Dodgers near TV rights deal with Time Warner Cable

The Los Angeles Dodgers have negotiated a long-term television deal that would pay the team $7 billion to $8 billion, a move that would help cover its recent spending spree and quiet critics who scoffed at the record $2.15-billion purchase price paid by the new owner, Guggenheim Partners.

The expected 20-year agreement with Time Warner Cable could be announced this week, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked that their names not be used because the deal has not yet closed.

The arrangement is bad news for rival News Corp's Fox Sports unit, whose channel Prime Ticket holds cable TV rights to the Dodgers through the upcoming season. Fox will pay $39 million this season — a fraction of what Time Warner Cable would pay under the new contract — and found the proposed price tag too high, people inside News Corp. said.

And the pact would probably mean bigger pay TV bills — even for those who don't watch Dodgers baseball, potentially leading to a backlash against the team and Time Warner Cable.

Under the terms of the proposed contract, Guggenheim would own a Dodgers-dedicated television channel that would start carrying games in 2014, said the people with knowledge of the pact. Time Warner Cable would manage much of the channel's operations and handle distribution to other pay TV companies, including DirecTV and Cox Cable.

The Dodgers' move to control their own channel is driven in part by a desire to pocket as much money as possible while still abiding by Major League Baseball's revenue-sharing agreement — which requires that 34% of each team's locally generated revenue, most of it from TV rights and ticket sales, be contributed to a pool for other teams.

Mark Walter, the Dodgers' controlling owner, was believed to be sharing details of the tentative deal Tuesday with Major League Baseball officials. Walter has negotiated extensively with the league over how much of the television money must be shared with the other 29 Major League teams.

The Dodgers' revenue-sharing bill could range from $1 billion to $2.7 billion, based on the structure of the deal.

The new channel would also give the Dodgers the opportunity to expand team-related programming throughout the day, as the Los Angeles Lakers do on their Time Warner Cable channel.

"If you look at what the Lakers are doing, they're communicating with their client base," Dodgers owner and Guggenheim Partners President Todd Boehly told The Times last fall. "It's fantastic. It becomes self-fulfilling. If you start interacting with the team in all-new ways, you're going to love the team even more."

Boehly was not available for comment.

The addition of a new Dodgers network would bring the number of local sports channels in Los Angeles to six, the most in any major city in the United States. Besides Time Warner Cable's SportsNet and Deportes, and Fox's Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, the Pac-12 Conference also has its own channel here. Fox Sports West carries Los Angeles Kings and Los Angeles Angels games.

"That's too many channels," said Marc Ganis, a sports industry consultant in Chicago. "I can't imagine that is sustainable on a long-term basis."

Sports channels aren't cheap. Time Warner Cable already charges other cable and satellite operators close to $4 a month a subscriber for SportsNet. The Dodgers and Time Warner Cable are expected to seek as much as $5 for their new channel, which is double what Fox charges for Prime Ticket, according to industry consulting firm SNL Kagan.

Those price hikes are generally passed on to consumers, who may resent the increase.

"Why do I have to pay for the Dodgers when I am not a Dodgers fan?" said Laura Burnes, a mother of two who lives in Orange County. "I don't want to see my cable costs go up any more."

The cost for sports has skyrocketed over the last decade. That's partly because the content is seen as "DVR proof." It is watched live by viewers, which makes it more valuable to advertisers and networks than sitcoms and dramas, which are often recorded and viewed later by people who skip ads.

But non-sports fans and pay TV companies are increasingly frustrated at having to pick up the tab for big sports deals. There have been calls to sell sports channels "a la carte," or separately from other programming.

The Dodger agreement with Time Warner Cable may be a tipping point.

"That is the solution everyone should be looking at seriously," said Derek Chang, a former senior executive at satellite broadcaster DirecTV. Such a move, he added, may be the only way to lower the cost of TV sports. "Ultimately the market for fees would then reset."

The Dodger deal marks the second time in less than two years that Time Warner Cable has outbid Fox Sports for a Los Angeles franchise. In 2011, the company agreed to pay $3.6 billion for a 20-year accord with the Lakers, which had been on Fox Sports West.

Time Warner Cable used the Lakers to create SportsNet and Deportes, a Spanish-language sports channel.

The two media titans have also done battle on other turf.

Last year, Fox acquired an ownership stake in Yes, the New York sports channel that is home to the Yankees. In 2011, Fox outbid Time Warner Cable for rights to the San Diego Padres.

Losing the Dodgers will hurt Fox's Prime Ticket, but the company still has rights to the Los Angeles Clippers and Anaheim Ducks. A Fox executive said there are no plans to consolidate Prime Ticket and Fox Sports West, which besides the Angels also has rights to the Stanley Cup champion Kings.

Distributors will press for a reduction in the fee for Prime Ticket without the Dodgers, but it's not a sure thing they'll get it, Ganis said. When New York's MSG channel lost rights to the Yankees, the subscription fee did not decrease.

joe.flint@latimes.com

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

Times staff writer Meg James contributed to this report.

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Why Subtraction Is the Hardest Math in Product Design

Simple doesn’t just sell, it sticks. Simple made hits of the Nest thermostat, Fitbit, and TiVo. Simple brought Apple back from the dead. It’s why you have Netflix. The Fisher Space Pen, the Swiss Army Knife, and the Rolex Oyster Perpetual are some of our most enduring products. All are marvels of simplicity.

Yet while many mechanical marvels of simplicity remain true to their original form, most electronic ones do not.

Travel back in time to use your parents’ first microwave and you’ll likely see a box with three buttons (High, Medium, Low) and a timer dial. By contrast, one of LG’s current models boasts 33 buttons. Do I hit Auto Defrost or Express Defrost? And what the hell is Less/More? None of these make my popcorn pop faster or taste better. And it’s not easier to use. Why do products become more complex as they evolve?

“Simplicity is about subtraction,” says Mike Monteiro, author of Design Is a Job. “We live in a culture of consumption, where quality is associated with more. So designers and manufacturers tend to believe that to succeed you have to provide more. What if Microsoft announced that the next version of Office had 75 percent less functionality? It would be usable! But there’s no way marketing would let them get away with that.”

Take Apple. Simplicity saved the company. Starting with the iMac, it rolled out hit after simple hit: OS X, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But as it grew into a behemoth, it allowed complexity to creep in. You can see it in iOS apps like Newsstand, which forces you to open a cheesy faux-wood bookcase before you can fire up the newspaper you actually want. A far worse example is iTunes. The new “simplified” version, iTunes 11, is fast but still has a baffling interface with a bevy of needless features. Its core function (playing music!) is lost in the shuffle. There is hope for Apple, though: The recent appointment of its minimalist-design guru Jony Ive as “human interface” chief is sure to mean re-simplified wares.

It’s no different at Google, which was also built on simple. Google won a decade of dominance with its sparse search page. Simplicity made Google a verb. But when Facebook got into its head, Google reacted by cluttering up its search page with features and buttons most people will never use. Worse, it junked up its results. A search for “pizza,” for instance, litters the page with ads, Google services like Zagat, and even news about pizza, none of which is clearly delineated from the actual search results.

As Apple and Google wrinkle into complexity, the doors are opened to newer, leaner rivals, like streaming music service Rdio or search engine upstart DuckDuckGo, both of which have clean interfaces that have won them passionate followings.

The ultimate lesson here may come from Microsoft. When it was time to roll out a new iteration of Windows, the company did something brave: It released a fundamentally different version of its flagship product. Windows 8 has a stripped-down interface, and full-screen apps run bereft of menus and ugly buttons. Simplified.

Well, half of it is. The other half is the traditional desktop. Want to run your existing Windows software? You’ll have to toggle back to that desktop. It’s confusing—jarring, even. By failing to commit, Microsoft made its OS more complicated, not less.

Simplicity is actually quite simple. It requires paring things away when market forces tell you to add. It means removing layers rather than adding them. In short, all it takes is a bit of courage.

Email: mat_honan@wired.com

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“Cyborg Foundation” wins $100K Focus Forward prize

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Spanish director Rafel Duran Torrent has won the $ 100,000 cash prize in the Focus Forward Filmmaker Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. The awards, the most lucrative ever given to short documentaries, went to five different shorts, with the top one being Duran Torrent’s “Cyborg Foundation.”

The director will also be invited to a Sundance Institute ShortsLab program of his choice this year.

Runners-up were Jared P. Scott and Kelly Nyks for “The Artificial Leaf,” Paul Lazarus for “Slingshot,” Kim Munsamy for “Bones Don’t Lie and Don’t Forget” and Callum Cooper for “Mine Kafon.”

The program was launched at last year’s Sundance by Morgan Spurlock and Karol Martesko-Fenster. Focus Forward was run by Spurlock’s and Martesko-Fenster’s company, cinelan, and sponsored by GE.

The top films were chosen by a jury consisting of Sundance senior programmer Caroline Libresco, actress Daryl Hannah and directors Barbara Kopple, Jose Padilha, Joe Berlinger, Floyd Webb and Peter Wintonick.

The winning films and the 15 other finalists can be viewed on the Focus Forward website.

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The New Old Age Blog: Study Links Cognitive Deficits, Hearing Loss

There’s another reason to be concerned about hearing loss — one of the most common health conditions in older adults and one of the most widely undertreated. A new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine suggests that elderly people with compromised hearing are at risk of developing cognitive deficits — problems with memory and thinking — sooner than those whose hearing is intact.

The study in JAMA Internal Medicine was led by Dr. Frank Lin, a hearing specialist and epidemiologist who over the past several years has documented the extent of hearing problems in older people and their association with falls and the onset of dementia.

The physician’s work is bringing fresh, and some would say much-needed, attention to the link between hearing difficulties and seniors’ health.

In his new report, Dr. Lin looked at 1,984 older adults who participated over many years in the Health ABC Study, a long-term study of older adults conducted in Pittsburgh and Memphis. Participants’ mean age was 77; none had evidence of cognitive impairment when the period covered by this research began. In 2001 and 2002, they received hearing tests and cognitive tests; cognitive tests alone were repeated three, five and six years later.

The tests included the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which is administered through an interview and yields an overall picture of cognitive status, and the Digit Symbol Substitution Test, a paper-only exercise that asks people to match symbols and numbers, which can reveal deficits in someone’s working memory and executive functioning.

Dr. Lin found that annual rates of cognitive decline were 41 percent greater in older adults with hearing problems than in those without, based on results from the Modified Mini-Mental State Exam. A five-point decline on that test is considered a “clinically significant” indicator of a change in cognition.

Using this information, Dr. Lin found that elderly people with hearing problems experienced a five-point decline on the exam in 7.7 years, compared with 10.9 years for those with normal hearing.

Results from the Digit Symbol Substitution Test showed the same downward trend, though not quite as steep: older people with hearing loss recorded a yearly rate of cognitive decline 32 percent greater on it than those with intact hearing. In both cases, the results showed an association only, with no proof of causality.

Still, given the fact that nearly two-thirds of adults age 70 and older have hearing problems, it is an important finding.

For caregivers and older adults, the bottom line is “pay attention to hearing loss,” said Kathleen Pichora-Fuller, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study.

Most people seek medical attention for hearing difficulties 10 to 20 years after they first notice a problem, she said, because “there’s a stigma about hearing loss and people really don’t want to wear a hearing aid.” That means years of struggling with the consequences of impairment, without interventions that can make a difference.

One consequence that may help explain Dr. Lin’s findings is social isolation. When people have a hard time distinguishing what someone is saying to them, as is common in older age, they often stop accepting invitations to dinners or parties, attending concerts or classes, or going to family events. Over time, this social withdrawal can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to the loss of meaningful relationships and activities that keep older people feeling engaged with others.

A substantial body of research by cognitive scientists has established that seniors’ cognitive health depends on exercising both body and brain and remaining socially engaged, and “now we have this intersection of hearing research and cognitive research lining up and showing us that hearing health is part of cognitive health,” said Dr. Pichora-Fuller, who originally trained as an audiologist.

Family physicians and internists, too, often dismiss older patients’ complaints about hearing, and should pay close attention to Dr. Lin’s research, she said.

“I hope this study will be a wake-up call to clinicians that auditory tests need to be part of the battery of tests they employ to look at an older person’s health,” agreed Patricia Tun, an adjunct associate professor of psychology at Brandeis University.

Although the tests are effective and cause no known harm, a panel of experts recently failed to recommend them for older adults because of a lack of supporting evidence, as I wrote last August.

Another potential explanation for Dr. Lin’s new finding lies in a concept known as “cognitive load” that Dr. Tun has explored through her research. Basically, this assumes that “we only have a certain amount of cognitive resources, and if we spend a lot of those resources of processing sensory input coming in — in this case, sound — it’s going to be processed more slowly and understand and remembered less well,” she explained.

In other words, when your brain has to work hard to hear and identify meaningful speech from a jumble of sounds, “you’ll have less mental energy for higher cognitive processing,” Dr. Tun said.

Even seniors who hear sounds relatively well often report that words sound garbled or mumbled, she noted, indicating a deterioration in hearing mechanisms that process complex speech.

Also, as yet unidentified biological or neurological pathways may affect both speech and cognition. Or hearing loss may exacerbate frailty and other medical conditions that older people oftentimes have in ways that are as yet poorly understood, Dr. Lin’s paper notes.

A limitation to his study is its reliance, in part, on the Modified Mini-Mental State exam, which asks older adults to respond to questions posed by an interviewer, according to Barbara Weinstein, a professor and head of the audiology program at CUNY’s Graduate Center.

Her research has shown that hearing-compromised seniors may not understand questions and answer incorrectly, confounding results. Another limitation arises from the failure to test participants’ hearing over time, as happened with cognitive tests, making associations more difficult to tease out.

Dr. Lin hopes to address this through another research project that would follow older adults over time and test whether interventions such as hearing aides help prevent the onset or slow the progression of cognitive decline. In the meantime, older people and caregivers should arrange for hearing tests if they have concerns, and consider getting a hearing aid if problems are confirmed.

Getting sound to the brain is the “first and most important step” in preventing sensory deprivation that can contribute to cognitive dysfunction, said Kelly Tremblay, a professor of speech and hearing science at the University of Washington.

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Bits Blog: Keeping the Internet Safe From Governments

Even before the World Conference on International Telecommunications took place last month in Dubai, Internet activists anticipated trouble. So did Congress, which issued a resolution calling it “essential” that the Internet remain “stable, secure and free from governmental control.”

The worries proved prescient. The conference, which supposedly was going to modernize some ancient regulations, instead offered a treaty that in the eyes of some critics would have given repressive states permission to crack down on dissent. The United States delegate refused to sign it. Fifty-four other countries, including Canada, Peru, Japan and most of Western Europe, voted no as well.

The OpenNet Initiative estimates that about a third of Internet users live in countries that engage in “substantive” or “pervasive” blocking of Internet content. They tended to be among the 89 countries that signed the treaty, including Russia, Cambodia, Iran, China, Cuba, Egypt and Angola.

Those in favor of a free and open Internet have long had a problem with the International Telecommunication Union, the affiliate of the United Nations that ran the conference. They see the I.T.U., which dates back to 1865, as longing for the pre-Internet era, when its influence and fortunes were greater. As a result, activists think, the I.T.U. has become aligned with, and a tool of, countries that desire more governmental control over public speech.

In the wake of the Dubai meeting, there are renewed calls to scale back United States financing of the I.T.U. drastically. The logic is, why are taxpayers supporting an organization whose motives they oppose?

“Paying for both sides of a conflict is unsustainable and illogical, and should simply be corrected,” says the De-Fund the I.T.U. Web site, which has posted a petition on the White House Web site.

The De-Fund site notes that the petition is not asking the United States government to take an unprecedented first step. “Many of our free-market democratic allies, led by Germany, France, Spain and Finland, have already de-funded the I.T.U. Likewise, right-thinking American companies like I.B.M., Cingular, Microsoft, Fox, Agilent, Sprint, Harris, Loral and Xerox, and others, have already withdrawn their private-sector contributions from the I.T.U.”

The petition was the brainchild of Bill Woodcock, the Berkeley-based research director of Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit institute. “This is really about whether people should be allowed to say what they think,” Mr. Woodcock said. “The Internet enables free speech, and that makes it very dangerous to countries that try to control public discourse.”

The United States government contributes about 8 percent of the I.T.U.’s budget. The 55 countries that voted against the treaty contribute about three-quarters of it. If the White House receives 25,000 signatures by Feb. 10, it will review and quite possibly act on the petition. As of Tuesday, it had about 600 signatures with minimal publicity.

A spokesman for the I.T.U., which is based in Switzerland, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

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County official calls car leasing contract procedure 'embarrassing'

Auditors reviewing a $1.75-million car leasing contract given to a company with a politically connected lobbying firm found that Los Angeles County officials had failed to create a "truly competitive" process, but that there was no evidence of improper influence.

Investigators with the county auditor-controller's office reviewed the Enterprise Rent-a-Car contract at the request of Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. A report by KCET-TV had raised questions about the way the business was awarded.

Enterprise was given a sole-source, five-year deal in March to provide 60 leased  vehicles to the county's Community Development Commission and to maintain the agency's existing fleet. Commission staff projected that outsourcing the fleet services would save about $300,000 a year.

The Nov. 28 report on KCET's "SoCal Connected" focused on the lobbying firm Englander Knabe & Allen and questioned whether its clients — including Enterprise — got an unfair advantage because partner Matt Knabe is the son of county Supervisor Don Knabe, who voted along with all the other supervisors to award the contract.

Both Knabes have said that their relationship has never posed a conflict, and a spokesman for the Englander firm has said Matt Knabe never lobbies his father directly.

The auditor-controller found no evidence of attempts to influence the rental car award. Matt Knabe told investigators that no one from his firm had lobbied on the contract, and the commission's executive director said he was "100% confident" the supervisor's son did not influence the process.

"The report shows that Matt acted professionally and used no undue influence in his dealings with the county," said Englander partner Eric Rose.

But the review did find that county staff did an "inadequate" job of trying to find other potential bidders.

Asked by KCET what vendors had been contacted and given a chance to compete for the business, a county analyst created a list to make it appear the department had reached out to 50 companies. In fact, only 16 firms had been contacted, auditors found. Enterprise was the only company that responded to the email request, and staff made no follow-up attempt to contact the other firms.

According to the auditor's report, the count of 50 vendors was originally used as a "place holder" in a template document and never corrected. By the time the contract was awarded, the contract analyst "felt he could not correct the number without embarrassment."

Investigators also found that the agency violated its own policy by not advertising the contract on the commission's or the county's websites, and that the contract should have gone through a full bidding process.

In addition, several vendors that contract officials emailed to invite interest had no "realistic potential" to provide a leased fleet to the county in the first place, the review concluded.

Investigators wrote that they couldn't determine whether the commission could have gotten a better deal but said "the potential for greater savings from a more competitive process appears to be plausible."

County auditor-controller Wendy Watanabe called the situation "embarrassing" but chalked up the issues to incompetence rather than intentional steering.

"I think they got lazy, they took a shortcut, and they didn't think it was that big of a deal," she said.

Watanabe said the investigation had focused on the Enterprise contract, so she could not say whether there was a broader issue with the agency's contracting process.

Commission representatives could not be reached Monday. The commission was slated to respond to the report's findings within 30 days.

abby.sewell@latimes.com

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Strut Your Digital Design Skills in Wired's 3-D Print-Off

No need to buy a gift box when you can 3-D print one. Design: Alia Hasan

3-D printing puts manufacturing on designers’ desks, at least for those who have access to a desktop printer. For the rest of us, Wired is inviting you to show off your 3-D design skills in our 3-D print-off. Send us your original, printable designs; we’ll post the submissions on our site, then select the ten coolest to print through Shapeways.com in one of many of their printable materials and feature in a photo gallery. Show the world your masterpiece, from your name in three-dimensional block letters, to a highly-detailed space demon sculpture, to a clever wall hanger for your iPad. There are no restrictions.

How Do I Design a 3-D Object? +We’ll show you how with tip-filled articles over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, for those who don’t have previous experience with modeling or CAD software, these free online and app-based tools can get you designing in minutes:

• Tinkercad — A web-based design application that allows you to access a variety of tools to draw shapes, then push or pull them to introduce depth. Simple to use. See our tips here.


• Shapeways Creator — Wide variety of tools for easy design creation. Includes 2D to 3D, an application that lets you take any black and white image (including text) and give it depth to create a digital object. Also, tools for making vases, figurines, and jewelry.


• Autodesk 123D Design — Entry-level iOS, Mac, PC, and browser-based tool for design, from one of the biggest companies. Includes a built-in library of pre-made shapes and objects that you can combine and modify. Our review.


• Sketchup — A slightly more advanced CAD software that is still accessible for beginners. Has a slightly longer learning curve than the other apps. See our tips here.

Submit Your Design

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Michelle Obama wears Wu to the balls again

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama made it a fashion tradition Monday night, wearing a custom-made Jason Wu gown to the inauguration balls. The ruby-colored dress was a follow-up to the white gown Wu made for her four years ago when she was new to Washington, the pomp and circumstance, and the fashion press.

She now emerged in velvet and chiffon as a bona fide trendsetter.

“I can’t believe it. It’s crazy,” said Wu, reached at his Manhattan studio. “To have done it once was already the experience of my life. To have a second time is tremendous.”

President Barack Obama also struck a similar style chord to his first-term inaugural balls: He wore a white tie with his tuxedo.

The red halter dress was the only one Wu, who went from fashion insider to household name on this night in 2009, submitted for Mrs. Obama’s consideration. He collaborated with jeweler Kimberly McDonald on the jeweled neckline. “For this occasion, it had to be real diamonds,” Wu said.

He said he felt the dress showed how he has grown up as a designer — and how Mrs. Obama’s style has evolved to be even more confident.

The first family headed out to inaugural festivities earlier on Monday with Mrs. Obama leading a very coordinated fashion parade in a navy-silk, checkered-patterned coat and dress by Thom Browne that were inspired by a menswear necktie.

The outfit was specifically designed for Mrs. Obama, but Browne said he wasn’t 100 percent sure she was going to wear it until she came out with it on at Inauguration. “I am proud and humbled,” he said.

The rest of Mrs. Obama’s Inauguration Day outfit included a belt from J. Crew, necklace by Cathy Waterman and a cardigan by Reed Krakoff, whose ensemble she also wore to yesterday’s intimate, indoor swearing-in ceremony.

Obama wore a blue tie with his white shirt, dark suit and overcoat. Malia Obama had on a plum-colored J. Crew coat with the hemline of an electric-blue dress peeking out and a burgundy-colored scarf, and her younger sister Sasha had on a Kate Spade coat and dress in a similar purple shade.

“It is an honor that Sasha Obama chose to wear Kate Spade New York,” said the company’s creative director, Deborah Lloyd, in an email to the Associated Press. “She epitomizes the youthful optimism and colorful spirit of the brand. We are so proud to have been a part of this historic moment.”

Jenna Lyons, creative director of J. Crew, said it was “a huge point of pride for all of us” to be a part of the day — as the brand was back in 2009 when the girls wore outfits by CrewCuts, its children’s label.

“It’s amazing to see the evolution of the family. I love the way Michelle looks. She looks beautiful in something so clean and tailored. It’s such an elegant choice,” Lyons said, “and they all look so sophisticated! You can see how the girls have grown up in the four years, and they’re still so alive and vibrant, but more sophisticated.”

The vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, wore a gray coat and dress by American designer Lela Rose.

Mrs. Obama has worn Browne’s designs for other occasions, including a gray dress with black lace overlay to one of the presidential debates last fall, and she honored him last summer at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards for his contribution to fashion.

Browne made his name in modern — very modern — menswear, but he launched womenswear in 2011. He was in Paris on Monday, just finishing previews for his next menswear collection. The idea to use the tie fabric came to him because he was indeed designing these men’s clothes at the same time, he explained.

“I wanted ‘tailored’ for her. For me, she stands for strength and confidence, and that’s what I wanted to design for her,” he said.

Simon Collins, dean of the school of fashion at Parsons The New School for Design in New York, said the Obamas dressed in their typical fashion: one that shows pride in their appearance.

“They are a stylish couple and their children look fabulous. Too many people get dressed in the dark,” he said. “They show it’s good to dress up, take pride in how you look. … It’s a wonderful example for America and the rest of the world.”

He also noted that the Obamas seem to understand that the fashion industry is a driving force in the U.S. economy and that its lobby is a powerful one. They don’t treat fashion frivolously, he observed.

The first lady “is so supportive of so many American designers,” Browne noted.

But Collins said he was a bit surprised the public doesn’t pay much attention to the president’s wardrobe. He joked that Obama should perhaps try one of Browne’s signature shrunken suits — the ones that show a man’s ankles.

At the end of the Inaugural festivities, Mrs. Obama’s outfit and accompanying accessories will go to the National Archives.

___

Samantha Critchell tweets fashion at (at)AP_Fashion, and can be reached on Twitter at (at)Sam_Critchell.

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The New Old Age Blog: The Brutal Truth of 'Amour'

It has been a few days since I left the movie theater in a bit of a daze, and I’m still thinking about “Amour.”

So much of this already much-honored film rings utterly true: the way a long-married Parisian couple’s daily routines, their elegant life of books and music and art, can be upended in a moment. The tender care that Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) provides for Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) as multiple strokes claim her body and her mind, and the inexorable way that care wears them both down. Their withdrawal into a proud dyad that seeks and accepts little help from outsiders, even family. “We’ve always coped, your mother and I,” Georges tells their daughter.

The writer and director Michael Haneke’s previous movies, which I haven’t seen, tend to be described as shocking, violent, even punitive. “Amour,” which Times critic Manohla Dargis called a masterpiece, includes one brief spasm of violence, but the movie remains restrained, not graphic. It’s brutal only because life, and death, can be brutal.

Is popular culture paying more attention to aging and caregiving? In the last couple of years, I have written about these subjects surfacing in a YouTube series (“Ruth & Erica”), in movies like “The Iron Lady,” in novels like Walter Mosley’s “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.”

A couple of weeks back, watching a play called “The Other Place,” starring the remarkable Laurie Metcalfe, I suddenly realized that the dynamic physician and businesswoman onstage had some sort of early-onset dementia. Dementia seems a particularly popular subject, in fact. Intrinsically dramatic, it suffuses the Mosley novel and Alice LaPlante’s “Turn of Mind,” and some of my favorite movies about aging, “Away From Her,” “Iris” and “The Savages.”

“Kings Point,” Sari Gilman’s compelling documentary about a retirement community in Florida where nobody seemed to expect to grow old, just won an Oscar nomination for best short-subject documentary and will be shown on HBO in March. And “Amour,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is up for five Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and a best actress nomination for the 85-year-old Ms. Riva. (Academy voters: Just give it to her.)

A number of these artists, Mr. Haneke included, have spoken about their own experiences with aged relatives. Perhaps, as the population ages and more people confront the consequences, the stories our culture tells itself have evolved to include more old people, more caregivers. Or maybe I just want that to be true.

“Do not go see this,” my movie-going buddy had been warned, probably because her mother has dementia and friends who had seen the film wanted to spare her. I know some people found “Amour” too slow-paced or claustrophobic — like many elderly couples’ lives, it basically takes place in four rooms — or too grim. (If you’ve seen it, tell us what you thought.)

If you’re a full-time caregiver or you’re coping with a relative with dementia, perhaps you would prefer to spend your 2 hours 7 minutes of precious time off watching something funny. Escapism has its virtues.

But I found “Amour” unflinching and provocative and beautiful.

Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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DealBook: At Davos, Crisis Is the New Normal

DAVOS, Switzerland — In certain ways, the very setting of the World Economic Forum reflects the restless, challenged state of human affairs. Our footing is uncertain, as on this ski resort’s slithery streets, and we have steep slopes to climb, as the Magic Mountain will remind the global elite this week.

Barely into 2013, Mali and Algeria are new sites of hot war and chilling fear. Where the tumult that began in the Arab Spring will end is still as unclear as when it erupted — far from Davos — two years ago.

The challenge posed by the free flow of information in China went to the New Year streets in Guangzhou. Washington’s feuding politicians walked up to the brink before resolving not to jump off the so-called fiscal cliff. Europe seems to have averted a collapse of the euro, but even in Germany, growth is anemic.

Crisis, in short, is the new normal.

And while the business community determinedly seeks opportunity in troubled times, even many an entrepreneur views the years since the financial crisis of 2008 as what Rich Lesser, the new chief executive of the Boston Consulting Group, called “a higher period of turbulence and uncertainty in the global economy than we have experienced in a very long time.”

The days in which “quants” and algorithms reigned supreme are gone, their increasingly untrackable results having helped the financial system spin out of control in 2008 and 2009. The heady triumph of capitalism after 1989 is also a distant memory, although its chief effect — that capital went global — remains a driving force of our age.

But global capital does not solve big world issues: debt and financial crisis, political paralysis or gridlock, the transformative effects of the digital revolution, climate change, resource shortages, shifting demographics.

For those tasks, we must rely either on the nation state — an aging collective unit that does not readily serve transnational action — or on international institutions whose effectiveness is regularly questioned by the Davos crowd.

“The global economy has integrated, but global society is as fragmented as ever,” said Dennis J. Snower, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

In that fragmentation, there is an increasing lack of consensus about the global way forward. A few years ago, the inexorable rise of China led to talk of a new Beijing consensus, replacing the Washington consensus that epitomized the confident domination of the United States.

But China, while still growing, is growing less fast. It remains a one-party state, and its advance has arguably resulted more from enormous investment than creative increases in productivity. The challenges to its new leadership are clear: the need for financial reform; the perils of shadow banking and corruption; thick urban pollution; and, above all, the free flow of information, as seen in the standoff this month between a state censor in Guangzhou and journalists at the Southern Weekend and their supporters.

Ian Bremmer, head of the Eurasia Group political consulting firm, who in general sees a big return of politics in business calculations as the world becomes permanently restless, likened China to a large car that is racing toward a brick wall, “and we don’t know if they have steering” to skirt the obstacle, or whether they will hit it.

“As China grows wealthier,” he said in an interview, “entrenched Chinese will see the benefit of the rule of law” — a key element of the Washington consensus. But “the new leadership is not anywhere near there.”

For Yasheng Huang, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the saving grace of the incoming president, Xi Jinping, and his colleagues is that they are pragmatists. Pragmatism, he argued in an interview by phone, “means that you weigh the costs and benefits of certain actions.” It “checks the ideology.”

Yet even as China helps to sustain international growth — where would Europe’s purveyors of luxury be without the eager Chinese consumer? — it remains, like other emerging countries, self-absorbed.

“Look at the big debates of the last five years,” said Minxin Pei, like Mr. Huang a Chinese-born academic, who teaches at Claremont McKenna College in California. “It’s very hard to find one that originated in Beijing. People talk about China outside China, but still the country is very inward-looking.” This also feeds rising nationalism seen most markedly in the escalating dispute between China and Japan in the East China Sea.

As with China, so with Russia, India and Brazil, or indeed South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia and other favorites of those who seek bright spots on a gloomy globe. In Brazil, “everything is focused on being Brazilian, how great it is,” noted Misha Glenny, a British analyst who has written on global mafias, cybercrime and is now working on a book about Brazil.

In these countries, absorbed in their own material advances and increasingly wary of a Washington-made prescription for their future, the “fiscal cliff” and debate about the limit on the United States deficit serve as proof that they are on the right path, though critics might dispute it.

“On the whole, we made a recovery from the crisis even faster than other countries,” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told a news conference last month. “Just look at the recession in Europe, while Russia has posted growth, albeit a modest one, but we still have a much better situation than in the once-prosperous euro zone, or even in the United States.”

In the United States, recent books have argued that the country’s status as a debtor nation is curbing its global reach. After the last-minute fiscal deal this month, a commentary of the kind believed to reflect high government thinking on the state-run Chinese news agency Xinhua noted tartly: “The American people were once better known for their ability to make tough choices on difficult issues.” It went on, “The Americans may be proud of their mature democracy, but the political gridlock in Washington really looks ugly from an outsider’s view.”

One example of how nations in transition are going their own way is Egypt, where President Mohamed Morsi seems to seek a geopolitical mix: a dose of Turkey, an Islamist-leaning democracy, with much-needed financial aid from China, and relations with Washington warm enough to garner more aid and collaborate on diplomacy like mediating the Israeli-Palestinian fighting over the Gaza Strip last November.

The fluid nature of this world is enhanced by digital communication. With the collapse in newspaper readership and the spread of social media, “everyone gets little snippets of information, and never fully understands the implications,” Mr. Glenny noted. “Very few people do deeper reading and thinking.”

This, he argued, increases people’s sense that “everything has just become too big to grasp and understand.”

A crucial topic for the dozen or so analysts interviewed for this article, and central also to discussions of increasingly important trends like the global rise of women, is education. Instead of machines being in charge, a nimble human mind, connecting individuals with collective wisdom, is seen as the antidote to cacophony, poverty and chaos.

In this view, more and better schooling will help lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, make it easier for populations to cope with change and stimulate the kind of innovation that Mr. Lesser sees already in technology, medicine and health care.

What kind of education is a topic that will be much debated at Davos, to judge from several scheduled sessions on disruptive universities and the like.

“We need government to recognize the need to build the next-gen work force,” Mr. Lesser said. This is “fundamental to staying competitive in the future,” he said. “The challenge goes beyond education. It’s also about good immigration policies.” In this way, he argued, a country facing demographic challenges — Germans, according to a government survey released last week, are the most childless adults in Europe — may preserve wealth and adapt to the future.

Whether by increasing online courses, interacting with students or raising the relatively dismal level of numeracy and literacy among American high school graduates, improving education “is one of the few things I can be unguardedly optimistic about,” said Niall Ferguson, the Harvard University historian. “The solutions are relatively cheap, simple and to hand.”

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