Lounging by a bright blue pool, Kyndra and Cami, stars of MTV’s hit reality show Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, chat with a bunch of other teenagers. Kyndra’s white bikini shows off an artificially enhanced figure, while Cami’s dark skin glows against an unnaturally bright blue sky. This is Laguna Beach, after a fashion, but it isn’t the TV show. It’s a live appearance, a chance for the show’s bitchiest characters to hang with some of the 2 million viewers who tune in to their breakups and hookups every Wednesday night. As the pool fills up with fans, someone asks why the girls are always so mean to fellow cast member Tessa. Kyndra shrugs: “We just don’t like her personally.” Cami can’t be bothered to answer; she’s busy tongue wrestling with some hipster dude in sunglasses.

Kyndra and Cami are kind of fake—and not just in the catty teenage sense of the word. The two girls by the pool are computerized 3-D replicas of the cast members, who are using mouse and keyboard to navigate their avatars through a multiplayer online environment known as Virtual Laguna Beach. Anyone with a PC and a broadband connection can join them.

You want your MTV? These days, that means going virtual.

Read the complete text at Wired.

An online game is an odd place to have your reputation precede you. But that’s exactly what happened to me not long ago in the massively multiplayer universe of EVE Online. My character there, a spaceship pilot named Walker Spaight, was minding his own business one day when I got a message from another player, who wanted to know if I was “the same Walker Spaight from Second Life,” another 3D online world.

Read the complete text at PC World.

It’s the middle of the night and I’m standing in an empty, starlit field in the virtual world of Second Life. In the distance is a low-polygon-count shopping mall. But at my feet, there’s only pixelated grassland – a simple green texture that repeats to the edges of the computer screen.

Just hours ago, a lavish mansion stood here. It was a custom job built for a player known as BallerMoMo King, whose blinged-out avatar carries a diamond-studded cane and is never without his posse of bodyguards and harem of “MoMo hos.” Baller is one of Second Life’s most notorious gangsters, famous for hiring talented residents to script weapons that can bounce an avatar across the gamespace and bombs that produce enough smoke and fire to occasionally crash a server. It seems Linden Lab, the company that runs Second Life, has had enough. The MoMo mansion – and Baller’s account – has been erased.

Read the complete text at Wired.

As we all know by now (and the rest of the world is rapidly learning), the imaginary currencies that are earned, spent and traded in massively multiplayer online games and other virtual worlds are anything but virtual, themselves. While no government authority stands behind them to insure their value, a seal of approval isn’t needed for a currency to become “real.” A World of Warcraft gold piece is worth as much as you can get for it on the market – about $0.10 at the moment. The U.S. dollar derives its value in exactly the same way.

Read the complete text at The Escapist.

Imagine relaxing in a tiny private cove, on a lava beach near the mists of a waterfall. The sun is shining, a tropical bird cries somewhere in the distance and the cares of the working world seem a million miles away.

It’s an idyllic vacation spot, but the best thing about it is that it takes less than five minutes to get there from anywhere in the world. In fact, you can reach it without ever leaving your home. That’s because it exists not in any physical location but in one of the many virtual worlds that millions of people now travel to every day with the help of nothing more than a decent computer graphics card and a broadband Internet connection.

Though most of these worlds take the form of multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Star Wars Galaxies, a few are simply open 3-D environments whose members can get away from it all in a place filled with colorful diversions and other cyberexplorers like themselves. Even in game worlds, many players log on not to slay orcs or blow up death stars but to spend time with friends, see the sights and take a small vacation without ever stepping foot outside their door.

More than 10 million people around the world travel to such imaginary destinations regularly. They get there via software that lets them guide their onscreen representatives, known as “avatars,” through places built entirely of pixels where they can interact with one another. Their destinations include virtual dance parties and nightclubs, auto races and yachting events, “Star Wars”-style cantinas, whimsical underwater jazz clubs and much more.

Read the complete text at The New York Times.

When I was 12 years old and supposed to be studying for my Bar Mitzvah, I was instead spending lots and lots of my time staring at what was then called a “dumb terminal,” on the screen of which scrolled hundreds of lines of text from the classic of all classic computer games, Adventure. It was 1978 or ‘79 and my father was taking his CompSci masters at the State University of New York at Albany. We had a big, aqua-colored CRT that lived on the dining room table, as I recall, and which, when you switched it on, would do exactly nothing. To liven it up, you had to dial the university’s PDP-11 computer (that is, turn the dial on the house phone), listen for the burr of the computer tone, then jam the handset into the pair of fat black rubber bushings that protruded from the brick-sized modem attached to the terminal.

Discovering that the static that came through our phone could bring the dead, tv-looking thing on our table to life was one of the most fascinating moments of my youth and young manhood. Sadly, that tone is almost gone from our world now, as dial-up disappears in favor of broadband connections (and rightly so). But even better was discovering what kind of life lay in wait on the other end of the line. My brother and I spent hours and hours playing Adventure, throwing axes at dwarves and scrawling dozens of pages of maps in an attempt to collect whatever treasures we could and somehow beat this game–though I don’t think the concept of beating a game even existed yet, as such. We had already discovered Dungeons & Dragons, and we weren’t about to give that up. I think I was already on to the Silmarillion (yes, I was a nerdy boy), and somewhere there still exists the epic fantasy novel that I’d begun to pen (or pencil, rather), complete with Tolkienesque family trees and lots of “begats,” etc. But Adventure held my attention in a different way.

For the uninitiated out there (if there are any still), Adventure was a text-based adventure game in which you navigated the halls and chasms of a place called the Colossal Cave, in which lurked nasty dwarves and dragons, a towering beanstalk (well, towering once you’d figured out how to water it, anyway), frustrating mazes that had to be navigated in order to collect more batteries for your flashlight, and a great many other things. Your interaction with the game consisted entirely of command-line inputs at the level of “throw axe,” “take cage” (so you could carry the bird that would scare away the snake, I think it was), or just plain “N” if you wanted to go north.

The place must have had just the right challenge-reward ratio, because it was absolutely addictive. And while the code behind it was simple, it was not a trivial piece of software. There’s a great passage in Tracy Kidder’s fantastic book The Soul of a New Machine in which he describes how Adventure was used to test early minicomputers. If it could run Adventure without crashing, it was thought, it could run anything. How’s that for system requirements?

As far as I’m concerned, Adventure was the great-great-grandaddy of the virtual worlds and first-person shooters we all wander around in today. Though it was only short chunks of text scrolling up your screen, there was a “you are there” sense to it that many games still fail to capture. It was the state of the art. Take away today’s graphics and Adventure is actually a good bit more complex than many contemporary FPS games, as it took place in a non-linear, open world where what you killed stayed killed, for the most part, and what you carried from the Hall of the Mountain King and then dropped in the large room full of dirty rocks would still be there should you chance to return. It wasn’t multi-player, but it inspired the first multi-player adventure game, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle’s MUD1.

As games go, it’s hard to overstate the importance of that moment. I’ll be interested to see how it’s treated in the documentary about such text adventures that’s apparently going into production next year. [Grand Text Auto's link to the documentary site was what inspired this post in the first place, though it's something I've been wanting to write for some time.]

But for me the fascination wasn’t just with the game. I don’t know how it happened, since I too should probably have been in class at the time, but I remember spending days with my father on the SUNY Albany campus, days that profoundly satisfied the geek in me (or helped shape and nurture it). My dad at the time was teaching a graduate course in programming, a course he was also taking from another instructor (thus his students were always a week behind those in the class where he was a student), and while he was in class I’d have the great privilege of being sent off with a pocket full of quarters to the game room, which at that time meant all the pinball I could handle–and I could handle a lot. (I don’t recall any video games there at the time.) On other days I’d sit in the rathskellar with my father and his friend Henry, which must be where I got the taste for smoky, smelly pubs and hanging out with people who knew how to make pipes out of nothing but a pear and an aluminum ashtray.

Of course, my dad and his friend couldn’t get high in the bar, so we’d skulk off to the tunnels that ran beneath the quad and after they’d consumed their consumables they’d show the kid a good time by trotting me around the steam pipes pretending to all be orcs or rangers or whatever we came up with. It was a good time. Best of all, though, was learning BASIC (instead of Hebrew) and getting to sit in the mainframe room in front of a teletype, one of those ancient keyboards that stood on its own legs like a little mech-dwarf demigod, fed by an endless scroll of rough brown pub-toilet-quality hand-towel paper, and punch a program into the machine itself on its big cylindrical keys. Hello, World!

That’s why even today when I fire up some World of Warcraft or ponder things like mods, maps or machinima, I still get the taste in my mouth of that time. I think it was my first experience of something “important,” something that was clearly going to change the world, even if I had no thought at the time of how that might happen. Here was something big, bigger than school and sports and whatever synagogue I never showed up at for my rite of passage into manhood, and we were involved. My father was part of this thing that was happening, this thing that was cooler than men walking on the moon because it was right there in front of you and you could do it too.

And I was doing it, and it was more than just pushing buttons. My own little 12-year-old’s text-based programming adventures didn’t come anywhere near what was happening in Adventure, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that what was coming back to me in little green letters or smudged black ink was something I had brought into being, my contribution to the world. For me, listening to the static song of the modem carrier signal or sitting in front of that clunky, clacketing teletype meant that I was charged, for however many minutes I could get, with the responsibility of creating something cool. And there’s no better drug for a pre-teen geek than that, no more solemn burden to shoulder. I never did make it to my Bar Mitzvah. But I’m pretty sure I learned some of the same lessons, thanks to dad and DEC and the big machines that did turn out to spark a revolution after all.

Most reviews of computer games cover only the bells and whistles: how quick was the action, how cool the villains, how original the story line. Over the last year, however, a handful of gaming writers have been bringing a more personal touch to their work, using a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player. Their young genre even has a name: New Games Journalism, after the New Journalism of the 1960’s and 70’s.

The seminal tract was an article by the 33-year-old Ian Shanahan, using his screen name, Always Black, in the February 2004 issue of the British magazine PC Gamer (which has been the house organ of New Games Journalism). “Bow, Nigger,” described the mechanics of the online game “Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast” (pictured at right), and also recounted how the epithet of the title, typed by an opponent many miles away, altered the course and meaning of a simple light-saber duel. That article inspired Kieron Gillen of Bristol, England, to write – after a long night at the pub with a few game-scribe friends – a blog post that has become known as the manifesto of New Games Journalism. While the genre takes games as its subject, Mr. Gillen wrote, “what it’s really talking about is the human condition.”

It manages to do that quite well. “Possessing Barbie,” also by Mr. Shanahan, describes a sexually charged encounter in the virtual world known as There, in which the author grapples with questions of virtual transgression and desire – and how they might affect his relationship with this real-life girlfriend, who’s on her way up with the afternoon tea.

According to Mr. Gillen, 29, who has been a games journalist since he was 19, articles by writers like Mr. Shanahan, Jim Rossignol and Tom Chick (who writes for QuarterToThree.com and is one of the field’s rare American practitioners), reflect how people experience games more accurately than the “previews” that are the meat and potatoes of the gaming press. “If you’re telling your friends about getting blown away in a game, you don’t say, ‘My character died.’ You say, ‘I died,’ ” he said. “That’s the weird magic of games. You do feel involved in something that’s actually happening to you.”

MANAMA, Bahrain — It’s the height of the holiday season and I’m hiding in the men’s room in the executive suite of a big steel-and-glass bank building, scarfing a Snickers bar and stealing sips of bottled water while no one’s looking because I don’t want to offend anyone. The problem is, it’s Ramadan and I’m in Manama, the capital city of the island nation of Bahrain off the Saudi Arabian coast south of Kuwait, and by religious bent and in some cases by law the secretaries and executives I encounter in the day-long series of meetings I’ve been stuck in for two and a half weeks aren’t able to offer me coffee or even a glass of water. Everyone is fasting from sun-up to sun-down, suffering the ever more gnawing stomach burn and squirm of uncomfortability that comes from not eating or drinking all day.

So I’m locked in a men’s room huffing chocolate. It seems outlandish, but really it’s a mild inconvenience, given the good fortune of finding myself on a magazine assignment in Bahrain. Although it’s Ramadan everywhere else, at least I can get room service whenever I get back to my hotel.

While the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is more like Easter than Christmas (or maybe more like Lent), it shares some characteristics with both Christian and Jewish holidays. (All three religions are based on the same text, after all.) At the end of the month there’s a great three-day party, called Eid Al-Fitr, when everyone dresses their houses in fairy lights, goes visiting and sits through an endless string of dinners with the relatives.

During Ramadan itself, as during Hanukkah, it’s sunset that determines when the fun begins. Only instead of lighting candles and giving out gelt, Muslims make the infinitely wiser move of gorging themselves on as much food as possible, keeping almost Spanish hours, and doing as little as possible during the day before closing up shop around 2 p.m. to head home and wait for the sun to set and the food fest to begin again. The restaurants are closed all day, and it’s illegal for even Westerners like myself to eat, drink or smoke outside.

Far be it from me, a non-denominational American in a Muslim nation at a time of unprecedented tension, another bombing next door in Saudi Arabia, and scary-sounding security warnings – stuff like “avoid places where Westerners might congregate” – far be it from me to step on my hosts’ highly inconvenient religious practices by inconsiderately indulging my hunger pangs in public. Hence the clandestine chocolate bar.

When I get a call from Moniem, an enthusiastic young stockbroker I’ve met at a Ramadan supper given by the stock exchange (their Christmas party, more or less), I’m ambivalent about going out. But it’s only in New York that I’ve ever been actually assaulted, and hey, how many times am I going to be in Manama on a Saturday night? So at 9:30 I meet him in the lobby of my hotel and we pile into his cousin Najeeb’s Suzuki Vitara and head downtown for what sounds to me like a gallery opening. “We can go see some paintings,” Najeeb, a back-office accountant, tells me. And all I can think is how fitting it is, somehow, that I should find Manhattan culture being imitated so far from New York.

It takes about two minutes to drive to downtown Manama from my hotel. It takes about two minutes to drive pretty much anywhere in Bahrain, an island about thirty miles long and only ten across. Most of the country’s 750,000 citizens live in Manama, at the northeast tip, but a few towns are sprinkled further down the dusty island, as are a U.S. naval base, a lushly irrigated golf course, and, weirdly, the Middle East’s first Formula 1 racing circuit.

The city itself is a mix of Financial District Modern and two- and three-story Colonial Stucco buildings of the kind found from Manila to Mozambique. Aspiring boulevards emanate from honking traffic circles only to bog down in one-lane back streets that wind around mosques, souqs, tea shops and grill restaurants. It’s a mellow city with a happening nightlife (this is where the Saudis come to cut loose, after all), but even during Ramadan there’s the impression that business is getting done.

Tonight the streets are alive. It’s only a few blocks from our parking spot behind the stock exchange building to the warren of narrow alleys that constitutes the old souq, but we walk them in the company of dozens of other Arabs all headed in the same direction. I lope along behind Najeeb from square to square, followed by Moniem and a melismatic soundtrack of Arabic music. It’s as crowded as an American subway at rush hour and I have to dip my shoulder between passers-by to keep up. I am the only white guy in sight, but no one seems to notice.

We stop on a corner where a man is serving something Tang-like in little plastic cups, but when I try to pay the cousins laugh at me. The crowd is lighter here, but they are still coming and going in all directions as if headed to a rock concert maybe, stopping to greet each other in the street or not stopping but just smiling and waving as they go past. At the end of the street I can see a building that’s somehow grand and squat at the same time, its soaring face a brilliant aquamarine festooned with tall ornate Arabic writing in white and gold. Most of the people passing by are either women in black abaya or men in white dish-dasha, the heel-length robe that is the standard men’s uniform in the Arab Gulf (though both Moniem and Najeeb wear American-style clothes). A couple of girls go by in the long robes and headscarves that leave only their faces revealed. Najeeb stares after them hungrily and asks me if I think they look nice.

Moniem is otherwise occupied. “Not so many paintings,” he tells me, looking disappointed, and it takes me a moment to realize he’s referring not to art in a gallery but to paintings like the one on the banner being carried toward us by two young men, of a bearded Muslim preacher or prophet or maybe even an ayatollah. “Maybe we see some music,” Moniem says. And as if on cue, a little cart like a laundromat wagon comes trundling around the corner with a loudspeaker teetering on a pole sticking out of it, powered by a car battery and tended by two young men in black slacks and black button-down shirts, broadcasting the words of the bearded, black-robed man who leads them. A phalanx of clarinetists, also in black, follows along, joined here and there by a trumpet or two, all tootling the same dirge-like Arabic melody, and between them and the imam’s sermon – it’s enough to drown out all the other noise on the street and focus my attention completely on the scene.

The musicians march four abreast but the street is only eight or ten feet wide, and Najeeb’s would-be girlfriends scamper down a side alley to get out of the way. Everyone else stands to one side or another and as the marchers go past, I suddenly find myself pressed into a doorway, transfixed by the musicians’ clamor and then by the long double column of men who follow behind them. They come in a slow, leg-swinging pantomime of a march, all dressed in black (some in what could pass for business attire, some in jeans and AC/DC tour shirts), and all in their 20s and 30s and 40s, neither too young nor too old, the same solemn expression on each man’s face. Each one carries a short bundle of chains fixed to a wooden handle, and as he rotates his torso through each step, he throws one arm over the opposite shoulder to deliver himself a ceremonial blow.

Once I get the hang of Moniem’s English, I understand that we’re out on the night of the Muslim year that commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Ali, who founded the Shiite sect of Islam in the Seventh century and who is apparently buried in Iraq’s holy city, Najaf. The men performing the ceremonial self-flagellation known as latmiyaat are expressing the sect’s 1,350-year-old grief – much as Christians commemorate Christ’s death and resurrection at Easter (or did, until the vapid bunnies and painted eggs got the better of them).

The streets of Manama are a million miles away from Manhattan and art galleries and insipid wine-guzzling scenesters – though even crowded into the doorway with a strange religious procession swirling through the night streets in front of me, I can’t help feeling momentarily like a five o’clock-shadowed Brad Pitt in the second act of a multi-million-dollar filmed-on-location epic of love, loss and bad line readings. When the procession passes, my co-stars and I wander on through the rough hodge-podge of three- and four-story whitewashed buildings. Thin short alleys let onto small rectangles of open space where kids run around and kick balls while the adults chat like friendly neighbors on the sidelines of a Fourth of July parade. Where five streets meet and somehow form a square, more than a hundred women dressed in black are seated on the ground, listening to the story of Imam Ali’s life. A more vitriolic sermon emerges from a mosque that appears suddenly, recessed between two buildings across the street from a row of storefronts. Amid the rapid-fire Arabic, one semi-familiar word surfaces from time to time: Amreeka. America. The security warnings return to my mind, but in this crowd I somehow feel more safe than threatened. This is not a place where Westerners might congregate, after all. “Don’t worry,” Moniem tells me. “It is George Bush they do not like, not you.”

Without my noticing, we’ve wandered back toward the car. The crowds have thinned out a bit, the procession has broken up. The breeze coming off the Manama waterfront, a block away, is downright cool. “What do you want to do now?” Moniem asks me. I hardly have an answer. Najeeb breaks in: “Let’s go to the mall.”

Seef Mall, about a mile away, strikes me as – well, it’s a mall. A vast multi-level indoor air-conditioned mall as up-to-date as any in America, filled with name brands, screaming children and teenage girls – much to Najeeb’s distraction. At the Dairy Queen I have a falafel-burger and marvel at how far down the fast-food chain Bahrain reaches: there’s DQ and Burger King, but there’s also Cinnabon, Bennigan’s, Ponderosa Steakhouse, and even, weirdly, a Seattle’s Best Coffee. I’m a bit shell-shocked by the transition from centuries-old ceremony to 21st century commerce, but it’s soon clear we’re here mostly for Najeeb’s benefit. He ducks into a cosmetics store to flirt with the girl at the register. He has a “girlfriend,” whom he’ll most likely marry, he tells me, but she’s still a teenager and he sees her only about a half dozen times a year. He prefers the idea of love American-style. Despite his frustration, the impression I have is that he gets to try his hand at it often enough.

It’s getting late. The cousins suggest we take in a movie at the mall’s 16-plex. “Johnny Depp,” Najeeb nods approvingly at a Pirates of the Caribbean poster. But the last thing I want to do in Bahrain is sit through an American movie.

Not that an American movie is at all out of place here. The Gulf has its share of American restaurants, American products, American attitudes and ambition (while I am in Bahrain, Najeeb is head-hunted away to a new job after only two days at his old one) and American institutions like the mall, the gigaplex movie theater and the AC/DC t-shirt. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, but not everyone sees it that way.

On the ride back to my hotel, Backstreet Boys blaring from the Vitara’s speakers, I thank the cousins for showing me a slice of Islam I probably never would have found on my own. This sparks a discussion of “living the Muslim way,” which Moniem and Najeeb describe as a life in harmony with one’s fellows – something they find lacking in the Arab world. “Here is violence, discrimination, bad feeling between Shia and Sunni,” Najeeb says. Moniem agrees.

“Here we are not living the Muslim way,” Najeeb tells me. “Only in America do you find people living like true Muslims.”

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AS A MEMBER of Oman’s Royal Family, Her Excellency Sayyida Zawan al-Said might be expected firmly to support her country’s government, or at least to keep a low profile where matters of domestic politics and international relations are concerned. This is the Gulf, after all, where women are meant to be seen and not heard.

But although the Sayyida presents the splendorous picture one expects from a Gulf royal – when she strides into the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Muscat to meet me, it’s in a Dolce & Gabbana denim waistcoat and jeans that hug her curvy figure, with a Chanel handbag swinging from her arm – her voice, with its distant hint of a lisp, is a different matter. When Zawan speaks, she hardly blends into the background – though this is due mostly to the fact that she can be heard every day on Oman’s only English-language radio station, hosting a breakfast show on which she regularly takes the Government to task and fields listeners’ calls on everything from male injectable contraceptives to women’s rights, Madonna’s latest change of style or whatever else might also cross her mind.

Far from being a quiet face in the royal crowd, Zawan has taken on a calling few in the Arab world – whether women or men – would dare to try: after a dozen years of work she has transformed herself into an American-style “shock jock”, with two popular and eyebrow-raising English-language radio shows each day that have just completed their first year on the air. When I meet her she is on her way to London for a well-deserved break, and to seek out foreign broadcasting talent who might be able to help her expand her offerings beyond Early On, the breakfast show she hosts from 7am to 9am five mornings a week, and Later On, the afternoon drivetime show she produces.

And far from earning the wrath of Omani society, her candour has been widely appreciated by listeners who call in to her shows or even drop by to be part of her studio audience ‹ once they get over their shock.

Though her subject matter might seem unremarkable to a Western audience, the relatively autocratic Gulf does not yet have many presenters who question things – such as whether it’s fair to have the police hiding speed cameras behind the bushes – or who ridicule Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said’s “meet-the-people” tour (”not a single woman among these so-called people”).

The 39-year-old BBC-trained broadcaster describes her show as “a bit of a wake-up call for a lot of people”. A typical comment from a caller: “I’m so glad someone is saying that at long last” ‹ though a segment on the search for female Viagra inspired one listener to call in with the news that “we’re so sick of faking it”, a comment that itself must have been something of a wake-up call for many listeners.

Though there is no ratings service in Oman to track Early On’s popularity, it is “the most listened-to programme”, according to Zawan, and has even attracted media attention in neighbouring states such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

At the same time, Zawan is aware that much of its success is due to a lack of choice: “It’s the only breakfast show on the only radio station for the British expatriate and English-speaking Omani communities,” she says.

But compared to what came before it, Early On is “extremely, extremely popular”, Zawan adds. “It was just a nothing breakfast show before. You had a string of songs and there was no one saying anything and it had no name and no specific presenter. I just waited and thought, gosh, what a goldmine this is.”

When she approached Oman’s Minister of Information about taking over the show, he was sceptical at first, but finally offered her the slot – with no support and no pay. After the first three weeks of funding, producing, co-ordinating and presenting the show herself, as well as raising three children, Zawan was ready to quit. But with some encouragement from her husband, a retired Omani brigadier – and in light of the fact that the show was a runaway hit within days of going on the air – she persevered, eventually striking a deal with the Ministry of Information under which she would continue to provide free programming to the station in return for the freedom to seek her own commercial backing.

Six months later she signed up HSBC to sponsor Early On, and soon after that landed Bank Muscat as a sponsor for Later On. Except for some bells and whistles that she says give her shows a more professional feel (things like the programmes’ jingles, voiceovers and other effects, which she pays for herself), the sponsorships cover most of her costs, and the salaries of ten people who work for her.

While it probably hasn’t been hard to outdo Radio Oman’s traditional fare, Zawan has also been lucky in that she hit the airwaves at a time when the country is hungry to be engaged by a liberal dialogue on politics and current events.

October 2003 saw all Omanis get the vote for the first time. But turnout to elect the Majlis al-Shura, or consultative council, the country’s parliament, was hardly stellar, coming in at less than 25 per cent of the 800,000 Omanis eligible to vote. Political analysts in Oman and the United States say the low numbers are due to the fact that most Omanis still do not feel they have a political voice, despite Sultan Qaboos’s token steps toward democratisation. The Majlis – like most in the Arab world – is not empowered to make any laws but only to comment on those proposed by the Sultan’s Cabinet. And political campaigns are forbidden to use the mass media, making it difficult for the more than 500 candidates who were standing to reach more people than they could shake hands with.

Zawan does what she can to move the political dialogue along with comments on things like the Sultan’s meet-the-people tour, but even she is constrained. “At the end of the day, I would have liked to know who these candidates were,” she says. “But how could you move towards a more publicised, political comment when you actually have a huge big notice stuck on the board saying ‘No one is allowed to talk to any of the candidates standing for election on any of the programmes’? How do you react? That just says it all, really.”

Nevertheless, for the Arab world she remains an unusually freewheeling presenter. Some have chalked this up to her royal heritage: her father was an Omani government minister and brother of Sultan Qaboos’s father, making the Sultan her first cousin.

Zawan, of course, disagrees with the notion that her royal blood has given her more latitude, and holds that anyone could say what she says on Omani radio. When I ask why she feels the freedom to speak out when others don’t, she gives an answer that is odd to hear, coming from royalty: “I feel I have nothing to lose.”

Though her lineage probably helped her gain access to the Minister of Information to propose her show, she did not simply walk into a career in radio. After taking advantage of London University’s external degree programme to study English literature at Oxford, Zawan cast about for direction before trying Radio Oman in 1991. Having found her passion, she went on to take a graduate degree in broadcast journalism and has pressed ahead with her ambitions ever since.

Now, with five hours of independent commercial programming on Radio Oman, Zawan has created what she calls “a radio station within a radio station”, and hopes to take it even further. While in London she will be looking for a presenter with a lively enough personality to take over her duties with Early On (her search in Oman proved fruitless), which would allow her to start a third programme in the lunchtime slot. At that point, she says: “The next step is to open my own radio station.”

Her dreams include even more than that. She is currently drafting a proposal for an English-language television entertainment show (”a really massive big programme”) to offer to an Arabic station, and hints that she would like one day to be in the business of commissioning such fare, rather than producing it. So how long will it be before we’re tuning into Zawan-TV? “I’m trying actually to be less of a control freak, so I don’t get hurt,” she laughs. She is committed to Oman and to helping to develop the media there, but admits to the possibility that her ambitions might one day take her abroad again: “At the end of the day, does it really matter where you base yourself if you are able to have your own satellite TV station?”

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“Did I show you my leather outfit?” Philip Kaplan pops up off the sofa and lopes through his midtown Manhattan loft, returning with a white leather pants-and-vest set. “Touch it,” he urges, pointing to the big red star stitched onto the vest. “It’s python. Made by the guy who does all the stuff for Guns N’ Roses and Marilyn Manson. The pants were like $2,000, and the vest was like $1,000.” He strokes the python. “I designed it,” he says proudly.

Until recently, Philip Kaplan could only dream about buying $3,000 rock-star outfits. When he arrived in New York from Chevy Chase, Maryland, five years ago, he lived at his grandmother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, in his mother’s childhood bedroom, because he couldn’t make rent. “I knew the locations of all the ATMs that gave out $10 bills,” he recalls.

Even at the height of the tech boom, when he had come up with FuckedCompany.com, the dot-bomb Web site he still runs out of his apartment, he couldn’t afford that much “rich-guy stuff,” as he calls it, with a dismissive wave. Then one day last year, when he was 26, he sat down to figure his net worth for a mortgage application. Somewhere along the way, he had hit seven figures. “I called my parents,” he says. “I was like, ‘Guess what?’”

Kaplan will only say that he’s “a 7- or 8-millionaire,” but the exact number isn’t the point. The point is that in the not-so-distant past, Kaplan was just a nice kid from the suburbs who could hardly afford a round of drinks. Now he’s a guy who once spent so large at the Tribeca Grand Hotel bar that the management comped him a room at closing time because they didn’t want the party to end.

When I first meet him, Kaplan has been up for 48 hours straight, staring at lines of code on his computer screen. Because he often works all night and sleeps late into the afternoon, he left the steel shutters on the bedroom windows of his loft on 31st Street. “I don’t want to be a cog in the machine,” he says. “I want to be the machine.”

Scattered around his Aeron chair are a bunch of shoeboxes that have just been delivered by UPS. Kaplan keeps buying shoes on Zappos.com because they have his size – no small thing to a guy with size 14 feet. He still favors jeans and t-shirts at home, but when he wanted to sharpen up his wardrobe recently, he kept the Versace boutique open late so he could buy a couple $2,000 suits. The upgrade is extending to his home : Kaplan has just closed on a new triplex apartment on 15th Street. We hail a cab to go see it. (If Kaplan had a few more errands to do, he might have hired a car and driver for the afternoon. He likes to drive, but like most New Yorkers, he doesn’t own a car. On a recent trip to L.A., he rented a $400-a-day Corvette.)

Down on 15th Street, Kaplan strides into his new place and opens his arms wide, surveying his kingdom. The large, empty ground-floor cube is fitted out with fixtures that were high-tech before he was born. “Isn’t it great?” He’d been looking in the million-dollar range, he says, but his broker showed him this $720,000 triplex because he knew it had something Kaplan would want: an underground bedroom that has no windows at all. Kaplan put 25 percent down. “There’s no reason to pay cash for anything with interest rates at 6 percent,” he says.

The new place also has a washer and dryer, which his current apartment lacks. One afternoon I go with him to the Laundromat to make good on an overdue bill. The last time they picked up his clothes, the sack tipped the scales at 76 pounds. “I just keep buying shirts and socks and let the rest of it get dirty,” Kaplan says cheerfully, writing a check for $170. “When I get to the point where I’m recycling underwear, that’s when I do my laundry.”

Kaplan takes pains to point out that as millionaires go, he is “not super bling-blingy.” But he has nothing against blowing cash in pursuit of a good time, and he’s flown himself to Vegas for the past two years for the Adult Video News Awards, where he rubs elbows (if only that) with the girls, parties with a porn photographer friend, and tries to get close to idols like Gene Simmons and Vince Neil.

If Neil didn’t remember Kaplan from the year before, it’s probably only because Neil has never seen Spel, the heavy metal band in which Kaplan moonlights, playing drums. One cold winter night, Kaplan rents a Ford Expedition to drive the group to a gig deep in the hinterlands of New Jersey. He picks his bandmates up at the $1,200-a-month rehearsal space he rents on Eighth Avenue where the guys also live. On stage, Kaplan beams from behind his drum set like a manic Charlie Watts. His best move is when he spins a stick and pushes his $800 Selima Optique glasses up the bridge of his nose in the same motion.

Spel is pretty good at their Jersey gig, but it’s clear that Kaplan shouldn’t quit his day job. Actually, he hasn’t had a day job in about four years. He quit a company called THINK New Ideas in 1999 to start his own Internet consultancy. Then he set up FuckedCompany in the spring of 2000, gave away the consultancy to his employees later that year, and has been happily working on his “art,” as he thinks of it, ever since. Besides FuckedCompany, Kaplan’s art consists of the handful of sites he’s dreamed up (like his latest, MarketBanker.com), almost all of which are designed, tested, maintained by Kaplan and a single employee. Kaplan usually eats at home so he can work more. If he wants a meal from a restaurant that doesn’t deliver to his neighborhood, he phones in a $14 pick-up order and hires a $25 courier service to get it for him. He would rather work than go on vacation. He likes to work so much that perhaps it’s not surprising that this interferes with his love life.

Kaplan is tall, handsome, nice, funny, and rich, so it seems odd that he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. “A girl might be really attracted to the things I’ve done, and then, once we get in a relationship, she’ll be frustrated that I can’t spend enough time with her,” he explains. “But I didn’t just wake up and have seven companies.” When he’s invited to the premiere of the movie Spun at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, the only girl he can think of to take is someone he chatted with recently on the Internet. “A normal bachelor millionaire would probably be able to lock down a date for that,” Kaplan muses. Even a fake rich guy like Joe Millionaire has better luck. “People perceive me as a man about town, but I’m just the dork who didn’t have any plans for Valentine’s Day,” Kaplan says. “I want a girl to use me for my money.”

One night, I meet Kaplan in Little Italy bar where he likes to hang out with a bunch of other young Internet successes every Monday night. “I have two very distinct groups of people who are my friends,” Kaplan says. “Half my crowd are not particularly rich, half are. It’s not like we sit around and count money. But we’ll go to a bar and get the $400 bottle of vodka and sit at a table and just be stupid.”

Not that Kaplan likes to be stupid with just anyone. He’s been to the Hamptons but has no wish to be part of that scene. Instead, Kaplan thinks he might prefer the seedy cool of Asbury Park on the Jersey shore, where he’s considering investment properties. “It’s half, like, crack den,” he admits, “but parts of it are starting to get nice.”

That’s about the state of things at his new home on on 15th Street, where we tread carefully on the stained shag rug of the upstairs balcony bedroom, soon to be Kaplan’s office, once it’s renovated. “A lot of doors are open,” he says. “The money thing definitely enables me to say maybe I want to have a magazine. I thought about opening a barbecue joint. “Everyone has one million-dollar idea every ten years, but the thing is, you have to do it, and nobody ever does,” he says. Kaplan’s latest? “A topless shoe shine. It takes a long time to shine a shoe, all that wiggling and stuff. It’ll be like Starbucks,” he says, his eyes flickering over an imaginary line of topless shoe-shine girls. “It’ll be everywhere.

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