DealBook: Buffett’s Annual Letter Plays Up Newspapers’ Value

Over the last half-century, Warren E. Buffett has built a reputation as a contrarian investor, betting against the crowd to amass a fortune estimated at $54 billion.

Mr. Buffett underscored that contrarian instinct in his annual letter to shareholders published on Friday. In a year when Mr. Buffett did not make any large acquisitions, he bought dozens of newspapers, a business others have shunned. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, has bought 28 dailies in the last 15 months.

“There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job,” he wrote.

Those purchases, which cost Mr. Buffett a total of $344 million, are relatively minor deals for Berkshire, and just a small part of the giant conglomerate. Mr. Buffett bemoaned his inability to do a major deal in 2012. “I pursued a couple of elephants, but came up empty-handed,” he said. “Our luck, however, changed earlier this year.”

Mr. Buffett was making a reference to one of his largest-ever deals. Last month, Berkshire, along with a Brazilian investment group, announced a $23.6 billion takeover,of the ketchup maker H. J. Heinz.

Written in accessible prose largely free of financial jargon, Berkshire’s annual letter holds appeal far beyond Wall Street. This year’s dispatch contained plenty of Mr. Buffett’s folksy observations about investing and business that his devotees relish.

“More than 50 years ago, Charlie told me that it was far better to buy a wonderful business at a fair price than to buy a fair business at a wonderful price,” Mr. Buffett wrote, referring to his longtime partner at Berkshire, Charlie Munger.

Mr. Buffett also struck a patriotic tone, directly appealing to his fellow chief executives “that opportunities abound in America.” He noted that the United States gross domestic product, on an inflation-adjusted basis, had more than quadrupled over the last six decades.

“Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain,” he wrote. “America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-increasing abundance.”

The letter provides more than entertainment value and patriotic stirrings, delivering to Berkshire shareholders an update on the company’s vast collection of businesses. With a market capitalization of $250 billion, Berkshire ranks among the largest companies in the United States.

Its holdings vary, with big companies like the railroad operator Burlington Northern Santa Fe and the electric utility MidAmerican Energy, and smaller ones like the running-shoe outfit Brooks Sports and the chocolatier See’s Candies. All told, Berkshire employs about 288,000 people.

The letter, once again, did not answer a question that has vexed Berkshire shareholders and Buffett-ologists: Who will succeed Mr. Buffett, who is 82, as chief executive?

Last year, he acknowledged that he had chosen a successor, but he did not name the candidate.

He has said that upon his death, Berkshire will split his job in three, naming a chief executive, a nonexecutive chairman and several investment managers of its publicly traded holdings.

In 2010, he said that his son, Howard Buffett, would succeed him as nonexecutive chairman.

Berkshire’s share price recently traded at a record high, surpassing its prefinancial crisis peak reached in 2007 and rising about 22 percent over the last year.

The company reported net income last year of about $14.8 billion, up about 45 percent from 2011. Yet the company’s book value, or net worth — Mr. Buffett’s preferred performance measure — lagged the broader stock market, increasing 14.4 percent, compared with the market’s 16 percent return.

Mr. Buffett lamented that 2012 was only the ninth time in 48 years that Berkshire’s book value increase was less than the gain of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. But he pointed out that in eight of those nine years, the S.& P. had a gain of 15 percent or more, suggesting that Berkshire proved to be a most valuable investment during bad market periods.

“We do better when the wind is in our face,” he wrote.

For Berkshire’s largest collection of assets, its insurance operations, the wind has been at its back. We “shot the lights out last year” in insurance, Mr. Buffett said.

He lavished praise on the auto insurer Geico, giving a special shout-out to the company’s mascot, the Gecko lizard.

Investors also keep a keen eye on changes in Berkshire’s roughly $87 billion stock portfolio. Its holdings include large positions in iconic companies like International Business Machines, Coca-Cola, American Express and Wells Fargo. He said Berkshire’s investment in each of those was likely to increase in the future.

“Mae West had it right: ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful,’ ” Mr. Buffett wrote.

He also complimented two relatively new hires, Todd Combs and Ted Weschler, who now each manage about $5 billion in stock portfolios for Berkshire. Both men ran unheralded, modest-size money management firms before Mr. Buffett plucked them out of obscurity and moved them to Omaha to work for him.

He called the men “a perfect cultural fit” and indicated that the two would manage Berkshire’s entire stock portfolio once he steps aside. “We hit the jackpot with these two,” Mr. Buffett said, noting that last year, each outperformed the S.& P. by double-digit margins.

Then, sheepishly, employing supertiny type, he wrote: “They left me in the dust as well.”

A former paperboy and member of the Newspaper Association of America’s carrier hall of fame, Mr. Buffett devoted nearly three out of 24 pages of his annual report to newspapers.

While Mr. Buffett has been a longtime owner of The Buffalo News and a stakeholder in The Washington Post Company, he told shareholders four years ago that he wouldn’t buy a newspaper at any price.

But his latest note reflects how much his opinion has turned. His buying spree started in November 2011, when he struck a deal to buy The Omaha World-Herald Company, this hometown paper, for a reported $200 million. By May 2012, he bought out the chain of newspapers owned by Media General, except for The Tampa Tribune. In recent months, he continued to express his interest in buying more papers “at appropriate prices — and that means a very low multiple of current earnings.”

“Papers delivering comprehensive and reliable information to tightly bound communities and having a sensible Internet strategy will remain viable for a long time,” wrote Mr. Buffett.

Mr. Buffett said in a telephone interview last month that he would consider buying The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., a paper that the Tribune Company is considering selling. But Mr. Buffett said he had not contacted Tribune executives.

“It’s solely a question of the specifics of it and the price,” he said about the Allentown paper. “But it’s similar to the kinds of communities that we bought papers in.”

Mr. Buffett has plenty of cash to make more newspaper acquisitions. To cover his portion of the Heinz purchase, Mr. Buffett will deploy about $12 billion of Berkshire’s $42 billion cash hoard. That leaves a lot of money for Mr. Buffett to continue his shopping spree for newspapers — and more major deals like Heinz.

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits,” Mr. Buffett wrote, “and resumed our search for elephants.”

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At War Blog: Remembering a Silent Success in Afghanistan

December in the mountains of southern Afghanistan greeted me and my men with strong and seemingly endless gusts of wind. The frigid temperatures were equally unforgiving. Our living quarters were constructed out of cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting, which didn’t create much of an escape. The highlight of my day, despite the obvious threat, was leading patrols as a squad leader. The physical activity kept me comfortably warm and allowed me to distance my mind from our frosty reality.

Despite daily patrols, it took me a few months to build rapport with the residents of Kunjak in Helmand Province. During the first month of my deployment in 2010, barely any villagers talked to me. This is when my interpreter, who we called H.B., suggested I start inviting the elders to our base for a meeting, or shura. He assured me this would build a mutual trust.

Soon, my Sunday mornings consisted of two to three hours of conversing with dozens of village elders. At 9 a.m., my interpreter and I would greet them as they climbed the steep and sandy hill to my remote outpost. To present a less hostile environment, I chose to meet them without my body armor or weapon.

We sat outside, suffering in the wind together. My interpreter would make chai, but I always brewed a pot of Starbucks coffee and offered some to my guests. Some liked it, some didn’t. I would like to think my generosity was appreciated.

The shuras were full of requests for new wells and mosques. But if there are two things Afghanistan has a plethora of, it’s those two things. I chose to propose something different, which thrilled them all.

We would build a school.

The Taliban had prevented them from being able to send their kids to school for years. With one suggestion, I had won over the villagers.

As the sun rose the following day, despite not having a school yet, I had over a dozen children waiting outside my base. Many had traveled from afar to attend what they thought was the first day of class. The last thing I wanted to do was send the children away. We invited them on the base, and H.B. taught them the Pashtu alphabet on our dry-erase board. It was on that Monday morning I realized I had to do something fast.

Our supplies were stored in a small tent at the back of our outpost, but I made the decision to move the tent to the base of our hill to serve as the school. By positioning it there, we could maintain its security, protecting it from Taliban attacks.

At 8:45 every morning, my Marines patrolled the school and used our metal detectors to sweep for improvised explosive devices. The safety of the children had to be paramount or our efforts would be for nothing. As the days passed, a growing number of children ranging in the age from 4 to 10 arrived for school. Within weeks we were teaching more than 40 boys and girls. During our time in Afghanistan, not a single child was injured at our school, and for the last four months of my deployment, the school was a giant success.

The Afghan National Police officers attached to my outpost did not participate much in the security of the school. In fact, many of them disapproved of it because it catered to girls as well as boys. I fear that as the American military presence draws down in Afghanistan, initiatives like our school will be abandoned by the Afghan government or destroyed by the Taliban. While the district mayor of Musa Qala knew of our efforts at the school, we received little to no local government support. Requests for a teacher, supplies and a permanent structure were either ignored or forgotten.

Stories like the one of our school tend to never make the limelight. Far too often the news is only about the horrors of war, or mistakes made by NATO troops, rather than their successes. It is easy to focus on the negative, especially as the United States plans to withdraw most of its forces by the end of 2014.

As I left Afghanistan in the spring of 2011, dozens of Afghans were attending our shuras, and they were full of varying requests. They no longer asked for wells and mosques. Now they wanted a community center and a larger school. I left before I could make those dreams come true for them. But I hoped the Marines who relieved me would be able to fulfill them.

I came home and listened and watched the news a lot. I kept hoping I would see or hear something good from Afghanistan. To no avail; the stories were depressing. After spending seven months in Afghanistan, I now knew good things were happening, but they just weren’t being shown.

I hope that my school wasn’t short-lived, and I would like to think that it is still operating safely. Whether it is or not, I still fondly remember our efforts. They led to one of the silent successes that have happened and, I believe, will continue to happen in Afghanistan.

Thomas James Brennan is a military affairs reporter with the Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. Before being medically retired this fall, he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. He served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, and is a member of the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Follow him on Twitter at @thomasjbrennan.

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The New Old Age Blog: Why Can’t I Live With People Like Me?

“Aging in place” is the mantra of long-term care. Whether looking at reams of survey data, talking to friends or wishing on a star, who among us wouldn’t rather spend the final years — golden or less so — at home, surrounded by our cherished possessions, in our own bed, no cranky old coot as a roommate, no institutional smells or sounds, no lukewarm meals on a schedule of someone else’s making?

That works best, experts tell us, in dense cities, where we can hail a cab at curbside, call the superintendent when something breaks and have our food delivered from Fresh Direct or countless takeout restaurants. We’d have neighbors in the apartment above us, below us, just on the other side of the wall. Hearing their toilets flush and their children ride tricycles on uncarpeted floors is a small inconvenience compared to the security of knowing they are so close by in an emergency.

Urban planners, mindful that most Americans live in sprawling, car-reliant suburbs, are designing more elder-friendly, walkable communities, far from “real” cities. Houses and apartments are built around village greens, with pockets of commerce instead of distant strip malls. Some have community centers for congregate meals and activities; others share gardens, where people can get their hands in the warm spring dirt long after they can push a lawn mower.

All of this is a step in the right direction, despite the Potemkin-village look of so many of them. But it doesn’t take into account those who are too infirm to stay at home, even in cities or more manageable suburban environments. Some are alone, others with a loving spouse who by comparison is “well” but may not be for long, given the rigors of care-taking. It doesn’t take into account people who can’t afford a home health aide, who don’t qualify for a visiting nurse, who have no adult children to help them or whose children live far away.

But by now, aging in place, unrealistic for some, scary or unsafe for others and potentially very isolating, has become so entrenched as the right way to live out one’s life that not being able to pull it off seems a failure, yet another defeat at a time when defeats are all too plentiful. Are we making people feel guilty if they can’t stay at home, or don’t want to? Are we discouraging an array of other solutions by investing so much, program-wise and emotionally, in this sine qua non?

Regular readers of The New Old Age know that I am single, childless and terrified of falling off a ladder while replacing a light bulb, breaking a hip and lying on the floor, unattended, until my dog wails so loudly a neighbor comes by to complain. A MedicAlert pendant is not something that appeals to me at 65, but even if I give in to that, say at 75, I’m not sure my life will be richer for digging my heels in and insisting home is where I should be.

So I spend a lot of time thinking about the alternatives. I know enough to distinguish between naturally-occurring-retirement communities, or NORCs (some of which work better than others); age-restricted housing complexes (with no services); assisted living (which works fine when you don’t really need it and not so fine when you do); and continuing care retirement communities (which require big upfront payments and extensive due diligence to be sure the place doesn’t go belly up after you get there).

What I find so unappealing about all these choices is that each means growing old among people with whom I share no history. In these congregate settings, for the most part, people are guaranteed only two things in common: age and infirmity. Which brings us to what is known in the trade as “affinity” or “niche” communities,” long studied by Andrew J. Carle at the College of Health and Human Services at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Mr. Carle, who trains future administrators of senior housing complexes, was a media darling a few years back, before the recession, with the first baby boomers approaching 65 and niche communities that included services for the elderly — not merely warm-weather developments adjacent to golf courses — expected to explode. In newspaper interviews as recently as 2011, Mr. Carle said there were “about 100 of them in existence or on the drawing board,” not counting the large number of military old-age communities.

Mr. Carle still believes that better economic times, when they come, will reinvigorate this sector of senior housing, after the failure of some in the planning stages and others in operation. In an e-mail exchange, Mr. Carle said there were now about 70 in operation, with perhaps 50 of those that he has defined as University Based Retirement Communities, adjacent to campuses and popular with alumni, as well as non-alumni, who enjoy proximity to the intellectual and athletic activities. Among the most popular are those near Dartmouth, Oberlin, the University of Alabama, Penn State, Notre Dame, Stanford and Cornell.

At the height of the “affinity” boom, L.G.B.T.-assisted living communities and nursing homes were all the rage, seen as a solution to the shoddy treatment that those of different sexual orientations in the pre-Stonewall generation experienced in generic facilities. A few failed, most never got built and, by all accounts, the only one to survive is the pricy Rainbow Vision community in Sante Fe, N.M.

A handful of nudist elder communities, and ones for old hippies, also fell by the wayside, perhaps too free-spirited for the task. According to Mr. Carle, despite the odds, at least one group of RV enthusiasts has added an assisted-living component to what began as collections of transient elderly, looking only for a parking spot and necessary water and power hook-ups for their trailers. Native Americans have made a go of an assisted-living community in Montana, and Asians have done the same in Northern California.

But professional affinity communities, which I find most appealing, are few and far between.

The storied Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, a sliding-scale institution in the San Fernando Valley since 1940, survived near-closure in 2009 as a result of litigation, activism by the Screen Actors Guild and the local chapter of the Teamsters, and news media pressure. Among film legends who died there — along with cameramen, back-lot security guards and extras — were Mary Astor, Joel McCrea, Yvonne De Carlo and Stepin Fetchit.

New York State’s volunteer firefighters are all welcome to a refurbished facility in the Catskill region that offers far more in the way of care and activities, including a state-of-the-art gym, than when I visited there five years ago. At that time, the residents amused themselves by activating the fire alarm to summon the local hook and ladder company, which didn’t mind a bit.

Then there is Nalcrest, the retirement home for unionized letter carriers. Even as post offices nationwide are preparing to eliminate Saturday service, and snail mail becomes an artifact, the National Association of Letter Carriers holds monthly fees around the $500 mark, is located in central Florida so its members no longer have to brave rain and sleet to complete their appointed rounds, and bans dogs, the bane of their existence.

So why not aged journalists? We surely have war stories to embroider as we rock on the porch. Perhaps a mimeograph machine to produce an old-fashioned, dead-tree newspaper, which some of us will miss once it has given way to Web sites like this one. Pneumatic tubes, one colleague suggested, to whisk our belongings upstairs when we can no longer carry them. Other colleagues wondered about welcoming both editors and reporters. How can these two groups, which some consider natural adversaries, complain about each others’ tin ears or missed deadlines if we’re not segregated?

I disagree. The joy of this profession is its collaboration. We did the impossible day after day when young. We belong together when old.

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Detroit Car Sales Climb Again

General Motors reported a 7 percent gain in auto sales in the United States in February, beating several analyst estimates on the strength of its crossover models and pickup trucks, while Detroit rival Ford Motor Co. posted a slightly weaker-than-expected 9.0 percent gain.

G.M. sold 224,314 cars and trucks last month. Sales of its Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks jumped nearly 30 percent, while its Chevrolet Equinox midsize crossover rose 16 percent.

G.M., the largest Detroit automaker, also predicted that the overall auto industry’s sales rate this month would be 15.5 million, better than the 15.1 million sales rate expected by economists polled by Thomson Reuters.

Ford said its American auto sales rose to 195,822 cars and trucks in February. The No. 2 automaker reported a 21 percent gain in sales of its crossover and sport-utility vehicles while its F-Series trucks saw a 15.3 percent gain.

But Ford’s car sales rose 6.4 percent, hurt by a 11 percent drop in the Focus compact car and a 9 percent drop in the Fiesta subcompact. Trucks overall, including the E-Series and heavy trucks, rose 3.6 percent during the month.

Chrysler Group, the third-largest Detroit automaker, said its United States sales rose 4 percent to 139,015 in February, slightly less than some analysts expected. Volkswagen’s American unit posted a 2.9 percent increase to 31,456 vehicle sales.

Auto sales each month are an early indicator of the consumer spending. Industry sales in February were expected to show a fourth straight month of seasonally adjusted annualized sales above 15 million vehicles, for the first time since early 2008, a sign of a sustained recovery after the recession.

Chrysler estimated the month will finish at 15.5 million, including medium and heavy trucks, which typically add 300,000 vehicles to the monthly sales rate.

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At War Blog: Group Seeks Out and Helps Homeless Veterans

Combat zones exist in many different places. For Joe Leal, the founder of the Vet Hunters Project, an all-volunteer group of veterans who have made it their mission to track down homeless comrades, the battlefield is a lone soldier living in his truck in the wake of a home foreclosure, or a veteran living in a dark, deafening homeless encampment secreted under a freeway.

“You know the expression ‘never leave the fallen behind’?” Mr. Leal said one recent afternoon, barreling down the highway in his typical style after spending the morning on the phone calming a distraught vet. “Homelessness is the equivalent of leaving a buddy on the battlefield. They’re heroes in the shadows.”

The group, which takes an aggressive “911 attitude” to homelessness, fans out to America’s forgotten places — bridge underpasses, dry river beds, bus stop shelters, even the concrete pads of subdivision houses that were never built. Started in 2010, the “vetwork,” as Mr. Leal likes to call it, now has 20 chapters around the country, with 113 active volunteers in California alone, who subsidize the work out of their own pockets. In an article Thursday, I write about the project’s work to with homeless female veterans, who are going without housing at higher rates than male veterans.

Among the ranks of the project’s volunteers are military families with spare housing and deployed soldiers who make their empty homes available to homeless vets while they are away.

Mr. Leal, who is something of a human Eveready battery, started the project in memory of his friend Master Sgt. Kelly Bolor, who was killed in action in Iraq in 2003. He and Mr. Leal served together in Iraq, where Sgt. Bolor, who was of Hawaiian descent, “would pull out his ukulele and sing to us when we were down,” Mr. Leal recalled.

Mr. Leal has had his own brush with homelessness, living in shelters with his family as a child — often separated due to restrictions on children — and then in public housing in Ontario, outside Los Angeles. “I watched my father do his best to make sure everything was O.K.,” Mr. Leal said of David Jimenez, the stepfather who raised him. Mr. Jimenez was killed by a hit-and-run driver when Mr. Leal was 25 years old.

Mr. Leal orchestrates much of the project out of the 115th Combat Service Support Battalion in South El Monte, where he is a reservist. “Soldiers won’t tell you their problems,” Master Sgt. Barry Marshall observed of the challenges of reaching homeless veterans. “It’s suck it up and drive on.”

Although the project encourages homeless veterans to seek help with the Department of Veterans Affairs, it can act on a moment’s notice, Mr. Leal said, because he and his cohorts have established relationships with city and county agencies serving the homeless as well as community organizations.

When the husband of one of their clients, Monica Figueroa, returned from multiple deployments, including Afghanistan and two tours in Iraq, the couple wound up homeless, living with their son amid oil and solvents in an auto-body shop owned by his family. They called Mr. Leal, who found them an apartment through Inland Temporary Homes, a community organization in San Bernardino that provides temporary housing and support services for homeless families.

First Sgt. Steve Kreider, now a reserve adviser stationed at the Middletown, Conn., Reserve Center, was one the project’s first volunteers. He participated in a cross-country bike ride in 2011 that was a fact-finding mission and an effort to raise public awareness. “That really opened up our eyes,” Sergeant Kreider said. “You think this only happens in New York or Los Angeles. But when you get to Kansas and see a homeless vet, you realize ‘holy moly,’ this is a bigger problem. It’s a travesty.”

The project helps out with official homeless counts, including one for the state of Connecticut and another for greater Los Angeles. In a count in Connecticut last February, accomplished with the help of 70 cadet volunteers from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, the group located 25 homeless veterans. “They often won’t have a photo I.D.,” Sergeant Kreider observes. “But if you ask them for their DD214, their honorable discharge order, 90 percent of the time they’ll have it. It’s a matter of pride.”

Thus far, the project is financed by the volunteers themselves, operating on a budget of some $50,000. Mr. Leal has about 2,000 volunteers and counting, enlisting even nonveterans living in homeless encampments in the cause. The group will sometimes intervene with car payments, traffic tickets, medication and other aspects of daily life that can sometimes become tipping points into homelessness.

“We don’t accept defeat, ma’am,” he explained after a characteristically long day in the field. “That’s not an option.”

Related Story: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home

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Rodman tells Kim Jong Un he has 'friend for life'

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman met North Korea's Kim Jong Un on Thursday on the third day of his improbable journey to Pyongyang, telling the leader "You have a friend for life," a delegation spokesman said.

Rodman and Kim sat side by side at an exhibition game in Pyongyang, chatting as they watched players from North Korea and the U.S. play on mixed teams, Alex Detrick, a spokesman for the New York-based VICE media company, told The Associated Press.

Kim, a diehard basketball fan, told Rodman he hoped the visit would break the ice between the United States and North Korea, Detrick said. Kim later invited the Americans to dinner.

The encounter makes Rodman the most high-profile American to meet with the young North Korean leader since Kim took power in December 2011, and takes place against a backdrop of tension between Washington and Pyongyang.

North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test just two weeks ago, making clear the provocative act was aimed at sending a warning to the United States to drop what it considers a "hostile" policy toward the North. The two countries fought each other during the Korean War, and do not have diplomatic relations.

Rodman arrived in Pyongyang on Monday with three members of the professional Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, VICE correspondent Ryan Duffy and a VICE production crew to shoot a documentary for a new HBO TV series.

The surprise visit by the flamboyant Hall of Famer known as "The Worm" makes him an unlikely ambassador at a time when North Koreans are girding for battle with the U.S. Just last week, Kim guided frontline troops in military exercises.

The Korean War ended in a truce in 1953, and the two foes never signed a peace treaty.

Thursday's game in a packed gymnasium ended in a 110-110 draw, with two Americans playing on each team alongside North Koreans, Detrick said.

After the game, Rodman addressed Kim in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands of North Koreans, telling him, "You have a friend for life," Detrick said.

The leader later plied the group with liquor, according to VICE TV producer Jason Mojica.

"Um ... so Kim Jong Un just got the (hash)VICEonHBO crew wasted ... no really, that happened," Mojica wrote on his Twitter feed from Pyongyang.

Duffy later invited Kim to visit the United States, a proposal met with hearty laughter from the North Korean leader, Detrick said.

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Follow AP's Korea bureau chief Jean Lee at twitter.com/newsjean.

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Phys Ed: What Housework Has to Do With Waistlines

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

One reason so many American women are overweight may be that we are vacuuming and doing laundry less often, according to a new study that, while scrupulously even-handed, is likely to stir controversy and emotions.

The study, published this month in PLoS One, is a follow-up to an influential 2011 report which used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine that, during the past 50 years, most American workers began sitting down on the job. Physical activity at work, such as walking or lifting, almost vanished, according to the data, with workers now spending most of their time seated before a computer or talking on the phone. Consequently, the authors found, the average American worker was burning almost 150 fewer calories daily at work than his or her employed parents had, a change that had materially contributed to the rise in obesity during the same time frame, especially among men, the authors concluded.

But that study, while fascinating, was narrow, focusing only on people with formal jobs. It overlooked a large segment of the population, namely a lot of women.

“Fifty years ago, a majority of women did not work outside of the home,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and lead author of the new study.

So, in collaboration with many of the authors of the earlier study of occupational physical activity, Dr. Archer set out to find data about how women had once spent their hours at home and whether and how their patterns of movement had changed over the years.

He found the information he needed in the American Heritage Time Use Study, a remarkable archive of “time-use diaries” provided by thousands of women beginning in 1965. Because Dr. Archer wished to examine how women in a variety of circumstances spent their time around the house, he gathered diaries from both working and non-employed women, starting with those in 1965 and extending through 2010.

He and his colleagues then pulled data from the diaries about how many hours the women were spending in various activities, how many calories they likely were expending in each of those tasks, and how the activities and associated energy expenditures changed over the years.

As it turned out, their findings broadly echoed those of the occupational time-use study. Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.

Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.

More striking, the diary entries showed, women at home were now spending far more hours sitting in front of a screen. In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television. (Home computers weren’t invented yet.)

By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week. In essence, women had exchanged time spent in active pursuits, like vacuuming, for time spent being sedentary.

In the process, they had also greatly reduced the number of calories that they typically expended during their hours at home. According to the authors’ calculations, American women not employed outside the home were burning about 360 fewer calories every day in 2010 than they had in 1965, with working women burning about 132 fewer calories at home each day in 2010 than in 1965.

“Those are large reductions in energy expenditure,” Dr. Archer said, and would result, over the years, in significant weight gain without reductions in caloric intake.

What his study suggests, Dr. Archer continued, is that “we need to start finding ways to incorporate movement back into” the hours spent at home.

This does not mean, he said, that women — or men — should be doing more housework. For one thing, the effort involved is such activities today is less than it once was. Using modern, gliding vacuum cleaners is less taxing than struggling with the clunky, heavy machines once available, and thank goodness for that.

Nor is more time spent helping around the house a guarantee of more activity, over all. A telling 2012 study of television viewing habits found that when men increased the number of hours they spent on housework, they also greatly increased the hours they spent sitting in front of the TV, presumably because it was there and beckoning.

Instead, Dr. Archer said, we should start consciously tracking what we do when we are at home and try to reduce the amount of time spent sitting. “Walk to the mailbox,” he said. Chop vegetables in the kitchen. Play ball with your, or a neighbor’s, dog. Chivvy your spouse into helping you fold sheets. “The data clearly shows,” Dr. Archer said, that even at home, we need to be in motion.

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DealBook: As Losses Mount, R.B.S. Unveils Plan to Sell Assets

LONDON – The Royal Bank of Scotland, hammered by losses, announced plans on Thursday to sell assets and pare back its investment banking business, in an effort to appease regulators and its biggest shareholder, the British government.

R.B.S. said it planned to sell a stake in the Citizens Financial Group, the American lender it bought in 1988, through an initial public offering in two years. The bank will also continue to reduce its investment banking operations, with plans to cut risky assets and eliminate jobs.

The moves are designed to help bolster the bank’s capital levels and refocus its operations, part of a multiyear turnaround effort initiated by its chief executive, Stephen Hester. In the end, R.B.S. will emerge a much smaller bank, largely focused on Britain.

“R.B.S. is four years into its recovery plan,” Mr. Hester said in a statement, “and good progress has been made. We are a much smaller, more focused and stronger bank. Our target is for 2013 to be the last big year of restructuring.”

Like many rivals, R.B.S. is struggling with the legacy of the financial crisis and a spate of legal issues. On Thursday, it reported a bigger-than-expected loss, in part tied to its legal troubles.

The bank, in which the British government holds an 82 percent stake after a bailout in 2008, posted a net loss of £5.97 billion ($9 billion) in 2012, much larger than the £2 billion loss recorded in 2011. Analysts had been expecting a loss of £5.1 billion. For the last quarter of 2012, R.B.S. reported a £2.6 billion loss, up from a £1.8 billion loss in the period a year earlier.

The rising losses reflect the bank’s regulatory and legal problems.

R.B.S. said on Thursday that it had set aside an additional £1.1 billion to compensate clients to which it improperly sold insurance products, bringing the total provision to £2.2 billion. It also estimated it would have to pay £700 million to compensate small businesses to which it improperly sold some interest-rate hedging products.

The bank agreed this year to pay $612 million to British and American authorities to settle accusations of rate-rigging. Since then, Mr. Hester has promised to tighten controls at the bank to limit the risk of future rate manipulation.

The head of R.B.S.’s investment banking division, John Hourican, resigned at the beginning of February as a result of the scandal related to manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. The bank plans to pay its fine with money clawed back from bonuses.

‘‘Along with the rest of the banking industry we faced significant reputational challenges,’’ Mr. Hester said in the statement. ‘‘We are determined to overcome the cultural and reputational baggage of precrisis times with the same focus we have applied to the financial cleanup from that era.’’

Eager to get back some of the £45.5 billion it invested in R.B.S., the British government recently increased pressure on the bank’s management to speed up the reorganization.

Some analysts said the government could start selling parts of its investment in the bank, even at a loss, before the next general election, which is set for 2015. R.B.S.’s shares are still trading at about half what the government paid for them in 2008. Some lawmakers said they would favor handing out shares to the public instead of a possible sale of the stake on the open market.

Richard Hunter, head of equities at Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers, said there were signs that Mr. Hester’s efforts to turn around the bank had started to pay off, but that “the ongoing absence of a dividend and overhang of the government stake are negatives which need to be resolved.”

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Lens Blog: The Largely Unknown Photography of Lola Álvarez Bravo

The year 2007 was a pretty good one for rediscovering long-forgotten images in Mexico. Most people already know about Robert Capa’s Mexican suitcase, a trove of his work from the Spanish Civil War. But that same year an unknown archive of vintage prints by Mexico’s greatest photographers was also discovered, left behind in the longtime home of Lola Álvarez Bravo.

The find, known as the Gonzalez-Rendon archive, had prints and original photomontages by Lola, as well as some beautifully printed images by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, to whom she had been married for several years. The find also included work by some of Lola’s students who had gone on to become noted photographers, Mariana Yampolsky and Raul Conde, among them.

Though overshadowed by her more famous partner, who had resisted her foray into photography, Lola ranks among Mexico’s most celebrated photographers, having done portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals as well as work among the indigenous and poor, whom she portrayed with a sense of compassion and social criticism. Her images provide a window in what she — a working photographer and teacher most of her life — valued as an artistic statement.

“It’s what an art historian dreams about, finding the missing pieces,” said James Oles, a lecturer at Wellesley College who was among the first to inspect the images in Mexico. “The material fleshes out some aspects of her work, giving us original titles and dates that radically change the meaning and interpretation of a work of art. And the original photomontages give an idea how she created them.”

Adriana Zavala, an associate professor of Latin American Art at Tufts University, was also among those who got an early look at the trove, which she now thinks consisted of things Lola forget she even had. Since then, she and Rachael Arauz, a specialist in modernist photography, have curated three exhibitions drawn from the archive, including a show that will begin in late March at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz., which will combine the more recent finds with previously held vintage work.

“It was like the Antiques Roadshow when we found this stuff, went through it carefully and got an opportunity to understand Lola in an ‘unauthorized’ way,” Ms. Zavala said. “This allows us to talk about the encounter between the two different bodies of material.”

Born Dolores Concepcion Martinez in 1903, she grew up in a wealthy family, although she had to move in with relatives when her father died. She first met Manuel in her youth, marrying him in 1925. As an accountant, he was sent to work in Oaxaca, where the couple began to take pictures, Mr. Oles wrote in the recently-published catalog, “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era,” which he edited and which also includes essays by Ms. Arauz and Ms. Zavala.

The area’s poverty struck her, and it elicited a compassion in her work that was different from her husband’s more complex images.

“Lola was maybe a little more natural,” Mr. Oles said. “She was interested in more candid and less intrusive images. She was certainly more interested in people than things.”

The couple separated in 1934, divorcing in 1949. Throughout, she kept his name and did not remarry. She supported herself as a photographer working for government agencies, as well as teaching, where she influenced many.

“I think Lola was a remarkable photographer, especially given all the challenges she faced,” said Elizabeth Ferrer, who published “Lola Álvarez Bravo” with Aperture. “There were women artists, though women were not supposed to be working in the street but in the studio. But the kind of photography done at the time involved a greater public interface, and the fact that she did that showed her incredible strength and desire to photograph the world around her.”

Although she found her own path apart from her more famous husband — she was more gregarious, enjoying the company of artists, writers and intellectuals — work and circumstance worked against her. It was not until the 1980s, Mr. Oles said, that her work as an artist came to the fore.

Mr. Oles visited her in the early 1990s, around the time when the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona acquired an archive of her work. Lola was moved by her son to another apartment, and she died in 1993.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Oles got a call from a museum in Mexico City. Relatives of one of Lola’s friends, who had bought her old apartment, had been safeguarding several boxes that had been left behind. One of them had taken the time to preserve and order the prints.

“She didn’t sell anything or have it framed in her apartment, but just organized it,” Mr. Oles said. “When I went there, it was amazing. It showed what had been separated at some time by Lola, and God knows when or why, there were a lot of her own photos. Many were by students of hers as well as a group of extraordinary vintage photos by Manuel Álvarez Bravo.”

Her photos — including some vintage prints that were exhibited in Philadelphia in 1943 — shed new light on her work. In some cases, original titles gave new meaning to old images. One shot of an indigenous woman seated against a wrought-iron fence that had long been titled “By the Fault of Others” turned out to have “Death Penalty” (Slide 6) as its original title.

“That changes how we interpret this photo of this woman who looks trapped by this grille,” Mr. Oles said. “You can go into the archive of any major photographer and find images they never printed and exhibit them after their death without knowing what they mean. Finding this material tells us these are the photos she chose which she thought were the key images that she was interested in during that era.”

While her photomontages are well known, the archive has the originals, which she made by gluing together cut-out images she would later photograph for the final montage.

“In Mexico, photomontage was mainly a strategy of media and advertising, not an artistic project,” Mr. Oles said. “What Lola was trying to do was elevate it to the realm of high art and view it as equivalent to muralism. The multiple perspectives of photomontage and the fragmented images resolved into a whole are what a muralist like Diego Rivera does when he shows multiple perspectives of a factory and resolving them together. Lola understood that.”

Among the greatest finds in the archive are works by her students. Even in death, though, Lola’s own images prove to affect a current generation. Mr. Oles said her photos of prostitutes, titled “Triptych of the Martyrs,” has a powerful element of feminist criticism.

“Their faces are obscured with wound-like shadows,” he said. “There is this undercurrent of social critique. Whenever my students see those pictures, they are moved sometimes to the point of tears. I don’t think any of Manuel Álvarez Bravos’s photos move them to tears.”

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The exhibit “Lola Álvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era” will be on view at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson from March 30 through June 23.

Follow @dgbxny and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 27, 2013

An earlier version of this post incorrectly implied that James Oles was the author of "Lola Alvarez Bravo and the Photography of an Era." He edited the catalog, though he also contributed an essay.

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Minnesota takes down No. 1 Indiana 77-73

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Retaining that No. 1 national ranking has been elusive throughout this wild season in college basketball, and Indiana was the latest to lose at the top — again.

Most important and maybe more challenging for the Hoosiers, however, is holding on to first place in the tough-as-ever Big Ten.

Trevor Mbakwe had 21 points on 8-for-10 shooting and 12 rebounds to help Minnesota take down top-ranked Indiana 77-73 on Tuesday night, the seventh time the No. 1 team in the Associated Press poll has lost this season. Three of those losses were by the Hoosiers, who were No. 1 when they fell to Butler and Wisconsin earlier this season. All three opponents were unranked at the time.

Indiana (24-4, 12-3) has held the No. 1 ranking for 10 of the 17 polls by the AP this season, including the last four, and that will likely change next week. But fending off Michigan, Michigan State and Wisconsin is what's on the minds of the Hoosiers, who'll take a one-game lead in the conference race into Saturday's game against Iowa.

"Winning the Big Ten was going to be tough whether we won today or lost," said star guard Victor Oladipo, who had 16 points. "We knew it was going to be tough from the jump. Now it's even tougher. But I think my team is ready for it. We just have to go back and see what we did wrong and correct it."

Andre Hollins added 16 points for the Gophers (19-9, 7-8), who outrebounded Cody Zeller and the Hoosiers by a whopping 44-30 and solidified their slipping NCAA tournament hopes with an emphatic performance against the conference leader. The fired-up fans swarmed the court as the last seconds ticked off, the first time that's happened here since a 2002 win over Indiana.

"There were just too many times when that first shot went up and they were there before we were because we didn't get into their bodies," Hoosiers coach Tom Crean said. "We weren't physical enough on the glass. That's the bottom line."

Zeller, the second-leading shooter in the Big Ten, went 2 for 9. He had nine points with four turnovers. Minnesota had 40 points in the paint to Indiana's 22.

Mbakwe, a sixth-year senior, had a lot to do with that. While positing his conference-leading seventh double-double of the season, the 24-year-old Mbakwe was a man among boys in many ways in this game, dominating both ends of the court when the Gophers needed him most. He grabbed six of Minnesota's 23 offensive rebounds, two of them to keep a key possession alive. His off-balance put-back drew contact for a three-point play with 7:22 left that gave the Gophers a 55-52 lead.

Mbakwe was called for a loudly questioned blocking foul, his fourth, with 4:39 remaining on Zeller's fast-break layup and free throw that put the Hoosiers up 59-58. But Austin Hollins answered with a pump-fake layup that drew a foul for a three-point play and a two-point advantage for the Gophers.

The Hoosiers didn't lead again, and Joe Coleman's fast-break dunk with 2:35 left gave Minnesota a 68-61 cushion that helped it withstand a couple of 3-pointers by Christian Watford and one by Jordan Hulls in the closing minutes. That was the only basket Hulls made after halftime. He had 17 points.

"Just the way we bounced back is unbelievable. We showed that we can beat one of the best teams in the country. Now we have to build off this," said Mbakwe, whose team lost eight of its previous 11 games starting with an 88-81 loss at Indiana on Jan. 12. The Gophers were ranked eighth then. They didn't even receive a vote in the current poll. That could change next week.

The Hoosiers are still in position for their first outright Big Ten regular-season championship since 1993. With another home game against Ohio State on March 5, Indiana could still clinch the title before the finale at Michigan on March 10.

For now, though, the Hoosiers have to regroup and re-establish their inside game after the trampling in the post they endured here.

"They were relentless on the glass. We just didn't do a great job of boxing them out," Oladipo said.

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Follow Dave Campbell on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/DaveCampbellAP

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