Mattel Gives Max Steel Action Figure New Lease on Life

Not many toys get a second shot at success. Once interest wanes, toy makers often are quick to move to the next franchise.

So when Mattel decided to revive its dormant Max Steel line of action figures in the United States, it had a rare opportunity to re-examine the old marketing strategy for the brand. In doing so, it decided this time to shift its focus to multimedia, and let the toys follow.

“We have put focus and discipline around franchise development and content development,” said Tim Kilpin, the executive vice president for global brands at Mattel, the world’s largest toy company based on revenue. Plans for the Max Steel brand include an animated television series, a live-action short movie, an online hub, mobile games, graphic novels and, eventually, toys and other products.

“If there is a new normal, it’s that there is not just one way to reach an audience,” Mr. Kilpin said. “You’ve got to reach them and engage them through all that’s available.”

When Max Steel was introduced in 1999 as a line of boys’ action toys, it found modest success in the United States. But after the terrorist attacks of 2001, it drew scrutiny from its parent.

“There were some themes that we were very concerned about,” Mr. Kilpin said, “so we did not pursue the range of opportunities in the United States.”

Max Steel faded away in this country, but it continued to sell in South America, where it eventually became a blockbuster hit, outselling Mattel’s top lines, Hot Wheels and Barbie. More than a decade later, when Mattel was looking for a new line to start in the United States, it found one in the back of its own closet.

“We stepped back and looked at why it was so successful in Latin America,” Mr. Kilpin said. Mattel found that boys loved the idea of someone who could unlock his potential and become a hero. Mattel tweaked the original concept, making the character Max younger and easier for boys to relate to, and it began to plot a campaign to bring the brand back to the United States.

But times have changed, and children are much more media-wise than they were in the late ’90s. To market the revived brand, Mattel took a page from its Monster High franchise, which was introduced in 2010 as a line of fashion dolls, with an emphasis on multimedia, including young adult novels and a Web site that used videos and games.

Mattel’s focus on multimedia is no surprise, said Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Company. “Mattel is a pioneer for creating toys with media property,” he said, citing He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a boys’ action franchise Mattel started in the 1980s.

Other toy companies have established similar strategies. Hasbro, the No. 2 toy maker, created a production studio in 2009 and worked with Discovery Communications in 2010 to start a cable television channel called the Hub. Last year, the toy maker Jakks Pacific worked with a subsidiary of Dentsu, the Japanese advertising giant, to produce its first animated television series, “Monsuno,” which was supported by a line of toys and other products.

Toy makers are looking for ways to shore up their revenue. Retail toy sales in the United States declined slightly last year, to $16.5 billion from $16.6 billion the year before, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. Mattel is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter earnings on Friday.

Mattel would not reveal the marketing budget for the reintroduction of Max Steel, but Mr. Kilpin said it was “significant.”

“The best way to put perspective around the scale of it is to say it is a major new franchise launch for the company, much like Monster High was,” he said.

Like Monster High, Max Steel will start with a Web site, maxsteel.com, which will begin at the end of February and include games, character biographies and other features. The campaign will include an animated TV series, Mr. Kilpin said, because Max Steel is better suited to episodic television than was Monster High.

In FremantleMedia Enterprises, Mattel found an experienced producer of children’s television entertainment that it said could generate excitement for Max Steel around the globe. The show will have its premiere on March 25 in the United States on the Disney XD channel. Then it will be introduced in more than 100 markets.

The intent of the wide distribution is to create viral marketing on social networks, said Bob Higgins, the executive vice president for children’s and family programming at Fremantle. “Around the world, kids will start hearing about this,” he said. “Kids want to do what their friends do. If they are watching Max Steel, they want to be a part of that party.”

The marketing campaign will also include graphic novels, which help immerse boys deeper into the storytelling, said Elizabeth Kawasaki, senior editorial director at the animé publisher Viz Media.

“There has been always traditional publishing with media tie-in stuff,” she said, but children’s properties once consisted primarily of early reader books and sticker books. “The market has really changed now.”

Other consumer products will follow, including toys that will appear in stores in August. By then, Mattel said it hopes the brand will be embedded in the hearts and minds of boys.

“The first way that they are going to experience the brand is through those storytelling mechanisms,” Mr. Kilpin said. “Marketing ground zero for this franchise will be maxsteel.com.”

“We believe we are experts in play, not just in making toys,” he said. “That’s what our job is today.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified Tim Kilpin, an executive at Mattel. He is the executive vice president overseeing the company’s global brands team, not a senior vice president.

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Well: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

Read More..

Well: Keeping Blood Pressure in Check

Since the start of the 21st century, Americans have made great progress in controlling high blood pressure, though it remains a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes, congestive heart failure and kidney disease.

Now 48 percent of the more than 76 million adults with hypertension have it under control, up from 29 percent in 2000.

But that means more than half, including many receiving treatment, have blood pressure that remains too high to be healthy. (A normal blood pressure is lower than 120 over 80.) With a plethora of drugs available to normalize blood pressure, why are so many people still at increased risk of disease, disability and premature death? Hypertension experts offer a few common, and correctable, reasons:

¶ About 20 percent of affected adults don’t know they have high blood pressure, perhaps because they never or rarely see a doctor who checks their pressure.

¶ Of the 80 percent who are aware of their condition, some don’t appreciate how serious it can be and fail to get treated, even when their doctors say they should.

¶ Some who have been treated develop bothersome side effects, causing them to abandon therapy or to use it haphazardly.

¶ Many others do little to change lifestyle factors, like obesity, lack of exercise and a high-salt diet, that can make hypertension harder to control.

Dr. Samuel J. Mann, a hypertension specialist and professor of clinical medicine at Weill-Cornell Medical College, adds another factor that may be the most important. Of the 71 percent of people with hypertension who are currently being treated, too many are taking the wrong drugs or the wrong dosages of the right ones.

Dr. Mann, author of “Hypertension and You: Old Drugs, New Drugs, and the Right Drugs for Your High Blood Pressure,” says that doctors should take into account the underlying causes of each patient’s blood pressure problem and the side effects that may prompt patients to abandon therapy. He has found that when treatment is tailored to the individual, nearly all cases of high blood pressure can be brought and kept under control with available drugs.

Plus, he said in an interview, it can be done with minimal, if any, side effects and at a reasonable cost.

“For most people, no new drugs need to be developed,” Dr. Mann said. “What we need, in terms of medication, is already out there. We just need to use it better.”

But many doctors who are generalists do not understand the “intricacies and nuances” of the dozens of available medications to determine which is appropriate to a certain patient.

“Prescribing the same medication to patient after patient just does not cut it,” Dr. Mann wrote in his book.

The trick to prescribing the best treatment for each patient is to first determine which of three mechanisms, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible for a patient’s hypertension, he said.

¶ Salt-sensitive hypertension, more common in older people and African-Americans, responds well to diuretics and calcium channel blockers.

¶ Hypertension driven by the kidney hormone renin responds best to ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers, as well as direct renin inhibitors and beta-blockers.

¶ Neurogenic hypertension is a product of the sympathetic nervous system and is best treated with beta-blockers, alpha-blockers and drugs like clonidine.

According to Dr. Mann, neurogenic hypertension results from repressed emotions. He has found that many patients with it suffered trauma early in life or abuse. They seem calm and content on the surface but continually suppress their distress, he said.

One of Dr. Mann’s patients had had high blood pressure since her late 20s that remained well-controlled by the three drugs her family doctor prescribed. Then in her 40s, periodic checks showed it was often too high. When taking more of the prescribed medication did not result in lasting control, she sought Dr. Mann’s help.

After a thorough work-up, he said she had a textbook case of neurogenic hypertension, was taking too much medication and needed different drugs. Her condition soon became far better managed, with side effects she could easily tolerate, and she no longer feared she would die young of a heart attack or stroke.

But most patients should not have to consult a specialist. They can be well-treated by an internist or family physician who approaches the condition systematically, Dr. Mann said. Patients should be started on low doses of one or more drugs, including a diuretic; the dosage or number of drugs can be slowly increased as needed to achieve a normal pressure.

Specialists, he said, are most useful for treating the 10 percent to 15 percent of patients with so-called resistant hypertension that remains uncontrolled despite treatment with three drugs, including a diuretic, and for those whose treatment is effective but causing distressing side effects.

Hypertension sometimes fails to respond to routine care, he noted, because it results from an underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed.

“Some patients are on a lot of blood pressure drugs — four or five — who probably don’t need so many, and if they do, the question is why,” Dr. Mann said.

Read More..

DealBook: Compuware Rejects Elliott's $2.3 Billion Bid

11:46 a.m. | Updated

Compuware said on Friday that its board had rejected a $2.3 billion takeover bid by Elliott Management, arguing that the hedge fund’s offer was too low.

Instead, the business software maker said that it was focused on its own corporate turnaround blueprint, including a three-year plan to cut costs and an effort to spin off its Covisint business communication products arm. It also announced plans to pay a 50-cent annual dividend, beginning next quarter.

Compuware said that Elliott’s offer of $11 a share, made last month, would not deliver enough value to shareholders, compared to the improvements that its self-help plan would yield.

“We believe that selling the company at $11.00 per share does not take into account our progress returning the business to profitable growth and our future prospects,” Bob Paul, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

The decision by Compuware sets up a potential clash with Elliott, which has managed to score some big wins in its battles with technology companies. It bid for Novell, leading the software maker to sell itself to Attachmate for $2.2 billion.

People close to Elliott have argued that the hedge fund was fully prepared to pay the $2.3 billion it had offered for Compuware. But the hedge fund also believed that private equity firms would also express interest.

Though shares in Compuware began rising after Elliott disclosed an 8 percent stake in the company in November, they have remained largely below the $11-a-share offer, implying investor skepticism about a deal being done. The stock closed on Thursday at $10.76.

Jesse Cohn, the Elliott portfolio manager overseeing the hedge fund’s bid, said in a statement: ““This is a good outcome. Compuware has granted our request for access to diligence to confirm an offer for the company. We will immediately reach out to negotiate an appropriate N.D.A. and look forward to moving quickly to engage in diligence with the help of our legal and financial advisors. We remain very interested in the company.”

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated Compuware's dividend plan. It is a 50-cent annual dividend, not a quarterly one.

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India Ink: One Delhi Gang Rape Suspect Is Ruled a Minor

NEW DELHI

The Indian Juvenile Justice Board ruled Monday that one suspect in the recent fatal gang rape of a young woman on a moving bus is officially a juvenile, which could result in a lenient sentence if he is found guilty of the crime.

The teenager, who school records show is 17 years old, could receive a maximum sentence of three years in a detention facility if found guilty. Five other men accused of the premeditated rape and killing of a 23-year old physiotherapy student on Dec. 16 could face life imprisonment or the death penalty if found guilty.

The December gang rape and the victim’s subsequent death of injuries sustained during the rape prompted widespread protests in India over the lack of safety and justice for women, and calls for the rapists to be executed.

Some criminal and legal experts expected the juvenile to be forced to undergo a bone ossification test, which is sometimes used to determine age in India where birth records are not always accurate. But the juvenile board’s ruling Monday makes that unlikely.

Separately, the judge in a fast-track court set up to try the five men accused in the Delhi gang rape on Monday rejected a plea by one suspect, Vinay Sharma, that he take a bone ossification test in order to prove his age, to prove he is a juvenile. Mr. Sharma’s mother told India Ink earlier this month that he was born in March 1994, which would make him 18, or legally an adult.

Lawyers for the five suspects on Monday began their arguments on the framing of charges against the men. They are jointly facing 14 charges, including robbery, murder, kidnapping and gang rape.

V.K. Anand, the lawyer for two of five suspects, brothers Ram and Mukesh Singh, argued on Monday that a majority of the charges against his clients should be dropped. The fast-track court, in the Saket District Court Complex, meets again Tuesday at noon.

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J. Richard Hackman, an Expert in Team Dynamics, Dies at 72

J. Richard Hackman, a Harvard psychology professor whose fieldwork sometimes took him to the cockpit of an airliner to observe the crew in a nearly five-decade quest to determine the dynamics of teamwork and effective leadership, died on Jan. 8 in Boston. He was 72.

The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Judith Dozier Hackman, said.

Dr. Hackman, the author or co-author of 10 books on group dynamics, was the Edgar Pierce professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard.

In one of his best-known books, “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances” (2002), he replaced the popular image of the powerful “I can do it all” team leader with that of someone who, as he wrote, had the subtle skills “to get a team established on a good trajectory, and then to make small adjustments along the way to help members succeed.”

The conditions for a successful team effort — among them “a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context and expert team coaching” — “are easy to remember,” Dr. Hackman wrote.

“The challenge,” he continued, “comes in developing an understanding of those conditions that is deep and nuanced enough to be useful in guiding action, and in devising strategies for creating them even in demanding or team-unfriendly organizational circumstances.”

Besides tracking the interplay of pilots, co-pilots and navigators aboard civilian and military planes, Dr. Hackman observed corporate boards, sports teams, orchestra players, telephone-line repair crews, hospital workers and restaurant kitchen staff members.

And in recent years, for his 2011 book, “Collaborative Intelligence,” he was allowed to observe interactions within the American intelligence, defense, law-enforcement and crisis-management communities.

“Although my main aspiration has been to provide guidance that will be useful to team leaders and members,” he wrote, “there are no ‘one-minute’ prescriptions here — creating, leading and serving on teams is not that simple.”

Anita Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said, “The key thing about Dr. Hackman’s work is that it stands in contrast to some of the more popular models of leadership that focused very much on style or how leaders behave, versus what they do.”

Rather than viewing pay as a prime motivator for good performance, she continued, “he focused on features of people’s jobs that made them more intrinsically satisfied: the freedom to determine how they conduct their work, having a variety of tasks, having knowledge of the ultimate outcomes of their work, knowing how their work affects or is received by other people.”

He also liked to overturn some of the received wisdom about teamwork. In a 2011 article for The Harvard Business Review, Dr. Hackman listed “Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork.” Among them was this:

“Misperception No. 2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

“Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.”

John Richard Hackman was born in Joliet, Ill., on June 14, 1940, the only child of J. Edward and Helen Hackman. His father was an oil pipeline engineer, his mother a schoolteacher.

Dr. Hackman received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., in 1962, and a doctorate in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1966. He soon joined the psychology and administrative sciences department faculties at Yale, where he taught until 1986, when he moved to the psychology and business departments at Harvard.

Besides his wife, who is an associate dean at Yale, he is survived by two daughters, Julia Beth Proffitt and Laura Dianne Codeanne, and four grandchildren.

After Dr. Hackman died, The Harvard Crimson wrote that for years he had “devoted countless hours to improving one team in particular — the Harvard women’s basketball squad, for which he volunteered as an honorary coach.”

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Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

Well: Ask Well: Squats for Aging Knees

You are already doing many things right, in terms of taking care of your aging knees. In particular, it sounds as if you are keeping your weight under control. Carrying extra pounds undoubtedly strains knees and contributes to pain and eventually arthritis.

You mention weight training, too, which is also valuable. Sturdy leg muscles, particularly those at the front and back of the thighs, stabilize the knee, says Joseph Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology and certified athletic trainer at the University of Virginia, who often works with patients with knee pain.

An easy exercise to target those muscles is the squat. Although many of us have heard that squats harm knees, the exercise is actually “quite good for the knees, if you do the squats correctly,” Dr. Hart says. Simply stand with your legs shoulder-width apart and bend your legs until your thighs are almost, but not completely, parallel to the ground. Keep your upper body straight. Don’t bend forward, he says, since that movement can strain the knees. Try to complete 20 squats, using no weight at first. When that becomes easy, Dr. Hart suggests, hold a barbell with weights attached. Or simply clutch a full milk carton, which is my cheapskate’s squats routine.

Straight leg lifts are also useful for knee health. Sit on the floor with your back straight and one leg extended and the other bent toward your chest. In this position, lift the straight leg slightly off the ground and hold for 10 seconds. Repeat 10 to 20 times and then switch legs.

You can also find other exercises that target the knees in this video, “Increasing Knee Stability.”

Of course, before starting any exercise program, consult a physician, especially, Dr. Hart says, if your knees often ache, feel stiff or emit a strange, clicking noise, which could be symptoms of arthritis.

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: On the Slopes

Apps that add a technological edge to your skiing or snowboarding vacation were the subject of a recent App Smart column. But the column could barely make a dent in discussing all the apps available to help winter sports enthusiasts. Here are some more suggestions.

One class of app that can be both helpful and fun is those apps that link you to the different Web cams that many resorts now have on the mountainsides. The Ski Webcams app, free on iTunes or $1.59 on Android, is one of the best of these. It can link you to resort Web cams either near your location or from a very extensive list or, just for fun, to random cams from around the world. It’s a very no-frills app. But it does tell you when each image was collected so you can see how up-to-date the picture is. And you can zoom into the images, which is useful for high-res video feeds.

For a different type of ski app experience, you may love the free iOS app SloPro. It’s a video editing app that offers a rather cool trick: the ability to slow a movie clip down to super slow motion, like the effects you get in sports videos shown on TV. These effects happen through image processing inside the app, so they’re not as eye-catching as using a slow-motion camera to film a skier making a jump, for example. But the effects are impressive, once you’ve mastered the app’s slightly tricky interface. And if you’re on a snow vacation with some friends, then you may be able to achieve some amazingly dramatic film clips.

There are also many apps available that are resort-specific, but since these come from different app developers their quality varies. For example the Val d’Isère Ski Guide app for Android, for the very popular French ski resort, has a pretty basic and uninspiring interface but offers detailed information on up-to-the-minute events, weather and facilities in the town. The $1 iOS app Live North Lake Tahoe is more graphically clever, and thus a little easier to navigate. It also offers a few niceties like a piste map and road cameras so you can plan your journey around traffic or difficult weather. But it does cost soemthing, and offers you services you could get for free by downloading one or two other free apps.

It’s definitely worth spending some time checking out what’s available for your chosen resort before you head off on a ski trip.

Quick call

Delta Airlines has released a free iPad app that has many typical services like destination maps and social networking tools. But it also has a “Glass Bottom Jet” option in-flight that shows an image of the ground underneath your aircraft’s flight path, assuming you’re hooked up to the airline’s in-plane Wi-Fi network.

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India Ink: Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

As India’s rival national parties, the incumbent Congress and the principal opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, begin preparing for the general elections scheduled for 2014, Open Magazine’s Jatin Gandhi analyzes the country’s potential choices for prime minister: Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of Gujarat, who was welcomed amid feverish chants of “P.M.! P.M.!” at his party’s New Delhi office last month, and Rahul Gandhi, the 42-year-old heir apparent of the Gandhi dynasty, who took charge last week as vice president of the Congress party.

In the cover story, titled “Devil’s Alternative,” the author writes:

“The din around their PMs-in-waiting pretty much sums up the current situation in the two parties. It is called the TINA factor in politics: There Is No Alternative. It’s Rahul Gandhi for the Congress, Narendra Modi for the BJP. Neither party can afford to pick any other candidate.”

The author scrutinizes the political pitches of the two leaders: Mr. Modi’s promise of economic prosperity through the “Gujarat model” of development, and Mr. Gandhi’s vision for systemic change in a knowledge-based, youth-driven country. “Rahul Gandhi is the Congress’ and Narendra Modi the BJP’s idea of ‘change,’” Jatin Gandhi writes. But, he argues in the piece, in Indian politics, the more things change, the more choice-less it gets.

“At first glance, a new set of party leaders denotes a shift, but take a closer look and you know that the two leading political parties (with 60 per cent of all Lok Sabha seats between them) have more or less the same political stereotypes to offer.”

India Today magazine, too, writes about a leadership crisis in the country. Relying on a “Mood of the Nation” poll, the writer, S. Prasannarajan, opines that the ruling coalition, helmed by the Congress party, has “lost India,” and the opposition, led by the B.J.P., is “caught in an existential crisis,” making way for regional parties “whose idea of India is smaller than their satrapies.”

This cover story, which carries images of Rahul Gandhi in a crisp white kurta and Narendra Modi in a saffron scarf, carries the caption: The UPA’s untested Rahul Gandhi and the NDA’s unanointed Narendra Modi rise above the rest, but India remains unled.

“On the eve of another General Election, Battlefield India, strewn with cracked icons and smashed reputations, tests the patience of one of the world’s most unforgiving democracies,” it says. “India is waiting to be led.”

Shooting by armed forces across the de facto border between India and Pakistan, known as the Line of Control, and the beheading of an Indian soldier this month, tested the fragile peace between the rival neighbors, threatening to cancel out the small but significant gains the countries have made since the Mumbai attacks in November 2008.

An article in Frontline looks at India and Pakistan’s fraught border relations, analyzing the cease-fire agreement that has been in place, largely successfully, since 2003. “The recent incidents have been the most serious in the last decade,” the article says.

The author, John Cherian, notes that as news of the violence emerged, the Indian and Pakistani governments first expressed hope that the incidents would not adversely impact bilateral relations between the nations. He then examines how a jingoistic Indian news media and right-wing opposition parties “forced the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to toughen its stance.”

“But better sense seems to have prevailed,” he writes, “after a week of sabre-rattling on both sides.”

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