DealBook: Alibaba's Founder to Give Up C.E.O. Title, but Will Remain Chairman

After 14 years of building up the Alibaba Group into one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, Jack Ma is taking a step back from the chief executive role of the Chinese e-commerce giant.

But Mr. Ma isn’t leaving entirely; he will hold on to the role of executive chairman, he told DealBook in an interview on Monday. He plans to name his successor when his title change becomes effective on May 10.

He won’t be the only one to hand over some of the company’s reins. Mr. Ma said that most of Alibaba’s leaders “born in the 1960s” will pass their leadership responsibilities to younger colleagues, born in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We believe that they understand the future better than us, and then have a better chance of seizing the future,” he wrote in an e-mail to employees explaining his change in duties.

The shift is the biggest change yet at Alibaba in some time, as it continues to ready itself for the next chapter of its existence. Last week, the company said that it was cleaving itself into 25 smaller divisions — to give managers more flexibility.

And it follows the transformative deal that Alibaba struck with Yahoo last year, in which the Chinese company agreed to buy back about half of the stake in itself held by Yahoo, its American partner. Alibaba had long sought to repurchase the shares to help regain control over its corporate destiny.

For Mr. Ma, the decision to step back from day-to-day management was borne of several reasons. One of them was personal: the job is increasingly tiring.

“I’m 48. I’m no longer young enough to run such a fast-growing business,” Mr. Ma said in the interview. “When I was 35, I was so energetic and fresh-thinking. I had nothing to worry about.”

Come May, Mr. Ma will slide into the role of executive chairman, which he said would let him focus on broad strategic issues, as well as corporate development and social responsibility.

It is a move that the entrepreneur said had been in the works for some time. He has been training “a few candidates” among the younger generation for the chief executive position.

Speculation about who will take over is likely to focus on the heads of Alibaba’s biggest businesses, including Alibaba.com, an online market for small businesses; Taobao, an enormous consumer shopping site; and Alipay, an online payment platform.

Mr. Ma’s early departure will give his replacement time to grow into the role, Mr. Ma said. That could be important when Alibaba finally goes public, sometime down the road. Mr. Ma added that the exact timing or other details of an initial offering haven’t been determined.

Until then, Mr. Ma will remain a powerful figure within the company he founded.

“I will still be very active,” he said. “It is impossible for me to retire.”

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Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

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What are your tips for vegan cooking and eating? Share your suggestions on ingredients, recipes and strategies by posting a comment below or tweeting with the hashtag #vegantips.

Read More..

Well: How to Go Vegan

When I first heard former President Bill Clinton talk about his vegan diet, I was inspired to make the switch myself. After all, if a man with a penchant for fast-food burgers and Southern cooking could go vegan, surely I could too.

At the grocery store, I stocked up on vegan foods, including almond milk (that was the presidential recommendation), and faux turkey and cheese to replicate my daughter’s favorite sandwich. But despite my good intentions, my cold-turkey attempt to give up, well, turkey (as well as other meats, dairy and eggs) didn’t go well. My daughter and I couldn’t stand the taste of almond milk, and the fake meat and cheese were unappealing.

Since then, I’ve spoken with numerous vegan chefs and diners who say it can be a challenge to change a lifetime of eating habits overnight. They offer the following advice for stocking your vegan pantry and finding replacements for key foods like cheese and other dairy products.

NONDAIRY MILK Taste all of them to find your favorite. Coconut and almond milks (particularly canned coconut milk) are thicker and good to use in cooking, while rice milk is thinner and is good for people who are allergic to nuts or soy. My daughter and I both prefer the taste of soy milk and use it in regular or vanilla flavor for fruit smoothies and breakfast cereal.

NONDAIRY CHEESE Cheese substitutes are available under the brand names Daiya, Tofutti and Follow Your Heart, among others, but many vegans say there’s no fake cheese that satisfies as well as the real thing. Rather than use a packaged product, vegan chefs prefer to make homemade substitutes using cashews, tofu, miso or nutritional yeast. At Candle 79, a popular New York vegan restaurant, the filling for saffron ravioli with wild mushrooms and cashew cheese is made with cashews soaked overnight and then blended with lemon juice, olive oil, water and salt.

THINK CREAMY, NOT CHEESY Creaminess and richness can often be achieved without a cheese substitute. For instance, Chloe Coscarelli, a vegan chef and the author of “Chloe’s Kitchen,” has created a pizza with caramelized onion and butternut squash that will make you forget it doesn’t have cheese; the secret is white-bean and garlic purée. She also offers a creamy, but dairy-free, avocado pesto pasta. My daughter and I have discovered we actually prefer the rich flavor of butternut squash ravioli, which can be found frozen and fresh in supermarkets, to cheese-filled ravioli.

NUTRITIONAL YEAST The name is unappetizing, but many vegan chefs swear by it: it’s a natural food with a roasted, nutty, cheeselike flavor. Ms. Coscarelli uses nutritional yeast flakes in her “best ever” baked macaroni and cheese (found in her cookbook). “I’ve served this to die-hard cheese lovers,” she told me, “and everyone agrees it is comparable, if not better.”

Susan Voisin’s Web site, Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, offers a nice primer on nutritional yeast, noting that it’s a fungus (think mushrooms!) that is grown on molasses and then harvested and dried with heat. (Baking yeast is an entirely different product.) Nutritional yeasts can be an acquired taste, she said, so start with small amounts, sprinkling on popcorn, stirring into mashed potatoes, grinding with almonds for a Parmesan substitute or combining with tofu to make an eggless omelet. It can be found in Whole Foods, in the bulk aisle of natural-foods markets or online.

BUTTER This is an easy fix. Vegan margarines like Earth Balance are made from a blend of oils and are free of trans fats. Varieties include soy-free, whipped and olive oil.

EGGS Ms. Coscarelli, who won the Food Network’s Cupcake Wars with vegan cupcakes, says vinegar and baking soda can help baked goods bind together and rise, creating a moist and fluffy cake without eggs. Cornstarch can substitute for eggs to thicken puddings and sauces. Vegan pancakes are made with a tablespoon of baking powder instead of eggs. Frittatas and omelets can be replicated with tofu.

Finally, don’t try to replicate your favorite meaty foods right away. If you love a juicy hamburger, meatloaf or ham sandwich, you are not going to find a meat-free version that tastes the same. Ms. Voisin advises new vegans to start slow and eat a few vegan meals a week. Stock your pantry with lots of grains, lentils and beans and pile your plate with vegetables. To veganize a recipe, start with a dish that is mostly vegan already — like spaghetti — and use vegetables or a meat substitute for the sauce.

“Trying to recapture something and find an exact substitute is really hard,” she said. “A lot of people will try a vegetarian meatloaf right after they become vegetarian, and they hate it. But after you get away from eating meat for a while, you’ll find you start to develop other tastes, and the flavor of a lentil loaf with seasonings will taste great to you. It won’t taste like meat loaf, but you’ll appreciate it for itself.”

Ms. Voisin notes that she became a vegetarian and then vegan while living in a small town in South Carolina; she now lives in Jackson, Miss.

“If I can be a vegan in these not-quite-vegan-centric places, you can do it anywhere,” she said. “I think people who try to do it all at once overnight are more apt to fail. It’s a learning process.”

---

What are your tips for vegan cooking and eating? Share your suggestions on ingredients, recipes and strategies by posting a comment below or tweeting with the hashtag #vegantips.

Read More..

Disruptions: Disruptions: Design Is Driving Technology Forward

Last year, at Apple’s event to announce the iPad Mini, I was wandering around the gadget petting zoo the company sets up after each product unveiling. As I turned a corner, I bumped into Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, who immediately wanted to show me something.

“Nick, just look at this,” Mr. Cook said as he held the miniaturized iPad in the air, brushing his hand along its edge as if he were about to perform a magic trick. Then, his index finger stopped, standing to attention as it pointed to two flat black buttons on the side. “Just look at those volume buttons. Have you ever seen anything like it? Aren’t they just outstanding?”

I took the iPad Mini from him, examining the buttons, which were the size of a grain of rice. “They sure are, Tim,” I replied in all seriousness. “Beautiful.”

What struck me about our brief conversation wasn’t that Mr. Cook was talking about two teensy buttons — this is Apple, after all — but that he never once mentioned the technology in the iPad Mini. Instead, he talked about one thing: design.

To this day, I’m not actually sure how many megahertz my iPad operates on. And frankly, I don’t care about the technology inside the technology anymore. It just works — for the most part — and therefore consumers no longer need to think about it.

“We’re on the tail end of technology being special,” says John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The automobile was a weird alien technology when it first debuted, then, after a while, it evolved and designers stepped in to add value to it.”

Walk into most car showrooms in America and sales clerks might spend more time explaining the shape of the heated seat than the engine that moves the car along. Several decades ago, he might have been heralding pistons and horsepower.

Now, Mr. Maeda said, this shift has happened to technology, be it computers, smartphones or the iPad Mini.

“We have this exciting next step for design,” he said. “Now that we have enough technology to do anything, design can now begin to be better than the technology itself.”

This, for example, is what happened with the Nike FuelBand, the bracelet that can track a user’s daily activity and connect to a smartphone.

“We want to make the product emotional for the person using it, and that happens with the design of it,” said Stefan Olander, Nike’s vice president for digital sport, who worked on the wristband. “You have to create a visceral, emotive experience around the design, which is something everyone cares about.”

Mr. Olander said that people did not look at the FuelBand and ask what technology powered it, they looked at the design of this device that, once on your wrist, disappeared.

“You try to make it smaller, you try to make it lighter, you try to make it go away,” he said.

As a result of the technology slipping into the background, Nike has become one of the most advanced companies for wearable computers.

The worship of design has also taken designers out of the back offices and into top executive jobs. Engineers are still in the mix, to be sure. But they don’t rule the roost in product development, which may also be why tech products are easier to use, more human. “Design used to be the gravy at the end of the meal,” Mr. Maeda said. “But now the quantity of design needed to be increased because of all of these screens, and we now metabolize this design for much longer.”

Now, the entire business is a Web site. Or an app. Or something else that is made to just vanish.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

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The Female Factor: New Delhi Only Seems Far Away

LONDON — Only an estimated 15 percent of female victims of rape and sexual assault in England and Wales report the crime to the police. Many of the rest say they chose not to because it was “embarrassing” or they considered the attack “too trivial or not worth reporting,” or because they “didn’t think the police could do much to help,” according to new official statistics released last week.

The publication by the Justice Ministry and the Home Office for the first time of “An Overview of Sexual Offending” also revealed that one in five of all women had been the victim of a sexual offense since the age of 16 and that there were about 400,000 adult female victims of sex crimes every year, including 69,000 victims of rape or attempted rape.

The release of these startling figures was followed a day later by the police report on the full scale of the sexual crimes committed by the late BBC host Jimmy Savile, which noted 34 rapes among 450 individual complaints and disclosed that the vast majority of victims who overcame their embarrassment to report assaults during Mr. Savile’s lifetime were not believed.

The information has triggered a wave of sober introspection about attitudes toward rape here — forcing a judderingly abrupt shift of geographical focus. For the past month, newspapers and news channels in Britain have devoted considerable attention to the unfolding details of the gang rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in New Delhi, with commentators lining up to discuss how India is a country battling deep-seated misogyny and to condemn official reluctance to tackle seriously the issue of violence against women.

Blithely criticizing failings in attitudes toward women thousands of miles away is easy. Focusing on why it is that so few women come forward to report crimes in this country has proved harder.

The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, last Friday apologized to Mr. Savile’s victims and called for victims of any sexual abuse who felt that their complaints had not been dealt with seriously to contact the police again and have their cases reviewed by new panels that are to be set up across the country. This would be a “watershed moment” in the way that victims of sexual assault would be dealt with, he promised, stressing that it was important that victims be believed.

Campaign groups are also hoping that this will be a turning point.

“We must change the cultures and attitudes which allow abusive behavior to go unchecked,” a statement from the End Violence Against Women Coalition declared. “There is a real opportunity now to make the U.K. a global leader in how it deals with sexual and other violence against women and girls.” The low conviction rates for rape are probably part of the reason that so many women here believe that the police cannot “do much to help.”

Campaigners have previously estimated that only 6 percent of allegations of rape reported to the police resulted in a conviction for rape, but this widely cited figure has always been controversial, contested by the police and increasingly seen as part of the problem because it makes victims so cynical about the system that they decide not to press charges.

The latest statistics from the report last week suggest that conviction rates are improving, if you look at cases that get to court; of those cases prosecuted in court, 62.5 percent ended in a conviction.

Police guidelines for the sensitive handling of rape cases have been in use for some time. Staff members investigating sexual violence are trained how to talk to victims who have been raped. Those interviewers know that while they can ask any of the when, where, what and how questions, they must never ask “Why?” and particularly “Why did you do that?” because this questions a woman’s own decisions and suggests shifting some of the blame from attacker to victim.

A visit to one of Britain’s well-respected sexual assault referral centers (where victims are sensitively fast-tracked through police questioning and medical examination so no evidence is lost) shows that where they are well staffed and funded, they provide an excellent service.

But while considerable work has been done to improve police attitudes toward rape cases, the general public (which makes up the juries that listen to rape cases in court) remains very judgmental. Burglary victims are not expected to prove that they have been burgled, because people tend to believe them; rape victims still find themselves having to prove that something has happened to them and needing to justify their actions.

And it is remarkable how frequently unhelpful attitudes are revealed by people who should know better. The senior Conservative politician Kenneth Clarke got into trouble last year when he was justice secretary for giving an interview in which he talked about “serious rape,” inadvertently suggesting that he thought there were categories of less serious rape.

Then there was the senior BBC editor who, when explaining why he had chosen not to air a program about Mr. Savile’s crimes last year, breezily said there was not enough substance to the material, using the now notorious line that there were “just the women” — only the testimonies of the victims themselves.

With attitudes like these, it is hardly surprising that so many of the 85 percent of victims who were asked why they did not report the attack indicated that the process was too embarrassing and ultimately futile to undertake.

Amelia Gentleman is a journalist with The Guardian. Katrin Bennhold is on sabbatical leave.

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Soft Opening for Wall Street Stocks

Stocks on Wall Street were little changed in early trading on Monday as investors faced a busy week for corporate earnings results, but shares of Apple were hit by fears of weakening demand for the iPhone.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index fell 0.1 percent, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose 0.1 percent.

The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index slid 0.3 percent. Apple lost 3.7 percent after reports that it has cut orders for screens and other parts for the iPhone 5 this quarter due to weak demand. Apple suppliers also fell. Cirrus Logic tumbled 4.8 percent, while Qualcomm lost 1.6 percent.

Earnings season picks up the pace this week with reports expected from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Intel and General Electric. Thirty-eight S.&P. 500 companies are due to report results this week.

Overall earnings were expected to grow by just 1.9 percent for the quarter, according to Thomson Reuters data.

“I think there’s going to be more misses than hits in terms of revenue and margins. It’s going to be a little bit light this earnings season compared to the last one,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York. “But the underlying factor is that there’s economic growth and that the global economy is picking up.”

In Europe, shares were mixed. United Parcel Service said it would drop its 5.2 billion euro ($7 billion) bid for Dutch delivery firm TNT Express on the expectation of a veto by the European Commission. U.P.S. was up 0.4 percent. TNT Express shares plunged 42 percent in Amsterdam.

Transocean. an offshore rig contractor, has disclosed that Carl C. Icahn, the billionaire activist investor, has acquired a 1.56 percent stake in the company and is looking to increase that holding. Its shares rose 3.2 percent.

A top Federal Reserve official, Charles Evans, said Monday the American economy was expected to grow by 2.5 percent in 2013, improving to 3.5 percent growth in 2014.

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Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.

Andrew Sacks

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema at the University of Michigan in 2003. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's research showed that women were more prone to ruminate, or dwell on the sources of problems rather than solutions, more than men.

Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.

Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men.

She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse.

“The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.”

Dr. Seligman added, “She was the leading figure in sex differences in depression of her generation.”

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote several books about her research for general readers, including “Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life.” These books described why rumination could be so corrosive — it is deeply distracting; it tends to highlight negative memories — and how such thoughts could be alleviated.

Susan Kay Nolen was born on May 22, 1959, in Springfield, Ill., to John and Catherine Nolen. Her father ran a construction business, where her mother was the office manager; Susan was the eldest of three children.

She entered Illinois State University before transferring to Yale. She graduated summa cum laude in 1982 with a degree in psychology.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the faculty at Stanford. She later moved to the University of Michigan, before returning to Yale in 2004.

Along the way she published scores of studies and a popular textbook. In 2003 she became the editor of the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, an influential journal.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema moved smoothly between academic work and articles and books for the general reader.

“I think part of what allowed her to move so easily between those two worlds was that she was an extremely clear thinker, and an extremely clear writer,” said Marcia K. Johnson, a psychology professor and colleague at Yale.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema lived in Bethany, Conn. In addition to her husband, a science writer, she is survived by a son, Michael; her brothers, Jeff and Steve; and her father, John.

“Over the past four decades women have experienced unprecedented growth in independence and opportunities,” Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in 2003, adding, “We have many reasons to be happy and confident.”

“Yet when there is any pause in our daily activities,” she continued, “many of us are flooded with worries, thoughts and emotions that swirl out of control, sucking our emotions and energy down, down, down. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Read More..

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Psychologist Who Studied Depression in Women, Dies at 53

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53.

Andrew Sacks

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema at the University of Michigan in 2003. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema's research showed that women were more prone to ruminate, or dwell on the sources of problems rather than solutions, more than men.

Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis.

Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men.

She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse.

“The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.”

Dr. Seligman added, “She was the leading figure in sex differences in depression of her generation.”

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote several books about her research for general readers, including “Women Who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life.” These books described why rumination could be so corrosive — it is deeply distracting; it tends to highlight negative memories — and how such thoughts could be alleviated.

Susan Kay Nolen was born on May 22, 1959, in Springfield, Ill., to John and Catherine Nolen. Her father ran a construction business, where her mother was the office manager; Susan was the eldest of three children.

She entered Illinois State University before transferring to Yale. She graduated summa cum laude in 1982 with a degree in psychology.

After earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the faculty at Stanford. She later moved to the University of Michigan, before returning to Yale in 2004.

Along the way she published scores of studies and a popular textbook. In 2003 she became the editor of the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, an influential journal.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema moved smoothly between academic work and articles and books for the general reader.

“I think part of what allowed her to move so easily between those two worlds was that she was an extremely clear thinker, and an extremely clear writer,” said Marcia K. Johnson, a psychology professor and colleague at Yale.

Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema lived in Bethany, Conn. In addition to her husband, a science writer, she is survived by a son, Michael; her brothers, Jeff and Steve; and her father, John.

“Over the past four decades women have experienced unprecedented growth in independence and opportunities,” Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema wrote in 2003, adding, “We have many reasons to be happy and confident.”

“Yet when there is any pause in our daily activities,” she continued, “many of us are flooded with worries, thoughts and emotions that swirl out of control, sucking our emotions and energy down, down, down. We are suffering from an epidemic of overthinking.”

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Finding Help With Apps

I like the convenience of downloading iOS apps, but where do I go if I need help or tech support with a program for iPhone or iPad?

Some apps include basic help guides and support information under its settings or tools menu. Apple has links to online manuals for its own iWork for iOS software in the Help option under the Tools menu. Tapping the toolbar question-mark icon in the company’s iMovie, iPhoto or GarageBand software activates the built-in help guides for those apps; the company also has an iOS Apps Support page online .

Not every iOS app has such extensive documentation, but in many cases, you can find technical support and help guides on the app developer’s own Web site. On either the iTunes desktop version or the iOS app for Apple’s recently redesigned App Store, search for the program you need help with.

On the app’s information page, click the Ratings and Reviews tab. Under the Customer Reviews section, you should see an App Support button. Click or tap App Support to go to the developer’s Web site, where you can find more information and hopefully get help. The quality of the technical support may vary based on the developer.

For those using Google’s Android software, checking an app’s page in the Google Play Store is also one place to look for help. Check the Overview tab on the app’s page for links to the developer’s Web site and a tech-support e-mail address. Google has a general help guide for using the Google Play store here.

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Malian Town Falls to Islamist Rebels, France Says

Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

People looked at newspapers focusing on France's military intervention on Monday in the capital, Bamako.

PARIS — The French Defense Ministry said on Monday that a town in central Mali had fallen to Islamist insurgents from the north, hours after Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said his country’s dramatic intervention there had succeeded in blocking a rebel advance that could have had “appalling consequences.”

At the same time, an Islamist leader in Mali said France had “opened the gates of hell” for all its citizens by intervening, reinforcing concerns that the far-flung military operation in Africa could inspire vengeance in mainland France.

French forces, Mr. Fabius said in a radio interview late Sunday, were now “taking care” of rear bases used by Islamists who took control of much of the north of the country last year after a military coup in the capital, Bamako. The duration of the French operation was “a question of weeks,” Mr. Fabius said, unlike the American-led military campaign in Afghanistan.

But within hours, reports began to emerge of a rebel counterattack in the small town of Diabaly, north of Ségou on the approaches to the capital — the first indication that the insurgents had regrouped after a wave of French airstrikes. The fighting in the town pitted government forces against rebels seeking to press southward under heavy fire from the air.

Reuters quoted residents and Malian military officials as saying that Islamists counterattacked after the insurgents infiltrated overnight in small groups. The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said the rebels “took Diabaly after fierce fighting and resistance from the Malian Army that couldn’t hold them back.”

The French intervention, which began on Friday and continued over the weekend, appeared to halt the main thrust of an Islamist rebel advance farther east, as West African nations authorized what they said would be a faster deployment of troops in support of the weak government.

French aircraft dropped bombs and fired rockets from helicopter gunships and jet fighters after the Islamists, who already control the north of Mali, pressed southward and overran the village of Konna, which had been the de facto line of government control.

The French struck two columns of Islamist fighters, the French Defense Ministry said. The first was in and around Konna, driving out the rebels from the village, and the second was to the west, across the Niger River, heading south toward Ségou.

That second column appeared from local accounts to still be advancing, with the rebels taking the small town of Alatona as well as Diabaly, a military camp on a main road to Ségou, the administrative capital of central Mali, according to The Associated Press.

A spokesman for the Malian army, Lt. Col. Diarran Kone, confirmed the rebel attack on Diabaly.

The French defense minister, Mr. Le Drian, said on Monday that the situation in Mali “is evolving favorably,” but he acknowledged that fighting continued.

“There is still a difficult spot in the west, where we’re dealing with extremely well-armed groups and where the operations are ongoing,” he said.

The rebel takeover of northern Mali began after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya in October 2011, when Tuareg fighters from northern Mali, who had been fighting alongside Colonel Qaddafi’s forces, returned home with weapons from Libyan arsenals.

They joined with Qaeda-affiliated Islamist militants who had moved to the lightly policed region from Algeria, and the two groups easily drove out the weakened Malian army in late March and early April last year. The Islamists then turned on the Tuaregs, routing them and consolidating control in the region in May and June.

The rebels struck a defiant posture on Monday.

Oumar Ould Hamaha, an insurgent leader, said the French intervention had “opened the gates of hell for all the French.”

He taunted French forces to launch a ground offensive, saying French warplanes had bombed from high altitude. “Let them come down onto the ground, if they are men,” he said. “We will greet them with open arms.”

France, he told Europe 1 radio, “has fallen into a trap which is much more dangerous than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia. And that is only the beginning.” On Sunday evening, French jets attacked the northern town of Gao, an insurgent stronghold.

Steven Erlanger reported from Paris, Alan Cowell from London, and Adam Nossiter from Bamako, Mali.

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