’s fund was dealt a blow last week when a Citigroup unit that manages money for wealthy families disclosed that it was withdrawing its $187 million investment. The move by the bank was the most prominent client departure since November, when the multiyear investigation into SAC’s trading practices entered a more serious phase.

Citigroup’s withdrawal represents a tiny percentage of SAC’s $14 billion in assets under management. The fund has said it expects total investor redemptions for the first quarter of up to $1 billion, a number that an SAC spokesman has said will not adversely affect its business.

SAC is largely insulated from the potentially devastating effects that client defections can have on a hedge fund in part because of Mr. Cohen’s extraordinary wealth. Unlike other hedge fund managers who rely almost entirely on outside investors, Mr. Cohen has the comfort of knowing that about $8 billion of SAC’s fund belongs to him and his employees.

Still, the Citigroup decision stung, say people close to SAC’s business, because of the longstanding and lucrative relationship between the bank and the fund. Another concern, said these people, is that the move could influence other large SAC investors currently weighing whether to keep their money at the fund.

For Citigroup, its withdrawal of money from SAC carries substantial business risk. The bank has a vast relationship with SAC, earning revenue by providing the fund with financing and trading services.

SAC could exact retribution on Citigroup by terminating, or at least scaling back, its broader relationship with the bank. An SAC spokesman declined to comment.

Citigroup’s move came two months after federal authorities arrested Mathew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager, in what they described as the most lucrative insider trading case ever uncovered. The Martoma indictment represented the first time that the government had brought charges stemming from a trade in which Mr. Cohen had been involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission has warned Mr. Cohen that it might file a civil fraud action against SAC related to the case.

In addition to Mr. Martoma, at least seven former SAC employees have been tied to insider trading while at the fund. Three have pleaded guilty to criminal charges.

Citigroup issued a statement that its decision “should not be construed as a statement on the merits of any outstanding legal proceedings or potential regulatory action.” But the bank specifically cited the Martoma case, explaining that “in the event these legal and regulatory matters are resolved favorably for Mr. Martoma and SAC, Citi Private Bank expects to reconsider admission of SAC’s funds to its hedge fund platform.”

Mr. Martoma has pleaded not guilty and rejected requests by federal agents to cooperate against his former boss. Mr. Cohen has told his employees and clients that he is confident that he has acted appropriately at all times.

Yet the heightened government scrutiny has caused skittishness among SAC’s top ranks, forcing the fund to lavish even richer financial incentives on a group of employees that is already among the most highly compensated in the hedge fund industry.

This month, SAC told its stable of portfolio managers that it would increase year-end bonuses by three percentage points. SAC portfolio managers — the fund’s most senior traders, given the authority to make their own investment decisions and also feed Mr. Cohen their best ideas — are paid, on average, 20 percent of the profits they generate for the fund.

“The program is intended to retain our most valuable resource, our investment professionals,” said Jonathan Gasthalter, the SAC spokesman.

Another valuable resource is SAC’s outside investors, which account for about $6 billion, or 40 percent, of the fund’s assets. That money accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, which SAC uses to finance one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated hedge fund operations, with more than 1,000 employees and 125 teams of traders and analysts. Its operation is also one of the most successful, posting average annualized returns of about 30 percent since 1992.

Those results have in the past kept SAC’s customers satisfied, but the government scrutiny has made many of them uneasy. The firm’s marketing team has reached out to the fund’s investors to address their concerns and reassure them that the insider trading inquiry will not affect its performance.

Despite those efforts, several investors in addition to Citigroup, including Titan Advisors and a unit of Société Générale, have notified SAC that they are withdrawing money. Other clients, like Chapwood Investments and SkyBridge Capital, have said they will continue to invest with the fund.

SAC executives continued the charm offensive with major clients on Sunday, holding an annual golf outing in Palm Beach on the eve of a hedge fund conference at the Breakers sponsored by Morgan Stanley. The conference — a matchmaking event that connects top managers with the world’s richest investors — is considered an important stop on the hedge fund money-raising circuit.

Since Morgan Stanley does not invite the news media to its conference, there is not expected to be the same paparazzi-like reports on Mr. Cohen that emerged last week from Davos. Bloomberg News filed a dispatch that Mr. Cohen sat in on a panel discussion on data security called “The Digital Infrastructure Context.” And Henry Blodget, the editor of the financial Web site Business Insider, wrote a Twitter post on a sighting of Mr. Cohen.

“Steve Cohen was hanging in Davos lounge yesterday,” he wrote. “Didn’t look worried.”

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Ariel Sharon Brain Scan Shows Response to Stimuli

JERUSALEM — A brain scan performed on Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who had a devastating stroke seven years ago and is presumed to be in a vegetative state, revealed significant brain activity in response to external stimuli, raising the chances that he is able to hear and understand, a scientist involved in the test said Sunday.

Scientists showed Mr. Sharon, 84, pictures of his family, had him listen to a recording of the voice of one of his sons and used tactile stimulation to assess the extent of his brain’s response.

“We were surprised that there was activity in the proper parts of the brain,” said Prof. Alon Friedman, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team that carried out the test. “It raises the chances that he hears and understands, but we cannot be sure. The test did not prove that.”

The activity in specific regions of the brain indicated appropriate processing of the stimulations, according to a statement from Ben-Gurion University, but additional tests to assess Mr. Sharon’s level of consciousness were less conclusive.

“While there were some encouraging signs, these were subtle and not as strong,” the statement added.

The test was carried out last week at the Soroka University Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba using a state-of-the-art M.R.I. machine and methods recently developed by Prof. Martin M. Monti of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Monti took part in the test, which lasted approximately two hours.

Mr. Sharon’s son Gilad said in October 2011 that he believed that his father responded to some requests. “When he is awake, he looks at me and moves fingers when I ask him to,” he said at the time, adding, “I am sure he hears me.”

Professor Friedman said in a telephone interview that the test results “say nothing about the future” but may be of some help to the family and the regular medical staff caring for Mr. Sharon at a hospital outside Tel Aviv.

“There is a small chance that he is conscious but has no way of expressing it,” Professor Friedman said, but he added, “We do not know to what extent he is conscious.”

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Ariel Sharon Brain Scan Shows Response to Stimuli

JERUSALEM — A brain scan performed on Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who had a devastating stroke seven years ago and is presumed to be in a vegetative state, revealed significant brain activity in response to external stimuli, raising the chances that he is able to hear and understand, a scientist involved in the test said Sunday.

Scientists showed Mr. Sharon, 84, pictures of his family, had him listen to a recording of the voice of one of his sons and used tactile stimulation to assess the extent of his brain’s response.

“We were surprised that there was activity in the proper parts of the brain,” said Prof. Alon Friedman, a neuroscientist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a member of the team that carried out the test. “It raises the chances that he hears and understands, but we cannot be sure. The test did not prove that.”

The activity in specific regions of the brain indicated appropriate processing of the stimulations, according to a statement from Ben-Gurion University, but additional tests to assess Mr. Sharon’s level of consciousness were less conclusive.

“While there were some encouraging signs, these were subtle and not as strong,” the statement added.

The test was carried out last week at the Soroka University Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba using a state-of-the-art M.R.I. machine and methods recently developed by Prof. Martin M. Monti of the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Monti took part in the test, which lasted approximately two hours.

Mr. Sharon’s son Gilad said in October 2011 that he believed that his father responded to some requests. “When he is awake, he looks at me and moves fingers when I ask him to,” he said at the time, adding, “I am sure he hears me.”

Professor Friedman said in a telephone interview that the test results “say nothing about the future” but may be of some help to the family and the regular medical staff caring for Mr. Sharon at a hospital outside Tel Aviv.

“There is a small chance that he is conscious but has no way of expressing it,” Professor Friedman said, but he added, “We do not know to what extent he is conscious.”

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Unboxed: Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens

ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.

The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).

These findings are hardly the last word. At this stage, this kind of digital analysis is mostly an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities. The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.

“Traditionally, literary history was done by studying a relative handful of texts,” says Mr. Jockers, an assistant professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. “What this technology does is let you see the big picture — the context in which a writer worked — on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

Mr. Jockers, 46, personifies the digital advance in the humanities. He received a Ph.D. in English literature from Southern Illinois University, but was also fascinated by computing and became a self-taught programmer. Before he moved to the University of Nebraska last year, he spent more than a decade at Stanford, where he was a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which is dedicated to the digital exploration of books.

Today, Mr. Jockers describes the tools of his trade in terms familiar to an Internet software engineer — algorithms that use machine learning and network analysis techniques. His mathematical models are tailored to identify word patterns and thematic elements in written text. The number and strength of links among novels determine influence, much the way Google ranks Web sites.

It is this ability to collect, measure and analyze data for meaningful insights that is the promise of Big Data technology. In the humanities and social sciences, the flood of new data comes from many sources including books scanned into digital form, Web sites, blog posts and social network communications.

Data-centric specialties are growing fast, giving rise to a new vocabulary. In political science, this quantitative analysis is called political methodology. In history, there is cliometrics, which applies econometrics to history. In literature, stylometry is the study of an author’s writing style, and these days it leans heavily on computing and statistical analysis. Culturomics is the umbrella term used to describe rigorous quantitative inquiries in the social sciences and humanities.

“Some call it computer science and some call it statistics, but the essence is that these algorithmic methods are increasingly part of every discipline now,” says Gary King, director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Cultural data analysts often adapt biological analogies to describe their work. Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.

Mr. Michel and another researcher, Erez Lieberman Aiden, led a project to mine the virtual book depository known as Google Books and to track the use of words over time, compare related words and even graph them.

Google cooperated and built the software for making graphs open to the public. The initial version of Google’s cultural exploration site began at the end of 2010, based on more than five million books, dating from 1500. By now, Google has scanned 20 million books, and the site is used 50 times a minute. For example, type in “women” in comparison to “men,” and you see that for centuries the number of references to men dwarfed those for women. The crossover came in 1985, with women ahead ever since.

In work published in Science magazine in 2011, Mr. Michel and the research team tapped the Google Books data to find how quickly the past fades from books. For instance, references to “1880,” which peaked in that year, fell to half by 1912, a lag of 32 years. By contrast, “1973” declined to half its peak by 1983, only 10 years later. “We are forgetting our past faster with each passing year,” the authors wrote.

JON KLEINBERG, a computer scientist at Cornell, and a group of researchers approached collective memory from a very different perspective.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 27, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated Matthew L. Jockers’s age. He is 46, not 48. It also misspelled the title of the movie known for the line “You had me at hello.” It is “Jerry Maguire,” not “Jerry McGuire.”

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