High Anxiety

"Show business today is fast food cooked by anxious people," says producer Richard Zanuck. How do the Hollywood players handle the pressure? The 15th in Times Staff Writer Paul Rosenfield's continuing series, "The Rites of Hollywood." The psychiatrist had a confession to make. "You have no idea," said Dr. Irwin Ruben of Beverly Hills, "the pressure put on doctors by the movie industry.

Baby boomers are in a state of stress, with half unsure of their retirement prospects and the vast majority blaming political gridlock for damaging their economic security, according to interest group AARP. Nearly half of voters ages 50 to 64 who have yet to retire say they're dissatisfied with their financial situation, AARP found in a recent survey . A majority believe the economic downturn will shrink their retirement savings, forcing them to rely more on Social Security and Medicare.

Baby boomers are in a state of stress, with half unsure of their retirement prospects and the vast majority blaming political gridlock for damaging their economic security, according to interest group AARP. Nearly half of voters ages 50 to 64 who have yet to retire say they're dissatisfied with their financial situation, AARP found in a recent survey . A majority believe the economic downturn will shrink their retirement savings, forcing them to rely more on Social Security and Medicare.

Workers at a crippled Japanese nuclear plant said they succeeded in connecting two reactors to the power grid Sunday, raising the possibility it could restore vital cooling systems to the overheated facilities. The glimmer of progress came on a day police miraculously rescued an elderly woman and her teenage grandson trapped under rubble for nine days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami leveled their home. But fears are emerging about radiation contamination in Japan's food supplies.

Roller-coaster fanatics call it "air time" or "full gonzo." It's that millisecond of panic, the blank fear that strikes when you go weightless from negative G-forces or plummet with blurry velocity. There is also the matter of nausea. A high-speed corkscrew or double loop-to-loop is likely to leave you queasy. "That's a normal inner-ear reaction," says one rider. Magic Mountain has built its reputation on providing such experiences.

Dear Cynthia: I had a dream that I was in an elevator that would suddenly drop as if it were about to crash all the way down, and then stabilize. Then it would start plummeting down again, only to halt and stabilize for what seems like seconds. I woke up before the elevator crashed, but in my dream I knew that it was eventually going to crash. I remember being terrified and hoping the elevator would crash once and for all so that it would stop.

In the course of a dozen years on movie sets, Annie Coe learned first-hand how stressful filmmaking can be. She saw the toll that long hours and unpredictability took both on herself and on her 15-year relationship with a local filmmaker.

Do you panic when confronted by a coffee maker that thinks? Do you wish talking gadgets would just shut up? You may be suffering from technophobia. Technophobes don't care about interactive megachannel TV or the Information Highway--a computer network that will someday link everything to everything.

Mexicans dread the sixth and final year of a presidential administration. These are the years when currency devaluations wipe out life savings and huge sums of money disappear from government coffers. Constitutionally forbidden to seek reelection, lame-duck presidents feel the near-imperial power that they have exercised for more than five years slipping away.

Everybody's favorite new technology, virtual reality, now has yet another potential application: treating behavioral disorders. A team of computer scientists and clinical psychologists at Georgia Tech has used virtual reality to help people with acrophobia reduce their fear of heights.

Dania Leon's portfolio has surged 55% during the stock market's booming rally over the six last months -- and she couldn't be more nervous. After suffering deep losses last year, the 41-year-old Pasadena resident is grateful to recoup some of her money. But she fears that stock prices have shot up far more than is warranted given the country's still-weak economy and nearly double-digit unemployment rate. "I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared," Leon said. "Why are we up, especially with unemployment as high as it is?

It's been three weeks since the nominations were announced. The champagne has been popped, the flowers sent. For most of those nominated, it's back to business as usual. But for those actors who've earned their first Emmy nomination, something new is settling in: nerves. That's what The Envelope is here for. We talked with some of those nervous newbies and then gathered tips from those who've survived TV's most exciting night. Don't thank us now, do it from the stage holding your trophy.

A hodgepodge crowd gathers here twice a week for handouts just steps from City Hall and an empty kosher deli. Outside the local food pantry snakes a line of Guatemalans wearing court-ordered ankle monitors, imported workers from the Pacific island of Palau and unemployed town natives -- almost all there because of a dramatic raid that has left a deep mark in the way the U.S. views and deals with illegal immigration.

Wedding photographer Pogos Kuregyan has lowered his prices. FedEx aircraft inspector Dan Wallace is dealing with a salary cut and a retirement fund that's lost half its value. Though prices are down for food, housing, energy and clothing, they can't buy much, because they're living on less. After years of worrying about inflation, some economists fear the opposite could soon happen: deflation, an extended period of falling prices that indicates the economy is in a backward spiral.

For investors, stocks look like bad karma: Wall Street again starts a week with oil prices at their highest levels yet, and banks poised to reveal that they remain on shaky footing. None of the troubles that have rocked the market over the last year have let up yet -- not the housing market, not high commodity costs, not the ailing financial system. "We've got a fistful of drivers that are working against the market," said Arthur Hogan, chief market analyst at Jefferies & Co.

Hussain Attar-Bashi watched the American-led invasion of Iraq on live TV, his illegal satellite dish hidden by cloth strategically draped across the roof of his home. Five years later, Iraqi laws restricting access to foreign television and the Internet are long gone, and Attar-Bashi is among those riding a communications revolution that has swept the country.

Six weeks after the Northridge earthquake, Maggie Burns still sits up in her Simi Valley home all night, every night, wrestling a dilemma: In the next quake, which of her two children will she rescue first? No answer comes by morning light, so she drops her guard just enough for the half-sleep of a brief catnap.

Hands nesting PalmPilots, ears adhered to cell phones, eyes locked on computer screens--these are common enough sights in Southern California. From looking around this privileged corner of the universe, you might conclude that our relationship to technology has already been consummated. It's intimate, passionate, committed and seemingly long-term.

Like many Americans, Steve Kriegsfeld has been watching his life savings bounce up and down each time the stock market takes a dramatic turn. Lately, it's the drops that have grabbed his attention. In just one day last week, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 465 points before partially recovering. It is down nearly 6% since Jan. 1. "Does it concern me when it goes down?

Say what you will about society's shallow preoccupation with physical appearance, no one can accuse us of not sweating the details. Never was this more clear to me than a few years ago, when I visited a "laser spa" at a dermatologist's office in the hope of lightening a small (and, in retrospect, inconsequential) scar on my knee.