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True Stories | NEW YORKER WRITER CONFRONTS REALITY

THE TRUTH IS THAT THERE IS NO TRUTH," a flamboyant criminal lawyer once told Philip Gourevitch '83. The New Yorker staff writer--whose subjects have included Siberian tigers, small-time boxers, and the U.S. presidential race--disagrees. "My expectations are very modest," says Gourevitch, whose chronicle of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, has been credited with renewing the debate over how and when the world should intervene in mass slaughter. "But it's very important to make sure that attention is paid to places easily ignored. Over time, the effort to get the story straight is a value in itself."

This summer, Gourevitch hit the campaign trail, combining meticulous research, a novelist's eye for detail, and an academic's sharp analysis in regular dispatches for the New Yorker. Howard Dean has "plump Rotarian looks," while John Kerry resembles "an equestrian statue (man and horse)." His sharp pen pokes Republicans and Democrats alike. "If anything, Bush's insistence on the righteousness of his script has intensified," he writes of the President in a late July analysis of John Kerry's foreign policy. "He jokes about never reading newspapers, lets it be known that he communicates with the Almighty, and dismisses his critics as pessimists." In the same article, he skewers the Democratic nominee's public speaking: "At his declamatory worst, Kerry can turn good, sound thought and cogent argument into a swamp of sound that inclines the listener to tune out, much like the mwah-mwah-mwah of adults in 'Peanuts' cartoons."

An aspiring fiction writer since childhood, Gourevitch entered the Arts college in 1979 as an anthropology major, switched to history, and then dropped out. "I wasn't persuaded that you could learn writing in writing classes," he says. "I wanted to see if I could do it with no one leaning over me, by doing a lot of sitting still in my room." So he tended bar, made pizza in Ithaca hangouts, and wrote."Most of my short stories weren't very good," he admits, "but I learned the tools of my craft."

After a two-year leave, Gourevitch reenrolled as an English major, published some fiction in the Daily Sun, and, in 1986, finally graduated. As an MFA candidate at Columbia, he became nonfiction editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and discovered the colorful narratives of New Yorker luminaries Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling. He freelanced for a few years, then decided to get a regular job.

His freelance credits already included assignments for the venerable Yiddish paper, the Forward, which launched an English language edition in 1990. So when the editor opened a search for a New York bureau chief the following spring, Gourevitch inquired--despite his lack of newsroom experience. "If you can tie a necktie," the editor told him, "you can do the job." He could and he did, working for a year before he was promoted to cultural editor, a title he held until 1993, when he left the paper.

In 1995, the New Yorker approved Gourevitch's plan to investigate genocide in Rwanda.His 16,000-word report ran in the magazine's December 18, 1995, issue; a 7,100-word follow-up ran two years later. In 1998, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published his 356-page account of the 100 days in which the world stood by as 800,000 Rwandans were murdered. Throughout, the author blends vivid imagery with hundreds of interviews with heroes, murderers, and victims. Soldiers' eyes "glare the color of blood oranges."A rain-soaked Bible rests on the stomach of a corpse. Even killers have their say. "I like to trust readers' moral sense," says the author. "I don't supply the outrage for them."

A former senior fellow for the World Policy Institute and frequent participant in human rights conferences, Gourevitch speaks and writes regularly about genocide. Despite his highest hopes, however, he calls himself "a skeptic" who believes the world remains far more prepared to deplore mass slaughter than to do anything meaningful to stop it. He sees more evidence to support his view in Darfur, western Sudan, where thousands of civilians have been killed and more than one million displaced in ongoing violence.

Throughout his work, Gourevitch has rejected what he calls some reporters' "cagey or confrontational" interviewing styles. And while he's succeeded in drawing out a range of subjects, he says there's no particular strategy he uses to keep them talking. "I try to be conversational, building gradually, bit by bit. It's a question of doing one's homework-- saturation reporting, so I can put the pieces together. The more specific my questions, the more specific the answer."

Gourevitch's approach relies on reportorial precision and narrative flair. In A Cold Case, his 2001 character study of a mob-linked murderer and the aging cop who cracked a decades-old case, a murderer meets his accomplice at a showing of Gun Crazy, a film about "fugitive lovers on a crime spree hurtling to their doom."He describes a feisty attorney "forever popping up on tiptoes . . . as if someone had just shouted, 'Let's cha-cha!' " And in that late July New Yorker report, he likens Kerry's oratorical style to that of a man hailing a ship, "one hand clutching a mike in front of his Adam's apple, the other hand pistoning from shoulder to waist like an oil-field pump jack, his voice hammering along to the same relentless rhythm, a seesaw booming." It's the sort of telling detail Gourevitch deploys in his efforts to reveal the truth, whether the topic is an international crisis or the contradictions of American political life. "There is no getting around the sheer carnival goofiness of an American political campaign," he has written. "Civilization-defining issues may hang in the balance, but the asinine and the inane always hover close at hand."

-- Bill Kirtz

Happy Camper | BERGHOLZ TAKES THE SUMMER SLEEP-AWAY GLOBAL

FOR MOST AMERICANS,THE WORDS "summer camp" conjure up memories of canoeing, ghost stories, and crafts involving Popsicle sticks. Lou Bergholz '94 went to that kind of camp. Starting at age seven, he attended sleepaways near his native Pittsburgh, and at sixteen he became a counselor. A selfdescribed "camp junkie," Bergholz lived for the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day. "Being at those places, where there can be this amazing mix of learning and recreation, has always allowed me to express a side of myself that I couldn't express anywhere else," Bergholz says. "About four or five years ago, I realized that the rest of my year was just waiting for camp."

Since then, the perpetual camper has transformed his summer gig into a fulltime career. In 1998, Bergholz began laying the foundation for Edgework Consulting, a company he established to offer camp-style retreats for corporate executives. For the Human Ecology grad, it's not only a way to make grown-up money doing what he's loved since he was a kid, it's also a way to subsidize work that's even supcloser to his heart.With clients including Paul Newman and the Rotary Club of Sarapee, Thailand, Bergholz is bringing the camp experience to kids in need all over the world.

"I think I've found my calling," says the thirty-two-year-old. "It took a lot of what might kindly be called 'productive floundering' to get here, though." After graduation, most of his friends pursued professional careers. "Instead, in those first five years out of school, I had seventeen jobs in three countries. I worked on one of the largest turkey farms in Israel. I was one of the first male human sexuality teachers in the state of Maine. I folded towels in a fitness center. I did lots of different things, but I wasn't finding my niche."

And every summer, he dropped what he was doing to work at camps. At last, when he was twenty-six, Bergholz drifted into part-time work as a facilitator for a corporate teambuilding program, and he found that he could support himself by doing what he knew best.

Bergholz immediately began building on those connections to establish his own consulting business.With activities ranging from ropes courses to improvisational theater techniques to custom-tailored teambuilding, Edgework Consulting now draws upon the talents of 200 freelance educators and independent consultants and is developing a reputation as a creative alternative to more traditional business training services. Bergholz is based in Boston; local clients include Boston Children's Hospital. His national client list includes Brown Brothers Harriman, Unilever, Pfizer, and the U.S. Army.

Even as his business started to take off, though, Bergholz knew he wouldn't be satisfied unless he could do even more important things with his experience. Back in 1998, he had spent a few months working at a program for critically ill children, and he realized that while camp was the quintessential "normal" childhood experience for most kids, it could be even more meaningful for those whose lives were anything but normal. And then the final piece clicked into place: Paul Newman went on safari.

The actor and activist, known for the charitable giving from his Newman's Own brand of food products, had long supported the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, located outside Ashford, Connecticut, for children with life-threatening illnesses. When a trip to Africa brought Newman face-to-face with hundreds of children whose lives were affected by HIV, he wanted to help.

A contact brought Bergholz together with one of the organizations charged with establishing Newman's Africa program, and he was soon alternating corporate engagements in the States with trips to southern Africa. Since 2002, Bergholz has helped establish children's camps with permanent on-site staff and partnerships with safari companies in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, and Malawi. These companies, some of the major economic players in the region, have lost hundreds of staff to the AIDS epidemic. Through the program, about 1,000 children per year learn more about the relatively well-paying careers that the safari companies could offer them--and about how protecting themselves from HIV infection can help them reach these new economic levels.

The program has been so successful that Newman's organization asked Bergholz to set up a similar program in Thailand. Working with the Rotary Club and other local business organizations in the country, he is establishing a curriculum, dealing with political red tape, and seeing the program through what he describes as the "make or break" first three years. "I don't get to be present for most of these programs," Bergholz says. "This kind of work is very labor-intensive, and I'm working with nonprofits with limited budgets. That's one reason why I keep up the corporate part of my business. I have to come back to the States and do that work, but I feel good that even though I can't be there when the programs happen, I'm doing the work that makes them possible."

He's taken a similar approach with Grassroots Soccer, another program in southern Africa, created by "Survivor" winner and soccer player Ethan Zohn. By recruiting volunteers from the ranks of African soccer and teaching sports skills as well as HIV prevention strategies, the program aims to instill confidence in kids who feel that they have nothing to live for. For Bergholz, himself a former Big Red varsity goalkeeper, the project is especially close to his heart.

"Kids in Africa think that soccer is cool, and that is going to make more difference in whether they listen to you than all the scare tactics in the world," he says. Bergholz believes that the summer camp model for education is successful precisely because it offers kids access to information on their own terms. Through songs, stories, games, and athletics, camp celebrates the playfulness and self-expression missing from these children's everyday lives.

"People can be skeptical about this kind of program, because they wonder what we can possibly accomplish in one or two weeks at a camp," Bergholz says. "But we're taking these kids out of their regular environment, showing them new possibilities.We follow up through outreach programs, and we tell the kids why they are amazing and valuable. When you're only eight or nine years old, that kind of message sticks with you. I know getting that message when I was at camp as a kid really made a difference for me."

-- C.A. Carlson '93, MFA '96

Here's Looking at You | GRADS OFFER VIDEO-CHAT BREAKTHROUGH

rEMEMBER THOSE TELEPHONES with TV screens we were all supposed to be using by now? The first working videophones debuted at the 1964 New York World's Fair; forty years later, we're still waiting. "It's been the Next Big Thing ever since," says Brad Treat, MBA '02, who's gambling that his Berkeleybased start-up, SightSpeed, will finally usher in the home tele-talk revolution.

Of course, computer users with webcams can already talk on video-chat features now offered by AOL or Yahoo, but it remains a little-used gimmick: because of bandwidth demands, the tiny, jerky image lags behind actual speech. SightSpeed uses a video compression algorithm developed by Cornell information theory professor Toby Berger, who spent eight years studying how the human eye perceives video and then paring the information down to the essentials, blurring details and accentuating outlines. The software, designed in Cornell's DISCOVER Lab with SightSpeed cofounder Aron Rosenberg '02, runs at thirty frames per second, eliminating image "latency" so mouth movement is synchronized. It's fast and fluid enough to catch the subtle nods and eye-rolling that make face-to-face conversation meaningful. "The value of visual communication has to hit a certain threshold," Treat says. "It has to convey emotions."

It also has to be marketed to the right people.When Treat--who came up with SightSpeed's business plan and lured investors from BR Ventures, a fund run by Johnson School students--was first approached by Rosenberg and Berger with the idea of turning their software into a business, he thought about why videoconferencing is still a high-end executive novelty. "We had to identify who would use this and why," he says. "When you think about who you want to see, it's not your boss--it's your family." Accordingly, he's targeting older, less tech-savvy users who want to keep up with growing grandkids or see a distant spouse--41 percent of subscribers are over fifty. Five dollars a month buys unlimited chat time. (In appreciation of their Big Red roots, Sight- Speed offers free subscriptions to anyone with a cornell.edu e-mail account. Go to www.sightspeed.com/ cornell for details.) The interface resembles the instant-messaging applications familiar to millions and is designed, says Treat, to be "Grandma-easy."

Early SightSpeed clients are pointing their webcams in unexpected places. One subscriber uses the feature for online classical guitar tutorials; another does hair transplant consultations. The technology has also been embraced by the deaf community --the image is sharp and quick enough to keep up with a sign-language conversation. "People will come up with creative ways to use this," says Treat, who sees SightSpeed as fulfilling a decades-old promise. "It's the kind of thing that will change the world."

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