The Financial Times Weekend Magazine

May 17, 2013

I’m sitting in rehearsals at the Eurovision Song Contest when two Montenegrin men dressed as cosmonauts start rapping in a cloud of smoke. After consulting the English translation in the programme, I’m no longer worried that I don’t speak Montenegrin. “Beat goes crazy in my head, burn down bag, give me a drink. Grill, garlic, parsley and fish, give me all so I can overeat.” I now understand why one of them goes by the name Noyz.

Fast-forward an hour and the production crew wheels a Belarusian woman on to the stage inside an oversized disco ball. She looks relieved when it finally opens. She then shakes her hips – and a barely-there silver costume that stops well north of her knees – and shrieks, “Solayoh, Solayoh, where the sun is always shinin’ on ya / We play-oh, we play-oh to the rhythm of a cha-cha.” I had no idea that Latin music was so big in Belarus.

In the two weeks that I’ve spent in Malmö, Sweden, the host of this year’s contest, I’ve watched 39 of these rehearsals, attended two semi-finals and, later this evening, will stand on the Arena floor through the marathon 3.5-hour finale. I’ve watched an Azerbaijani dancer stand on his head inside a glass box, and endured a Romanian man performing opera to a disco beat. He sings in falsetto and prefers an unshaven look. The end result is that he resembles a bearded lady. More unfortunate, however, was listening to Britain’s Bonnie Tyler rehearse “Believe in Me”, a country music song that might have been popular in the early 1990s – in Nashville. In a competition heavy on the dance music, it’s like bringing bloody sausages to a vegetarian dinner.

The thought of my annual pilgrimage to Eurovision makes plenty of my British friends nauseous. They can’t deal with the kitsch factor and inevitably moan about their ears bleeding. But they miss the point. As an American who moved to London at the age of 24, I find the lunacy of Eurovision irresistible. The mish-mash of cultures – and varying notions of good taste – remains distinctly European, as does the presence of schlager and Turbofolk, esoteric music genres I discovered far too late in life. Drawn into the Eurovision orbit in 2007 – when the Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serduchka lost to a Serb of Romany descent – the songs started to matter less to me than the thrill of the competition itself. In subsequent years I’ve also found people who share my obscure – and severely stigmatised – interest.

As the editor-in-chief of a Eurovision fan blog (wiwibloggs.com), I’m given press accreditation and access to the behind-the-scenes machinations of contestants and their people. The onstage thrusting leaves an impression, but the offstage choreography is even more intense.

“Ninety-five per cent of the outcome is the strength of the performance, but the other 5 per cent is publicity,” says Dariia Partas, the PR co-ordinator of the Ukrainian delegation. “There has to be a story and it has to be everywhere.” In 2011 Ukraine fielded an appalling number that sounded like the soundtrack to a bad telenovela. So she and her team called in Kseniya Simonova, the sand artist whose videos had gone viral on YouTube, to perform on stage during the act. “It took attention off the bad song,” she says. They finished in fourth place.

This year the Ukrainian song is so saccharine it might induce diabetes. But viewers may be too shocked to notice that. As part of her performance, the singer Zlata Ognevich has flown in Igor Vovkovinskiy, the tallest man in the United States, who stands 7ft 8in and lives with gigantism. He carries her on to the stage and, as Ognevich explains, “into the circle of life through the magic forest”. I’m still trying to unpack that, but Vovkovinskiy seems to follow. “The message of the song speaks to me because there are so many challenges in my life that I have had to overcome,” he says.

That’s one way to grab attention. Tying yourself to a political issue is another. In recent weeks Krista Siegfrids – a Finn singing a song called “Marry Me” – courted Eurovision’s gay electorate by coming out in support of gay marriage. “I want ‘Marry Me’ to be a song for everybody,” she says. “I would love for it to be a gay anthem.” That’s convenient, given that her debut album, Ding Dong, dropped on May 10.

Showing off your abs works too. The Azerbaijani contestant Farid Mammadov has made much of his background as a freestyle wrestler and fitness fanatic. He launched an iPhone app on which you can watch his capoeira workout series called Stay Fit with Farid.

Others have played the humanitarian card. The team from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia have emphasised that their contestant Esma Redzepova – one of the world’s most famous Romany singers – has fostered 48 children. It’s a miracle she has time to practise her caterwauling.

Most of the aspiring pop stars at Eurovision perspire ambition. A smaller number perspire when they come under attack from journalists at the mandatory press conferences. Alyona Lanskaya, Belarus’s 27-year-old Eurovision starlet, has had to work hard to distance herself from the perceived corruption of her homeland. It didn’t help that she won the right to represent Belarus at last year’s national selection contest, only to have that right revoked after a special committee set up by President Alexander Lukashenko determined that the result was rigged. She re-entered this year and won, and will now get to jump out of her disco ball.

“I don’t know what happened last year,” she told a room of a hundred journalists when pressed on the matter. “It’s very expensive to live in the past.” So she chooses to invest her money elsewhere. Ahead of Eurovision she travelled to Belgium and sent journalists cheeky photos of herself eating waffles covered in whipped cream, and others of her laughing as she stared at a statue of a boy urinating. During her press conference, she passed out gift bags filled with chocolate, gumballs and fudge, each wrapped in paper with her face printed on top. “Don’t eat any of it,” a Dutch blogger whispered to me after putting down an 8in piece of gingerbread that said “ALYONA LANSKAYA” in white frosting. “It’ll turn you into a communist.” Others joked that she chose to wear only silver on stage as a symbol of one-party rule.

Some contestants seem a bit too committed to their talking points. Valentina Monetta, who is billed as “one of the most talented jazz singers in San Marino”, was the laughing stock of Eurovision last year. Wearing a blue leather suit, she sang “The Social Network Song” – with all explicit references to Facebook removed at Eurovision’s insistence, but still with lyrics like “Do you wanna be more than just a friend? Do you wanna play cyber sex again?”

So, in her second straight bid for San Marino, she’s back with a more mature ballad about the life cycle of butterflies and transformation. And she lets you know it. How did you prepare for the contest this year, Valentina? “I learnt to accept myself.” Great, but what did you actually do? “I found myself.” At the start of her number she clutches a spherical lamp. I ask if it’s from Ikea and she isn’t amused. “The brand doesn’t matter,” she says. “It’s the light inside of me.”

And if the Brits won’t tune in en masse to bask in her glow, Monetta can be sure the Swedes will. The nation that produced Abba, the most successful Eurovision winners ever, remains the spiritual homeland of the contest. Last year a whopping 84 per cent of the Swedish TV audience watched the final (only 36 per cent of the British audience did). Even the prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, has admitted publicly that he loves Eurovision (as well as mugs from his favourite musicals). In Malmö this week, he might also have collected a calendar with images of the Russian contestant’s face, and postcards of the Maltese contestant vogueing on a park bench.

He wouldn’t be alone. On the Saturday before the final, crowds of Swedish fans followed the trail of promotional CDs to Slagthuset, a Malmö nightclub where Alyona from Belarus was throwing a party for around a dozen contestants and 500 of her closest friends. Tables were stacked with her chocolates and bonbons. As she crooned “cha-cha” on the small stage at the end of the room, I spotted a rival PR from eastern Europe picking up some fudge. “This adds no value to the entrant,” she said, looking slightly disgusted. “It’s just below the line.” She ate a piece anyway.

Time, April 1, 2013

“Sometimes we’re quite rude,” says Danny Boyle, “because you get impatient when you’re busy.” In fact, Boyle is not rude, even though he is beyond busy. It’s October 2011, and the director has two weeks to finish Trance, a psychological thriller that won’t hit theaters for another 17 months. With his spectacles slipping down his nose and his hair disheveled, he scurries—the man doesn’t walk—through the labyrinth of stages and rehearsal rooms of London’s 3 Mills Studios, laughing frequently, pausing each time someone places a schedule or drawing in his ever gesticulating hands.

At the moment, Boyle deploys his frantic energy seven days a week: he films Trance from Saturday to Wednesday and spends the other two days planning the opening ceremony for the Olympics in London. He created a pop-cultural touchstone with his second feature, Trainspotting, back in 1996 and a global phenomenon with Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which won eight academy awards, including Best picture. Soon his $42 million Olympic spectacle is going to raise his international profile even higher. For now, though, he’s happy to let Trance distract him from the 7,500 volunteers he needs to cast and the 12,956 props his team needs to make for the opening ceremony. “The idea was to give us a break from the Olympics because there’s so much planning involved,” he says. “It’s lovely to get out and do something else.”

Now Boyle is rushing to another set, which resembles a sleek doctor’s office on London’s famous Harley Street. Except for the trail of ratty carpet squares just outside the camera frame. And the fact that no one in this office is wearing shoes. The makeshift insulation and the no-shoes policy are meant to minimize background noise so that carefully positioned microphones pick up only Rosario Dawson’s voice. Dawson plays hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb, who in this scene attempts to lull her patient Simon, a fine-art dealer played by James McAvoy, into a trance. McAvoy will spend the afternoon slouched in an armchair and later admits that at times Dawson’s calm voice and gentle instructions to relax affected him as much as his character. “I fell asleep once,” he says, “just because she was so soothing.”

Few aspects of Trance, which hits theaters April 5, qualify as soothing. The mind-bending narrative opens with a snatch-and-grab raid of a London auction house and the theft of a multimillion-dollar Goya painting. Simon, the heist crew’s inside man, suffers a concussion in the melee and afterward claims not to remember where he stashed the loot. Lead gangster Franck (Vincent Cassel) tries and fails to use torture to jog Simon’s memory, then turns to Elizabeth for help. As the narrative twists and backflips, truth, hypnotic suggestion and psychosis blur together; a love triangle comes into focus, but it’s hard to find a hero—or a reliable narrator. “If you like pledging yourself to a particular character, then you may struggle with this film,” Boyle, 56, says. “You won’t be quite sure where to stake yourself.”

That ambiguity contrasts with his two previous films, which invite audiences to root for their dogged, daunted protagonists. In Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010), James Franco plays a real-life adventurer who saws off his arm to escape certain death in a Utah canyon, and Slumdog Millionaire follows a kid from the slums of Mumbai to fame and riches on television. Both films have a strong sense of place, while Trance is stubbornly placeless: its main characters have Scottish, American and French accents, and Boyle shot in the Docklands and Tilbury Docks—areas of London less than instantly recognizable to Britons and foreigners alike.

But a reach back into his filmography reveals the untethered, morally ambiguous Trance as a kind of return to his roots. In his debut, Shallow Grave (1994), three friends do unspeakable things to their roommate’s corpse as part of a scheme to keep a suitcase of his cash, and body horror abounds in Trainspotting’s anarchic tale of thieving Scottish junkies. Trance’s characters endure electroshock therapy, are divested of their fingernails and are buried alive. “You just feel victimized the whole time,” says McAvoy of shooting the more brutal scenes. “It was horrible.”

Weirdly enough, the gory intensity and mind-warp psychology of Trance may in some sense derive from Boyle’s two-year stint in the belly of the Olympics. When he agreed to the opening- ceremony gig in 2010, he negotiated a contract that included two sabbaticals: one to mount a stage production of Frankenstein in London and one to shoot Trance. Filming, he says, became an anti-dote to the sterility of corporate meetings and the sugarplum sweetness of children dancing on beds in pajamas. “The two projects are linked in the sense of yin and yang,” Boyle says. “While you’re doing a nationally responsible, family-orientated celebration, it’s wonderful to be able to go off and make a deliciously dark film at night.”

Much of the particular delicious darkness of Trance is rooted in his devotion to film noir: its long shadows and mirrors and hermetically sealed moral universes. (The film’s visual palette and looping structure owe a particular debt to a noir update from a decade ago, Christopher Nolan’s Memento.) “What I love about noir, and what we borrow from it, is that stories happen in a bubble,” Boyle says. “The actors have to sustain that bubble and make you believe it so it doesn’t pop.” True to noirish form, crime and sex mingle in Trance with potentially damning consequences, and Dawson’s character—who appears to use her sexuality to manipulate the men around her—conjures a contemporary femme fatale: a heady mix of strength, vulnerability and gorgeous unknowability. The character’s last name, Lamb, suggests a victim being circled by predators. But even a lamb can bite back. “She’s not going to be able to match the men muscle for muscle. that’s not possible,” Dawson says of Elizabeth. “She can hold her own because she’s intelligent and confident.”

And because she has that velvety, opioid voice. It’s captured with pin-drop precision by sound recordist Simon Hayes, winner of this year’s academy award for sound mixing for Les Misérables, which famously featured its actors (including fellow Oscar recipient Anne Hathaway) singing live on camera. For Trance, Hayes aimed for a heightened sense of reality so that the audience could experience Elizabeth’s words as if they were inside Simon’s mind and under her spell. “We wanted the voice way up front in the mix so the soundscape would be almost dreamlike,” Hayes says.

Or nightmare-like. Trance is rough stuff, made by a man who moviegoers might have forgotten has no qualms about ripping his ostensible heroes to shreds. For Boyle, who’s lately famous for the whimsical joy he brought to the London Olympics and whose most acclaimed movies have made the underdog top dog, it’s a welcome diversion.

“Over the past few years,” he says, “all the films are exactly the same in that they’re all about someone overcoming insurmountable odds, whether it’s the guy in Slumdog Millionaire or the guy in 127 Hours. The trick with Trance is that you don’t know which character has the insurmountable odds. You’re playing with the characters as they come in and out of focus. I love that.”

“We basically want to say there is something else to celebrate,” says Ingar Dragset, sitting in a low-slung leather chair in his Berlin studio. Michael Elmgreen, his long-time collaborator, is more explicit. “The London mayor’s office kindly asked us not to describe it as an antiwar sculpture,” he says of the piece. “But it is.”

(Read the full story on Time.com)

For nearly 20 years, Elmgreen, a 51-year-old Dane, and Dragset, a 43-year-old Norwegian, have said whatever they want, regardless of the controversy it may generate. Frequently cheeky and often irreverent, their defiant art probes the status quo and inevitably finds it wanting. In a work called Gay Marriage, they dismissed the dangers associated with same-sex unions by uniting two porcelain urinals with a single hose. In Prada Marfa, they parodied the exclusivity of luxury brands by placing a replica of a Prada boutique—replete with handbags and shoes but lacking a door—in the middle of a Texas desert. And last fall they installed a giant bed featuring an ominous vulture perched on one of its posts inside the Louis Vuitton flagship store in London. Titled One Night Awaits Us All, the piece hinted that everyone—from wealthy patrons to shop clerks—meets the same fate. It also challenged the store’s rather genteel employees to break protocol in favor of an occasional nap. They did. “Every time we do a work,” Elmgreen says, “it’s a question of, What would happen if?”

Throughout 2013 the duo will pose that question often in their role as honorary curators for the city of Munich. Hoping to dust off the well-to-do Bavarian city’s fusty image and draw tourists back from Germany’s reigning capital of cool, Berlin, officials handed Elmgreen and Dragset more than $1.5 million to stage “A Space Called Public.” Running until September, the project will include up to a dozen works by international artists that question how the city shapes its identity. “Munich’s machinery runs so well that officials are bored by themselves,” Dragset says. “They’ve asked us to throw some dirt at them.”

Among the grit are Berliner Pfütze (Berlin Puddle), an installation by Kirsten Pieroth that will regurgitate rainwater from Berlin onto the streets of Munich for one month, and Malaysian-born Han Chong’s Made in Dresden, a giant Buddha, buttocks exposed, that will recline in Viktualienmarkt, the city’s open-air marketplace. Elmgreen and Dragset will also contribute two works of their own. In one, which previously ran in Rotterdam, a performer will remove a stainless-steel megaphone from a glass cabinet once an hour and shout, “It’s never too late to say you’re sorry!”

“It not only reminds people who pass by that they should apologize to their mom or girlfriend, but it also offers catharsis,” Elmgreen says. The performance will take place on the Odeonsplatz, where Hitler delivered some of his most notorious speeches.

In October the duo’s curatorial prowess goes on show again at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. To create Tomorrow, they will convert five rooms into a fictitious architect’s home stocked with furniture (including the bed from Louis Vuitton) and works they have sourced from their personal collections. A written handout will tell the story of the architect’s failed ambitions, turning the space into a metaphor for his frustration. “In their work, people are the uninvited visitors,” Louise Shannon, the curator overseeing the V&A exhibition, says of the pair. “They use objects to weave spectacular narratives around things that may seem completely mundane.”

The artists’ personal narrative began in Copenhagen at a gay bar called After Dark, where they met in 1995. They went home together only to discover that they already lived in the same apartment building. Elmgreen, a poet turned artist, introduced Dragset, then a mime fresh out of theater school, to Copenhagen’s contemporary art scene. In an early work, they knitted skirts and slowly unraveled them off each other in public spaces, including a locker room and a public toilet. “It was like an unspectacular peep show that took a long time,” Dragset says, noting that their main goal was simply to spend time together. “We were using inexpensive materials that went against gay identity, which was considered more flashy and clichéd.”

Disillusioned by their respective home countries, which they still view as monocultural and unsupportive of outsiders, they moved to freewheeling Berlin in 1997. Dragset, who grew up in a close-knit family, eventually emerged as a father figure for the older Elmgreen, who had run away at 16 and never saw his parents again. “I don’t respect authority, but I needed someone to be close to,” Elmgreen says. “I have a tendency of not being very steady.”

The couple bristled at what they saw as attempts to categorize them as a gay double-act specializing in lighter works and soon dreamed up bigger sculptural pieces in response. In an early sculpture, they installed the base of a diving board inside Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, with the board poking out the window toward the sea, suggesting that museums should connect more with the real world. Then came the mammoth Dug Down Gallery, located in a field outside Reykjavík, Iceland, which reimagined the bare white interior of a contemporary art gallery as a massive, roofless hole in the ground. Later, in a daylong performance piece called The Great Escape, they mocked the art world’s haughtiness and self-importance by having workers pack up the entire collection of a Düsseldorf art museum. They then drove it around the block one time and reinstalled each item in its original location.

A growing international profile and a steady stream of commissions spoke to the success of their professional collaboration, but 10 years after meeting, their personal relationship had waned. “If you want to keep things fresh, you need to mess them up,” Elmgreen, the more loquacious of the two, says. “You need to be on thin ice, and you need to experience new things. Splitting up was part of that.” The tense transition led to some disturbing works. Just a Single Wrong Move, part of a show at London’s Tate Modern, consisted of a highly realistic animatronic sparrow that twitched and writhed on a windowsill in apparent pain. Its placement behind glass meant no one could come to its aid.

Today Elmgreen lives in London, though he visits Dragset several times a year in Berlin, where they have a studio, a former pumping station, that spans five floors and has 42-ft. ceilings on the ground level.

Their work process is one of collaboration but not compromise: assisted by a full-time staff of six, each sees a project through on his own from beginning to end, and they resolve differences of opinion by pursuing entirely new paths rather than accommodating with trade-offs. When apart, they speak on the phone up to 10 times a day and communicate regularly by e-mail. “I would never do art without Ingar,” Elmgreen says. “Our chemistry and the excitement of creating together is what drives it all.”

Although they choose to live outside Scandinavia, both artists prize the values upon which the region’s welfare states were built. A pair of upcoming works assert their shared belief that society should look after the well-being of the poor and vulnerable. In the fall they’ll reveal a permanent installation in a ritzy new business district of Oslo, where they will clad a decrepit, 90-ft. chimney in bronze and stainless-steel rings to resemble a stack of gigantic—and completely useless—Norwegian coins. Called Change, it’s a reminder of values beyond money. And later in the year they’ll unveil The Weight of One Self outside the Palais de Justice in Lyon, France. The marble figure—a man carrying a drowned version of himself—takes another swipe at society’s failure to help those in need.

What takes place once their work appears in public has a tendency to surprise even them. Short Cut, a car and trailer that appeared to burst through the floor of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, became a favorite site for newlyweds to pose for photos. Fashionistas still make pilgrimages to Prada Marfa to leave offerings of rocks and shoes or, like Beyoncé, to photograph themselves dancing in front of it. And Dug Down Gallery turned into an after-hours party venue. “When you put art out there,” Elmgreen says, “it has a dangerous life, but also a more real life.”

Aside from the playful interactions their work encourages, much of the artists’ appeal stems from a knack for reimagining the familiar. Just as Duchamp famously drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa, they’re not afraid to appropriate existing objects to make a point. Located in Berlin’s Tiergarten, their Memorial for the Homosexual Victims of the Nazi Regime alludes to the city’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which consists of a series of grey concrete stelae. “We make the stela ours,” Dragset says. “It’s a queer-looking one leaning to the side.” Last June, they unveiled Han, a reinterpretation of Denmark’s beloved Little Mermaid statue, at the end of a dock in Elsinore. Han—Danish for “him”—depicts a naked man who assumes the original mermaid’s languorous pose on an identically shaped rock. Critics roared that the homoerotic statue had no place in a former shipyard where strong men once worked. But the artists say Han better reflects the man on the street than do classical statues that appear to be on steroids.

This same irreverence extends even to their own mounting fame. Last year the Queen of Denmark presented the duo with the Eckersberg Medal, one of the country’s most prestigious awards. Elmgreen, who missed the ceremony because of a bout with the flu, keeps his bronze medallion in a sock drawer and plans to melt it down and turn it into a work for a show at Denmark’s National Gallery in 2014. “It’s good to get medals because you can use them for something,” he says. “It’s disrespectful, but disrespectful isn’t bad.”

Time, July 12, 2010

The seagulls begin squawking at 6 in the morning and the cigarettes cost too much, but Lars, 41, knows there are worse places to call home. On Bastoy, an island 46 miles (74 km) south of Oslo, he and 124 other residents live in brightly colored wooden chalets, spread over one square mile of forest and gently sloping hills. Besides enjoying views of the surrounding fjord, they go horseback riding and throw barbecues, and have access to a movie theater, tanning bed and, during winter, two ski jumps. Lars’ neighbors often conceal the reasons they are there, but, as in any small community, word gets around. “I try to be as nice to the pedophiles as I am to the drug dealers,” he says. Despite all its trappings, Bastoy island isn’t an exclusive resort: it’s a prison.

Arne Kvernvik Nilsen, Bastoy’s governor and a practicing psychotherapist, describes it as the world’s first human-ecological prison — a place where inmates learn to take responsibility for their actions by caring for the environment. Prisoners grow their own organic vegetables, turn their garbage into compost and tend to chickens, cows, horses and sheep. They also operate the ferry that shuttles a number of them to school and jobs on the mainland, make their own dinner (they’re allowed to use knives) and chop wood (using axes and chainsaws). Although authorities carry out routine drug tests, the prison generally emphasizes trust and self-regulation: Bastoy has no fences, the windows have no bars, and only five guards remain on the island after 3 p.m. and on weekends. “They are among the worst criminals in Norway. They are murderers, they are rapists, they are Hells Angels,” says Nilsen. “But they keep the whole society alive and running.”

In an age when countries from Britain to the U.S. cope with exploding prison populations by building ever larger — and, many would say, ever harsher — prisons, Bastoy seems like an unorthodox, even bizarre, departure. But Norwegians see the island as the embodiment of their country’s long-standing penal philosophy: that traditional, repressive prisons do not work, and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society. “People in other countries say that what Norway does is wrong,” says Lars, who is serving a 16-year sentence for serious drug offenses. “But why does Norway have the world’s lowest murder rate? Maybe we’re doing something that really works.”

Countries track recidivism rates differently, but even an imperfect comparison suggests that Norway’s system produces overwhelmingly positive results. Within two years of their release, 20% of Norway’s prisoners end up back in jail. In the U.K. and the U.S., the figure hovers between 50% and 60%. Of course, Norway’s low level of criminality gives it a massive advantage. Its prison roll lists a mere 3,300 inmates, a rate of 70 per 100,000 people, compared with 2.3 million in the U.S., or 753 per 100,000 — the highest rate in the world.

John Pratt, a professor of criminology at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington and an authority on Scandinavian prisons, believes that the secret to the low crime levels in Norway and its Nordic counterparts is strong welfare systems that reduce poverty and inequality — key drivers of criminality. Studies show that countries and states investing more in education, health and social security typically spend less on their prison systems. Last year, California spent 11% of its state budget on its prisons — more than it put into higher education. “For marginalized populations in Anglo countries, the prison increasingly acts as a kind of surrogate welfare state,” says Pratt. “That’s not only much more expensive than running a welfare state, it’s also brutalizing and often degrading — and that has negative consequences for everyone.”

It Takes a Village
Thirty-six percent of prison places in Norway, including all of those at Bastoy, are classified as low-security. With perks like unlimited phone calls and up to four days of leave per month, they act as inducements for good behavior elsewhere: inmates at high-security prisons can apply for transfer at any time, and authorities are legally obliged to consider transferring them during the final year of their sentence. And while the conditions at Norway’s 52 prisons vary, even the strictest facilities stress rehabilitation over retribution. The maximum sentence, even for murder, is just 21 years. “At some point in the future, these men will live in the community,” says Knut Storberget, Minister of Justice and the Police. “If you want to reduce crime, you have to do something other than putting them in prison and locking the door.”

On April 8, Norway took that strategy to a new level by inaugurating Halden, a maximum-security prison 10 years and about $230 million in the making, situated in southeastern Norway. With a capacity of 252 inmates, it’s the country’s second largest facility — and its most secure. Security guards use a system of underground tunnels to get around the prison, and a 20-ft. (6 m) concrete-and-steel wall surrounds the perimeter. But, following guidance from the ruling Labour Party, the harsh signs of incarceration end there. According to a 2008 government-issued white paper, “the smaller the difference between life inside and outside the prison, the easier the transition from prison to freedom.”

With that in mind, architects designed Halden to mimic a small village as a way to remind prisoners they are still part of society. Hans Henrik Hoilund, one of Halden’s architects, describes the prison as “an iron fist wrapped in a silk glove.” To avoid an institutional feel, exteriors are made not of concrete but brick, galvanized steel and larch. Trees obscure the wall, which is rounded at the top, Hoilund says, “so it isn’t too hostile.” Inside, the cells rival well-appointed college dorm rooms, with their flat-screen TVs and minifridges. Designers chose long vertical windows for the rooms because they let in more sunlight. And every 10 to 12 cells share a living room and kitchen, which resemble Ikea showrooms. “Many of the prisoners come from bad homes, so we wanted to create a sense of family,” says architect Per Hojgaard Nielsen. To preserve the important bonds of an inmate’s real family and to reduce tension, the prison has a two-bedroom house where inmates can host guests overnight.

“The punishment is to be in prison, not to lose your rights as a citizen,” says Terje Moland Pedersen, the Deputy Minister of Justice. Building on its so-called “normalization principle,” the prison expects inmates to spend most of their day out of their cells. From 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., the authorities organize activities on jogging trails and in a soccer field, a woodshop, a professional training kitchen and a recording studio. “When prisoners arrive, many of them are in bad shape,” says Are Hoidal, Halden’s governor. “We want to build them up, give them confidence through education and work and have them leave as better people.”

Strong relationships between prisoners and guards also help with rehabilitation. Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. and the U.K., who are sometimes seen as little more than turnkeys, Norway’s prison guards enjoy an elevated status. They undergo a year of theoretical training and a year of practical training at an officers’ academy. They don’t carry guns — which create unnecessary social distance and intimidation — and they call prisoners by their first names and play sports and eat meals with them. The respect they get from prisoners stems, for the most part, from appreciation, not fear. “Twenty percent of them shouldn’t work with people — or animals,” says Lars, the inmate at Bastoy. “But the other 80% think it’s their mission in life to help people. I believe most of them.”

Shared Values
Criticism of Halden has been muted, but it does exist. At the moment, foreigners account for 32% of Norway’s prison population, and Per Sandberg, deputy leader of the conservative Progress Party, worries that Halden’s high standard will lure more organized crime to the country. “Foreign criminals are coming to Norway because they know there are good facilities for them and shorter sentences compared to those in Romania or Bulgaria,” he says. While he’s not thrilled that the government spent $1 million outfitting Halden with art, his main complaint is that foreigners shouldn’t exploit the welfare system: “Halden should only be for Norwegian criminals.”

But in general, Norway’s cultural values and attitudes toward crime mean the public sees no need to push for tougher penalties or harsher prisons. In Halden, the local community sees the prison as an opportunity for jobs, not as something to fear. The majority of Norwegian prisoners don’t pose a serious threat to society. Nearly three-fourths of those released in 2009 had spent less than 90 days in jail for crimes such as drunk driving and petty theft, and that same year police investigated just 29 murders in a country of 4.8 million people. Bastoy’s policy on escapees demonstrates how little people worry about criminals out in the community. Nilsen, the governor, makes a deal with inmates when they arrive. “If you run away, please telephone us as soon as possible so we know you are O.K. and won’t need to make use of helicopters,’” he says, noting there have been just three incidents in the past two years. “They always ring and say, ‘I’m all right. I’m safe.’”

The national media’s portrayal of crime also helps foster tolerance for Norway’s prison system. Newspapers rely on subscriptions rather than newsstand sales, so they don’t depend on sensational headlines. And the writing style is less emotional, more pragmatic, than in other countries. In his book When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture, American criminologist David Green compares the British media’s reaction to a murder case in which children tortured and killed a child with a similar case in Norway. The British newspapers, he writes, portrayed the murder as “alarmingly symptomatic of deep-seated moral decline in Britain.” The Norwegian papers, however, presented their case as “a tragic one-off, requiring expert intervention to facilitate the speedy reintegration of the boys responsible.” In Norway, acts of extreme violence are seen as aberrant events, not symptoms of national decay.

Beyond the Walls
Despite the exceptional conditions in Norway’s prisons, it’s still a challenge for someone who’s incarcerated to learn how to live in freedom. Thomas Mathiesen, co-founder of the Norwegian Association of Penal Reform and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo, says amenities shouldn’t blind people to that reality. “If you consider the possibility of spending three months or three years in a hotel like the Continental in Oslo with guards all around, you can [see how] even the most humane prisons present a series of problems.”

The government agrees. Although it has no plans to shut down its prisons completely, there is momentum to expand alternative sanctions like an electronic-monitoring program, which currently allows around 100 criminals sentenced to four months or less to serve their time at home, limiting disruption to their families’ lives.

The government is also keen to set up more so-called “open prisons” like the Sandaker facility in downtown Oslo. Situated on the ground floor of a residential apartment building, Sandaker houses 16 inmates who work in the city during the day and return to the apartment in the evening. In order to be released, residents (they’re not called inmates) must first secure employment. Lars Oster, Sandaker’s head, says that allowing convicts to spend the last stretch of their sentences at the facility helps ease their transition from imprisonment to freedom. Residents pay rent, clean their own clothes, take out cell-phone contracts and have access to the Internet — many for the first time in their lives. “Prisons are like bubbles. They’re safe, you always have food, you know what to expect,” Oster says. “Here, you have to face reality and prepare yourself mentally and practically for life on the outside.”

Back on Bastoy, Lars has been thinking about life on the outside for nine years — the first eight in a high-security prison, and the past year on the island. Despite the idyllic scenes — farm, fjord, fresh air — Bastoy punishes him every day. Sure, he now knows that cows are more affectionate than horses, but that doesn’t make up for having to watch his four children grow up from afar. “It makes you tired,” he says, pointing out that he has to be counted by guards four times a day, submit to random drug tests and return to his chalet by 11 p.m. every night. “I’m grown up now,” he says. “I’m too old for this.”

But he still has two years to go before parole. In the meantime, he runs a bicycle-repair shop in a converted shed and organizes group sessions for prisoners who want to become better fathers. He’s active in the community, but says he won’t miss it. “I don’t know if I’ll commit crime or do drugs again,” he says taking a drag on a cigarette. “I hope not. I don’t want to visit this place again.” If Norway’s prisons fulfill their promise, he won’t have to.

Those shoes are notably absent from his office, though they clutter his conversation. “A while ago, I saw this woman arriving in my store in Paris. She was very elegant, very delicate,” he says, folding his hands in his lap and sitting upright to demonstrate her prim posture. “She put on the Pigalle”—a patent-leather pump that most buyers prefer in black with a 5-in. heel. “She walked around and said, ‘It feels great. I look like a slut! I feel like a slut!’” A few hours later, another woman—short skirt, spilling cleavage—picked up the same shoe. “But she said, ‘Oh! I look so chic, so elegant!’”

(Read the story on TIME.com)

In this tale of two shoppers, what happens between the ears is as important as what happens below the ankles. “Shoes,” Louboutin says, “are a mirror of what you want, what you are or what you’re missing.”

What he sees in that mirror are straps, studs, fur, glitter and, of course, superhigh heels. Since setting up his first boutique in Paris in 1991, Louboutin—­the subject of a retro­spective at the Design Museum in London beginning May 1—has become one of the few household names among shoe designers, surpassing his rivals Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik in global ­recognition. Kicked out of school at 16, Louboutin, 49, now employs some 500 people around the world. Every year he sells more than 500,000 pairs of mules, lace-up boots and be­jeweled heels, each with his signature red sole—amounting to more than $250 million in sales in 2010. His footprint is only growing: in 2012 Louboutin will open stores in 13 more cities, including São Paulo and Istanbul, extending his network of 49 existing stores. Women fork over anywhere from $395 (for the Hola Nina summer sandal) to as much as $6,395 (for the 6.2-in. Daffodile platform heel, covered in Swarovski crystals).

“When a woman puts on a heel, she has a different posture, a different attitude,” he says. “She really stands up and has a consciousness of her body.” Consciousness of comfort does not factor into his design process—which is not to say that the Louboutin woman must suffer unduly for her art. “I’m really like a doctor,” he says. “I have my tricks, which makes a thing that is not looking comfortable possibly comfortable.”

“A girl wearing Louboutins is instantly more intriguing,” says burlesque star Dita von Teese, who performs only in Louboutins. “It says that she has good taste. It says that she’s not too conservative because that flash of red sole is really something sexual.” Louboutin likes to point out that the arch of a high heel mirrors a woman’s foot position when she orgasms.

His style balances ornament and architecture; the clean silhouettes temper aggressive accents like silver spikes, as on the shoe called the Kryptonite, and glittered lettering that spells out S-E-X, as on the shoe simply called Sex. The Guinness features a heel made out of a beer can. The Déjà Vu, a black patent-­leather pump, is covered in dozens of googly eyes. The Pesce, an open-toe pump with a fish-head appliqué on its vamp, regurgitates the wearer’s toes. The Anemone, a pink satin heel with a burst of feathers and ribbons at the back, resembles the aftermath of a battle royal between a showgirl and a flamboyant ostrich.

Louboutin’s love of color and embellishment stems from growing up in 1970s France, which he remembers as dreary and austere, with anonymous white and gray concrete buildings popping up all over Paris. “There’s nothing I liked visually of the period I was a child,” he says. “There was no dream in it, and nothing sparkled.” His best friend wore colorful dresses from America; classmates taunted her “simply because she was clean.”

“There was this big thing of feminism in France, and it was all about wearing no makeup and looking pretty crappy,” he says. “And if you were having heels, you were evil.” He became obsessed with a sign at the Museum of African and Oceanic Art: a high heel with a large red X over it, representing a plea from management to avoid wearing shoes that might harm the flooring.

Louboutin studiously avoided school, with his mother’s help. (She wrote sick notes for him that he would dictate.) At age 12, he moved out to live with an older boyfriend. “I was having lunch with my parents, and I was sleeping there sometimes,” he recalls, as if this arrangement were perfectly ordinary. As a teen he danced at Le Palace, the iconic club where Mick Jagger, Loulou de la Falaise and Grace Jones mingled with club kids, whose clothes inspired Thierry Mugler and Yves Saint Laurent. Often young Christian would bring people home—a guy, a girl, guys and girls—in the wee hours of the morning. If his father, a cabinet­maker, were away, his mother would insist they take her room.

Sometimes he and his friends would sneak into the Folies Bergère—the cabaret where Josephine Baker perfected her danse banane—and snag vacant seats during intermission. After leaving school, Louboutin interned at the Folies Bergère, gluing jewelry on costumes and fetching coffee for the performers. He spent much of his time dreaming up “super fantasy shoes” for the dancers. Some drawings of those ideas landed him a design gig with Charles Jourdan, who created shoes for Christian Dior; that in turn led to a job as an assistant and secretary to Roger Vivier, the “Fabergé of footwear,” who invented the comma heel and the stiletto.

But Louboutin’s love of cabaret never left him. Feu, his collaboration with the erotic-cabaret troupe Crazy Horse Paris, runs through May 31 and features original music by David Lynch and Swizz Beatz. “I always loved fish for the colors and birds for the plumage,” he says. “In the same way, I loved those women of the cabaret. They were birds of paradise.”

“creative people often need time to crank it up or tease it out,” says Louboutin’s friend Bella Freud, the English fashion designer who recently created a line of fetish knitwear that incorporates four of his drawings. “With Christian, it is always at his disposal. He’s not a tortured genius.”

A grand illustration of Freud’s point can be found throughout Louboutin’s workspace, which spreads over several buildings on the rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not far from the Louvre. In Louboutin’s playful atelier, a tin man hangs from the ceiling. Shelves house a stuffed lemur, a pink motorcycle helmet and the limited-edition Cat Burglar Barbie, which Louboutin designed in 2009 on the condition he could shrink her ankles. (He deemed them too fat.) A bulletin board includes a calendar of priests, a drawing of Louboutin and Diane von Furstenberg on a mule, a photo of his friend Dina (“she’s the biggest belly dancer in the world”) and a 1950s-vintage picture of a gay Lebanese couple mimicking Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. “I love this picture,” Louboutin says, covering the torso and face of a person on a postcard. “People have said these are the legs of Katharine Hepburn. But look”—he removes his hand—“it’s Albert Einstein!”

For all his whimsy, Louboutin is vigorous about protecting his brand. His red sole is a genius marketing flourish, but it’s also an easy target for counterfeiters selling knockoff Loubis. In 2010 he launched stopfakelouboutin.com, which features a video of a bulldozer plowing through a sea of fake shoes.

He has even called the fashion police on fellow designers. In April 2011, he filed a lawsuit against Yves Saint Laurent after the house produced shoes with red soles for its cruise collection. YSL argued that a designer cannot own a color; Louboutin cited Hermes’ virtual ownership of orange and Tiffany’s trademark of its duck-egg blue. “I would not use a green-and-red ribbon because I know those are the colors of Gucci,” he says. “If you are supposedly creative, use your creativity to find a new path.”

Louboutin’s current path, alongside museum retrospectives and cabaret extravaganzas, includes the arrival of his second men’s store, in New York City, this spring. His men’s range, priced from $465 to $2,500, includes simple loafers and lace-ups as well as “trash” shoes decorated with discarded string, fabrics and notes from Louboutin’s atelier. The No Limit Men’s Flat, a $1,695 high-top sneaker, features dozens of golden spikes protruding from its vamp and crystals lining its red, brown and turquoise exterior.

Both his men’s stores (the first opened in Paris last year) offer a tattoo service that lets customers imprint their own inkings on their shoes. He got the idea after hearing his friend Gareth Thomas, the openly gay English rugby player, discuss his love of his own tattoo. “They’re pretty much a postcard of your life,” Louboutin says. “People are proud of their tattoos. It’s like a modern coat of arms.”

And in Louboutin’s eyes, his women’s shoes are a modern badge of honor. He has little patience for those who complain that skyscraping heels slow women down, whether literally or metaphorically. “Why do people always want you to run?” he asks. “The issue is the same for every­one: you run, and at the end there is a grave. If you run all your life, you end up having seen nothing.” As he walks out of the atelier for lunch at the Crazy Horse, his black studded flats make a gentle scuffle against the wooden floorboards.

For nearly 60 years, IVP — Switzerland’s last traditional finishing school — has taught women social graces, from floral arrangement and table decoration to the art of serving afternoon tea. Updated annually, its intensive six-week course consists of 216 hours of class and, for those working toward a diploma in international etiquette and protocol, 45 exams. Daily practice brings students up to speed on how to whip up the trendiest desserts — like mascarpone mousse and balsamic cream, a fresh alternative to tiresome tiramisu — and how to gracefully adhere to local customs in 20 countries, including Mexico (where you may shake your waiter’s hand) and Japan (where you should never use chopsticks as decorations in swept-up hair). But contrary to stereotype, the motive is not marriage; it’s money. “Lots of people have M.B.A.s, but few have the extra knowledge we can give them,” says Viviane Néri, the school’s principal. “People now realize that good manners make for good business.”

(Read the story on TIME.com)

Among those who agree is P. Christopher Earley, the incoming dean at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management and a co-author of Cultural Intelligence. Before globalization became the norm, “cultural issues were of less immediacy to businesses,” he says. “But that’s all changed in the past several decades with the flow of goods, services and information across transparent borders as well as the increasing interdependence of firms and subsidiaries.”

It’s this reality that draws midcareer executives to enroll at IVP, where they hope to gain an edge with international clients; younger students come to prepare for careers in public relations and the foreign service. Princesses and the daughters of Presidents and Prime Ministers enroll to better perform such duties as entertaining dignitaries and giving gifts while abroad. During TIME’s recent visit, the school’s roster listed 36 women, ranging in age from 18 to 46 and hailing from 14 countries including Syria, Thailand and the U.S. Given their high-profile backgrounds — as lawyers, consultants and captains of industry, as well as the daughters of business magnates — the students don’t share their last names with teachers or with one another.

“This isn’t about staying at home and saying yes to everything my husband says or serving him,” says Polly, a 39-year-old wearing pearls, a blue dress and a pink cardigan. “It’s about knowledge that empowers you as a modern lady.” Polly, who speaks fluent English, Mandarin and Cantonese, retired from a lucrative job as an investment banker in 2007 and now manages her family’s funds from her home in Hong Kong. She plans to deploy her new knowledge — like how to peel and eat kiwis using only cutlery — at philanthropic events where she encounters Indian, Malaysian and Chinese investors. “Good manners are essential to business,” she says. “If you don’t have good manners, then your clients and colleagues will question your competence.”

Refinement comes at a price: a six-week course, which includes room, two daily meals and weekend excursions, costs about $20,000. Student housing consists of well-appointed rooms with bathrooms en suite and names like Rose and Violet. Married students, including a Supreme Court judge from a European country who recently studied at IVP, often elect to stay in nearby hotels with their families and nannies.

Dropping Courses like Sewing
Perched on the hills overlooking Lake Geneva, Néri’s school is set in and around the former home of a Dutch baroness, built in 1911 as the Belle Epoque drew to a close. Néri’s mother acquired the property and established the school in 1954. “She wanted a house that would correspond to the type of house the students would have and entertain in,” she says. “The kitchen is downstairs because it assumes you have servants.” The ground-floor layout assumes students also have six chandeliers, 16 paintings and a marble staircase.

By the time Néri took the helm in 1972, many of her traditional rivals — the more than 60 finishing schools established around Lake Geneva before World War I — had shut down or fallen into decline. In some instances, it was an issue of succession: the founders’ emancipated daughters simply didn’t want to take the reins. In other cases, schools sitting on prime real estate were sold to the highest bidder. Subsequent decades saw the closure of iconic schools like Mon Fertile, which refined Camilla Parker Bowles, and the Institut Alpin Videmanette, which counted Princess Diana among its alumni. Le Manoir now serves as the headquarters of Tetra-Pak, a food-processing company, and Le Matin Calme was transformed into a private residence that has passed through several owners, including Shania Twain.

But IVP has managed not only to stay open but also to keep filling up months in advance. Néri and her staff members — who frequently visit the Middle East to tutor royalty in the comfort of their palaces — may be as good at strategic planning as they are at party planning. As early as the 1970s, Néri began courting students from Latin America and Asia who slowly replaced gap-year students from Britain and Germany. Néri dropped courses like sewing and expanded the curriculum to reflect the changing demographics of global influence and power. She started teaching classes in English instead of French and eventually broadened courses to cover the customs of each of the BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India and China — the emerging markets where women are increasingly likely to conduct business. “This was never the kind of school where you just walked around with books on your head,” she says. “We’ve always targeted the career woman.”

Néri believes there is more pressure on women in the business world. “Generally their mistakes are less easily forgiven than those of men,” she says. To help more of her students obtain C-level suites (CEO, COO, CFO, etc.), Néri serves as an encyclopedia of cultural taboos and international savoir faire: Don’t ask a Spanish businessman about his family. (He’ll consider it invasive.) It’s not acceptable to talk about money in Europe (unless you’re in Russia). And never correspond with Buddhists in red ink. (They use that color only to write the names of the dead on coffins.) “We’re actually antisnob,” Néri says. “The snobs are the ones who operate by secret codes and don’t explain them to you.”

Dissecting etiquette in a formal setting also gives women the opportunity to learn some unpleasant truths. “If a student’s outfit is in bad taste, then we tell her it doesn’t work,” Néri says. “She comes to get the feedback she won’t get from her friends or colleagues.” Teachers are equally quick to tell students if their table settings look rushed or violate the rule of keeping plates at least 55 cm apart. Anna, a 40-something financial controller at an international company in the construction industry, rolled her eyes when teachers brought out irons during a class on folding napkins. But an hour later, she was hooked. “You see the exactness and the symmetry, and it gives a completely different atmosphere,” she says. “If your table is slightly sloppy, your deal could fall through. The client might think, If the table is set like that, how will she treat my contract and our relationship?”

Back in the dining room, the five student servers — stomachs grumbling — have more pressing concerns. Their hostess’s husband continues to spoon his Toblerone mousse. “Take your time,” says Nouf, a 19-year-old business student from Oman who makes no effort to hide her sarcasm. “We don’t want to eat lunch or anything.” When the man of the house finally finishes, they clear the table and escort the guests to the drawing room for coffee. The waitresses return to the dining room, take off their gloves, wipe their foreheads and let out a massive sigh of relief. “I’ve been thinking about my servants all the time,” says Nouf. “It’s really hard work. I definitely have more respect for them.” For a true lady, that unexpected lesson may prove the most lasting.

Buoyed by liberal attitudes such as those, politicians across Western Europe are stepping out of the closet and into their country’s highest political offices. Eleven openly gay men and women now serve in the British Parliament, including two in the Cabinet. Last June, Nicolas Sarkozy appointed Frédéric Mitterrand, a gay television presenter, to the post of Minister of Culture. Paris’ Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, tipped by some to contest the 2012 presidential race, is gay. And Guido Westerwelle, chairman of Germany’s Free Democratic Party, has just become his country’s Foreign Minister, joining a gay élite that includes the mayors of Berlin and Hamburg, Germany’s two largest cities. Klaus Wowereit, Berlin’s mayor, says coming out ahead of the 2001 mayoral race while under pressure from tabloids strengthened his campaign. “My confession might have contributed to my popularity,” he says. “Many people appreciate honesty.”

(Read the story on TIME.com)

That’s a far cry from the climate in most of the U.S., where — despite the recent election of Annise Parker, a gay woman, as mayor of Houston, America’s fourth largest city — honesty can still end a gay politician’s career. Openly gay politicians such as San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk began winning seats in U.S. cities with large gay populations in the 1970s. Progress has since slowed, says David Rayside, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He believes that the relative strength of incumbency in the U.S. creates a barrier to the corridors of power, as does “the strength of religious conservatives.” Of the 511,000 elected offices in the U.S. — from local school boards way up to President — openly gay men and women occupy just 450 of them, according to the U.S.-based Victory Fund, an organization that offers financial support to gay political candidates. No openly gay person has ever sat in the Senate, and only three hold seats in the House of Representatives.

The gap between the U.S. and Europe doesn’t just exist at the top: 49% of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center in 2007 believed that society should “accept” homosexuality. Contrast that with attitudes in Europe where more than 80% of French, Germans and Spaniards had such a view. Only Catholic and conservative Poles felt as uncomfortable with the idea as Americans. Denis Dison, a spokesman for the Victory Fund, says those attitudes can make it difficult for gay people to campaign — let alone obtain office. “In places where the climate isn’t friendly, it’s hard for them to even go into a town hall meeting or public forum because they get such nasty questions.”

The European Difference
Europe’s political landscape has not always been so welcoming. Thirty years ago, as Sigurdardottir began her political career, “Iceland was extremely homophobic,” says Baldur Thorhallsson, a political scientist at the University of Iceland. Education changed that. Over the last 30 years Samtokin ’78, a Reykjavik-based gay-rights organization, worked with the national media to produce news programs that gave gay men and women a human face, and acquainted the public with the prejudice gays encounter. Activists visited high schools to create gay role models and counter stereotypes. By 1996 the country had legalized gay civil unions, and Sigurdardottir had served as a Cabinet minister. Today, only 6% of Icelandic clergymen say they would refuse to perform a gay marriage. “We’re a small country of 300,000 people, so news spreads quickly,” Thorhallsson says. “If you get on the main news program, your message will reach everybody.”

In larger countries like Britain, with relatively deeper pockets of conservatism, progress has come more slowly. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government passed a Local Government Act, Section 28 of which barred the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and defined gay partnerships as “pretended family relationships.” Such homophobia emboldened both gay-rights advocates and future politicians. “People came out who otherwise wouldn’t have, and it woke up our heterosexual friends and family,” says Michael Cashman, now a Labour Member of the European Parliament. In 1989, Cashman and actor Ian McKellen co-founded campaign group Stonewall. Around the same time, Cashman played the role of a kindhearted gay man on popular BBC soap opera EastEnders. As Cashman says: “We moved on and politics eventually followed.”

By 1997, when Tony Blair’s Labour government came to power, the ground was shifting. Chris Smith, the only out MP for 14 years, was named Minister of Culture. “The really astonishing thing was that no one pointed out a gay man had been appointed to the Cabinet,” he says from Britain’s Environment Agency, which he now runs. The same year in Exeter, a constituency in southwestern England, Conservative party candidate Adrian Rogers attacked his openly gay opponent Ben Bradshaw by describing homosexuality as “a sterile, disease-ridden and godforsaken occupation.” Voters awarded Bradshaw the seat, in one of the biggest swings away from the Conservatives in the country that year. “He tried to use my sexuality as a political weapon and that blew up in his face,” says Bradshaw, now the U.K.’s Minister of Culture. “That election was a huge sea change in our politics. Since then we’ve been in a new world.”

Gay-baiting has proved equally ineffective in Germany. Andreas Heilmann, a social scientist at Berlin’s Humboldt University, believes that a politician who discloses his sexual orientation is insulated from criticism. “They embody a certain authenticity and credibility because they’re open,” he says. By contrast, opponents who make sexuality an issue are typically viewed as mean-spirited and politically incompetent. When Hamburg’s former vice mayor Ronald Schill outed the city’s Mayor Ole von Beust at a press conference in 2003, Germans mocked Schill, and Von Beust went on to win the 2004 elections in a landslide.

It helps that Europe’s liberal laws — 18 European countries allow gay marriage or same-sex civil unions, and gay couples in nine countries can adopt children — have largely normalized perceptions of gays. Christophe Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, believes the legal framework for gay partnerships has “forced respect.” (Girard is in a civil partnership with his partner of 13 years and has two children). “Gays are no longer just seen as partiers, but also as parents,” he says. Paris, of course, is not rural France. But even in Barsac, a village of 2,200 people in the country’s southwest, gay leaders have seen progress. Philippe Meynard, the mayor for five years, says his own visibility has influenced local attitudes. “People have become aware that a gay person isn’t a caricature,” he says. People now judge him primarily by his work building parking lots and beautifying the village.

Demographic shifts may also play a part. For a growing number of people in a continent grappling with how to assimilate migrants, the gay community can seem less threatening than recent arrivals from the Muslim world. “It’s creepy,” says Rayside of the University of Toronto, “but sexual minorities are seen as a safer and more respectable minority because they know what ‘Britishness’ or ‘Dutchness’ is.” A 2008 poll, for example, found that while only 27% of Dutch voters would approve of a Muslim Prime Minister, 78% would approve of a homosexual in the same role.

The Road Ahead
For its part, Britain’s Conservative Party has come a long way since Section 28, which the Labour government repealed in 2003. David Cameron, the Tory leader, apologized for the law at a gay-pride event last June. In October, the Conservatives even organized an official “gay night” at their annual party conference. Among gay activists, debate still rages over whether leaders who have not gone public with their sexuality should do so. Girard, the deputy mayor of Paris, knows several elected officials who keep their sexuality private. “By not accepting their homosexuality publicly, closeted politicians are holding back progress,” he says. So long as they remain hidden, he argues, gay leaders will remain an oddity. “I don’t mean that they have to wave a banner, but just be calm and confident about it.”

Wowereit, Berlin’s mayor, is all of those things: he regularly appears with his neurosurgeon boyfriend at public events and ran for office with the slogan “I’m gay and that’s a good thing.” But even he doesn’t believe a level playing field exists yet. “As long as the sexual orientation of a candidate is publicly discussed at all,” he says, “one has to assume that it’s still not normal for a gay person to aim for such a position.”

Still, that’s a long way from the climate faced by many gay politicians in America. Opponents of gay candidates there often focus the race on sexuality — and have found that it wins them more votes. Jim Roth, former Oklahoma county commissioner and the state’s first publicly elected gay official, says that in 2002, rivals wrongly claimed his partner had AIDS. In 2006, church groups, he says, passed out literature claiming he would “advance the homosexual agenda.” In 2008, while running for a post to oversee the state’s energy resources, he faced similar attacks and lost. “Their coordinated attacks on my sexuality really resonated in parts of Oklahoma,” he says. “How do you respond to a ridiculous anti-gay-only message?” One answer: don’t. During the home stretch of Houston’s mayoral race in December, Annise Parker simply ignored attacks on her sexuality, and won.

For a group fighting for the right to marry and serve in the military while openly gay, success in politics is about more than pride. “We need to have people at the table of power when decisions are being made about our lives,” says Dison of the Victory Fund. “Our straight allies and nonallies get to know us as human beings, and that tends to affect hearts and minds.”

In Iceland, Sigurdardottir now sits at the head of that table. In a country where gay men and women have few battles left to fight, she’s thought of first as a politician. That may explain the media’s indifference to her sexuality. Some editors in Reykjavik say they ignored it to respect Sigurdardottir’s privacy. Thorhallsson, of the University of Iceland, who is himself gay, believes that shows there is still work to be done. “It’s a strange claim because she isn’t in the closet,” he says. “It shows that the media doesn’t really know how to handle gay politicians.” Perhaps. But only in Iceland could overlooking the Prime Minister’s sexual orientation be taken as a slight. In many other parts of the world, that would count as a victory.

Outreach workers from the Romanian Association Against AIDS (ARAS) make runs like this twice daily, distributing clean needles to Bucharest’s most vulnerable residents: sex workers, street children and homeless adults, most of them Roma, and most of them heroin addicts. It’s a vital service to help prevent the city’s 17,000 addicts from sharing needles and spreading HIV. “Even the pimps know us now,” says Alexandra Luca, a health educator in charge of this evening’s run. “They see the women as money machines, so we explain that it’s in their best interest to keep them healthy, clean and informed.”

(Read the story on TIME.com)

With the global community focused on AIDS in Africa, Romania isn’t an obvious front line in the fight against HIV. But across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, injecting drug use is driving the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic. According to UNAIDS, since 2001, HIV prevalence in the region has risen by 66% to include 1.5 million people. In Russia, 160 people contract HIV every day and the average age of death from AIDS-related causes is just 32. An estimated 70% of Ukraine’s injecting drug users (IDUs) now have HIV.

The problem, experts say, is lack of funding for HIV prevention and of political will to work with stigmatized groups. Despite the explosive growth of HIV rates in parts of Europe, UNICEF reports that combined international investment in HIV in the entire region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia “does not come close” to investments in a single country like Ethiopia, which records a similar number of HIV cases as Russia or Ukraine. “Donors and politicians see our region’s epidemic as a lower priority,” says Shona Schonning, an activist with the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network based in Vilnius, Lithuania. “They see the countries as a little richer and the epidemic as a little smaller, and therefore something that can be ignored. But the only difference between Eastern Europe and Africa is time.”

Until now, Romania had been the exception. Romanian NGOs were the first in the region to gear up AIDS-prevention programs targeting vulnerable groups a decade ago, and together they have helped keep the HIV rate among the nation’s IDUs at just 1% — the lowest in Eastern Europe. That result is in big part thanks to needle-exchange programs run by ARAS and five other NGOs, who together gave out more than 1.6 million syringes last year to 7,500 addicts. Now a funding crisis could see all that good work undone. The NGOs have long relied exclusively on international donors. But nearly four years after Romania joined the European Union, the World Bank no longer classifies Romania as a developing country, making it ineligible for a number of international grants. Since June, UNICEF, the Open Society Institute and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have all withdrawn funding for the country’s HIV programs.

Without money going into prevention, some experts say, Romania’s HIV problem could get very serious, very fast. “Where you don’t provide interventions for drug injectors, there’s a potential for the epidemic to rage out of control,” says Martin Christopher Donoghoe, the World Health Organization project manager for HIV/AIDS in Europe. That has consequences for the rest of Europe too. Freedom of movement within the E.U. makes it easier for disease to spread; what’s more, in 2008 Romania surpassed Russia to become the largest supplier of migrant sex workers to the E.U. “The bulk of HIV infections are in the east, but HIV doesn’t respect national boundaries,” says Donoghoe.

Romania’s NGOs can’t turn to their cash-strapped government for help. Last year its total contributions to ARAS allowed for the purchase of 7,000 syringes — enough for just one day. Now, with Romania mired in recession — its economy shrank by 7% last year — the chances of the government throwing organizations like ARAS a lifeline are slim.

Uncertain Future
Romania’s unique history with HIV partly explains its success in fighting the spread of the disease. Unlike in the rest of Eastern Europe, the majority of people living with HIV in Romania did not become infected as adult drug users or sex workers, but as children living in orphanages. In 1987, nurses hoping to cure Romania’s orphans of their anemia started injecting them with whole-blood transfusions daily, reusing syringes on multiple children. Some of the blood turned out to be contaminated and at least 10,000 orphans contracted HIV. By 2000, Romania claimed 60% of all the pediatric HIV infections registered in Europe.

International pressure, coupled with a burgeoning activist movement inside the country, compelled the government to act. The infected children began receiving state-provided antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, which still keeps 7,000 of them alive today. In 2001, the government closed a deal with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices, paving the way for Romania to become the first country in Eastern Europe — and one of the few in the world — to provide universal coverage to HIV-positive patients. Besides improving the quality of patients’ lives, the drugs also reduce their viral load, making them less likely to transmit the disease to others. “At that time, Romania was the model for the region,” says Eduard Petrescu, the Romania country coordinator for UNAIDS. “I hope in two or three years it will be seen as a model of how to deal with HIV/AIDS during an economic crisis.”

It’s not off to a good start. The Ministry of Health used up all of this year’s budget to pay for ARVs in August and must now wait for more funding to arrive through bureaucratic channels. The delay could take up to 180 days. ARV shortages have already interrupted treatment for up to 1,000 patients, and forced patients from rural areas to line up outside Bucharest hospitals to receive treatment. “The government has given us no guarantees, and we are scared what will happen in September,” says Iulian Petre, the executive director of the National Union of People Living with HIV/AIDS.

With funding in limbo, ARAS worker Luca continues to steer her van into an uncertain future. At yet another squatter complex, a 13-year-old girl stands in line. Bright-eyed and surprisingly cheerful for someone surrounded by homeless men and sex workers, she visits every week to get basic medical care and a dose of attention. Her father is an addict and at home used syringes are scattered around the floor. She stepped on one recently, so wants to get an HIV and hepatitis test. “She’s still in school and she’s trying to stay clean,” Luca says. “Miracles happen everywhere.” But if support for Romania’s outreach programs disappears, there may not be many left.

(See pictures inside a Romanian drug house.)

Critics lambasted Sozzani for glamorizing tragedy and dismissed her as an opportunist. Just over a year later, sitting in her office in Milan, she remains unapologetic — and feels more than a bit misunderstood. Banalities about skin bronzer aside, “the spread had a positive message,” she says, petting her sleeping West Highland terrier. “Don’t push nature too much, or she will rebel against you.”

Rebellion has become Sozzani’s calling card. It’s helped her transform Vogue Italia from a domestic trade publication into the world’s most influential fashion magazine, despite its relatively small circulation of 140,000 (compared with the 1.3 million readership of the more commercial American Vogue). Other editors view it as the barometer of which models and photographers will become household names, and newsrooms warm up the presses whenever Sozzani champions a cause — or takes a misstep. Earlier this month, she suggested that Dior rehire John Galliano after a French court convicted the designer of anti-Semitic speech. And in August she sparked a global race row by running a feature on hoop earrings titled “Slave Earrings.” It traced the origins of the jewelry to “women of color who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade.” Readers called it distasteful and racist. Sozzani attempted to defuse the controversy by blaming poor translation.

Language presents other challenges too. “Italian is only spoken in Italy, so our images have to be very strong to attract attention,” she says. Cue Linda Evangelista pretending to go under the knife for an edgy issue titled “Makeover Madness,” and Iselin Steiro in a black leather skirt holding a matching machine gun for a spread on “Homeland Security.” The topical, anything-goes attitude works: in the first six months of 2011, sales of Vogue Italia jumped more than 20% year on year, and traffic to its website, vogue.it, more than doubled to 1.86 million page views per month.

Despite her status as Europe’s leading fashion czar, Sozzani says she never saw herself as a career woman. After completing a degree in philosophy and Germanic language and literature, she married at the age of 20 and imagined a life of playing golf and raising children. She left her husband after three months. “I thought it was time to do something good with my life,” she says wryly. In 1976, Sozzani landed at Vogue Bambini as “assistant to the assistant to the assistant.” In just four years she rose to become editor in chief of LEI, Italy’s top fashion magazine for young women, and by 1988 had nabbed the top spot at Vogue Italia.

Her defiance shined early. Rather than following the magazine’s tired template — one article on each prominent Italian fashion house — she made room for foreign designers and put Yves Saint Laurent on her first cover. “I didn’t respect the idea that couture should be Italian,” she says.

These days, the magazine’s niche readership — high-end fashionistas and arty intellectuals — gives Sozzani the freedom to experiment. She uses that power for good. “Franca sees the bigger picture. She always has done,” says Anna Wintour, Sozzani’s legendary counterpart in the U.S. “She completely and utterly understands that Vogue is about much more than editing a magazine every month, but that it has to play a vital part in setting the agenda for the fashion industry.”

In July 2008, Sozzani directly challenged the standard racial composition of Western fashion magazines and runway shows. Her now famous “Black” issue featured only black women and articles related to black lifestyle. Industry wisdom suggested consumers would turn their backs on all the black faces. But the magazine sold out within three days in Britain and the U.S., and became the magazine’s best-selling issue of all time after Condé Nast reprinted 60,000 copies.

But championing beauties like Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell seems a cinch compared with Sozzani’s latest curveball: plus-size women. In February she launched Vogue Curvy — an arm of vogue.it staffed by plus-size bloggers who offer fashion tips for the full-figured. A month later Sozzani started a petition calling on governments to take down proanorexia websites. Then, in June, she plastered three Rubenesque models in lingerie on the cover. In a 20-page spread called “Dream Woman,” they remove their bras while sipping champagne, smoking and straddling furniture. The goal was to show that “curvy girls are sexy, more sexy than the skinny girls.”

As usual, controversy followed. Some critics suggested that larger women were — with the exception of the June spread — being relegated to online purgatory. Others have called Sozzani a hypocrite for selectively championing the fuller figure while pouting waifs remain the stock-in-trade of Vogue Italia and fashion magazines everywhere. Sozzani is nonplussed. “You cannot make me responsible for everything that happens in the fashion world,” she says, admitting that she too is bored of “sad-faced” models who all look the same.

At 61, Sozzani shows no signs of slowing down or playing it safe. She writes a daily blog — the most popular part of vogue.it — and among other things has asked why fashion editors dress so ridiculously at runway shows, analyzed whether people are born vulgar or grow into boorishness, and mused on Italy’s appalling youth unemployment rate. Ask her about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s indiscretions, and Sozzani takes a deep breath. “It gives the impression that Italy is one big casino,” she says, explaining that Italian female contempt for Berlusconi is “not about being a feminist.” It’s about a nation’s standing in the eyes of the world. “We have fantastic, involved, artistic women,” she declares, setting a none-too-shabby example herself.

The Carnarvon family has lived on this estate in rural Hampshire, England, since 1679. The countess sees it as her duty to open the doors of Highclere not just to television crews but also to tour groups and schoolchildren. “It’s a living house and a part of our national heritage,” she explains. But sharing Highclere is also a matter of necessity. The Carnarvons, like many aristocratic families in Britain, are asset-rich but cash-poor. Exorbitant main­tenance costs can make even the bluest of blue bloods cringe: Geordie, Carnarvon’s husband and the eighth earl, estimates that he will need to sink $18 million into renovations in the coming years, from fixing faulty plumbing to restoring a 15th century barn with ancient timbers. Any revenue the house generates—from its tearoom, its filming contract, its $15 entrance fee—goes toward upkeep. “If I wanted Manolo Blahnik shoes or swish clothes from London, I definitely married the wrong man,” says Carnarvon, 47. “But I like looking at sheep and walking across lawns with dogs, so it’s fine. Everybody with houses like ours faces exactly the same challenges.”

(Read the story on TIME.com)

But not everybody with houses like Carnarvon’s has the free marketing of a Downton Abbey. Now starting its second season in the States on PBS, the Emmy-winning hit—which charts the ups and downs of the aristocratic Crawley family and its busybody servants—has transformed Highclere into Britain’s most talked-­about stately home. In 2010, about 1,200 people visited the castle on its busiest days; in October, following the U.K. premiere of the second season, 4,000 visitors came in a single afternoon. The so-called Downton Abbey effect has boosted the fortunes of other stately homes too. Increased interest following the series’ first season helped historic houses attract more than 17 million visitors in 2010, up from 15 million in 2009.

Part of Downton Abbey’s appeal stems from the castle’s Elizabethan grandeur. “It is a sculpture dedicated to the superiority of birth,” says Julian Fellowes, the show’s writer and creator. Highclere isn’t just Downton Abbey’s title location; it’s effectively one of the show’s main characters. Carnarvon understands this, and she’s given the producers access to ­every corner. The abundance of furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries reduces the need for outside props, though Carnarvon draws the line at china and ­glassware. “They have all these lighting cranes above the tables,” she says somewhat apologetically. “I’d much rather they broke their own kit than mine.”

The Crawleys’ life on Downton Abbey ­frequently mirrors the Carnarvons’ reality. Just like the fictitious Lady and Earl of Grantham (played by Elizabeth Mc­Govern and Hugh Bonneville), Carnarvon and her husband eat opposite each other frequently in the castle’s state dining room, which counts 15 paintings on its walls, including a 14-ft.-tall (4 m) van Dyck portrait of Charles I. And the Carnarvons do gather around the red velvet sofa in the library after dinner—though they usually roll in a bar and play charades, and the countess is more likely to don leather boots and jeans than a corset and elbow-length gloves.

Shooting disrupts any cozy routines. During filming, the crew arrives at 7 in the morning and generally stays for 13 hours; each day results in just six minutes of TV footage. Carnarvon must constantly consider logistics: if Highclere is hosting a weekend wedding, filming a fox hunt on the pristine grass simply won’t do. Naturally she sometimes feels trapped. “I’ll be walking from my office to get a cup of tea and I suddenly hear, ‘Silence!’” she says. “I always hope it’s a quick scene. Otherwise I’m stuck there for a while.”

Keeping Up with the Carnarvons

Downton Abbey has helped propel the Carnarvons’ renovation efforts and given them the peace of mind of knowing they can sustain their staff—­including two full-time chefs and an 88-year-old steward—for years to come. But the future of hundreds of other British stately homes remains less cushy.

Nick Way, director general of the Historic Houses Association, says Britain’s historic homes face a backlog of repairs amounting to more than $600 million, up 50% from six years ago. For the 1,500 stately homes that his organization ad­vises, the average cost of maintenance—from cleaning antique carpets to roof work—is $150,000 per year, and at least three properties budget more than $1.5 million. “Most of us live in our houses­ and decide how and when to decorate or renovate,” Way says. “But if you live in one of these houses, it’s not like that. The house lives you.”

Hoping to ease the squeeze, home­owners have started innovating to attract more visitors. Dalemain, a Georgian house in Cumbria, stages a Hindu dog blessing to celebrate the Nepalese day of the dog. At Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII’s old digs, guests receive velvet cloaks at the start of their tour. At Kelburn Castle, which dates back to the 13th century, the Earl of Glasgow commissioned Brazilian street artists to paint psychedelic murals on his home. The National Trust, a charity that advises historic properties, has encouraged estates to hire actors in period costume and remove barriers so that visitors can climb into beds and play billiards on pool tables.

Critics have lambasted such moves as the Disneyfication of British heritage. “I’m absolutely against throwing vulgarian tosh at the public. If increasing visitor numbers alone is your objective, then ­offer live sex and public executions,” says Stephen Bayley, the founder and former chief executive of London’s Design Museum. “I loathe this awful idea of having chewed chicken bones on the floor and his lordship’s cigar butt smoldering in the ashtray. The contemplation of great architecture and landscape doesn’t require third-rate circus activity.”

But something of the kind might be ­required to preserve these wonders for future generations, especially as costs rise faster than incomes. “It’s a tricky one,” Carnarvon says of the need to both lure visitors and respect a building’s integrity. “I’m afraid I still have the red ropes up.”

She has, however, expanded her revenue stream—without erecting a barbecue pit in her living room. In honor of her husband’s great-grandfather—the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who was present alongside archeologist Howard Carter at the discovery of King Tut in 1922—the Carnarvons converted their cellars into an exhibition that contains 5,000-year-old artifacts exhumed from Tut’s tomb. And she recently published a book, Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey, about a predecessor who steered Highclere Castle through World War I.

That’s a lot to keep straight, even if you have live-in staff to help. But unlike the characters whose tumultuous lives unfold in her drawing rooms, Carnarvon knows that resolution to her own drama is never far from hand. “At the end of the day, if I haven’t done it all, at least I’ve tried,” she says. “And if it’s really bad, a glass of pink champagne does wonders.” Surely all home­owners can agree on that.