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As a candidate, Barack Obama heralded his stance against racial profiling. As president … well, he's not publicizing his position like he was last fall.

In the dutiful copying of "Issues" pages from campaign-centric barackobama.com to the newly austere whitehouse.gov, pretty much everything made it over intact. So a before-and-after comparison of this item is curious: In his "Urban Policy" agenda, the section on ending racial profiling is absent from whitehouse.gov.

The pledge to ban racial profiling survives—just in a different part of the Web site. It's part of the "Civil Rights Agenda," which includes a whole new "Support for the LGBT Community" addition. I wonder what John McCain and Sarah Palin would have made of Obama's newly prominent support for gay adoption and elimination of "don't ask, don't tell"?* (Then again, maybe I'm being too cynical. It's entirely possible that these agenda items came about only because of the whole Rick Warren inauguration kerfuffle.)

Meanwhile, now that the Obama team must comply with federal privacy requirements at whitehouse.gov, it's curious to note changes to the site's privacy policy. In particular, apparently YouTube now has an exemption from long-standing federal prohibitions on cookies. Pretty lucky for Google, I suppose: We assume that the Obama administration won't, therefore, go along with European Union efforts to put a stop to these persistent cookies? Hmm.

Overall, the bland new whitehouse.gov site, adult and oh-so-serious, is expectedly disappointing. Even the archival Bush bio is more enamoring than the official Obama page. And it's not just that hint of Texan stubble; in Obama's photo, he looks like he's Employee #29137 at LAX Terminal 3.

Indeed, how to follow up on the vaguely messianic barackobama.com or its freewheelin', anything-goes twin, my.barackobama.com? And while the transition site, change.gov, had a more formal veneer, it still had wild-and-crazy "open government" apps like the "Citizen's Briefing Room." There, the most popular proposals included decriminalizing pot and online poker, re-evaluating aid to Israel, ending the "truth embargo on Extraterrestrials," and eliminating the tax-exempt status on the Church of Scientology. (Wait, aren't those last two at odds?)

It's perhaps not unexpected that this sort of fantastical "citizen involvement" is completely absent from the new whitehouse.gov. And, sadly, the blog at the new site is nothing more than a press release machine: boring, byline-less announcements with nary a crazy comment. Bizarrely, though, you still have a parallel blog happening at the campaign site: each entry with hundreds of comments.

Yes, Obama has been afforded some leeway with his BlackBerry. But his remarkable and game-changing online presence during the campaign has probably been crushingly and dully overhauled.

Clarification, Jan. 28, 2009: A previous version of this article stated that Obama's support for gay adoption and elmination of "don't ask, don't tell" had been "newly articulated" on his White House Web site. The language supporting these issues is the same as on Obama's campaign site, but the statements are now included as part of the "civil rights agenda" on the White House site, whereas on the campaign's site they were part of a blog about lesbian and gay issues. (Return to the revised sentence.)

With sexual perversion, what we make of it may be less critical than where we locate it. For much of the last century, deviance occupied the core of human psychology. For Freud, the Oedipus complex or its female equivalent shaped personality; everyone was incestuous. In the course of development, children were aroused by a variety of body parts. Inevitably, quirky desires lingered into adulthood. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud concluded that no healthy person "can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim." That normal aim was genital and heterosexual—Freud lurched between avant- and arrière-garde when it came to homosexuality. Unusual sexual drives were of great theoretical import, since they offered clues to the nature of the unconscious as it metamorphosed across the life cycle.

Today, we simply don't believe that science will uncover a Rosetta stone that translates sexual idiosyncrasy into truths about who we are as a species. Modern science reads odd compulsions as mere idiosyncrasy, glitches resulting from inheritance or environment that signal only damage or else particular solutions to particular developmental problems. As a result, perversions are back in the side show, a collection of curiosities at psychology's fringe. Scattered researchers still dedicate their careers to studying sexual aberrations, but the findings are likewise scattered: fragments of information about genetics, brain functioning, and cognition.

Yet the topic still fascinates, both because perversion is uncanny and because it is not alien to us. In The Other Side of Desire, Daniel Bergner, a journalist who has written well-received books about Sierra Leone's civil war and Louisiana's Angola prison, approaches deviance with a reporter's notepad. He selects four areas: foot fetishism, sadomasochism, pedophilia, and an obsession for amputees. In each case, he finds and follows a devotee. In the process, Bergner does what science cannot: He illuminates peculiar longings. His method is at first descriptive and finally poetic. The message of the book is in the interplay among personal narratives that prove alternately bizarre and mundane.

Surely the oddest of Bergner's topics is attraction to amputees. The exemplar is Ron, who from age 5 has felt the appeal of women with misshapen and missing legs. An advertising man, Ron photographs cripples in his spare time. Psychotherapy has helped Ron, and the useful therapist was one who found no harm in Ron's pursuing what he loved.

In time, Ron courts Laura, who lost both her legs when an automobile ran over her. Before the accident, Laura had aspirations to become a psychiatrist and, later, a fashion model. With Ron's help, she approximates her dreams, posing for porn magazines (for readers who share Ron's tastes) and counseling the mentally ill. Ron's enthusiasm for Laura is expressed in conventional terms: "And like the cherry on the cake is that she's a double amputee, which brings me such happiness and pleasure and joy." Obscure lust leads to domestic bliss. At times, Ron seems to see his obsession as a virtue, since it has served to restore Laura's self-esteem. Of the couple's meeting, he says, "It sounds kind of silly, but she was a bud about to bloom."

In contrast, the man Bergner calls Jacob is tortured by his erotic attraction to women's feet. Often what makes a symptom is less the nature of a wish or belief than the manner in which it is held. Jacob experiences his longings as pathology and is tortured by them. The mere mention of feet arouses him. Of weather forecasts, he complains, "Imagine if snowfall was measured in breasts and you were the only man with that sick desire." Jacob has found a psychiatrist, Fred Berlin, who agrees that perversions must be brought under control. Berlin prescribes Jacob a drug that suppresses male sex hormones. His fixation muted, Jacob runs a therapy group for men with mood disorders. Jacob is married, but his shame is such that he never tells his wife of his proclivities.

What makes our attention oscillate between these narratives is the focus on feet. Why is passion for their absence preferable to lust in their presence? Perhaps the sickness in deviance lies not in the object of desire but in the view of the self, as perverted rather than simply different.

Or perhaps it is merely medical authority that defines disease. In Bergner's deft sketches, the doctors he interviews seem as narrowly absorbed as their subjects. Of Berlin, who suppressed Jacob's foot fetish with libido-squelching drugs, Bergner writes, "[I]t sometimes seemed he was driven, consciously or not, to medicate aberrant lust out of Jacob's life."

Effectively, these paired sketches—of Ron, who (with professional help) takes pride in his fetish, and of Jacob, who subdues desire but holds onto the shame—divide the perversion problem in two. We may not know how deviance arises, but we can decide how we respond to it as a component of the self. Implicitly Bergner favors accommodation, making a virtue of necessity.

Of course, this approach works only for perversions that cause no harm. Bergner complicates the moral calculus by introducing Roy, who has touched his first wife's pubescent daughter sexually. (Here, too, the social surround is conventional: Roy is remarried to a woman who recalls, "One of the nicest things he ever said to me was that when he met me God was giving him a second chance.") Bergner does not ignore the contrast between pedophilia and perversions that lead to consensual sex; he sees molested children as victims. But in the context Bergner offers, the quality of Roy's obsession cannot seem especially strange. Judging by measures of penile engorgement, Bergner reports, normal heterosexual men are significantly "aroused by female pubescents and, less so but markedly, female children." Though Roy's actions are heinous where Ron's are harmless, Roy's desires are more mainstream than Ron's. Bergner seems to be asking what defines perversion—displaying deviance or causing injury.

But, then, injury has its complexities. The Baroness, a dominatrix, specializes in extreme pain—for example, roasting a man on a revolving spit one foot above glowing coals. A former theater costume designer and now an impresario of sadism, the Baroness is a true female paraphiliac, taking as much pleasure as she provides to her submissive subjects. (Often their service is mundane—vacuuming, for instance.) The Baroness has a fine empathic ear, anticipating her clients' needs and fulfilling them in vigorous fashion. She casts her calling in therapeutic and moral terms: "I have the power to change people. I get to do so much good." Like Bergner's other subjects, the Baroness enjoys a staid marriage to a man who proposed to her in the Rainbow Room between dances to the swing band.

Faced with the high drama of idiosyncratic lust, modern science speaks with a quiet, not to say confused, voice. There is still truth in Freud's claim that we all bear a touch of the perverse. Shown erotic videos, Bergner writes, women undergo "swift vaginal engorgement to images of all sorts of human sexual activity." Scenes of bonobo chimpanzees humping increase women's vaginal blood flow. But this equal-opportunity arousal is more in brain and body than in mind. Measures of genital response correspond poorly to women's reports of excitement. Evidently "what women want" is largely a cerebral matter, and on that level, convention rules. The Baroness notwithstanding, exceedingly few paraphiliacs are women.

Men's desires are more focused. Male homosexuality has a strong genetic component. (Less is known about female homosexuality, but the genetic contribution may be weaker.) Bonobo intercourse has no appeal for men. In general, the penis and the mind are in reasonable agreement; men recognize when they've been turned on. Part of what saves men from pedophilia is the very vigor of their sexuality; most men are strongly drawn to adult women, albeit in a promiscuous way. When asked what they visualize when they climax, few men say it's the partner they're with.

These disjointed observations raise more questions than they answer. If female arousal is more mind-based, shouldn't diverse experiences have led women, and not men, to seek out idiosyncratic love objects? If the penis rules cravings in men, why aren't more of them child molesters? The answer might be that socialization, judgment, and morality can corral desire; but then you would think that psychotherapy should be especially effective at redirecting pedophiles' leanings. Some of the doctors Bergner interviews do hold out this hope, but only drugs that blunt sex drive have a track record.

Given the limitations of science, resonant journalism may be the best way to approach paraphilia, and Bergner's book has a musical quality. The vignettes form a sequence of theme and variations, a counterpoint of exotic and banal in which outlandish longings alternate with bourgeois aspirations and bland uxoriousness. The juxtapositions give rise to a host of paradoxes and conundrums. Who provides true therapy, physicians or dominatrixes? As sexual beings, Ron and the Baronness are strangely constrained*; and outside the realm of their obsessions, they sound dull. At the same time, these two often seem freer, less bound by convention, more joyful, more aware of others' needs, and arguably nobler than the doctors intent on correcting deviance. Nor is the contrast with doctors only; after a century of Freudianism, how many of us refine this part of the self, the sexual, with the assiduousness of Bergner's happier subjects?

Finally, paraphilia bears on the central issue of human psychology, free will. We don't choose our desires, and our ability to redirect them is limited. Midway through the book, a sex researcher remembers wondering, in preadolescence, why people kiss. This question, which led to her career, remains unresolved. The normal is as puzzling as the perverse. What we cannot know about Ron, Roy, Jacob, and the Baroness is what we do not know about ourselves.

To read an excerpt from The Other Side of Desire, click here.

Correction, Jan. 30, 2009: This sentence mistakenly referred to Roy instead of Ron. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

House Republicans may have unanimously rejected Obama's stimulus bill, but the legislation passed anyway, thanks to an ample helping of Democrats in the House. So while the narrative yesterday was that Obama's hopes of bipartisan collusion in D.C. had fallen flat—for a measly five-point gain on our scale—the fact remains that the bill is moving rapidly toward passage. That, along with the president's first bill signing and signs of goodwill from Russia, amounts to a 45 on the Change-o-Meter.

While the stimulus bill is now headed to the Senate, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act today, which makes it easier to sue one's employer for salary discrimination. As the New York Times notes, the Bush White House opposed this bill, and its quick passage is certainly due to a party change in the White House. At the same time, passage of the law was no more bipartisan than the stimulus vote. Only three Republicans voted for this year's House version of the bill, which passed on Jan. 9, while five Republicans got onboard last week in the Senate.

Scoring a situation like this comes down to the age-old difference between "what" and "how." Much of Obama's rhetoric over the past two years has focused on repairing the tone and mechanics of Washington, and in that respect, there's very little sign that anything is changing yet on Capitol Hill. But as reader Dmitri Tymoczko wrote yesterday, "By defining 'change' as 'doing things that both Republicans and Democrats agree to' you are making it so that Republicans hold a veto power over Barack [Obama]'s ability to bring 'changes.' " Point taken, Dmitri. While bipartisanship will remain part of the narrative, is it not the sole lens by which one can evaluate change. The combination of the fair-pay act and a major step in stimulus legislation is good enough for 40 points.

To close out the day, Russia has reportedly delayed the placement of missiles in the Baltic Sea while it awaits signs from Washington on a U.S. plan to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe. "Analysts interpreted the move as a good will gesture toward new U.S. President Barack Obama," Reuters notes, though the Kremlin has not confirmed this news. While it's good for an extra five points, the situation remains delicate; if the United States backs off from its plans for the shield, the move could quickly sour relations with allies in Eastern Europe.

Today's announcement of another 74,000 lost jobs—and estimates that 500,000 will be lost this month—is another sign that the nation is staring into the maw of a crisis that is severely reluctant to budge. (If you're still reading, there's a little good news from home sales and money supply.) While this might fuel support for Obama's stimulus package, these ugly numbers are a reminder that the change Americans require most acutely is still in the distance. But stricter fuel efficiency standards and a few signs of public confidence in the new president offer the Change-o-Meter a little stimulus of its own, for a score today of 35 percent.

In the first Gallup poll since in the inauguration, 69 percent of respondents approve of the job Obama is doing, a near-record for the first week among post-World War II presidents and significantly higher than any president since Jimmy Carter. (George W. Bush posted numbers like that only between Sept. 11 and the early days of the Iraq War.) It's still too early to usher in a new era of confidence in government, but the notion of a president with any sort of appreciable public backing is good enough for a few ticks on the meter. As Michael A. Fletcher wrote in the Washington Post today, "In his first week in office, Obama is giving clear signs that he is willing to trade on his own popularity, personal suasion and loose-limbed ease in the spotlight to help him lead the nation."

Elsewhere in the different-from-Bush department, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider applications by 14 states to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks that are more stringent than the national standards. EPA regulators are expected to reverse the Bush administration's rejection of those applications. Last week, Lisa Jackson, Obama's choice for EPA administrator, placed the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions at the top of her to-do list. Obama's remarks today made another important mention of "sound science" as a cornerstone of environmental policy, echoing a similar statement in his inaugural address. As we mentioned in a recent chat about the Change-o-Meter, these major tonal shifts in a president's public statements are significant, even if action and legislation will always speak louder than words.

Abroad, the European Union indicated that it is willing to work with the United States to house freed detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison, though many details still need to be ironed out.

To round out the day, the New York Times notes that, unlike the pre-recorded radio addresses of presidents past, Obama is delivering his weekly chats via YouTube. Perhaps "Fireside Vlog" doesn't have the same folksy ring, but it certainly feels a little more 21^st-century.

As Slate's John Dickerson wrote this week, "It has always been hard to define bipartisanship in Washington." Partisanship, on the other hand, can seem pretty simple, particularly when it looks like this: every member of one party voting against nearly every member of the other. That's the political reality Barack Obama faces on an early bellwether vote in the House on his stimulus package. Only a postgame booze session at the White House saves the day from a whopping zero on the scale, for a score of five—out of 100—on the Change-o-Meter.

It's certainly possible that, in the final House vote on the stimulus bill, at least a few Republicans will get onboard with Obama. For now, however, the GOP is sending a clear signal to Obama that it is not cowed by his high approval ratings. Most of the early analysis suggests that it's as much tactical as it is philosophical. Obama has often decried this sort of canny political maneuvering, but his public efforts to court Republicans are, for now, looking fruitless. That said, the bill will probably pass the Democrat-controlled Congress. (Meanwhile, the House also shot down a proposal, which Obama supported, to delay the switch to all-digital TV signals.)

Assuming the stimulus bill does pass, the onus will be on the Obama administration to show that it is willing to make its contents clear and accessible, per its repeated promises of greater transparency and accountability. The Change-o-Meter was ready to award 10 points for recovery.gov, a site meant to do just that, but it had to subtract nine when we realized there was nothing on it. The other four points are awarded for the bipartisan cocktail party Obama is throwing for congressional leaders tonight, marking alcohol's triumphant return to the negotiating table at the White House.

There's a lot to cover, so we want to hear your thoughts on what the Change-o-Meter should be taking into account. No detail is too small or wonky. E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.

In an ostensible revamp of White House foreign policy, Obama selected an Arab television network to broadcast his first interview from the White House, his U.N. ambassador promised direct diplomacy with Iran, and, in connection with Middle East policy, he used the word listen in a sincere manner. But words can move the meter only so far, even when they have that "anything Bush can do, I can do differently" overtone. That message, some static from Biden, and more outreach to the congressional GOP notch a 30 on the Change-o-Meter.

The tone Obama struck in Monday's interview with Al-Aribiya TV represented a distinct departure from the rhetoric of the former president. But talk is just talk, and the interview wasn't totally devoid of his predecessor's trademark us-vs.-them speak: "I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down," Obama said at one point. But coupled with the remarks in his inaugural address that he directed toward the Muslim world, the symbolism of Obama giving his first foreign interview to an Arab TV network is hard to miss.

The administration's U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, talked, too—promising direct diplomacy with Iranian leaders once they suspend their uranium enrichment programs. Notes the BBC, "Under George W. Bush, there were no direct U.S. nuclear talks with Iran." Meanwhile, the administration also announced the deployment of George J. Mitchell to the Middle East as a special listening envoy today.



But the New York Times discerns evidence from among Joe Biden's nondisclosures and harrumphing that indicates—sputter—military operations over Pakistan's border are not going to change. Yes, "the early signals suggest that Mr. Obama plans to keep up the military pressure" against Taliban and al-Qaida targets in Pakistan's border areas. Since Obama took office, continued attacks by Predator drones have been reported in the region.

On the domestic front, Obama is still struggling to curry Republican support for his stimulus package. He headed to the Capitol today to wax bipartisan some more. Republicans have so far treated his economic rescue legislation like green eggs and ham, while Obama tries to muster the persuasive power of Sam-I-Am. If Obama doesn't win GOP support, says the Los Angeles Times, "it could be a bad omen for his efforts to build bipartisan coalitions on even more divisive issues, such as healthcare and energy legislation."



Finally, matters Web continue to hold the meter back as the remade whitehouse.gov turns out to be new in content but not so new in form. As Peter Bray complains, Obama's "remarkable and game-changing online presence during the campaign has probably been crushingly and dully overhauled."

There's a lot to cover, so we want to hear your thoughts on what the Change-o-Meter should be taking into account. No detail is too small or wonky. E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.

Three years ago, Ellen Gamerman reported in the Wall Street Journal on a deeply discouraging trend: Summer internships were being put up for bid at charity auctions for elite private schools. You could see immediately how so grotesquely inegalitarian a practice might evolve. Corporate bigwigs felt they were making a noble sacrifice by donating internships to their kids' place of learning. Private—ahem, I mean "independent"—schools were usually scrupulous in dedicating the proceeds to scholarship programs. Winning bidders were making generous charitable contributions (these items didn't go cheap), officially recognized as such by the Internal Revenue Service, which allowed a tax deduction for the bid amount spent in excess of market value. Within this tiny bubble of human interaction, all parties were doing good. Outside it, they were conspiring to make life even more of a rigged game than it already is.

I figured Gamerman's story would get wide pickup, provoke outraged public hearings, maybe even inspire some creative sort of criminal investigation (though you can't really prosecute people for violating the Declaration of Independence's claim that all men are created equal). I was wrong. Equality of opportunity was no longer a fashionable topic, except as it pertained to race or gender (where it enjoys some legal protection) or to sexual orientation (where public attitudes are evolving toward greater tolerance). The failure of college kids who lacked means or connections to get choice internships was not new, and the formal monetization of such internships didn't seem to shock very many people. As the Brazilians say: "When shit acquires value the poor are born without assholes."

The problem with such world-weariness is that it encourages bad situations to get worse. In the Jan. 28 Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger reports that the selling of internships has blossomed into a cottage industry. There's no mention of private schools—is it too much to hope that the earlier Journal piece shamed them out of it?—but other charities now auction off internships routinely. Web sites aggregate these auctions for the bidder's convenience. At CharityFolks.com, the current bid on a semester-long internship at ID-PR, a "public-relations powerhouse," is $2,500. ("Get your foot in the door today!") Or maybe you'd like to "jump start your career in the music industry" with an internship at Atlantic Records, cradle of rhythm and blues (a genre nursed largely without help from career-minded collegians). Next bid: $2,500. Proceeds from the sale of both internships go to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, where equality apparently must take a back seat to freedom. On CharityBuzz.com, I'm sorry to report, the bidding on an internship with fashion designer Caroline Herrera (proceeds to New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases) is already closed, as it is on an internship with Rolling Stone magazine (proceeds: New York Restoration Project). Better luck next time!

Inevitably, the internship-selling racket has slipped the surly bonds of philanthropy and entered the for-profit marketplace. An outfit called the University of Dreams guarantees placement or your money back. Summer-internship fees (the University of Dreams prefers to call it "tuition") range from $5,499 to $9,499. For 3 percent extra, you can pay on an installment plan. The interns have been placed with firms like Hill and Knowlton and Smith Barney (did a rich, dumb intern start the credit crunch?) in Barcelona, Chicago, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, Sydney, and Washington, D.C. For-profit consultants like Fast Track Internships are extending the principle of SAT prep to internships by teaching marginally literate students how to polish their résumés and cover letters and by guiding them to potential summer employers. Like the University of Dreams, Fast Track Internships offers a money-back guarantee. Its Web site boasts that it can tap into 85 percent of all internships that are never advertised, a proposition that suggests divine omniscience. Prices range from $799 for an unpaid internship to $999 for a paid internship to $1,999 for a full-time job.

"It's a huge misconception to say this is a program for rich kids," Eric Lochtefeld, CEO of University of Dreams, told the Journal. "The average student comes from the middle class, and their parents dig deep." To whatever extent that were true, inegalitarianism would shade into encyclopedia-salesman-style exploitation. The company "has begun funding scholarships and grants for low-income applicants," the Journal reports. But that merely lowers the price of opportunity. Whoever said a summer internship was something you had to pay for? The idea of getting a job is that they're supposed to pay you.

A new Congressional Budget Office study provides ample reason to doubt that President Obama's stimulus package will create jobs fast enough to meet the growing unemployment crisis. The CBO puts the total cost of the House version at $816 billion. Of that, $356 billion will be appropriated; $248 billion will be given out as benefit increases in programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, and Medicaid; and $212 billion will be given out as tax cuts (of which close to half are corporate goodies of dubious value to economic recovery). Only the first of these spending categories—appropriations—will attempt directly to reverse growing unemployment (officially now at 7.2 percent, unofficially at more than 13 percent). How much of this $356 billion in job-creating money will go out the door between now and Sept. 30? Only $29 billion! Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, had a cow last week after the Washington Post reported that less than half of the appropriations in the stimulus bill will be spent within the next two years. But the real shocker is that less than one-tenth of the appropriations will be spent during the current fiscal year, which still has eight months to go.

In an earlier column, Charles Peters and I pointed out that in 1934, Franklin Roosevelt was able to put 4 million people back to work within a period of two months through the Civil Works Administration, precursor to the WPA. Obama proposes to put the same number of people to work "over the next few years." The CBO analysis helps to clarify this discrepancy. "Lags in spending," the CBO explains, "stem in part from the need to draft plans, solicit bids, enter into contracts, and conduct regulatory or environmental reviews. Spending can be further delayed because some activities are by their nature seasonal. For example, major school repairs are generally scheduled during the summer to avoid disrupting classes, and highway and construction work are difficult to carry out during the winter months in many parts of the country."

But under Harry Hopkins' impatient leadership, the CWA managed in the dead of winter to build or make substantial improvements to 40,000 schools and 255,000 miles of roads. This all happened between Nov. 1933, when the CWA was created, and April 1934, when it was shut down. That's five months. Hopkins was able to move so quickly because he didn't have to solicit bids and enter into contracts; he put workers directly onto the federal payroll. Indeed, the reason Roosevelt created the CWA was that Harold Ickes' Public Works Administration, similarly tasked to put people back to work quickly, had failed to spend money fast enough. The PWA, like Obama's stimulus bill, worked through private contractors.

"Brand new programs pose additional challenges," the CBO study continues. "Developing procedures and criteria, issuing the necessary regulations, and reviewing plans and proposals would make distributing money even more difficult—as can be seen, for example, in the lack of any disbursements to date under the loan programs established for automakers last summer to invest in producing energy-efficient vehicles." Although the CBO is here talking about government programs in general, it is telling that the example it cites is of a government program that works through the private sector. "Throughout the federal government," the CBO concludes, "spending for new programs has frequently been slower than expected and rarely been faster." Correct. Please note, however, that just yesterday, 11 companies announced mass layoffs that will result in the loss of 75,000 jobs. This would seem to be one of those times when the government needs to spend money faster than usual, not slower.

President Obama's $825 billion economic-stimulus package needs a lot less PWA and a lot more CWA.

The PWA was the Public Works Administration, led by Harold Ickes Sr. The CWA was the Civil Works Administration, led by Harry Hopkins. Both were New Deal agencies created in 1933 to get Americans quickly back to work at a time when unemployment reached 25 percent, its highest point in U.S. history. The PWA failed. The CWA succeeded.

The strategy behind Obama's stimulus bill resembles that of the PWA. Like the stimulus, the PWA tackled unemployment indirectly by spending money largely through private contractors. That handicap—worsened by Ickes' cautious-to-a-fault management style—resulted in only $110 million of the program's authorized $3.3 billion getting spent during the program's crucial first year. Frustrated by Ickes' poky pace, Roosevelt yielded to the pleas of his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, to help get unemployed workers through the coming winter by putting them directly onto the federal payroll. Roosevelt had been reluctant to create a federal work program for fear of alienating organized labor. Hopkins overcame that worry by pointing out that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, had in 1898 proposed essentially the same idea. Roosevelt diverted not quite one-third of Ickes' PWA budget to Hopkins' CWA with the goal of putting to work 4 million people. As a percentage of the population, that would be the equivalent of putting 10 million people to work today. In his first weekly radio address, Obama pledged that the stimulus package would "save or create 3 to 4 million jobs over the next few years." (His budget director estimates that 75 percent of the money will be spent within 18 months.) Hopkins got there within two months.

The current economic downturn has yet to bring us near the depths of the Great Depression, but the situation is dire. The official unemployment rate now stands at 7.2 percent, a figure that rises to more than 13 percent when you add in people who've given up looking for work and people working part-time only because they can't find full-time work. The economy shed more jobs last year than in any single year since 1945. "Three to 4 million jobs over the next few years"? With the country currently losing half a million jobs each month, that won't be fast enough.

The CWA moved more swiftly than the PWA in part because of the difference in temperament between Hopkins and Ickes. Ickes was so fearful that the PWA would appropriate funds to an unworthy or scandalous project that he dotted every I and crossed every T before spending a nickel. The advantage to this approach in the long run was that it led to many significant projects, including New York's Triborough Bridge. The disadvantage was that it didn't create jobs quickly. Hopkins' anxieties were focused on the prospect that the CWA would fail to provide a sufficient number of jobs to the people who desperately needed them. Better to get the money out the door, Hopkins believed, and to address any irregularities immediately as they came up. The CWA's field investigators, who included journalists Lorena Hickock and Martha Gellhorn, helped keep Hopkins on the right track. The CWA's programs were further scrutinized by Roosevelt's friend Frank Walker, who as president of the National Emergency Council supervised all the president's new alphabet agencies, and by Army Lt. Col. John C.H. Lee (at the direction of the War Department). Both men were deeply impressed by Hopkins' leadership. "I'd pay little attention to those who criticize the creation of CWA or its administration," Walker reported to Roosevelt after touring CWA projects around the country. "You have every reason to be proud." Lee, a military engineer, had the reputation of a hanging judge—serving later as one of Dwight Eisenhower's top generals during World War II, he earned the nickname "John Court House Lee." Yet Lee had nothing but admiration for Hopkins' "loose fluidity of organization" and marveled that Hopkins had in two months enlisted as many people as the Army had in 18 when the U.S. entered World War I. The CWA even won praise from Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, Roosevelt's future Republican opponent in the 1936 presidential election. "This civil-works program is one of the soundest, most constructive policies of your administration," Landon wrote FDR, "and I cannot urge too strongly its continuance."

The PWA's poor performance relative to the CWA was more than just a matter of being ruled by the wrong Harry. Structurally, the CWA was much better able than the PWA to mobilize quickly because it could avoid the cumbersome process of putting contracts out to bid and all the other obstacles to swift action that arise with public-private partnerships. (Government by contract was popular then, and remains so today, because it allows a politician to create the semblance of government action without expanding the government work force. It also caters to the public's belief that the private sector is more capable, an illusion punctured by recent scandals surrounding Blackwater and other U.S. contractors in Iraq.) Hopkins enjoyed immediate carte blanche to apply directly the apparatus of the federal government. He shifted staff from the federal relief program he'd headed up, seized tools and equipment from Army warehouses, and cut checks through the Veterans Administration's vast disbursement system. The CWA laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or made substantial improvements to 255,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 playgrounds, and nearly 1,000 airports (not to mention 250,000 outhouses still badly needed in rural America). Most of the jobs involved manual labor, to which most of the population, having been raised on the farm, was far more accustomed than it would be today. But the CWA also provided considerable white-collar work, employing, among others, statisticians, bookbinders, architects, 50,000 teachers, and 3,000 writers and artists. ("Hell, they've got to eat like other people," Hopkins noted matter-of-factly.) This was achieved with a remarkable minimum of overhead. Of the nearly $1 billion—the equivalent today of nearly $16 billion—that Hopkins spent during the CWA's five-month existence, 80 percent went directly into workers' pockets and thence stimulated the economy by going into the cash registers of grocers and shop owners. Most of the rest went to equipment costs. Less than 2 percent paid for administration.

The only serious obstacle the CWA encountered is the same one that President Obama would face today: politics. Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress screamed bloody murder about Roosevelt's dalliance with state socialism—Republicans like Landon who were willing to admit a government program might actually work were as rare then as they are today—and the segregationist Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge was apoplectic to learn that black laborers were being paid as much as white ones. Once winter had passed, Roosevelt, worried that the controversy would cost him Democratic seats in the coming midterm congressional elections, ordered Hopkins to shut the CWA down. Hopkins promptly and uncomplainingly did so. A year later, though, Roosevelt recognized his error and put Hopkins in charge of the Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration). Over its life, the WPA would create, on the model of the CWA, more than 8 million jobs, which today would be equivalent to creating more than 20 million.

Let's hope that the current economic crisis won't worsen to the point that the U.S. needs a government program on that scale. But if it does, please don't say the job can't be done. In his inaugural address, President Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works." That may presage a departure from Republican orthodoxy ("government is the problem") and Democratic surrender to it ("the era of big government is over"). If government can do the job best, let it.

Click here to read Troy Patterson's obituary of John Updike, and here to read John Irving on receiving Updike's mail.

John Updike died of lung cancer in Danvers, Mass., on Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009, at the age of 76. Updike's career spanned five decades, and his work brightened every corner of American letters. He is perhaps best known for his four Rabbit novels, which chronicled the life of a former Pennsylvania high-school basketball star, but he also wrote acclaimed stories, poetry, essays, criticism, and meditations on the meaning of golf. In the following roundup, editors and authors remember Updike.

Chip Kidd, author, graphic designer

My relationship to Mr. Updike and his work is varied and curious. First, I was born and raised in the exact same small town in southeastern Pennsylvania as he (Shillington). His father, Wesley, was my father's high-school math teacher, and they were quite fond of each other. As I grew up, my dad would regale us with stories about the "real" Harry Angstrom from the Rabbit books, a local former Shillington High basketball star since gone to seed.

In college, my very first assignment in Introduction to Graphic Design was to create a cover for Updike's Museums and Women, a short-story collection. My solution (which I'd thought brilliant at the time and which certainly was not) was roundly dismissed by my teacher, who suggested that perhaps I was better suited to another line of work.

So it was more than a little—what? ironic? fateful?—that I would be hired directly out of school to be a book-jacket designer at Knopf, eventually designing covers for … you guessed it. Working with and for Mr. Updike was an honor and a treat, and because he was so prolific—not only in quantity but in type of book (novel, poems, essays, criticism)—there were many different kinds of design scenarios. One extreme was his habit of drawing up by hand the entire cover layout, including type specs, which I or another of us in the art department would then execute. On the other end of the spectrum, he would occasionally let us do whatever we wanted. And then everything in between. The last book of his I worked on, Terrorist (a novel), was a very happy collaboration. He had found the art, but I ended up laying it out in a way he didn't expect at all (upside-down) yet was delighted by.

I feel so incredibly fortunate and proud to have known and worked with this truly great American artist.

Anne Fadiman, author

Updike surrounds me. Thirty-three of his books crowd my shelves, some of them read so often and so strenuously that their covers have parted from their spines. Above my desk hangs an author photo Xeroxed from the hardback edition of Assorted Prose, his first nonfiction collection. Updike sent it to me in 1997 after reading a nostalgic essay I'd written about the paperback edition. (I'd noted the courage he displayed in allowing his substantial nose to be photographed in profile; in the picture he sent me, he faces the camera head on, looking rumpled and heartbreakingly young.) No boy-band groupie could have been more overjoyed to receive a missive from the object of her affections. For more than two decades, Updike's ravishing sentences had set a bar I knew my own could never reach but toward which they longingly inclined.

Not long afterwards, I became the editor of a small quarterly called The American Scholar. Over the next seven years, Updike submitted work, mostly poetry, at regular intervals. The arrival of an envelope from Beverly Farms, Mass.—cheap, white, with the home address stamped smudgily in the top left corner—never failed to make my heart skip. My favorite Updike poem was "Transparent Stratagems," nine unrhymed quatrains inspired by a Scientific American article on transparent marine animals: siphonophores, Venus's girdles, jellyfish, and roachlike creatures whose needle-shaped guts rendered their partly digested but still-opaque contents as inconspicuous as possible. (Who but the polymorphously curious Updike could have found poetry in this subject?) He didn't let us publish "Transparent Stratagems" until, over the course of six months, he had sent in four versions. It didn't matter that our circulation was modest and our honoraria microscopic. What mattered was getting every word and rhythm right. He changed "boundariless" to "unbounded" and finally to "boundless"; "unsolid" to "sun-shunned" and then back to "unsolid"; "slants" to "tilts"; "tear" to "shred"; "seized" to "ambushed." He deleted qualifiers ("a bit," "so-called"), replaced a comma with an exclamation point and a dash with a semicolon. I'd always imagined that his sentences were born perfect, like Athena from the head of Zeus, but it was even better to see that perfection required work.

On Tuesday morning, when I heard he had died, I took out the Updike file and, swallowing hard, reread the contents of the "Transparent Stratagems" folder. From his letters:

3/14/2000. "Here is a poem I've been trying to work into shape, though the material may be refractory."

3/21/2000. "Well, knock me over with a jellyfish, I'm delighted you want to take that poem. … Being invisible with only your food showing–disgusting to think about, actually."

6/1/2000. "I've been worrying about 'Transparent Stratagems'–it seems long for what it does, and the four-line stanzas spin it out a little clunkily. Try this version, without the stanza breaks and the blank verse a bit regularized."

7/2/2000. "I have gratefully bowed to your preferences—most noticeably, in restoring the quatrains, which do indeed break up the somewhat dense matter and work, sometimes, as verse units. I just am wearying, I guess, in my verse, of these ghost forms—sonnets that don't rhyme or break into octave and sestet, quatrains that run on like free verse."

7/17/2000. "Do you think our correspondence will make it into the Fitzgerald-Maxwell Perkins category, or shall we settle for Granville Barker-Bernard Shaw?"

Undated. "All this for $100?" (Actually, we paid him $50.)

Can it really be that John Updike will never write another sentence?

Michael Agger, senior editor, Slate

I read John Updike as a Pennsylvanian. Beached in my hometown of Bethlehem ("The Christmas City") one summer, I sped through the four Rabbit novels. They're set in a fictional version of Reading, Pa., and Updike's writing entered and magnified everything around me. The squat brick homes now vibrated with uneasy dreams, and the low ridge of mountains were now Updike's "damp green hills" of Pennsylvania, a landscape from which young lives were launched and where they sputtered.

The Rabbit books also inspired my first (and only) literary pilgrimage: I visited Updike's town of Shillington, found his old house, and found the alley that must have been the model for the opening moments of Rabbit, Run when Rabbit joins a pick-up basketball game with school kids. I couldn't believe how such ordinary stuff, such a day-to-day little place, had been reworked into a multiplex human fiction. To this day, I still think of Rabbit Angstrom as someone I knew, an uncle who died when I was in college.

Updike wrote so much that there are many Updikes. I cling to the Pennsylvania Updike—the questing narrator of "Flight," the ironic ad-man of Of the Farm. Those books contain slivers of my own past rendered more precisely than I ever could. The danger of reading Updike is that he overwhelms your native sensibility (see Nicholson Baker's U and I), but I'm not complaining. It's a bit like having been Proust's neighbor in Combray. Farewell, John. Thanks for the memories.

J. D. McClatchy, poet, editor, the Yale Review

In 2007 I had the honor of presenting John Updike with the Gold Medal for Fiction at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It is not given often, and over the century had been presented to William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and a few others. The first award the Academy had given John was in 1960, for his very first novel, and four years later he was elected a member. There is a good deal of gray hair on the top of those academicians, and it is astonishing to realize that John was just 32 when he was tapped. Henry James was 55 when he was elected, Edith Wharton was 64, and Sinclair Lewis 55. But by 32 Updike had already written The Centaur and Rabbit, Run, and staked out the territory he explored with acuity and virtuosity for decades. As a realist, he knew that the novelist's task is not merely the accumulation but the illumination of details. That, in turn, was accompanied not merely by a keen observation of the murky secrets repressed beneath the bright façade but by revealing that tension between inner and outer in sentences of astonishing lyrical grace and rhetorical power. If sex and religion—his moral arena—preoccupied many of his chronicles of American life, it was because he wanted to discover how we cling to the moment and to something beyond the moment, or what he once called "the tension and guilt of being human."

When he came up to the lectern that afternoon to receive the medal, he reminisced about all his years as a member of the Academy, but then went on to talk about the mysteries of fiction. "Its purpose is a matter of debate, its practice a matter more of feel than of rules. For all that is said, and taught, about the art and craft of fiction, there remains something incorrigibly amateurish about it; time and again a novice puts his or her hand to it and leaves us so-called professional practitioners in the shade. After more than a half-century of living by and for fiction, I can only tell you that it takes everything you can give it—every inspiration, every flight of imagery—and wants more; and that, in the writing of it, when it's going even half-well, there is a distinct bliss to it; and that there is nothing like it for taking hold of the many-sided, volatile, fraught, live truth of the human condition." That is just what he gave us. He painted the nation's spiritual portrait, and in times to come we will return to his novels to find ourselves—sympathetically and mercilessly displayed—in ways that will continue to startle and stir.

Ann Hulbert, books editor, Slate

John Updike was a writer you could entrust to a young editor: His prose required no tinkering. It welcomed a devoted eye. More than two decades ago, when I worked on the New Republic's back-of-the-book section, I was thrilled to be handling what I'm pretty sure was the first piece on art he ever wrote for the magazine, on Fairfield Porter. I proudly ushered his tidy typewritten manuscript—how neatly he'd penned in a few last-minute changes—through the typesetting process. Then I eagerly awaited the task of going over the galleys. Scrutinizing those sentences was a chance to learn from the master—to appreciate up close the way he made words do what Chardin's brush could manage with a peeled lemon: At his best, Updike caught the depths, the shifting lights and shadows, beneath the exquisitely rendered surfaces. I marked the typos as neatly as he had made those small revisions of his and I mailed the long galley sheets back, along with a letter (how I slaved over it) asking him to let me know if he saw anything I'd missed.

I wasn't surprised that I had heard nothing back from him by the time we went to press. The piece had been just right; I had been totally obsessive. So why—on the very day the boxes of fresh TNRs arrived in the office, his essay announced on the cover—did a fat envelope also arrive, with Updike's blue-inked return-address stamp in the left-hand corner? It was plainly stuffed with his galleys. What error hadn't I spotted? However tiny it was, I wouldn't forgive myself. I tore open the envelope in a panic that comes back as I write this: Neatly, Updike had marked up each page with changes, big and small.

He not only forgave me but made fun of himself as a fusser who would have yet another chance to preserve an even more final version in the collection of essays he was planning. John Updike was "an incorrigible retoucher," as he noted of Degas in a later piece (if only he'd warned me earlier). The ease and the grace in his work went hand-in-hand with meticulous care. The result was a truly rare generosity with words.

Ben Yagoda, author

Some time in my teens, I became aware that there was such a thing as a writer. Shortly thereafter, John Updike became my idea of what a writer was. He remained so throughout his life, and he remains so now. In my college years, I became something of an Updike buff; I remember my excitement when my college library's copy of Buchanan Dying appeared on the shelves. That state of extreme fandom faded, but not my great admiration for his intelligence, his taste, his diction, his sentences, his work ethic, and his work.



Updike was, of course, the quintessential New Yorker writer. In researching a history of the magazine, I discovered that his percentage of acceptances—somewhere in the mid-to-high 90s—outstripped all other contributors' to roughly the degree Art Tatum played faster than all other pianists. He graciously answered, by mail, my questions about his experiences with the magazine. Do I have to add that his typewritten letters and postcards were composed with insight and care? But the quote that sticks in my mind on this sad day is from a 1960 letter I came upon in the magazine's archives, written to Updike from his editor and great friend William Maxwell. "From the very beginning," Maxwell said, "I have been so confident of your ability to paddle your own canoe—so positive that the day would come when you would have to go to Sweden and make a speech in white tie and tails—that I have allowed myself the fatherly feeling of pride in your career, but not the equally paternal feeling of having had much to do with it." And what is up with the Nobel Committee? Among its many missteps over time, its ignoring of John Updike may be the most indefensible.

Stephen Metcalf, critic at large, Slate

John Updike had talent, he was prolific, and he sold a lot of books—the three things posterity cares least about. Borges once said something canny to V.S. Naipaul about literary fame: "The important thing is the image you create of yourself in other people's minds. That image—as with Byron—may in the end be more important than the work."

What image has Updike created in other people's minds? He chronicled the horny undercurrents of suburban normality. He loaded even the most banal detail with writerly elegance. He wrote about being white, Protestant, and male, as these began to surface as suspicious facts worthy of inspection, rather than sources for a universally aspirational norm. He created the last naïve Everyman, Rabbit Angstrom, a unit of close to no account—and yet the protagonist of the great American midcentury epic.

The work is so profuse, the image still indistinct. And yet almost any page induces at least one swoon. I hold in my hand The Early Stories: 1953-1975 and open almost randomly to:

"But when has happiness ever been the subject of fiction? The pursuit of it is just that—a pursuit. Death and its adjutants tax each transaction. What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted." What is possessed is devalued by what is coveted—like a formula, it captures a structure of reality so elegantly that it is beyond comprehension that the thought ever lay beyond comprehension. Together with a million such moments, an idea of Updike will coalesce—the last literary gentleman, chronicling the end of the great white male?

Tom Perrotta, author

Updike's Rabbit novels form a genuine American epic—I can't think of any contemporary fiction that works so well on the microcosmic level. So much of our recent history, for better and worse, is reflected in Harry Angstrom's experience—not just the sexual revolution, but Vietnam, the racial and generational upheavals of the '60s, feminism, the gas crisis, the fat years of the '80s, even changing attitudes about food and healthy living. I remember talking to a woman friend of mine, a true veteran of the '60s, telling her how much I loved Rabbit, Run. "It's amazing," I said. "The marriage actually broke up over a blow job." "Believe me," she said, "a lot of marriages broke up over that blow job." A hundred years from now, if people want to know what it was like to be a middle-class white American in the second half of the 20^th century, they could do a lot worse than reading the four novels Updike wrote about this flawed Everyman who, like the country he embodied, always wanted a little more than what was good for him.

Emily Yoffe, author, Slate columnist

My parents kept their dirty books under their bed, and when I was a teenager, I discovered John Updike's Couples there. It was a scandalously explicit book at the time (1968) about the incessant, adulterous couplings of the dissatisfied citizens of a small Massachusetts town. Since my parents had a marriage that could have come out of an Updike novel and I lived in a small Massachusetts town, I read the book not so much as a novel but a guide to the adults around me. I haven't looked at it in the 40 years since, but so precise and vivid was Updike's prose that I still remember his description of a tongue licking papery, freckled skin. Updike's writing about sex didn't make me want to have sex. Instead it made me feel that I would be compelled to—that sex was something inevitable, exciting, and awful.

I read Updike avidly for many years (although to read him completely would mean turning over one's life to his prodigious output). I don't have a very retentive memory, but Updike was able to put scenes in my head that have stayed there for decades. I just looked up the O. Henry-esque opening story, "Friends from Philadelphia" from his 1950s collection, The Same Door in which the 16-year-old protagonist, sent by his mother to buy a bottle of $2 wine for company, is refused service by a clerk. The boy is rescued by the big, bluff father of the neighbor girl he lusts after, who completes the mission by handing the teenager $1.26 in change and a bottle of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild 1937. Then there is his 1971 description of a television commercial for natural gas, "Commercial," in his collection Problems and Other Stories. This isn't the finest short story he ever wrote, but I remember being galvanized by it. I had seen the same commercial myself dozens of times, but Updike's second-by-second dissection was as powerful as an experiment in quantum physics in demonstrating how acute observation utterly changes the thing being observed.

William Pritchard, author

Two personal memories of Updike. He came to Amherst College in 1983 to receive an honorary degree. At the president's party the night before, he ran into a woman who informed him that her mother had been disgusted by Rabbit Is Rich (doubtless, the sex writing). Updike smiled his most elaborate smile, raised his eyebrows, and said, most winningly, "I hope she won't be here tonight!" That seemed to me very resourceful. He then proceeded to be introduced to a trustee who hadn't the faintest notion of what was going on. "And what do you do?" the trustee asked Updike. Another winning smile and the confession, given rather haltingly, "I ... write."

Always charming, he had his unsmiling side that rarely surfaced, but when it did, you knew it. I once wrote a letter to the New York Review of Books defending him against aspersions cast on his recent books (especially Roger's Version) by Frederick Crews. In it, I said he had written a dozen memorable short stories that would last, etc. A note from him said thanks, but allowed to me how he'd written, by his count, a good many more than a dozen memorable ones. Nicholas Delbanco said this week on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, when asked about Updike's sunny nature, that the velvet glove could contain an iron fist, and this was an instance of it.

Donald Fagen, co-founder, Steely Dan

In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the late David Foster Wallace said that many of John Updike's protagonists—"clearly stand-ins for the author himself"—are "incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous," and "self-pitying," and that many younger readers consider him to be the worst of the generation of "Great Male Narcissists" that included Mailer, Roth, Exley, and Bukowski. As a reader who came of age in the bohemian subculture of the '60s, I've found myself reacting in much the same way to Updike's "old school" attitude toward women and to the sometimes near-sociopathic detachment that seems to be part of the profile of his leading characters.



And yet I remember my excitement when the publication of a new installment of the Rabbit Angstrom series was announced. Each novel was a reality check on the preceding decade, revealing a just-lived chunk of time in startling new ways. If you want to know what it really felt like to live through the late '60s, forget Easy Rider: check out the creepy, entropic nightmare that is Rabbit Redux. That strangely nourishing epic Rabbit is Rich nails down the Me Decade in the most entertaining possible way. And throughout the series, as in all of Updike's work, we're treated to those Proustian waves of prose in which Rabbit, magically endowed with his creator's extraordinary perceptual depth and descriptive power, tries to find some key to eternity in the details of the physical world.

Wendy Lesser, author, editor, the Threepenny Review

Though John Updike was never one of my personal literary talismans (the way, say, Norman Mailer was), I always considered him an essential and indeed somehow permanent part of the American landscape, so I am both shocked and sorry to hear that he is gone. I am also sorry because, as he got older, I liked his work better and better: The virtuosity and ironic coolness of the earlier novels was being transmuted, book by book, into something much weightier and more moving if less self-consciously perfect. This was heartening to see and interesting to read, and I would have liked to go on reading it for the rest of my life. His death is a loss for everyone in the writing world, and we can ill afford such losses these days.

John Swansburg, culture editor, Slate

Beverly, Mass., is a town on the state's second-best cape, sandwiched between better-known neighbors—Salem, famous for its witches, and Gloucester, for its fish sticks. When I was a kid, Beverly posted signs trumpeting its status as the "Birthplace of the American Navy," a claim disputed, convincingly, by a town in Pennsylvania called Philadelphia.

Beverly had this going for it, though: John Updike lived there. My mom used to see him at the post office, but it wasn't until I was in college that I crossed paths with him. I was back in Beverly for the summer, working as a cashier at the local supermarket. (Foolishly, I had accepted this position despite having been versed in its indignities by "A&P"; I found myself hoping a manager would reprimand some improperly attired girl so I could quit in protest.) On my days off, I'd often visit the Beverly Public Library. It was there that I saw Updike, wearing a yellow alligator polo and a belt from the Myopia Hunt Club.

After an amiable chat with the reference librarians, he made his way to the stacks. I followed him, loitering nearby while he located the volumes he was after (on Helen Keller, I noticed). Under normal circumstances, I'm not the type to accost a celebrity. But I knew tomorrow it was back to bagging cat food. Here was a chance to rescue the summer of '98 from oblivion. So as he made his way back to the elevator, I caught up to him, getting aboard just as the elevator doors were closing.

"Are you John Updike?" I blurted.

"Some people say that I am," he replied with a grin.

"Oh. My name is John, too."

My witty riposte hung in the air for a long moment, until finally the elevator doors opened on the sleepy lobby. It was Updike's opportunity to flee, and if I'd been him, I'd have taken it. Instead, he asked if I was from Beverly, and seemed genuinely pleased to discover that we lived off the same loping street, down near West Beach. He asked what brought me to the library. Surely he had more pressing matters before him—a review of a new Helen Keller biography would appear a few weeks later in The New Yorker—but he took the time to be neighborly to a tongue-tied shopping-cart shagger. Such gifts, but also such graciousness. Hey, Philadelphia—you can keep the Navy.

Sven Birkerts, author

Like some others, I had my "Updike problem" in recent years. I thought he should have practiced more literary "tantra," holding the prose back for better eventual issue—this in spite of the fact that I understood deeply his contention, made public I forget where, that only by writing every day could he certify not just his literary citizenship, but his title to existing. Still, since I heard the news of his death, he has been front and center in my thoughts. It's as if another vast shelf of language, a landmass outcropping, had sheered off. Bellow, Mailer, Sontag, and now Updike. These were the presiding figures of my first formation, the ones who gave me the certainty that writing mattered. Updike was the sentence guru; he showed me just what lyric accuracy a string of words could accomplish. Back then, in my teens, it was all about surfaces—the world rendered. Now I see that it's more about memory, the life of the senses refracted back through time, becoming a code for the emotion of being alive. Being alive is an emotion—Updike persuaded me of that. Harry Angstrom working the remains of a caramel from his molar is a straight shunt to the living human now.

My one contact with the man lasted for a stutter and a gulp. I was in New York, attending some large literary event. There was a reception, and in the breath-catching moment when the crowd opened, I saw that I was just a few feet away from Updike. John Updike. He was—could this be?—unattended. I took it as my sign. I stepped over and introduced myself. I offered the standard-issue, but sincere, praise of the work. As memory has it, Updike blinked and tipped his head down so that he was looking over his glasses. There was a pursed smile. "You look so much younger than you sound on paper," he said. "I thought you'd be a good deal older." A compliment or a subtle dig? I'll never know, but I grinned like the young man I was. And I felt right then that a circuit had closed, one that had started in early high school when I bought the blue paperback of The Centaur and took in the first sharp cut of his prose.

Brad Leithauser, poet

For the aspiring young writer—such as I once was and as my students are today—there's an especially acute if poignant pleasure in feeling that someone has gotten in just ahead of you. You come across a bright observation, an astute simile, a nimble play on words, and you think, I might have come up with that. While you may regret being pre-empted, there's a compensatory thrill in feeling that you've become part of a loose collaborative exercise, that you're pursuing the same ends: You're a writer among writers, combing the streets in search of unexpected vistas, curious encounters, lost coins.

It's mostly a misconception, of course—this sensation that you might have arrived at the same admirable observation, simile, wordplay … But one remains forever grateful to the writer who inspires this illusion, and when I first began to read Updike seriously—in the late '60s, when I was in high school—I was time and again struck by this feeling. I mention this only because so many writers of my generation had the same experience; in our populous but scattered literary world, the debt to Updike runs very deep. He continually left one imagining, If I'd only been a little more astute or industrious or venturesome, I might have thought of that. Or, If I'd only been John Updike, I might have written like John Updike.

Paul Berman, author

I love Updike's writing so much I can barely read it. My eye falls on a sentence. My mood has already improved. I slam the book shut. Another sentence may do me in. Still, I read on, and my mood goes vaulting upward yet again. This isn't reading; this is drinking. I read him in order to become ebullient. Those extra words he plunks into his sentences, the unusual images, the way that everything seems to shimmer, his habit of dissolving each new visible thing into microscopic radiant glints of God knows what—every last over-the-top element of Updike's prose has the effect of lighting me up.

I think Updike became somewhat neurotic in his later years, annoyed at his own readers, intent on finding ever more aggressively humble postures to adopt. I blame America. Updike was well-appreciated, but not sufficiently well, even if he won all the prizes. There are two parties in the American literary world, the Updikeans and the anti-Updikeans, and the Updikeans will someday be redeemed. He wrote better book reviews than everyone else. But why didn't he like Emerson more than he did? My first emotion on learning that Updike had died was a stab of regret that now I will never learn. I am stuck with my own puzzlement—the form my reader's grief has taken.

In the shadow of Shea Stadium, a street urchin ekes out a living doing odd jobs at an auto-body shop. Further north, a dollar-store worker resorts to smuggling immigrants across the U.S.-Canada border to supplement her income. In the Mississippi Delta, a single mother tries to keep her family afloat tending a convenience store on a desolate stretch of road. Across the continent, a drifter and her dog linger in a small Oregon town after her car stalls and she can't afford to have it fixed.

Scenes from the precarious economic moment? They are, in fact, plotlines from some of 2008's best movies. Last week, the academy recognized Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, a downbeat chronicle of a woman on the economic periphery, with nominations for lead actress Melissa Leo and Hunt's own script. But it was hardly the only American indie to tap into the dismal zeitgeist. Other homegrown films from last year—Chop Shop, Ballast, and Wendy and Lucy—fixed a steady gaze on American poverty. Delving into the lived experience of the poor, these "recession indies" offer a corrective for a culture in which the poor are usually invisible, both in real life and at the movies. It's a welcome change in an indie landscape that has recently been dominated by the solipsistic likes of Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, and Juno.

In Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop, the protagonist is Alejandro, a 12-year-old Latino orphan who calls a junkyard swathe of Queens home. When he's not slaving away at a garage, he's working the streets peddling bootleg DVDs. His dream is heartbreakingly pathetic: to buy and fix up a broken-down food truck—a venture that, once we get a glimpse of the battered truck, has "bad idea" written all over it.

A stoic lament for a dream deferred, Chop Shop builds on the achievements of Bahrani's previous film, Man Push Cart, a stark study of a Pakistani food-cart vendor in Manhattan. Bahrani may stack the deck by making a likable, hardworking kid his protagonist, but his movie is resolutely unsentimental. Like the other recession indies, Chop Shop isn't interested in agitprop. The mode is ethnographic. Bahrani renders an outer-borough subculture with unblinking detachment, refusing to judge or lecture. Moral epiphanies unfold organically. When the camera leaves the dingy streets for a scene at the U.S. Open nearby—where a desperate Alejandro, surrounded by a glittering crowd, ponders his first purse-snatching—the effect is powerful. At that moment, Ale seems to have walked out of his reality and into the audience's, implicating us in his marginalization.

Ballast, the stunning debut film by Lance Hammer, shares similar qualities. Like Chop Shop, Ballast bears the hallmarks of Italian neorealism: nonprofessional actors, location shooting, no score, a rejection of artifice. Set in rural Mississippi in the bleak midwinter, the story centers on a fractured family: Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Jr.), an African-American man who runs a convenience store with his twin brother; Marlee (Tarra Riggs), his estranged sister-in-law; and James (JimMyron Ross), Marlee's 12-year-old son. The three are brought together when Lawrence's brother commits suicide—and Lawrence tries, and fails, to follow suit.

The movie is matter-of-fact in its depiction of rural poverty. Lawrence's house is bare and dim. Marlee's days are stretched thin by a long commute and an exhausting job as a janitor. Shot handheld and opting for ellipses over exposition, only once does Ballast go too far: a shot of Marlee scrubbing a urinal at her job that puts too fine a point on her plight. But elsewhere Hammer is restrained, observing life on the margins as it's lived without the condescension of false redemption.

More conventional but no less attuned to everyday life is Hunt's Frozen River. Leo plays Ray Eddy, a woman who wakes up one morning to find her husband and the money she had been saving to buy a prefab home gone. Stuck with a dead-end job at Yankee Dollar and desperate to make the payment for the double-wide trailer, Ray turns to smuggling immigrants in the trunk of her car across the U.S.-Canada border, with the help of a Mohawk woman who lives on a nearby reservation. Meanwhile, back home are her two kids, left to fend for themselves while Mom tries to make ends meet.

Compared with the other movies, the plot-driven Frozen River is less formally adventurous and more accessible (hence, perhaps, the Oscar nominations). But Hunt and Leo nail the details of a life without a safety net. The movie takes place in a succession of drab locales where the downtrodden congregate—trailer homes, bingo parlors, dollar stores. Hunt also enlarges our image of poverty by setting her movie in and around an American Indian reservation in upstate New York, shining a light on perhaps the worst-off—and most frequently forgotten—segment of the American poor.

Part of what makes Ray's plight at once moving and terrifying is how familiar it is in the current moment. The dread of missing a house payment, the frustration of not making enough at your job: This is what every day looks like for Ray. Leo's portrait of working-class desperation is bracingly unaffected—she never once plays to the crowd. Her turn underscores a common strength among the movies discussed here: the absence of recognizable stars and the baggage they bring. Leo's Ray is no Erin Brockovich—the former is a lived-in performance without a hint of vanity; the latter a strenuous, Oscar-baiting act of faux de-glamorization. (True to her character—and her status as a character actress—Leo was both grateful and grounded when she received word of the Oscar nomination: "It's delightfully surprising. I had no expectations. What does all of this mean? Four letters: W-O-R-K.")

Michelle Williams, on the other hand, is a star, but the way she disappears into her role in Wendy and Lucy is a marvel. Williams plays Wendy, a drifter on her way to find work in Alaska who gets stranded in a small Oregon town after her car stalls. Strapped for cash, she's reduced to sleeping in the driver's seat, returning scavenged cans and bottles for deposits, and shoplifting Iams for her dog, Lucy. Her normally blond hair shorn and dyed brown, Williams looks like a Bressonian pixie. But Wendy and Lucy's real forefather is Vittorio De Sica, whose Umberto D., about an impoverished pensioner and his dog, remains one of the highlights of Italian neorealism.

That influence notwithstanding, Reichardt's movie is distinctly American. It invokes one of the great traditions in American cinema—the road movie—but pointedly has the car stall 10 minutes in. Reichardt foregrounds Wendy's existential dilemma by eschewing back story. For the entire running time, all that matters is what's in front of Wendy: a broken-down car, a dwindling reserve of cash, and a missing dog. The movie ends with Wendy moving on, carrying even less than the little she already had—an all-too-common feeling for many Americans right now.

Too few to be a trend but too great to be ignored, these socially committed movies suggest, one hopes, a new sobriety and seriousness among American independent filmmakers. But will audiences respond? So far, the signs aren't encouraging. The four films, combined, have made about $2.5 million, or roughly one-third of Twilight's opening midnight gross. When Americans do go to movies about the poor, they're usually set a continent or two away—think of art-house hits City of God, Born Into Brothels, and Slumdog Millionaire. Perhaps bulletins from our own trenches sting too much for domestic audiences. That certainly seemed to be the case for The Wire, arguably the most devastating portrait of the urban poor that audiences have seen in years, which saw its run end in 2008 after five critically acclaimed, poorly rated seasons.

The Wire shares something with these films: They all serve as urgent dispatches on the way we live now. Wendy's predicament—like Ale's in Chop Shop, Marlee's in Ballast, and Ray's in Frozen River—resembles, if not in its details then certainly in its outlines, what millions of Americans are going through. Immersive and rigorous, these movies depict an experience that is at once common and unseen: the struggle of scratching out a living, or getting by without one.

Like most men my age—I am a decade younger than John Updike—I began reading him because of the sex. I was still in prep school when I first read Rabbit, Run, in college when I read The Centaur. I had finished with the Iowa Writers' Workshop and had my first teaching job when I read Couples, which was published around the time I published my first novel, Setting Free the Bears. People were always critical of what Updike wrote about; I always defended him because he wrote so well. He was one of those writers who taught me: You're a writer because you can write well, not because of your "subject."

Like Margaret Atwood, Updike was unafraid—he didn't write the same novel over and over again. OK, there were the Rabbit novels, and the Bech stories; and after the marvelous witches (of Eastwick), they came back, most recently, as widows. What made the sex different was that it was elegant, refined—yet no less inappropriate, or nasty, when Updike wanted it to be. Kurt Vonnegut said there are writers who, if it hadn't worked out for them to be writers, would be in jail. There were writers who simply couldn't have made a living for themselves if the writing hadn't worked out; that meant Vonnegut, and that meant me. But Updike always gave me the impression that he could have/would have been successful at anything. He was smart; not all writers are intellectuals. I'm not. He was, but he was good-humored about it; he never flaunted it.

He was also a quick study. His novel Terrorist was criticized by the sudden abundance of terror experts; Updike didn't get this right, or he didn't correctly understand this element, or—whatever. I thought the novel was an amazingly quick study, and an insightful one. I cared about the characters—something many intellectuals who write fiction don't get at all.

We weren't friends. We knew each other socially for the brief period of time when I lived in Massachusetts—in Cambridge—and he was in Beverly Farms. We had dinner together a few times. We had a polite but not frequent correspondence, too. For a period of time—no longer—fans used to confuse the two of us. How could this have happened? Because we were both "John"? It was baffling, but I got numerous fan letters that were meant for him, and he got fan letters that were meant for me, and this gave us the occasion to write to each other—and send the misdirected fan mail to each other. This has stopped; it hasn't happened in five or six years. Maybe this was mail from a single demented village or the same deranged family; maybe it was generational, and they've died out—those idiots who thought I was John Updike and John Updike was me.

Slate V: Watch John Updike on the dilemma of both writing and reviewing books

The letters would begin "Dear John Irving," and I would read for a while before I realized that the letter-writer was talking about an Updike novel; it was the same for him. I admit that I miss this craziness; it will probably never happen again.

Look at all he did! The novels, the short stories, the poems, the essays, and criticism; he was productive, and envied. I read him because I always knew I would be entertained. His writing was lively; there was a constant energy in the language, and a mirth—a great good humor.

Once, when he came to dinner, my middle son, Brendan, was in a phase of dressing up—disguises, voices with accents, bizarre enactments. Updike and I were having dinner when Brendan appeared in a kimono; he was holding a lit candle, and something that looked like (or was) a microphone. "Good evening," Brendan said. "This is the news in Japanese." And then he went into an incomprehensible imitation of Japanese news; it was pretty convincing. (I think Brendan must have been 8 or 10 at the time.)

That was all. Brendan left, with a bow, and we went back to our dinner. Updike had never met Brendan before.

When we were saying good night, Updike asked: "The news, in Japanese—is it a regular event?"

"No, just for us," I said; I couldn't think of what else to say. Brendan had never done it before, nor would he ever do it again.

"Well, that was … special," Updike said.

I shall miss him, and his fan mail.

Get "Dear Prudence" delivered to your inbox each week; click here to sign up. Please send your questions for publication to prudence@slate.com. (Questions may be edited.)

Dear Prudence,

When I was a freshman in college, I had a tight group of friends. Two of them got together and married last summer. We three were close in college but less so since we graduated. I found out from mutual friends that the groom recently committed suicide. Since people in the group hadn't heard from his wife, I was put in charge of contacting her. She said there was nothing to talk about and asked me not to visit. I then contacted her brother, who had been close to them, and this was the first he'd heard of her husband's death. She apparently had a closed funeral and told no one, because she said that is how he had wanted it, even though he had many friends and was always outgoing and happy. His college friends are distraught and don't know what to believe, especially since there is no record of this in any of the area newspapers. Also fishy is a rumor that he got one of his female friends pregnant. I checked—she is pregnant and says he's the father. His parents live overseas, and his wife never got along with them; as far as we know, no one has contacted them. How can his friends be sure he died, so we can come to terms with everything? I have a crazy idea that maybe she found out about the other girl and killed him in a fit of rage. What is the polite way to make sure our dear friend is resting peacefully and not locked away somewhere?

—Mediating Mourning

Dear Mourning,

I admit I don't often get questions about the manners and morals of possible murder. But if the facts are as you've described, then, yes, I can see why you're alarmed at the idea that your friend, who was young and seemingly happy (if not, perhaps, happily married, viz., the pregnant girlfriend), suddenly killed himself. Also bizarre is the conduct of his wife. Her behavior is so inexplicable that you would think anyone who had watched even a few episodes of CSI or SVU would know to act more like a grieving widow. You and your friends should take what steps you can to establish whether your friend is actually dead or at least whether his death was noted by official channels. First, contact the local coroner or medical examiner and see if they have any record of your friend's body. There are also genealogy sites that track deaths reported to the Social Security Administration, although they may take a while to update. Type "social security death index" into your search engine, and check the sites that pop up to see if your friend is listed. If all this turns up nothing, then you can go to the police jurisdiction where he was living at the time of his "death." Do not make accusations against the wife. Just report the fact that he is missing, that you are unable to confirm his death, and that he did not seem depressed or suicidal. It would also be reasonable to contact his parents to express your condolences. Perhaps they can confirm this tragic turn of events—but if they can't, then they have the standing to push for answers to his disappearance with the authorities and to hire a private investigator to try to dig up the truth.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: Tattooed Bride

Dear Prudence,

My husband runs a Web site and chat forum around his hobby. (He is a collector.) His forum is very popular, and people post there not just about their shared interest, but about their personal and professional lives as well. Yesterday, I had the idea to look back at forum posts from around the time my husband met me to see if he had written about the experience. Well, he did. And what he wrote has my stomach in knots. Had I seen it at the time, we would probably not be married now. The posts included lurid details of our private activities, admissions that he didn't want a relationship with me and just wanted to keep it physical, comments about my having kids being "a no-no," a post about plans to go to another woman's apartment that he was interested in, etc. I know for a fact that today he doesn't feel any hesitation about being married to me, he loves my kids, and he is very reserved with the information he posts on the Internet. We have a near-perfect marriage, and I love him with all my heart. I am incredibly hurt by what I saw online, and since I read it, I can't even look at him. I don't want to bring it up because it would only make him feel awful. I know I need to get over it, but I just can't stop thinking about it. What should I do?

—Wish I Hadn't Looked

Dear Wish,

This is a vivid lesson that when you run a Web site devoted to, say, collecting medieval weapons, the best way to keep from finding yourself on the wrong end of a poleax is to refrain from posting musings about your intimate activities to your fellow enthusiasts. But let's put this in perspective. As far as gut-churning revelations are concerned, this doesn't rate a box of Zantac. Be grateful your Internet search didn't turn up that your husband was named "patron of the month" at the local escort service, or that his history cache doesn't show that he's a NAMBLA frequent visitor. The reassuring thing about all this is that it shows that someone can be beset by doubts and worries as he enters into a relationship and still end up being a devoted husband and father. If your marriage is as happy as you say—and I believe you that it is—surely your husband is going to start noticing that you are no longer able to look him in the eye. You have to let him know what you found. Take a thousand or so deep breaths and, with as little rancor as you can muster, tell him that on a lark you went back a few years on his forum and found his postings about your courtship. Say you wish you'd never seen them but that you are certain he doesn't feel that way anymore. And to make sure that all the people on his Web site also don't get the wrong impression, you would like him to delete these personal posts. I bet you will never see anyone's fingers fly faster—and that he will be grateful his stupidity hasn't ruined what you two have.

—Prudie

Dear Prudie,

After nearly 15 years together and two children, my partner and I were married in California, prior to the passage of Proposition 8. We created a gift registry so our friends and family could provide us with tokens of their esteem and good wishes. During a light political discussion with one of my co-workers, before the election, it became clear she did not support gay marriage and intended to vote yes on Prop 8, because, as she stated, marriage is strictly "one man, one woman." In order to maintain workplace cohesion, I refrained from further discussion. After my marriage, when opening the wedding gifts, I discovered that this same co-worker, who was not invited to the wedding (I did not invite anyone from work), had sent a lovely item from the gift registry! The quandary: What do I do with this gift? Should I return it, write a sarcastic letter of thanks, or take this as a "teaching moment" to enlighten her on her crass hypocrisy?

—Gifted but not Grateful

Dear Gifted,

I'm going to choose "None of the above." You already made the wise decision to let go of the political discussion with her at work, so extend that to this gift. No, it's not your obligation to change the minds of those who voted for Prop 8, but perhaps you have a chance to do so in this case. How much more effective you'll be if you respond to her gracious gesture with one of your own. In the abstract, she opposes gay marriage, yet she was moved to provide a "token of her good wishes" for your gay marriage because she knows you and knows you have a lovely family. That is the kind of opening that shifts people's thinking on social issues. Write her the kind of generous note you would write to anyone. Then, when you see her, instead of being disdainful or didactic, be disarming. Say something like, "Linda, thank you for the beautiful gift. It means a lot to have you celebrate our happiness."

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

The situation with people answering cell phones and texting during movies is getting progressively worse. I've decided it's time to fight back. I generally will comment nicely to people to please turn off the phone. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, going to management has been a complete waste of time. Of late, I've taken it to a new level. I've responded to serial offenders by tossing peanut M&M's at them. Most of the time, people get the point and also have no idea where the confectionery came from. However, in two cases the offenders did and said something. Both times, I feigned shock and responded with, "Oh, I'm sorry. I can't imagine why it would distract you from your phone call during a movie." In each of the cases, the person has been too embarrassed to do anything and gave up. Have I crossed the line?

—Dial M for M&M,

Dear Dial,

I acknowledge that part of me wishes I'd been at the showing of Gran Torino when you started pelting texters with M&M's. But you know I'm not going to tell you that I find the more effective confectionery for braining your fellow patrons to be Milk Duds. Yes, it is amazing that people will pay for a baby sitter, parking, and movie tickets, then proceed to ruin the show by lighting up their phones to text, "Hey, what's going on? I'm at a movie." But I'm afraid you have to stick with saying in a contained but exasperated way, "All of us have been asked to turn off our phones. Please do everyone the courtesy of turning off yours." Your approach escalates mere rudeness to assault with a peanut projectile. Keep bonking heads with M&M's, and you're going to end up munching not on popcorn, but a knuckle sandwich.

—Prudie

Photograph of Prudie by Teresa Castracane.

JEBALIA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza—Along the dusty alleyways of this crowded camp in northern Gaza, cleaning crews wearing green Hamas baseball caps are beginning to clear the destruction of 22 days of heavy fighting between Israel and Hamas. Banners of green Hamas flags flutter above the streets.

Israeli officials say the war against Hamas was a success—that they have put an end to rocket fire into southern Israel and have established a new international mechanism that will clamp down on Iranian arms smuggling into Gaza. They point to an Iranian ship flying a Cypriot flag that the U.S. Navy stopped last week. Egypt refused to let the ship enter the Gulf of Suez, and it has now sailed to Syria.

But on the streets of Gaza, Hamas has become more popular and seems to be more firmly entrenched then ever before.

Rafat al-Rafati lived his with his wife and seven children, along with his brothers and their wives and children, in a three-story house in Jebalia. On Jan. 11, an Israeli missile crashed through the roof of the house, instantly killing one of his brothers and his 2-year-old nephew, Tasnim. A 10-year-old niece was killed when she ran outside, trying to escape.

On the second floor, jagged bloodstains are still visible on the wall. The floor is covered with concrete rubble, and glass crunches underfoot. There are gaping holes in the concrete wall.

Since the attack, the family has been living in a nearby U.N. building. They say they have no money to rebuild, and because of the Israeli blockade, there are no building materials or cement in Gaza. Yet Hamas has begun distributing money to Palestinians whose homes were destroyed. They've promised $5,000 per home. A Hamas official has already come to the Rafatis' home to survey the damage.

The Rafatis do not consider themselves Hamas supporters and say they voted for Fatah in the January 2006 election. But in the future, they say, they will support anyone who helps them rebuild their home and their lives.

These sentiments are echoed all over Gaza. Palestinian anger is directed primarily at Israel. Hamas, which has fired thousands of rockets at southern Israel since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, is now seen as the only power that is actively resisting Israel.

"Today, Hamas is stronger than ever before," said Asad Abu-Sharq, a professor of linguistics at al-Azhar University, as we sat in his third-floor apartment in Tel al-Hawa, a Gaza City neighborhood. His building was also damaged during the fighting, and he has saved several jagged pieces of metal in the corner of his apartment. "Hamas held out against the terrible, formidable Israeli army, and it won this war."

In 1967, he says, Israel defeated four Arab armies in six days. In the recent fighting, Hamas alone held out against Israel for three weeks and is still firmly in control in Gaza. He says Israel's disproportionate use of force and the large number of civilian casualties have increased anger against Israel and boosted support for Hamas.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev disagrees. He says that Israeli intelligence information shows that Gazans blame Hamas for the crisis and that Israel has succeeded in weakening Hamas. "Because they are an authoritarian regime, they can bring out 'spontaneous' celebrations of support and silence with their guns anyone who speaks out against them. But they have a real problem with the street in Gaza."

Regev says the money that Hamas is distributing might give it a short-term propaganda boost. But when the estimated billions of dollars in development aid start to flow into Gaza, they will be controlled by the World Bank or some other international body, rather than by Hamas.

Regev says Hamas had a set of assumptions about Israeli behavior that fell apart during the recent fighting. Hamas assumed Israel would not risk a ground invasion into the densely populated Gaza Strip, fearing large-scale Israeli casualties. Hamas assumed that Hezbollah would open a second front against Israel and that Palestinians in the West Bank would also support them. None of this happened, says Regev, which leaves Hamas weaker than ever before.

Many Hamas leaders, like Ismail Haniye, are still in hiding. A Hamas office in Gaza City was deserted. But Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmed Yusuf, who is seen as a moderate, says Hamas is satisfied with the results of the fighting with Israel. "I don't think Israel achieved any of its objectives," he told me in an interview in his office in Gaza City. "They said they would stop us from firing rockets, but the rocket capability is still there. They said they would make people angry at Hamas, but most people back Hamas. And they said they would weaken Hamas, but like a phoenix Hamas rises from the ashes."

Egypt is currently brokering an agreement that would lead to a more formal cease-fire and reopen the border crossings between Gaza and Israel, and Gaza and Egypt. Israel closed its borders with Gaza, except for humanitarian aid, after Hamas violently took complete control over Gaza in June 2007. Yusuf said Hamas does not oppose a European Union presence at the crossing and would even accept members of the rival Fatah movement. If the crossings reopen, and international aid flows in to rebuild Gaza, Hamas will almost certainly become even stronger.

Robert Altman might have spurned conventional happy endings in his films, but the finale of his own career was pure Hollywood. The pitch for an Altman biopic would read like a redemption tale straight out of George Cukor or Frank Capra: Rebellious, anti-establishment filmmaker of the '70s crashes and burns in the '80s, loses his shirt, sobers up, and finally returns, wiser and grizzled, with two bitter but ultimately sympathetic portraits of Los Angeles—The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993)—that win over the natives. In the final years of his life, Altman received steady critical praise, major studio funding, and an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In an essay written for the Criterion Collection's impressive new two-disc edition of Short Cuts, Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington describes Altman's comeback as a "sudden cinematic re-emergence." "In Short Cuts, returning to the style and strategy of his earlier seventies movies—with their interweaving story lines, huge casts, and open-ended narratives—Altman actually topped his official masterpiece, Nashville." The claims that Short Cuts "topped" Nashville, and that Nashville's status as a masterpiece is "official," are peculiar. So is the implication that Altman's intervening films—including Popeye (1980), Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), and Vincent & Theo (1990)—were uniformly dismal. But most strange is the assertion, made by numerous critics, that Short Cuts is a return to the spirit of Nashville. It is true that both films have huge casts and interweaving story lines and take place in a single American city. Yet the similarities end there. In style and approach they diverge dramatically in ways that reveal the hollowness of the traditional critical perspective on Altman and the surprising innovativeness of Altman's late career.

The ensemble picture, with numerous interweaving story lines, is an old genre. Early examples include Grand Hotel (1932), Stagecoach (1939), and The Rules of the Game (1939), which provided inspiration for Altman's last hit, Gosford Park (2001). Altman had already made an ensemble picture himself—M*A*S*H—five years before Nashville. What sets Nashville apart is the ruthless extent to which Altman dismantles conventional patterns of plot and structure yet, in the process, manages to tell a story about America that is as vivid and contradictory as any that has appeared on screen. The film features 25 major characters—political activists; news reporters; hangers-on; and aspiring, triumphant, and failed musicians and singers—and their tales of heartbreak, insecurity, infidelity, greed, and compassion. Altman's approach is unique in the way that he refuses to develop any of these stories in isolation. Almost every sequence is a tug-of-war between multiple scenes, occurring simultaneously. Dialogues blend into one another and are interrupted by extended musical performances, television and radio reports, and the incessant political diatribes of a presidential candidate, whose van drives through every outdoor scene.

The richness of Altman's technique is evident even in the film's most mundane moments. Take, for instance, the following scene, from early in the film, in which Altman introduces several characters, subplots, and themes in a single burst of action. We see the indifference of strangers to the sadness of Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn), whose wife is dying; the desperation of the aspiring country western singer (Gwen Welles) who wrongly assumes that the strange man at the counter (Jeff Goldblum, in one of his first film roles) can somehow further her career; the disgust of her friend, the cook (Robert DoQui), one of the few characters in the film who exhibits common sense and rationality; and last, a glimpse into the melancholy of political hack Del Reese (Ned Beatty). Though the scene is meticulously choreographed, the transitions feel natural. The viewer is made to feel as if he were having a coffee down at the other end of the counter, eavesdropping on the various conversations going on around him.

There is a glimpse of this layered style at certain points in Short Cuts—particularly the opening and closing sequences, during which Altman cuts quickly between different characters during citywide crises. But where Nashville is gloriously messy, a ball of tangled wires, Short Cuts feels curated, like a guided tour through an exhibition. Each scene is a vignette unto itself, an effect that derives from the film's source material: the short stories of Raymond Carver. For the purpose of the film, Altman loosely connects the different stories, but they rarely merge in meaningful ways. The film lacks its predecessor's kaleidoscopic exuberance, its lightness, and its symphonic manipulation of sound and dialogue. As a result, Short Cuts already feels dated, while the much older film continues to amaze.

But there are benefits to a more conventional approach. While there are emotionally stirring moments in Nashville—such as Lily Tomlin's patient interactions with her deaf children or the disturbing onstage breakdown of Ronee Blakely's fragile country-western star—the film never attains the emotional complexity of a scene in Short Cuts in which a down-on-her-luck waitress (Tomlin again) drives into an 8-year-old child who is walking to school. She is horrified and runs over to see whether the child is seriously injured. (He is.) But, as we later learn, she's terrified of having to pay for damages that she can't afford. In a turn of events that haunts the rest of the film, she allows the child to convince her to drive away. Tomlin passes from shock, to guilt, to denial, in a single harrowing shot.

In Nashville, Altman's camerawork is fluid and impatient; in Short Cuts he lingers on a single dramatic encounter, often for an uncomfortable amount of time. An astonishing example of this technique comes when Marian (Julianne Moore) tells her husband (Matthew Modine), in meticulous detail, the story of how she committed adultery—an upsetting scene made perverse by the fact that she is not wearing any pants. The voyeuristic shock of her red pubic hair makes the viewer uneasily complicit in her sexual transgression.

A subtler, but equally excruciating scene takes place in a hospital waiting room where Howard (Bruce Davison) is attending to his son, who lies in a coma. To his alarm, Howard's own estranged father (Jack Lemmon) shows up. In a monologue that lasts nearly six minutes, Lemmon describes how he ended up sleeping with his sister-in-law (Howard's aunt)—an act that would ruin his relationship with his wife and son.

It's a remarkably nuanced episode, for while Lemmon is a sympathetic, defeated figure, he is also unreliable. He wants to earn his son's forgiveness, yet he defiantly insists, against reason, upon his own innocence. In Davison's face we can see that he has heard another version of the story—his mother's—that contradicts what his father is saying. He may be desperate to avoid revisiting this sordid episode, but he can't help but listen to his father's story.

The main subject of Short Cuts is not, ultimately, Los Angeles. If anything, Nashville, with its show-biz hucksters, gray eminences, wannabes, and divas, is a better portrait of L.A.; in an interview Altman once described the country music capital as "a microcosm of the Hollywood syndrome." Short Cuts is a more personal film. It cuts deeper, exposing the secret motives that make us hurt the people we love.

On Tuesday, NBC declared a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals commercial—featuring, among other suggestive images, a woman preparing to pleasure herself with a broccoli stalk—too racy to be shown during the Super Bowl. The text in PETA's advertisement reads: "Studies show vegetarians have better sex." Do they?

Not necessarily. In a statement released in response to NBC's decision, PETA noted that meat makes people "fat, sick, and boring in bed," claiming that vegetarians are, "on average, fitter and slimmer than meat eaters" and that meat and dairy consumption is linked to impotence, heart disease, and obesity. It's true that cardiovascular disease is associated with sexual dysfunction in both women and men and that obesity has been linked to low libido in both sexes. It's also true that, in Westernized countries at least, vegetarians and vegans tend to weigh less and have lower body-mass indexes and lower cholesterol levels than omnivores. This may be due to the fact that vegetarian diets tend to be higher in fiber and lower in protein, but it also may have to do with the fact that vegetarians are, in general, more health-conscious. An avowed vegetarian who ate nothing but french fries, after all, would run a high risk of both obesity and heart disease. (A PETA spokesman cited research on vegetarian diet plans developed by Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn as sources for the commercial's claims—both regimens are also strictly low-fat and low-cholesterol.)

Vegetarianism also may have some negative effects on sexual desire. Vegetarian diets tend to correlate with higher rates of zinc deficiency, which is closely associated with lower testosterone levels and depressed sex drives. Vegetarian women are also more likely to develop amenorrhea (loss of periods), a condition that's usually accompanied by low testosterone, vaginal dryness, and poor libido. Finally, the notion that overweight people are less sexually active isn't entirely accurate (for women, at least): A recent analysis published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology shows that overweight women might, in fact, be slightly more active.

Historically, vegetarianism has been linked more closely with chastity than with licentiousness. Sylvester Graham, the crusading 19^th-century dietary reformer and inventor of the eponymous cracker, believed that meat—along with feather beds, coffee, tea, and richly seasoned foods—encouraged the "degenerating habits of luxury, indolence, voluptuousness and sensuality." (He also believed that the paroxysms of orgasm were related to diarrhea.)

Around the same time, in Russia, Leo Tolstoy gave up meat because of his concerns about animal cruelty. In "The First Step," his "essay on the morals of diet," Tolstoy claims that meat-eating is "quite unnecessary, and only serves to develop animal feelings, to excite desire, to promote fornication and drunkenness." Later, in the early 20^th century, English schoolmasters recommended vegetarian diets to their students as a means of curbing their appetites for self-abuse.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Jacqueline Jacques, chief science officer of Catalina Lifesciences Inc., and Dan Shannon of PETA.

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Marc Dreier, the New York lawyer charged with defrauding his investors out of $400 million, failed to make bail last Thursday. He will await trial in jail rather than at home, because he could not meet the conditions set by Judge Douglas Eaton—namely, a $20 million bond and at least four "responsible" co-signers.* By contrast, Bernie Madoff, who confessed to a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, was released on $10 million bail and has been living under house arrest in his Manhattan penthouse since December. Who qualifies for house arrest?

Those unlikely to break the terms of their confinement. Judges may impose house arrest in lieu of incarceration before trial (as a condition of bail) or as a sentence. Prior to sentencing, judges are chiefly concerned with the risk of flight—determined based on criminal record, a person's ties to the community (does he have a family to support?), and his visibility (will someone notice if he tries to fly the coop?). Judges considering house arrest instead of jail time are mostly concerned with the likelihood of recidivism. While it's not common for convicts to serve out an entire sentence at home, nonviolent offenders may get away with a jail-free punishment if they have a clean rap sheet, a steady employment history, and no gang affiliation. Parole commissions may also impose home confinement instead of releasing an offender after he's served a prison sentence. This option is especially common for sex offenders.

There are several different types of home confinement. It's rare for an offender to stay at home 24 hours a day. Some offenders get "curfew," which means they only have to be at home during evening hours. Others can go to work or certain pre-approved activities like medical visits, training programs, or school. To make sure the defendants or offenders abide by the terms of their confinement, the court orders them to wear electronic monitoring devices. Courts (or whatever agency is responsible for the offender) frequently outsource the surveillance of these devices to private companies, who assign as many as 500 cases per employee. (The employees just stare at a computer screen, then call a parole officer if a monitoring device trips an alarm.) In high-profile situations (like Madoff's) or for high-risk criminals (like sex offenders), this caseload can go down to eight or 10 per monitoring employee.

Judges often opt for home confinement when a prison term seems too harsh or parole too lenient. This form of punishment is also economical: It costs less to incarcerate someone at home than in a penitentiary. On average, it costs nearly $26,000 a year to lock up someone in prison, and that's just counting food, electricity, and guards' salaries, not the price associated with building or expanding prisons. That makes home confinement, at about $6,000 a year—for the electronic monitoring device, the people who stare at a screen, and parole officers—a bargain. Furthermore, offenders are often expected to defray the cost of their own confinements. An offender's contribution is set on a sliding scale, based on his ability to pay.

Judges have imposed sentences of home confinement instead of parole since as far back as the 1900s. It didn't become a widespread alternative to imprisonment, however, until electronic monitoring devices made it inexpensive and easy to manage. In 1977, Judge Jack Love of Albuquerque, N.M., read a Spider-Man comic strip wherein a villain tags Spidey with a surveillance device and asked an electronics expert to manufacture a similar gadget for use with criminals. Six years later, in 1983, the judge issued the first-ever court sentence of house arrest with an electronic bracelet. (Similar technology had been used in Boston in the '60s and '70s to track parolees, research volunteers, and mental patients.) By 1988, there were approximately 2,300 monitoring devices in use. By 1998, that number had increased to 95,000.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Joan Petersilia of the University of California, Irvine.

Correction, Jan. 30, 2009: This article originally referred to "jail" as "prison." (Return to the corrected sentence.)

A woman gave birth to octuplets in California Monday after 30 weeks of pregnancy. The six boys and two girls ranged in weight from 1 pound, 8 ounces, to 3 pounds, 4 ounces. How many babies can fit inside a pregnant woman?

There's no scientific limit, but the largest reported number of fetuses in one womb was 15. In 1971, Dr. Gennaro Montanino of Rome claimed to have removed 15 fetuses from the womb of a 35-year-old woman. The largest number of babies ever delivered was in Australia in 1971, when a 29-year-old women gave birth to nonuplets. They all died. (Decaplets were supposedly born in Brazil in 1946, but that report is unconfirmed.) The largest set of children to be born together and survive—not including this week's octuplets, who are all still alive—is seven. A set of septuplets born in Iowa in 1997 became the first to survive infancy. At least two more sets of septuplets have since been born and survived.

How do so many babies fit in one woman? The limit isn't so much the number of babies as their volume and weight. In general, once the total weight of the babies inside reaches about 12 pounds, the uterus goes into labor. The greater the number of fetuses, the earlier the labor will occur. (The rough formula for due dates is to start at 40 weeks of gestation for one baby and subtract three weeks for each additional child: 37 for twins, 34 for triplets, etc. It's remarkable, then, that eight fetuses were able to gestate for 30 weeks, as in the California case.) Labor can also occur if a sac ruptures and introduces bacteria into the uterus or if one of the fetuses isn't growing correctly and signals the uterus to induce labor. (Scientists still don't know exactly what causes labor to start.) But for safety reasons, multiple births are often carried out before labor naturally occurs, and almost always by cesarean section. If the uterus gets too big and the fetuses too heavy, it can be difficult for the woman to breathe. The amount of placental tissue can also cause the mother to develop pre-eclampsia, or pregnancy-related hypertension.

Don't the babies get tangled up? No. Each baby is enclosed in its own amniotic sac, which keeps the various umbilical cords and limbs from getting intertwined. Picture a bucketful of water balloons. In each sac, there's plenty of fluid—about two-thirds the volume of the fetus—for the baby to move around in. After the sacs break, the babies can get tangled up during birth—so-called interlocking twins—which is why doctors usually opt for cesarean section.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Joshua A. Copel of Yale University Medical School and Thomas Moore of University of California, San Diego.

Inauguration organizers admitted on Friday that while Yo-Yo Ma and his fellow musicians were playing live onstage at the ceremony last week, they weren't miked; it was the sound of a pre-recorded performance that was heard in the crowd and around the world. The musicians explained that the temperature conditions would have ruined the sound. What are the optimal climatic conditions for playing an instrument?

Around 70 degrees, with 40 percent to 50 percent humidity. But instruments are more stressed by rapidly changing conditions than by extreme temperatures or moisture levels. Because heating systems warm air without adding moisture, the relative humidity is often as much as 30 percent to 40 percent lower indoors, even on a cold and dry day. When instruments made of wood move between environments of varying humidity, they absorb or expel moisture. The resulting expansion and contraction can crack the instrument. String instruments, such as violins and cellos, are particularly susceptible to cracking, because they are often made of two different types of wood (usually spruce and maple) that absorb moisture at different rates. Hide glue, the collagen-based sealant used to secure the pieces together, moderates the problem. It is weaker than synthetic glues and is likely to release the various parts before the wood cracks.

Less dramatic climatic changes can take instruments out of tune. Piano strings, made of a combination of steel and copper, expand and contract in response to temperature changes. Even the warmth of stage lights can affect a piano. For this reason, pianos are usually tuned just before a performance and left in place, but doing so in the outdoor din and clamor of Inauguration Day would have been tough. Modern violin strings are less susceptible to expanding and contracting, as they are made of a type of nylon rather than the traditional "gut," or sheep intestine. However, the pegs that hold the strings do expand or contract in response to changes in humidity, loosening or tightening the strings.

In terms of absolute temperature tolerance, hide glue and varnish soften at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the risk that the instrument will become sticky and fall apart. And no instrument containing high moisture levels (such as the clarinet, which must be played with a moist reed) can be used at temperatures below freezing. As for string instruments, the minimum temperature would depend on the instrument's storage history and age.

Both Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman left their Stradivarius instruments at home on Inauguration Day, preferring to subject less-valuable pieces to the cold. (In a bit of irony, some scientists believe that a prolonged cold period is what gave the prized Stradivarius instruments, built around 1700, their unique sound.) But a cracked Stradivarius would not be the tragedy one might imagine. Of the 600 or so remaining instruments, almost all have experienced some form of trauma, ranging from poor storage to being thrown in a trash bin or crushed under the weight of a violin virtuoso. Repair is expensive but effective. And experts believe even the most mint Stradivarius pieces sound nothing like their original incarnations. Shortly after the instruments' creation, finicky luthiers thinned the wood to generate a bolder, louder sound. Most modern musicians have also adjusted the neck angle and play with different bridge and bow types.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Stewart Pollens of The Violin Advisor.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the decree of automatic excommunication against a group of right-wing bishops who were ordained without papal approval, an act of schism, in 1988. Most of the publicity surrounding this intra-ecclesial move has focused on its effect on Jewish-Catholic relations, because one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, has recently and publicly denied the Holocaust. In protest of the decision to remove the excommunication, the chief rabbi of Jerusalem severed relations with the Vatican, and the Pope's planned trip to the Holy Land later this year is now in doubt.

Just because the decree was lifted does not mean the bishops are within the Catholic fold: To achieve full communion with Rome, you must accept all the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. But the bishops belong to the conservative Society of St. Pius X, a group founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre because they rejected Vatican II. Since he took office in 2005, Pope Benedict has made no secret of his desire to end the schism. Holocaust deniers, of course, are crazy. But for a Catholic to deny the teachings, and even the validity, of the Second Vatican Council is pretty insane, too.

An ecumenical council is the most authoritative form of church teaching. The first council, at Nicaea in 325, issued the creed that is still recited at Sunday Mass. Other early councils defined the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. In the 16^th century, the Council of Trent represented Catholicism's response to the Reformation.

Rejecting the teachings of a council is a bit like being a Republican in favor of higher taxes: You have to wonder why you're still a member of the club. Lefebvre and his ilk decided to leave the club rather than accept the teachings of Vatican II. They were especially alarmed by the abandonment of the Latin Mass and the Decree on Religious Liberty, which recognized the separation of church and state as a valid form of constitutional arrangement. "The Second Vatican Council is the religion of man, of man put in the place of God," the British Williamson told a U.K. paper. "Deep down what it means is that it's a new religion, dressed up to look like the Catholic religion, but it's not the Catholic religion." While the leader of the Society of St. Pius X, Bishop Barnard Fellay, has forbidden Williamson from speaking about the Holocaust and apologized for the controversy, he actually echoed Williamson's objection to Vatican II. (And at least one society member has spoken out in support of Williamson's beliefs about the Holocaust.)

Pope Benedict's decision to try to bring the Lefebvrists back into the fold was entirely his own. The pope believes he has a special responsibility to promote unity among Catholics—including those who have fallen away from the church. In a rare show of public dissatisfaction with his superior, Cardinal Walter Kasper said tersely, "It was the decision of the pope." Kasper called Williamson's remarks "gibberish" and emphasized that lifting the automatic excommunication was the start of a long process that could come to fruition only if the Lefebvrists accept the teachings of Vatican II. Other Vatican officials have expressed dismay at the pope's move off the record.

Benedict's decision is especially difficult to understand when the Vatican is proceeding against two priests for their disagreement with the magisterium of the church. American theologian Roger Haight was recently silenced and forbidden to teach because of concerns about his writings, which the Vatican thought misunderstood the nature of Christ. Rev. Roy Bourgeois, of the Maryknoll order, has been threatened with excommunication because he participated in a ceremony at which women were ordained to the priesthood. Indeed, the similarities between Bourgeois' case and that of the Lefebvrists are uncanny: Both set themselves up in judgment over the magisterial authority of the pope and council; both are implicated in illicit and invalid ordination ceremonies.

Progressive Catholics are accustomed to being called "cafeteria Catholics" because of the perception that they pick and choose among Catholic teachings, accepting some while ignoring others. But here it is the progressives who are claiming foul and the right wing that is charged with its own bizarre brand of cafeteria Catholicism. Some wish to deny the church's ban on ordaining women; others wish to deny Vatican II's teachings on separation of church and state.

When the Vatican moves against a renegade theologian, it is easy enough to acknowledge that the church has a right to decide who does and does not speak in its name. No pastor can be indifferent to the possibility of his flock being led astray. But it will be curious to see if the Lefebvrists will reconcile themselves to Vatican II and how much wiggle room the Vatican will allow them in interpreting the documents of that council. The smart money says they will end up biting the papal hand that has just tried to feed them, and Benedict will regret his decision. After all, they are crazy, and crazy people can draw outsiders into their world of mirrors, leaving onlookers to figure out who is sane and who is not. If Benedict wants to make some room for the crazies on the right, I just hope he will give similar latitude to those on the left. We all may be cafeteria Catholics in one way or another.

At the height of his powers in 2005-06, Ted Haggard was a poster child for Christian conservatism and an object of liberal fascination. His political power was profiled by Harper's and featured in a string of documentaries—Jesus Camp, Friends of God, and the United Kingdom's The Root of All Evil? But in November 2006, Haggard lost his posts as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and senior pastor of Colorado Springs' New Life Church when a male escort claimed he had known the minister for three years as "Art," a drug user and sex-for-cash client. Haggard admitted to "sexual immorality" and was said to be entering a process of restoration guided by other well-known ministers.

Two years have gone by with little more than occasional peeps from Haggard, and now he's back in The Trials of Ted Haggard, an HBO film directed by Alexandra Pelosi, a sort of sequel to her Friends of God, that documents Haggard's dreary life in exile—no job, no home, no friends, no ministry. Earlier this week, when CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed Pelosi, he tried to open with a question about the fallen minister's "spiritual restoration." Pelosi interrupted Cooper before he could finish the question, saying she couldn't speak to Haggard's mental or spiritual condition. Fair enough. But Cooper's question is the right one—for journalists, for Haggard, for his former church, and for countless other congregations that have suffered similar betrayals.

I was Haggard's writer and editor for eight years. When he called me the weekend he was exposed, he sounded like a broken man. He was grateful for a chance to come clean and stop his downward spiral. In those early days, those of us who knew Haggard figured we would come to know the depth of his duplicity—that he'd fess up completely now that he had nothing to lose. In a confession letter, he promised us that he'd be guided "through a program with the goal of healing and restoration for my life, my marriage, and my family."

But Haggard never really came clean. A Colorado Springs TV station reported last week that he had at least one other inappropriate relationship while ministering—this time with a young man who had been an intern at the church. Mike Jones, the male-escort-turned-author, recently posted a YouTube video claiming to know of still "others" who were sexually involved with Haggard. And Haggard certainly hasn't been restored. In February 2007, the Denver Post reported that Haggard "emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is 'completely heterosexual.' " Haggard denied making that claim—it was uttered by a New Life Church overseer—but his therapy never went beyond those three weeks at an Arizona treatment center. A year later, after Haggard caused a stir by sending a fundraising e-mail, his former church rebuked him publicly and officially released him from any restoration program without describing the nature of the program or how much Haggard had completed.

And now Haggard is back, telling Oprah Winfrey and Larry King that he's confused about his sexuality and accusing his former church of telling him to "go to hell." In his interviews, Haggard has ranged from humility and self-deprecation to wondering aloud how Christians can be so mean and claiming that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mother of Trials of Ted Haggard director Alexandra, sent him words of encouragement during his time in exile. (Pelosi's office denied that claim.)

Haggard has complained to some of his old friends, including me, that if he had been a CEO instead of the senior pastor of a church, he would have been back at work in one month. New Life Church needed to protect itself and had to shun one of its own in order not to expose itself to financial ruin in the form of fleeing members. Haggard has complained, and now has Alexandra Pelosi complaining for him, that New Life Church refused to do the main thing churches are designed to do: forgive.

The searing pain of a minister's betrayal is not an uncommon experience. Haggard won't be the last high-profile pastor, and certainly not the last evangelical minister, to fall from grace in our era. Those sorry future pastors will probably also be encouraged to be spiritually restored. But what will that mean for them? What does a spiritual restoration process look like? More complicatedly, what does it look like for a pastor of Haggard's stature—someone who, at his height, could claim to speak for 30 million evangelicals? We're short of models. For 1980s disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker, it was a prison stint, a long confessional book, and a slow return to a modest TV ministry. In Haggard's case, it initially seemed to involve nothing more than tapping recognizable Christian ministers and what he has called "secular" therapy. What else did the church have in mind? What should Haggard, his family, and his former church members have expected?

One place to look is outside religious ministry and inside British politics, to the famous Profumo Affair. When popular politician John Profumo was caught with a prostitute in 1963, he resigned and withdrew completely from public life. For the rest of his days—he lived until 2006—he did the work of atonement, cleaning toilets, washing dishes, and working with alcoholics in London's East End. Profumo never published a memoir or even granted so much as an interview, even though he once acknowledged "deeply distressing inaccuracies" in reports of his affair.

Before his fall, Haggard always claimed he'd do the same. From time to time over the years, from his pulpit, Haggard would say that if anything ever incapacitated his ability to minister, he hoped he'd just continue to come as a member and volunteer at the church—clean floors, scrub bathrooms. Unfortunately, given allegations of inappropriate behavior between Haggard and a church member, he couldn't be allowed within his church at all. But there were plenty of other options. Every town has an East End.

The problem for people like Ted Haggard—the problem that John Profumo intuited—is that he was in a position of public trust. Once fully lost, that trust can never be fully restored. Robert Downey Jr. can become an A-list actor, ruin himself with drugs, sober up, and become an A-list actor all over again. A businessman, a scholar, or a parent can do something similar. Why can't Haggard? Because his very public career was based on the antithesis of his failures. Downey wants only to be a damn fine actor, and he can be that no matter the content of his character. Haggard wanted to be a minister, a position that makes claims on his behavior—claims that Haggard professed to be equal to. Haggard didn't have to be a big supporter of President Bush, or outspoken against homosexuality, or any of the things that charged his public life. But he did have to have character that was consistent with the values that he so loudly espoused. His life did have to be consistent with what he preached, because preaching is based on public trust within the preacher's community of followers. Integrity is the deal-maker, hypocrisy the deal-breaker.

Most people who fail need only redeem themselves with their most immediate friends and family. They can ask forgiveness of every person they've wounded. How could Haggard ask forgiveness of 30 million—or even the 14,000 members of his former church? Sitting across from Oprah is no substitute for sitting across from those you've hurt. But he can go away quietly, do the work of atonement, and let tales of his renewed life spring up naturally, Profumo-style.

Haggard can't enter a pulpit, and he shouldn't seek to be a spiritual leader, at least not for eons. He can enter a congregation somewhere, and if he wants to do that, he should, as a fellow traveler with other seekers. And that congregation should embrace him. That's what his spiritual restoration would look like.

If you walk into a store and see your child for sale—face emblazoned on a T-shirt, name planted on a doll—what's the proper reaction? In my world, there is only one: dismay, followed by protest. Which is why Michelle Obama's response to the blatant packaging of her daughters by the toy company Ty, as brown-skinned dolls named "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia," hit precisely the right maternal note. Even in the carefully chosen words of Michelle's spokeswoman—"We feel it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes"—you can feel the heat beneath the ice.

And that comes as something of a relief to me. Because Barack and Michelle Obama's job as parents is to think first, middle, and last about what's good for their girls. When it comes to the kids, forget the country. Forget the opportunity and burden of being black role models, and all the children out there whose horizons will expand as they hug their little Sasha and Malia replicas. There are plenty of other people—a whole nation's worth, it seems—who can obsess about the implications of that. The Obamas have a harder task: negotiating the boundaries for their children without, apparently, resorting to the utter kids-off-limits policies of presidents before them.

In the Washington Post, my friend Ruth Marcus says that she understands Michelle Obama's reaction to the dolls but urges her to "embrace them." (I'm not sure why Michelle O. had to make this all about the first lady's office, since the president could have spoken out as a father, too.) Ruth hearkens back to the famous psychology experiment cited by the Supreme Court in its 1954 school desegregation decision, in which black children by wide margins chose to play with white dolls, which they called "nice," in contrast to the "bad" black ones. Ruth adds that a 2005 documentary posed the same choice and got the same distressing results. My colleague Jessica Grose makes a similar point that there's an upside to Ty's opportunistic profit-making: "Little girls of all races might want to play with black dolls now."

Lovely. The one time I bought my older son dolls, when he was 2 or 3, we picked out a pair of twin black babies dressed in pink and white. (Don't give us too much credit for enlightenment: Eli named the boy doll Rohan, after a baby at his day care, and completely ignored the girl doll.) Sure, it will be good for African-American children's self-image, and white children's perceptions of race, if the Obama products do well.

But in solidarity with the Obamas as parents, I am not going to buy Sweet Sasha and Marvelous Malia for my 3-year-old niece. It's beyond dispute that Malia and Sasha have already lost all semblance of ordinary life. They are growing up as objects of national fascination. Inevitably, almost everyone they meet will think of them as Barack Obama's children first and as 7-year-old and 10-year-old girls second. The problem with the Ty dolls isn't so much the crass commercialization. Hey, it's America, and there's even a shred of tradition here: When Caroline Kennedy was a little girl in the White House, someone made a doll of her, too, we learn from The New Yorker this week. The dolls irritate because they're part of the myth that these very real White House girls are slowly being wrapped in, one more data point that suggests to them that they're not just living in a storybook, they're starring in one.

And that can't be a good thing for a kid. Childhood shouldn't be about watching other people watch you and thinking of yourself differently as a result. On Slate's "XX Factor" blog, my colleague Samantha Henig asks, "Do any of you moms hold it against [Obama] that he chose to go for it anyway, even though [becoming president] would almost certainly make a 'normal' childhood impossible for his daughters?" My answer is yes: It's the least appealing thing about the man.

That's why I've found a couple of the Obamas' recent moves about their kids faintly disturbing. Why release pictures from the first day of school at Sidwell Friends? Why write an open letter to the girls for publication in Parade magazine the week before the inauguration? That letter didn't seem pitched to kids of their age. And as I wrote at the time, it was a combination of stilted rhetoric ("I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential") and of weighting down Malia and Sasha with the burden of future service. Their father charges them with "righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had." Give it a rest.

At the same time, I'm not sure I want to argue that the only choice parents can make for kids who grow up in the White House is a reclusive rule of no press and no exposure at any time. It's not that I think the nation shouldn't be denied the teachable moments that will come from glimpses into our first African-American first family. Like I said, as parents, Barack and Michelle Obama are the two people in the world who should ignore that consideration. But I do wonder if keeping entirely out of the public eye isn't what the girls want themselves.

Maybe it's a sign of our overly permissive, child-centric times to take what may be their wishes into account in this way. (Also, maybe I'm trying to excuse myself, once again, for writing about my own kids.) But once you've decided to run for president, and in the process vaulted your kids into a position as America's darlings, I'm not sure how you tell them to stay entirely out of sight. Those girls clearly reveled in waving to the crowds on Inauguration Day. In the TV interview they gave last July—the one that their father later apologized for—they betrayed traces of impatience and tiredness. After a few minutes, I wasn't really sure they wanted to be there. But I bet they were the instigators. And I do think they enjoyed puncturing their father for the world by rolling their eyes over his odd disinterest in dessert.

The Obamas are still finding their footing over how much to let the girls into public view. Meanwhile, that parenting tightrope-walk is itself the subject of endless press interest. Mine included: I share the ambivalence of Salon's Broadsheet about how much I should be peering, via photograph or video, into those girls' wide-open faces.

My hope for Sasha and Malia is that at least some of the kids they go to school with will respond to them simply as kids. Sidwell is its own D.C. fishbowl, but at least the girls are young enough to have young, relatively uncanny classmates. Or at least a few. I heard a reassuring story, third-hand, along these lines: Soon after Sasha showed up for school, the mother of one of the boys in her class couldn't resist pumping her son for details. What was the president's daughter like? His answer went something like, "I don't know. She's a girl. I don't talk to girls." That's the best news I've heard yet about Barack Obama's girls since they moved to the White House. Let's hope that it's a bubble that lasts.

We all communicate "Do as I say, not as I do" to our kids in one way or another.

Sometimes, it's not such a bad thing. We hope our children won't make the same mistakes we made in life, and we want them to do better than we did, so it makes sense that we want them to do things differently. "Yes, I smoke, but you're not allowed to" is not simple hypocrisy, especially if you follow up with something like, "I made a bad decision when I started, I realize it's not good for me, and I'm trying to quit. You'll never have to face this problem if you never start." Also, for many behaviors, children ought to wait to until the appropriate age, so it's not inconsistent to say, "Do as I say" (no makeup, violent video games, staying out late, owning a car) "and not as I do" (all of those) but with an added phrase such as "until you are older," "until you can pay for it with your own money," or "until you can take care of yourself."

But "Do as I say, not as I do," when it does take the form of inconsistency, can also undermine your intentions as a parent. Think of the mother reclining in her beach chair who bellows to her distant kids, "You guys stop making so much noise and bothering everybody!" or the father who regularly spanks his son for hitting his sister, or the couple who routinely curse a blue streak around the house and punish their children for swearing. If you're a parent, you're probably conducting a swift mental review of your own behavior for similar, if less dramatic, inconsistencies. And if you're honest, you'll find them. Why does it matter?

The research points to three consequences of inconsistency. First, the effects of your teaching are diminished when deeds and words are not in line. The more inconsistent you are, the more you will hear yourself saying, "How many times have I told you not to do that?" Second, children can readily recognize inconsistencies, and they become more upset with their inconsistent parents than children who have parents who are more consistent. And although even small children can readily report on parental inconsistencies, they usually wait until adolescence to throw them in their parents' faces. Third, a parent who does one thing but expects or demands the opposite from a child is more likely to have discipline problems and more likely to punish a lot in the effort to overcome the influence of his or her own modeling.

The main idea to bear in mind here is that modeling—teaching by example—affects behavior far more than telling your children what to do (and far more than punishing them, too). Even when young children have to do what their parents tell them to do, they may well intend to do what their parents actually do as soon as they can get away with it. If you make your kids use seat belts, helmets, and sunscreen but you don't model these safety behaviors yourself, they're more likely to let such precautions slide as they grow up and take charge of themselves. Most modeling influences are tacit. The parent does not have to say "Watch this" or "This is how you carry yourself in the world." The child just learns by observing. He does not have to understand what the parent is doing in order for the learning to take place.

Brain research has demonstrated that there are special cells called mirror neurons. When we watch someone do something, our mirror neurons become active in the brain as if we ourselves were engaging in the same behavior we are observing. This suggests that learning consists of making connections not only in a figurative way (as we assemble sequences of behavior) but also in a literal way, as observation of a behavior forges the same neural connections made from practicing that behavior. Let's say—not that this is true of anyone who reads Slate, of course—that while you never give other drivers the finger when your spouse is in the car, you'll do it when the kids are in the back. Just picture the little darlings, strapped snugly into their car seats, raising their own middle digits every time they see you do it. Thanks to mirror neurons, they're getting lots of bird-flipping practice back there without moving a muscle. Remember this in a few years when they start doing it to one another—and to you, of course, which will fill you with baffled rage and a desire to chastise them in innovatively harsh ways.

Modeling does not always dictate a child's behavior—your kids won't inevitably do everything you do—but it's an important and underappreciated way to transmit information, experiences, skills, beliefs, values, and large segments of behavior. Modeling can teach a child how to handle conflict, react to stress or fear, or interact with others. It's unforgiving in that it teaches your best and worst behaviors, the ones you're most careful to practice and others you're barely conscious of. One way to test the power of modeling is to play a game with your child in which you imitate each other. Pretend that you (as your child) broke something, returned home with poor grades, or committed some other plausible offense; ask your child, playing you, to respond to the news as you would. These renditions are usually uncomfortably accurate and nuanced, and yet our typical first reaction is "I never do that."

A certain degree of inconsistency in modeling and its relationship to what you say is inevitable. You are not the only model in your child's life: There are other relatives, peers, teachers, peers' parents, media characters, and so on. You're modeling one way to respond to stress, for instance, and Hellboy and Hannah Montana are modeling others. In two-parent households, the two adults will model different behaviors and ways of being in the world. Sometimes the discrepancies are large—for example, when one parent lives on junk food and the other inveighs against this habit. This is a normal level of inconsistency for family life. It gets more complicated when you add to the mix other relatives in the home, separated or divorced parents with new partners, and the like, but children have to cope, and they usually do. After all, doing one thing but saying something else to your child is the important tip of a larger iceberg, a larger set of common inconsistencies that go far beyond child rearing. It's only human.

While inconsistency may be inevitable, parents can still take steps to reduce its effects on their kids. If you're interested in practical parenting advice along those lines, please click here. We cannot appear to our children as saintly fictional characters who model only desirable behaviors, but an appreciation of the potency of modeling can help us set an example for them with a little more purpose and effectiveness.

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1. Choose key areas you want to influence. Parents model an almost infinite range of actions, beliefs, and values: the way we interact with friends and strangers and what we say about them when they're not around, how irritable we are on a bad day, how we handle errors by others, how we treat animals, whether we use a Kleenex or our sleeve ... it's endless. We cannot—and should not—be models of perfect behavior across the board. So with your spouse or partner (if you have one) identify the high priorities: the positive activities you would like to develop (specific competencies, skills, habits), undesirable behaviors you want to discourage, or values and beliefs you wish to establish. Keep the list short and use it to concentrate your conscious modeling efforts. Some of the goals may be lofty—like teaching your child to be generous with those less fortunate—but others may be mundane. If you really want your child to eat more fruits and vegetables, buy plenty of them and eat them yourself.

2. Talk to your child about whatever you want to encourage. Direct communication—talking about those key areas you have identified—complements the influence of modeling. Studies have shown this to be the case in such areas as safety, self-care, and how to treat other people. It's crucial, though, to wait for a moment of calm to talk positively about the behaviors you want to see more of. That sounds obvious, but far too often parents find themselves trying to have such conversations in the opposite circumstance: when they're yelling at a child for doing the opposite of what they want and when any intended content is therefore least likely to get through. The best time for a swimming lesson is not when a person is desperately trying not to drown.

3. Make available any materials associated with the behaviors you do want. In many cases, it helps to have the right things around and to use them yourself. If you want to foster interest in a particular topic, keep books, magazines, or photos related to the topic around the home where your children can get to them. If you would like to foster an interest in playing music, toy instruments and then a real instrument can help. Materials provide cues that support your modeling and direct communication, and they offer direct opportunities to play, tinker, and explore. Such opportunities allow for self-generated exploration in addition to your direct influence.

4. When you are inconsistent, when you ask your child to do what you say and not what you do, the best option is to change your own behavior. If life were simple, you'd just stop doing the behavior you don't want your child to copy. But, since life is not always so simple, the next-best option is to engage in the behavior in moderation and away from the child. The research shows that direct exposure to a behavior is more potent as an influence on the child than indirect exposure—when the child knows about it but does not see you doing it all the time. Indirect exposure is not the same as secrecy or lying to the child. Think of the difference between your child knowing that you're playing a violent video game in a separate room and your child sitting on your lap while you play it. Finally, if you are inconsistent, it's better to tell the child to do otherwise than to be silent. For example, research shows that parents who smoke often have children who smoke, but when smoking parents preach nonsmoking, it slightly lowers the rate of smoking in their children. Modeling is still by far the more powerful influence, but it helps to tell the child not to smoke (Jackson & Henriksen, 1997).

5. Modeling may be a powerful influence on a child's development and behavior, but it's not the only one, and it doesn't operate by itself. Here are other major influences:

- Responsiveness to the child; responding thoughtfully, warmly, and in a caring fashion

- Preventing risky behaviors and problems; setting limits that protect the child

- Monitoring—knowing where the child is, with whom, what he or she is doing, and how the child will get there and come back

- Mentoring—providing support, guidance, respect, and instructions

- Focusing on conventional values in the context of your culture—like teaching the child that it is good to read, do homework, have family activities and routines, do chores and take a little responsibility for little tasks (such as setting the table). Activities like these are associated with doing better at school, showing fewer problems in school behavior, and a lower likelihood of engaging in high-risk behaviors later in adolescence.

Modeling is a potent way to teach, but there's more than one way to teach, and there's more to parenting than teaching.

6. Fostering a good relationship with your child makes modeling more effective. Among the many benefits of a parent's good relationship with a child—trust, comfort, affection, close attachment—is that it makes the child more likely to model the parent's behaviors. This is great when the behaviors are desirable, but as one study of smoking and drug use among adolescents suggests, the caveat is that children will pick up negative behaviors more readily, too (Andrews et al., 1997).

For more on this and other aspects of parenting, one excellent resource is Adventures in Parenting from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Listen to Curtis Sittenfeld read Part 1 of her novella here:





You can also download the MP3 file directly here or listen through Slate's Audio Book Club podcast iTunes feed.

Standing in the arrivals area of the Philadelphia airport, waiting for her 77-year-old Aunt Lettie to come into view, Patrice thinks that it's not that she wasn't thrilled about the outcome of the election—of course she was, how could she not be?—nor is it that she wasn't planning to celebrate the inauguration. It's just that she wasn't planning to attend it. She'd seen the news reports: up to 2 million people converging on the capital. Ten thousand charter buses and 11,000 U.S. troops and (this to Patrice was the biggest deterrent) more than 12,000 porta-potties. Both blessed and cursed with an acute sense of smell, Patrice has more than once, when alone and walking by a construction site, actually crossed a street to avoid passing within a few feet of a porta-potty's stench. And besides that, what would any normal person, without special access, be able to see at the inauguration? The question wasn't whether you'd have a view of the swearing-in but whether you'd even have a view of a Jumbotron.

No, Patrice was happy to stay in Philadelphia and toast history from the comfort of her own apartment. She was going to take the day off work, and so were Renee and Corinne, and the three of them were going to order in lunch and watch at Patrice's place—Patrice has the best television, a 40-inch flat screen—and probably they were going to cry a lot and intermittently pat or grip one another's hands and ponder the incredibility of it all and discuss Michelle Obama's outfit; that's pretty much everything they did on election night, except that then they ordered in dinner instead of lunch and drank champagne that Corinne had brought.

Watching the inauguration on TV with her two closest friends sounded to Patrice like a fine plan, a grand plan, even, but shortly after Christmas, her cousin Janet called from St. Louis. "You know I hate to lean on you," Janet said after they'd exchanged pleasantries and Patrice felt a gathering of dread below her sternum; Janet has never hated to lean on anyone, least of all Patrice. "William got his dates mixed up is what happened," Janet continued. "Here he arranged a romantic getaway for the two of us—and Patty, you know we haven't taken a vacation for years, just William and me—and he's so proud of himself when he tells me Christmas morning, and what do you know but the trip's the week of January 20^th?"

Patrice said nothing; she still wasn't clear what exactly Janet was after.

"Well, Patty, that's Inauguration Day," Janet said. "Now, I'm sure you remember I was going to take Momma, and now I'm just in this terrible bind—"

"Have you asked Ernie or Steve?" Patrice interrupted. These were Janet's brothers.

"Oh, Ernie and his family were there in the living room on Christmas, but, Patty, he doesn't have the flexibility you do, and with Steve's kids all crazy now and you already there on the East Coast …"

Of course: Reliably single, childless Patrice—why on earth wouldn't it be her pleasure to pick up the slack for her extended family or co-workers? It couldn't be that she chose her situation, could it? To live alone at the age of 48 in a high-rise in downtown Philadelphia, to work 60-hour weeks as a senior vice president of the nation's largest cable provider, to not even own a cat? It could only be that she settled on this life because of a lack of other options, right? (Or else—Patrice knew from Janet's clumsily faux-open-minded inquiries that this was an ongoing source of speculation—could it be that Patrice was a lesbian? The answer, which she denies her relatives the pleasure of learning, is that, no, she's not.)

By this point in the conversation, Patrice had mostly tuned out her cousin—she caught a reference to Cancun as the vacation destination, as well as a few more explanations and buttery, pre-emptive expressions of gratitude—and then there was a silence, and she knew the request had formally been made. "I'll look at my calendar," she said. "I'll call you back, all right?" This, Patrice had learned the hard way, was how you declined to do a favor, or at least how she did, because when she answered in the moment, she was inclined to say yes, and once she'd said yes, she felt obligated to go through with it.

"Absolutely, you pray on it." Janet lowered her voice. "It's Momma's dying wish. Not that she's dying, but, really, Patty, that's the only way to put it, and can you blame her? I'm disappointed myself not to go, but I'm between a rock and a hard place."

Oh, really? Patrice thought. So which one is Cancun?

She walked to her living room's sliding glass door, which opened onto a narrow balcony. Her apartment, on the 17^th floor of a building on Spruce Street, was less than a block off Broad, and on election night, she and Renee and Corinne had walked outside and waved down at the revelers who'd congregated on Broad after Pennsylvania was called for Obama; the celebrating was still going strong when Patrice went to bed around midnight, and it was such a wonderful sound to hear that she purposely didn't turn on her white-noise machine.

But being overjoyed that Obama had won wasn't the same as wanting to escort Aunt Lettie to the inauguration. Apart from what was sure to be the madness of Washington, there was also the fact that Patrice and Aunt Lettie had never been each other's favorites. Growing up in a duplex in suburban St. Louis, the other half occupied by her aunt, uncle, and cousins, Patrice had always known they considered her and her younger sister, Brenda, to be a bit prissy. Even as a very young girl, Patrice had been meticulous about keeping her clothes clean, and one of her earliest memories was of Aunt Lettie mocking her after Patrice declined baked beans at a family cookout for fear of spilling them on her pink pants; the youthful Patrice had also earned her relatives' scorn for not only memorizing the spelling of the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious but for frequently offering to recite it.

Patrice and her sister's separation from their cousins was exacerbated when, at a teacher's suggestion, first Patrice and then Brenda enrolled at a parochial high school instead of the public one, which led to their attending out-of-state colleges—Wellesley in Patrice's case—which in turn led to both of them going to graduate school, Patrice at Wharton. Neither of them has lived in St. Louis since high school. Brenda has been in London for more than a decade, married to a Senegalese-French man, and they're the parents of 9-year-old twins. Patrice and Brenda's father, an electrician, died of colon cancer in 1985, when Patrice was in her second year at Wharton; when her mother, a retired nurse, developed Alzheimer's in 1998, Patrice and Brenda paid for her to live in a top-of-the-line assisted care facility in the Clayton suburb of St. Louis, and until her mother's death in 2002, Patrice flew in to visit every other weekend and arranged for the delivery of fresh flowers on the weekends she wasn't there.

As Patrice held the phone to her ear and looked beyond her balcony—her view faced south, toward the stadiums and the shipyards on the Delaware River—it was hard not to imagine what her mother would want in this situation. In her quiet way, Patrice's mother had acknowledged that Aunt Lettie could be overbearing ("Lettie speaks her mind" was how Patrice's mother would put it), but still, to her, family was family—you shoveled out their car when you were shoveling out your own, you called to see whether they wanted to go along when you were getting Saturday lunch at the Chinese buffet. Patrice's mother would be shocked, Patrice thought, if she knew neither of her daughters had even gone back to St. Louis for Christmas this year. Don't be selfish, Patty, her mother would tell her in this moment, and her mother's voice would be not nagging but calm and generous, the voice of the person who had always believed in Patrice most. A porta-potty never hurt anyone. Take Aunt Lettie to see Barack Obama.

"Let's leave it like this," Janet was saying. "You call me in a day or two after you've—"

"Wait." Even as she spoke, Patrice winced, but at least Janet wouldn't be able to see. "I'll do it," she said.

****

Aunt Lettie, Patrice notes with alarm when at last she comes into view on the far side of the airport's security checkpoint, is not walking; rather, she's being pushed in a wheelchair, something Patrice has never witnessed of her aunt and a detail Janet neglected to mention over the phone. Patrice swallows, steeling herself, and walks forward. "Aunt Lettie," she calls as warmly as she can manage—after all, it's not really Aunt Lettie's fault Janet dumped her on Patrice. Aunt Lettie wears large plastic glasses and a wig Patrice hasn't seen before, a short full, model with auburn highlights, and she smiles broadly at Patrice, waves, and says something over one shoulder to the airport employee—a heavyset white woman—who's pushing her chair.

As they approach, Patrice also sees that Aunt Lettie is holding her cane so it rests diagonally across her body (which means she can walk, doesn't it? because otherwise why would she still need a cane?) and that it's wrapped in alternating red and blue streamers. A large Obama pin hangs on the collar of Aunt Lettie's black wool coat—Obama grinning broadly and pointing with his index finger beneath the words "I Proudly Voted for President Barack Obama 11/4/08"—and under her coat, which is open, Aunt Lettie wears a sweatshirt featuring a Barack Obama-Martin Luther King Jr. montage. Patrice herself has acquired no Obama merchandise, not during the election or since; she just isn't much of a pin-wearer, and living in the middle of the city, she doesn't own a car on which to affix a bumper sticker.

"There she is," Aunt Lettie says loudly as she's wheeled closer. "Patty Wilson, you come here and give me a hug."

Patrice leans over, inhaling the honeyed scent of shea butter. She feels for a moment as if it's her mother she's embracing, and she must blink back tears.

When Patrice has righted herself, Aunt Lettie continues to clasp both her hands, looking her up and down, and she says, "Baby, I don't know what you're doing, but keep right on doing it! You look fabulous!"

Excuse me? Patrice thinks. Has she ever, in 48 years, been greeted this enthusiastically by her aunt?

Then Aunt Lettie says, "Patty, are you ready to go to Washington, D.C., for the celebration of our lifetimes? Patty, yes, we did! Yes, we did, baby!"

In spite of herself, Patrice giggles, exchanging amused glances with the airport employee. So apparently, all these years, all it would have taken for Aunt Lettie to be transformed into a sunnily uncritical presence was the election of a black president.

"Ma'am, we need to go downstairs to baggage claim," the airport employee says, but, unexpectedly, Aunt Lettie stands. Glancing disdainfully at the wheelchair, she says, "I don't need that thing, that's just Janet getting herself worked up. Patty, you and me, we can carry one little suitcase between us, can't we?"

Patrice nods; she is more relieved than she cares to let on that Aunt Lettie is still ambulatory. She takes her aunt's surprisingly heavy black leather pocketbook and hitches it onto one shoulder, and Aunt Lettie holds her cane in her right hand. Should Patrice tip the airport employee? She errs on the side of assuming she should, slipping the woman a $5 bill. "What was that for?" Aunt Lettie asks before the woman has moved more than a few feet away. "That's what she's paid to do, Patty. You're just a pushover like your momma."

They collect Aunt Lettie's suitcase without incident and climb in a cab to Center City; they'll have lunch at Patrice's apartment before catching their midafternoon train to D.C. They'll be staying not in a hotel but in an apartment a few blocks off Dupont Circle that Janet's son found for them on Craigslist. Patrice is trying to remain open-minded, but she is uneasy about the fact that no matter the apartment's condition, they won't have other options.

As their cab crosses the Schuylkill River, Aunt Lettie leans forward and says to the driver, "Young man, I can tell you're as excited as my niece and I are about President Obama."

"Aunt Lettie," Patrice murmurs, before she can really stop herself. Yes, the driver is black—he looks about 30—but still.

"What? He's not hiding it." Aunt Lettie points to where an Obama-themed air freshener, a cardboard rectangle with that distinctive O, hangs from the driver's rearview mirror.

The driver looks back and grins at them. In thickly accented English, he says, "Indeed, I am as excited as you are."

Coming tomorrow: Patrice and Aunt Lettie make enemies and friends on the train to D.C.

Listen to Curtis Sittenfeld read Part 2 of her novella here:





You can also download the MP3 file directly here or listen through Slate's Audio Book Club podcast iTunes feed.

Yesterday, the Obama and Biden families departed by train from Philadelphia for Washington in an elegantly choreographed bit of political theater. Today, the Philadelphia train station is chaos. Patrice had anticipated as much and gotten them there more than an hour in advance of their departure time, but still, when their gate listing appears on the sign in the station center, they end up in the rear half of a long, snaking line that she checks three times to confirm is the correct one. Today is Sunday, almost 48 hours before the inauguration ceremony, so she suspects the crowds will only get worse between now and then, but already rumors are swirling that all of the trains en route from Boston and New York are overflowing. "Why don't you sit on that bench over there, and I'll hold our place?" Patrice says, but Aunt Lettie declines; she has struck up a conversation with a husband and wife behind them, a couple from West Philly who are telling her they have it on good authority from their minister that the Obamas will be acquiring a labradoodle because those are good dogs for someone with Malia's allergies. More people than not are wearing variations on Aunt Lettie's Obama apparel, hats and pins and shirts. Is anyone present not headed for the inauguration?

In one way, Patrice is reminded of the time seven or eight years ago when she agreed to join her friend Corinne in the Broad Street Run, Philadelphia's annual 10-mile road race. In the morning, as she and Corinne rode the subway to the start of the race, she kept looking around at the other passengers, all of them in shorts and spandex and race bibs, and thinking that no matter their age or appearance, they all in this moment had something in common—they had arrived in the same place, for the same reason. The difference this afternoon in the train station, though, is that unlike with the race, when she didn't care about doing anything but finishing, Patrice now feels like the people around her are her competition. They have something in common, something good, and she'll likely need to fight them for seats on the train. And maybe this is the reason she doesn't like crowds—that they bring out her own less-than-generous impulses. She wonders again how much of an uphill battle D.C. will be, how tricky will be the logistics of hailing a cab or finding a spot on the Metro, of obtaining food; she'd intended to buy snacks for herself and Aunt Lettie, granola bars and pretzels, as well as a nice big bottle of hand sanitizer, but she ended up having to go into work yesterday and didn't get to a store.

Riding the escalator down to the boarding platform while trying to balance both her own and Aunt Lettie's suitcases on the step, she bumps the man in front of her, who says over his shoulder in a gruff tone, "Watch it." Once they're on the train, it's moving before they can find seats, and then they're in the middle of a car, being pushed from both sides by other passengers, until there is total gridlock. I knew it, Patrice thinks. But a white girl, gesturing toward Aunt Lettie's streamer-bedecked cane, says to Patrice, "Does your mom want to sit down?" Patrice gratefully accepts on Aunt Lettie's behalf. When a second girl sitting next to the first one offers her own seat to Patrice, Patrice declines, but the girl insists. She says, "We got on in Providence, so I'm ready to stretch my legs."

Of course, there's nowhere for the girls to go, so after they've stood, they just sort of park themselves in the aisle next to Patrice and Aunt Lettie, holding onto the top of the seats. "You folks from Philadelphia?" the first girl asks. She wears a navy blue bandanna that pushes back her hair and a long-sleeved T-shirt that says Got Hope? The other girl has on a sweatshirt that reads O'Bama in green letters and features a shamrock instead of an apostrophe between the letters O and B.

"I am." Patrice gestures toward Aunt Lettie. "She's from Missouri."

"Awesome," says Shamrock. "They—" she nods with her chin to the seats on the other side of the aisle "—flew in from Sweden. How cool is that? Hey, where are you guys staying?"

"Near Dupont Circle," Patrice says.

"In a hotel or with friends or what?" The girl could not possibly, Patrice thinks, be angling for a place to sleep. Could she?

"An apartment," Patrice says. "It's very small."

"Craigslist?" the girl asks, and when Patrice nods, the girl says, "That's totally what we did, too. We found a sweet place in Takoma Park—" Thank God, Patrice thinks, "—but the rates some people were charging, it's like, what the hell? Don't they have any sense of history?"

"I guess they'll charge whatever someone's willing to pay," Patrice says.

"Yeah, but $15,000 a night?" This is the other girl—Bandanna—piping up. "Don't they know there aren't any Republicans coming to the inauguration?"

Patrice laughs. She knows which listings they're talking about—five-bedroom houses in Bethesda, Md., or massive Kalorama apartments that mention stainless-steel refrigerators and Jacuzzi tubs and even maid service. Which does raise the question, if you live in a place like that to begin with, do you really need the money you'd get from renting it out to strangers? Patrice personally can't imagine what amount she'd require in exchange for allowing people she's never met to sleep on her sheets and shower in her bathroom. Granting that she's uptight, it just seems overly personal and a little unsavory.

She had never ventured onto Craigslist before two weeks ago; perhaps it was a function of her age that she'd never felt the need. After Janet mentioned that Patrice and Aunt Lettie would be staying in a place procured on the site, Patrice went online, hoping to see their actual apartment, but of course that listing had been removed. She poked around the other inaugural listings—"$2065 / 3BR – STUNNING DOWNTOWN BROWNSTONE SLEEPS 6-12," or "5 SHORT BLOCKS TO THE WHITE HOUSE"—and then, with some mix of embarrassment and curiosity, she clicked over to the "casual encounters" section of the site's personals. She'd heard about this somewhere—was it from Renee or in an article?—and it wasn't as if she were going to act on any listings, but as long as she was in the area, why not learn more about the cultural phenomenon?

Which is how she found herself sitting alone in her apartment at 10:15 at night looking at penises. Actual penises! And these were under the "m4w" heading, not even the more complicated headings that she had to pause to decipher, like "t4mw." No, in the "men for women" section, you could click on a headline as innocuous-sounding as "Looking for Fun" and find yourself gazing at a disembodied, erect male member. Were there women out there who'd be tempted by this explicit greeting? Presumably so. The world we live in, Patrice thought wonderingly, half-appalled at the seediness and half-impressed at the gumption of the individuals who'd so brazenly go after what they wanted. Patrice's own forays into online dating, which had been of the decidedly more PG-rated variety, had mostly served to remind her of the pleasures of her own company: In the last eight years, she'd been told by three separate men—two were white, and one was black—that she reminded them of Condoleezza Rice, an observation to which she'd been tempted to respond, at least to the white men, by saying they reminded her of George W. Bush.

"Hey, did you guys hear about cell phones at the inauguration?" This is Shamrock speaking. "They think they're not going to work with so many people, so they're recommending texting instead. But honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if texting barely works, either."

Patrice turns to Aunt Lettie, who has been looking out the window at the industrial corridor on the outskirts of Philadelphia. "They're talking about cell phones," Patrice says. "I was thinking we could use mine to call the family during the inauguration, but she's saying the service won't be good."

"Oh, I've got a cell phone, too," Aunt Lettie says nonchalantly.

Patrice can't conceal her surprise. "You do? Did Janet get it for you for this trip?"

"Honey, I've had this for years." Aunt Lettie removes a silver model from her coat pocket, and when she unfolds it, the screen and number pad light up. "It's how I reach Janet to pick me up from bingo."

"Do you know how to text?" Shamrock asks. "I'll show you if you want." She is leaning over them, mostly over Patrice because she's in the aisle seat, and Shamrock says to her, "Do you know how to text?"

"I have a BlackBerry," Patrice says.

To give Aunt Lettie the lesson, Shamrock and Patrice switch places. It is as Shamrock is instructing Aunt Lettie—their heads bent together, Shamrock scrolling through Aunt Lettie's phone's options—that Patrice notices on the aisle floor a backpack, presumably Shamrock's, on which a triangular pink pin reading Dykes for Obama is attached to the outermost pocket. Ah, yes. Right. Not that Patrice particularly cares, but she isn't sure how Aunt Lettie would feel about the fact that the person at this very moment helping her type "DC or bust!!!" into her phone is a proud lesbian. "Then all you have to do is hit send," Shamrock says. "Voila!"

"Bless you, sweetheart." Aunt Lettie leans over and pulls a large Tupperware container from her pocketbook (no wonder it's so heavy). She peels off the lid and extends it toward Shamrock. "You want a lemon square, baby?"

Coming tomorrow: A surprise awaits Patrice and Aunt Lettie in their Craigslist apartment.

Listen to Curtis Sittenfeld read Part 3 of her novella here:

You can also download the MP3 file directly here or listen through Slate's Audio Book Club podcast iTunes feed.

Patrice and Aunt Lettie wait in line an hour and 20 minutes for a cab from Union Station to Dupont Circle; by 30 minutes in, Patrice wishes they'd just taken the Metro, but a cab seemed better with their suitcases and Aunt Lettie's cane, plus there's a rumor that one of the up escalators at Dupont Circle isn't working, and the stranger who told her this didn't know whether the escalator was at the northern or southern exit. The apartment she and Aunt Lettie are staying in is on 17^th Street where it intersects New Hampshire and S—it's technically not on Dupont Circle at all but three or four blocks north. Patrice is curious how much her cousin Janet is paying and also how exactly Janet and her son selected this apartment. Was nothing available on Capitol Hill, which would have been a much shorter walk to the Mall, or was it just more expensive? Or did it seem less safe? Patrice has already decided that she and Aunt Lettie will rise at 5 a.m. on Tuesday with the goal of getting to the Mall by 6 or 7; they'll have to walk because the Metro entrances will be blocked for people within 2 miles of the Mall.

It is dark outside as she and Aunt Lettie enter the apartment building using keys FedEx-ed to Patrice's office earlier this week, along with directions, from one Gretchen J. Shumacher. (Patrice was relieved to learn the apartment's usual inhabitant was a woman, because she thinks, perhaps unfairly, that women tend to be cleaner.) Though the building has two elevators in the lobby, just beyond the glass doors of the entrance, Gretchen J. Shumacher's apartment is on the first floor, down the left-hand corridor. All the keys work as per Gretchen J. Shumacher's written instructions, and the apartment turns out to be tidy, if plain and not particularly well-lighted. One bedroom holds a queen-size bed—this will be Aunt Lettie's—and the other bedroom features a foldout couch, its mattress extended and made up. This room also contains a large desk and a bookshelf filled with fat novels whose covers show dragons or men on horseback wielding swords; apparently, Gretchen J. Shumacher is a fantasy buff. We're here, Patrice thinks with gratitude.

Aunt Lettie has been subdued since the train ride, and Patrice suspects she's weary, so she offers to pick up food for dinner. Without unpacking, Patrice lets herself out of the apartment and the building and walks south toward Dupont Circle; she has visited Washington a dozen or so times in her life, usually for work, and she's stayed in this area but she doesn't know it well. She passes a Chinese takeout place that's full but, contrasting with other nearby establishments, doesn't have a crowd out the door, and she takes note of it as a possibility. The sidewalks are thick with people and festive energy, as if the city has become one extended block party. Police officers and military personnel are visible at corners, but even they don't detract from the celebratory mood in the air, and Patrice is struck by the thought that when, as a teenager in the suburbs of St. Louis, she imagined city life, this was what she pictured—this density and merriment—when in fact city life is hardly ever like this, or only for certain stretches on certain streets: Fifth Avenue in New York or Michigan Avenue in Chicago. In Philadelphia, she often takes a cab instead of walking home from Renee's place at night, even though it's only half a mile, because entire blocks can be empty, Patrice herself the only one out. Where is everyone? she always thinks in those moments.

As she approaches Dupont Circle, Patrice hears music, and then she sees the band on the far side of the fountain in the circle's center. There are 30 or 40 of them—as she gets closer, she realizes they're adults, not teenagers, as she thought when she was still across the street—and they're all black, wearing maroon uniforms and helmets with white tassels and white gloves. (They must be a marching band.) They're playing a rousing, totally unironic version of "Stars and Stripes Forever," and they're wonderful.

Previously, Patrice has pondered just what it is Aunt Lettie wants from the trip, whether being in D.C. is enough, being on the Mall during the ceremony, or whether there's some more specific moment or sight she's hoping for, and now Patrice thinks, This. This is what Aunt Lettie has come for. Patrice must go get her, in spite of it being several blocks for Aunt Lettie to walk. And will the band have moved on by the time they get back? But it's people and music and patriotism—Barack Obama has been elected, and now he's about to be sworn in!—and she has to try.

Aunt Lettie is initially confused by Patrice's entreaty but amenable. She has been lying in Gretchen J. Shumacher's bed, watching CNN on the television on Gretchen J. Shumacher's bureau. "Wear your scarf," Patrice says. "I think the temperature has fallen."

Outside again, retracing her steps, she tries not to hurry Aunt Lettie, though her aunt's slow pace reinforces Patrice's worry that the band won't still be there by the time they arrive. In any case, she needs to be more careful in allotting Aunt Lettie's energy.

But the band is there. Now they're playing "Living in America," and some people are dancing, people of varying ages and races (is it jaded for Patrice to think she has rarely observed a scene like this outside a soda commercial?), and the people who aren't dancing are using video cameras or regular cameras or cell phones to document the people who are. Aunt Lettie leans over and says, "That girl must weigh 400 pounds. How does she blow on that thing?" She means a trombonist in the second row who is indeed large, though Patrice doubts she's 400 pounds. Does this comment mean Aunt Lettie isn't enjoying the performance?

"She must have strong lungs," Patrice says.

"Janet's sure getting fat, but you've kept your figure," Aunt Lettie says. "You ought to tell her to go on a diet."

Yeah, when hell freezes over, Patrice thinks. She gestures toward the band and says, "Aren't they good?" The musicians have segued into "Yankee Doodle," which delights the crowd.

Aunt Lettie turns her head, squinting for a moment at Patrice, then says, "Your momma couldn't understand why you never found a man, but I always said to her, 'Patty is a girl that knows herself and likes her own company, and ain't nothing wrong with that.' "

For several seconds, Patrice is speechless. Her relatives flit around this topic constantly when she's in their presence—if she's being honest with herself, she can admit that it's the reason she's not in their presence more than once or twice a year—but they never land on it this squarely. And certainly no one ever defends her singleness; even her own sister, when she visits Brenda in London, says, "But don't you want someone to grow old with?" in a way that implies Patrice has been arguing against such a scenario. At last, because she still can't think of anything better to say, Patrice murmurs, "Thank you."

****

After dinner at the Chinese restaurant—Patrice anticipated getting takeout, but a table opened up, and they grabbed it—they return to the apartment, and Aunt Lettie gets ready for bed while Patrice sits in the living room typing a message to Corinne and Renee on her BlackBerry. Aunt Lettie spends a long time in the bathroom—Patrice can hear her humming to herself—and when Aunt Lettie's out, Patrice knocks on the door frame of the open bedroom. Aunt Lettie is sitting on the edge of the bed; she's wearing a long-sleeved, turtlenecked, pale-pink nightgown and has removed her wig. Her real hair is thin and mostly gray, smoothed back against her scalp. "Did you take your blood-pressure medicine?" Patrice asks. This is basically all Janet gave in the way of instructions.

"I sure did, baby," Aunt Lettie says.

"Do you need anything else?" Patrice asks. "Is the heat high enough?"

"I'm just fine." With effort, Aunt Lettie swings her feet up onto the mattress. Her ankles, Patrice notes, are heartbreakingly bony. Something about the absence of her wig makes her seem extra vulnerable, and Patrice considers tucking her in and kissing her forehead, but acting on this impulse would probably make them both uncomfortable.

From the doorway, Patrice says, "OK, well, sweet dreams. If you need me, just holler."

She crosses the apartment and opens the door to her own bedroom. She's pretty sure there's an overhead light, but she can't remember whether the switch is on the right or left, and she feels along the wall with her palm. Not there, not there, not there … she extends her left arm, finds it, and flicks. When the room is illuminated, the head that pops up from a pillow on the far end of the pull-out couch is not in and of itself terrifying—it's the head of a genial but disoriented-looking middle-aged white man, a balding fellow with a bushy sand-colored mustache, wearing a blue T-shirt—but it's the fact of anyone there at all, of a stranger in this room, that makes Patrice shriek. She is so startled, so totally unprepared in this moment to stumble upon another person, that a scream of exceptional pitch and duration escapes from her mouth.

The man holds up both hands, palms out, as if in surrender. "Lady—" he starts to say even before her scream has ended, and then again, "Lady, relax. All we're doing is trying to get some sleep."

"Patty, what is it?" Aunt Lettie calls, followed by the sounds of her scrambling out of bed and then, it seems, knocking over her cane. "Lord have mercy," Patrice hears her aunt say.

He could not be an intruder, she tells herself, grasping at logic, willing her pounding heart to slow, her entire body to quit shaking. An intruder would conceal himself, waiting to pounce, or he'd be gathering silver or electronics to steal. He would not be sleeping. This is when another head pops up from the other side of the pull-out couch, causing Patrice to gasp anew. The second person is an adolescent boy with pale skin and shaggy brown hair and—the faint glitter takes her a second to discern—a hoop earring at the corner of his lower lip. He glares at Patrice. "Who the fuck are you?" he says.

Coming Monday: The White House, racial tension, and porta-potties! Oh my!

Listen to Curtis Sittenfeld read Part 4 of her novella here:

You can also download the MP3 file directly here or listen through Slate's Audio Book Club podcast iTunes feed.

They are father and son. The father, apparently, is named Bruce; the son is Caleb. They drove here (yes, drove) from Nebraska: They left Lincoln yesterday morning, stayed last night at what Bruce cheerfully describes as a fleabag motel outside Toledo, then rose today at the crack of dawn and put in another 10 hours—hence their "hitting the sack," as Bruce also puts it, before 9 p.m. this evening. They're Obamaniacs who started volunteering for the campaign back in February '07, Bruce explains, and wild horses couldn't have kept them from the inauguration. Caleb has never visited Washington. Bruce worked on Capitol Hill during his idealistic youth—more years ago than he cares to remember—but he hasn't returned in decades, and he's excited as hell to see the back end of George W. Bush and celebrate the advent of change that's been far too long in coming.

This information emerges while Patrice stands in the doorway with her arms folded; Aunt Lettie stands behind her wigless and nightgowned, peering into the room; Bruce perches on the edge of the foldout couch, above the covers, in his T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts dotted with faded red hearts (it's not as if Patrice is looking, but the boxers are on clear display, along with his scrawny and rather hairy legs); and Caleb watches the women in a surly way before lying back down and pulling a pillow over his head. Caleb does not, to say the least, seem Obamaniacal.

Oh, and, Bruce adds, they took this bedroom because it seemed like the one that wasn't occupied, but if she and her mother would rather switch—?

There then ensues the part of the conversation when Bruce reveals that he was well-aware he and Caleb would be sharing this apartment with strangers. No mix-up occurred, no error—all along, this was what was supposed to happen. He can hardly believe what they're paying, Bruce says, but, hell, compared with some of the prices people are charging in this very neighborhood, it's a steal.

Patrice turns to Aunt Lettie—did Aunt Lettie also understand that this was the arrangement?

"Janet took care of everything," Aunt Lettie says.

"Is Craigslist a miracle or what?" Bruce is saying. "I gotta tell you, I hardly remember what any of us did before it." To her distress, Patrice immediately finds herself thinking of those penis pictures, wondering whether Bruce is the kind of man who'd post a photo like that. Is he married or single? Not, based on what she gleaned during her search, that being single is a prerequisite for posting penis pictures on Craigslist. But she merely nods in a noncommittal way as Bruce adds, "When Caleb's mom and I split up, I used Craigslist to furnish my new place for under a thousand bucks, no exaggeration. Some stuff people aren't even selling. They're just so glad you'll take it off their hands they're offering it free. With my pal Davey's truck, I was golden." This answers two separate questions, or at least sort of. "Tell you what," Bruce says, "Lemme get myself decent and come out in the living room, and we'll all have a glass of wine. Nothing a bottle of vino among new friends can't set right, eh?"

"You don't need to get up," Patrice says. "Really. I'll just move my suitcase out of here."

"No offense, ma'am, but after that blood-curdling scream, I'm not sure I could go back to sleep," Bruce says. "You don't by any chance make your living acting in horror movies, do you?"

Patrice realizes then, based on the ma'am, that she hasn't introduced herself. She says, "I'm Patrice Wilson, and this is my aunt, Miss Lettie." She pauses, and it feels like an awkward pause. Then she says, "We'll give you some privacy." She darts into the room, picks up her suitcase, and carries it out, closing the door behind her.

****

How it is that Bruce and Caleb end up accompanying Patrice and Aunt Lettie on their walk to the White House on Monday Patrice isn't sure, but Bruce seems to assume that now they're all in this together and it feels too decisively rude to inform him otherwise. It occurs to Patrice that he might be the type of white person who's extra-pleased to be spending time at the Obama inauguration with actual, authentic black people, or, even worse, that he might try to strike up some earnest conversation about race. (She discusses race with Corinne and Renee, of course—the irritation of still, after all these years, being mistaken for her own assistant or just the slight eye-widening in professional situations that means the other person didn't imagine she'd be black; the expectation from total strangers that she'll be their sassy, finger-snapping girlfriend; the implicit and explicit signs she sometimes gets from other blacks that with her education and job and lifestyle, she has sold out—but these are certainly not topics she'd want to chew on with Bruce from Nebraska. Although there was a brief period at Wellesley when consciousness-raising seemed heady and well worth the effort, that was a long, long time ago.)

Caleb, who is 14, speaks little, especially in contrast to his voluble father, and Patrice wonders whether he is annoyed to find himself in the company of an old woman and a middle-aged one. "If you two would rather keep moving, go ahead," Patrice says to Bruce while Aunt Lettie is a few feet away snapping pictures of the north lawn of the White House, but Bruce says, "Patty, we've got no particular agenda—just glad to be enjoying a moment of history on a historic day." He means Martin Luther King Day, though Patrice is more focused on the fact that not only does Bruce call her Patty, having ignored the way she introduced herself and instead picked up on what Aunt Lettie says, but he also addresses Aunt Lettie as Aunt Lettie. She keeps wavering on whether to correct him. While the habit seems disrespectful, she and Aunt Lettie will ride back to Philadelphia after the inaugural parade on Tuesday, meaning they'll know Bruce for only about 24 hours longer. Is taking a stance worth it?

Part of the reason Patrice wanted to come to the White House today is that it's a little closer to Gretchen J. Shumacher's apartment than the Mall is and therefore gives her the chance to find out roughly how long the walk will take them tomorrow morning and how Aunt Lettie will hold up. The answer to the former question is quite a while (an hour to go less than two miles), and the answer to the latter seems to be OK. They rested a few times along the way.

Outside the gates on Pennsylvania Avenue, a jolly throng of protestors, monitored by a cadre of police officers, is chanting "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" and then they switch to "Bush, go home! Bush, go home!" Patrice wonders whether this is worth the energy, either. Bush, too, will be gone in 24 hours. Is he now packing—does a president pack any of his own possessions? His time in office has appalled but rarely surprised her; even his decisions, or lack thereof, around Katrina felt less like new information than like more evidence of what she'd already suspected.

Patrice looks at the White House's four huge Ionic columns, and above them the pediment and then the American flag; in its massive symmetry, its peculiar familiarity, the building really is a stirring sight.

"Patty, turn around and smile," Aunt Lettie says, and Patrice complies. Aunt Lettie takes no fewer than half a dozen shots of her.

"Let me take some of you," she finally says, and Bruce, who has been using his camera, says, "Why don't I take one of both of you together?"

He does, first with Aunt Lettie's camera, then with his own (perhaps to document the actual, authentic black people he has befriended?). Patrice didn't bring her camera to Washington—if they were going to meet Barack and Michelle, sure, she would have, but she guessed she'd mostly be seeing the back of a lot of people's necks.

Caleb buys a hot dog from a vendor on the corner, consumes the whole thing in about 10 seconds, then goes back to buy another. Twenty feet from them, a street performer, a magician in an Uncle Sam costume, sets up and begins his tricks, and they watch him without moving closer; the crowd that assembles in front of him soon obscures their view.

When Patrice checks around for Aunt Lettie, her aunt is facing the White House again, and Patrice is surprised to see that tears are running down her cheeks. Their eyes meet, and Aunt Lettie says, "A black family is going to live in there, Patty. Did you ever think we'd see the day? That brave man and his strong, beautiful wife and those two little girls—" Aunt Lettie shakes her head. "The world those girls will grow up in, they'll have no idea there was a time when you were told you didn't count just for the color of your skin. God bless that family, Patty."

1931—that's the year Aunt Lettie was born, and Patrice's mother was born two years later. Aunt Lettie was 23, married and pregnant with Janet when Brown v. the Board of Education was decided, 33 during the march on Washington. Patrice knows from having heard her mother talk about it that they all watched King's speech on the living room television in Aunt Lettie and Uncle Ernest's half of the duplex; Patrice was 3 and has no memory of it. And then Aunt Lettie was 37—still much younger than Patrice is now—when King was shot. Who could have imagined Barack Obama then? And Patrice thinks, as she almost always does when considering Obama's election, Let it be as good as we hope. Don't let there be some shard of horror mixed in. Let him be, at worst, unexceptional, let people criticize him in the ways and for the reasons Carter or Clinton were criticized—because they were, in the end, only men. Let Obama be an ordinary president, not a cautionary tale, not a symbol, and please, please not a tragedy.

Aunt Lettie doesn't particularly seem to be waiting for an answer, and so Patrice doesn't give one; instead, she sets her hand on Aunt Lettie's back and leaves it there for nearly a minute.

The four of them, she and Aunt Lettie and Bruce and Caleb, are crossing H Street, heading back up 16^th, when Patrice spots the porta-potties—six in a row, set at the edge of the sidewalk. Walking around yesterday and today, they've passed plenty of others, but she hasn't considered using one until now. Can she hold it until they return to the apartment? Already today, when they went by a Starbucks, she looked in the plate-glass window and saw a line 20 deep for the women's bathroom.

She gestures vaguely forward and says, "If you'll all excuse me for a minute. Aunt Lettie, maybe you also need to—" Aunt Lettie nods, and while she goes, Patrice stands outside the porta-potty holding her aunt's cane, almost glad for the delay. Aunt Lettie doesn't ask for help, but she's in there a good eight minutes, during which time Patrice attempts to breathe through her nose as minimally as possible. When Aunt Lettie finally emerges, Patrice passes back the cane, squares her shoulders—she'd rather eat glass than what she's about to do—and enters the one Aunt Lettie just exited. She tries to let none of her skin or clothing touch any surface, an unlikely goal given that she's wearing a knee-length shearling coat. She lays strips of toilet paper—of course it's a thin, cheap brand and hard to tug off the roll—onto the seat and perches there. The smell from down below—human shit inadequately concealed by an industrial-strength disinfectant—is unignorable, and she starts to gag. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, she thinks. Oh, how she hates porta-potties. But somehow, because all moments eventually do, this one passes. She stands. To open the porta-potty's door, she bends her index and middle fingers and turns the lock with her knuckles. And then—fresh air! Thank God! She does actually gag once as she steps back into the light, but it's practically a relief-gag now that the ordeal is finished.

When she has rejoined the others, Caleb holds something out to her and says, "You want this?" She looks from his face—that distracting pierced lip—to his hand and sees that it's a clear, travel-size container of Purell. She accepts it, and when she's squeezed out a dollop, and then a second dollop for good measure, she thinks that Caleb has just become her favorite person in the world.

Coming tomorrow: Our novella concludes with inaugural smooching and political sea change.

Listen to Curtis Sittenfeld read Part 5 of her novella here:

You can also download the MP3 file directly here or listen through Slate's Audio Book Club podcast iTunes feed.

Late Monday afternoon, while Patrice is sitting in the living room checking her BlackBerry (the living room couch is where she slept last night—she had a feeling both she and Aunt Lettie would get more rest not in the same bed), Bruce offers to make dinner. He asks whether they eat seafood. "Some," Patrice says. He proposes clams with red sauce, which sounds fine to her—it's fish she's not crazy about—and fine to Aunt Lettie, too, when Patrice checks. Together, Patrice and Bruce walk to a grocery store on 17^th and Corcoran. In addition to the clams, which he buys canned, he gets crushed tomatoes, a bulb of garlic, an onion, a bunch of parsley, a box of spaghetti, and two $10 bottles of red wine, and in the checkout line, with little discussion, they split the total. At the apartment, she sets the table while he puts water on to boil and chops the vegetables. Aunt Lettie is in the bedroom talking on her cell phone to her son Steve, and Caleb is sequestered in the other bedroom doing Patrice has no idea what, though a good bet, based on observing him so far, would be listening to his iPod.

Bruce turns on the radio on Gretchen J. Shumacher's stereo, winding the knob until he settles on a station—jazz erupts into the kitchen, dining room, and living room, which are one open space—and Patrice is struck by Bruce's ability to make himself at home here; left to her own devices, she wouldn't even change the radio station, or at least not without taking note of where it was set to before. Bruce also helps himself to Gretchen J. Shumacher's olive oil, which he uses to sauté the garlic and onions, and to her herbs, which are lined up in a cabinet. He pours himself and Patrice each a glass of wine and, while stirring the contents of the skillet, he says, "You like to cook?"

"I don't do it that often," Patrice confesses. She is finished setting the table and has taken a seat at one of the stools pulled up to the counter dividing the kitchen and dining room. "I work long hours."

"Yeah?" Bruce says. "You a lawyer by any chance?"

She laughs. "I'm pretty sure you don't mean that as a compliment." It's strange, a reminder like this of how they hardly know each other—unconnected to whether she likes him at all, she has over the course of the day become accustomed to his presence. She says, "But no, I'm not a lawyer. I do strategic planning for Comcast."

"Ah, a corporate muckety-muck."

"Somehow I haven't convinced them to put that on my business card."

Bruce smiles. "But not for lack of trying?" Then he says, "I'm a humble middle school science teacher who can't even afford HBO. Think you could look into getting us a cut-rate? I'd be Caleb's hero."

Dryly, Patrice says, "I'll talk to my supervisor."

Bruce lifts the lid off the water, peers in, then sets the lid back in place. "Watched pots, right?" he says. "So how about the personal side of things—you married, single, attached, kids, no kids?"

Is he hitting on her? While Aunt Lettie and his teenage son are no more than a room away, while they all await tomorrow's historical milestone? And if he is, isn't that awfully tacky? "No kids," she says. "Not married."

"Divorced?"

She shakes her head.

"Lucky you," he says. "Divorce is brutal. When Deb and I split, it took me a good two, three years to get back on my feet, and it wasn't even that I thought we should stay together. But it just shakes you to the core."

"Caleb is an only child?"

"Light of my life. He's shy, obviously, but what a great kid. My proudest accomplishment."

Shy? Really? Patrice thinks. Not surly? But she says, "It was nice of him to share his Purell today."

"Yeah, those porta-potties kinda seemed to freak you out. You a germaphobe?"

"Not exactly."

"But maybe a little?" Bruce smiles again. She's not sure about his bushy mustache, but he has a nice smile, the smile of a man with no mean or manipulative inclinations. He's corny, but he's not stupid and, his HBO comment notwithstanding, he really doesn't seem to want anything from her except inaugural conviviality; he'd be this friendly to anyone else he and Caleb had ended up sharing the apartment with.

Before they eat, Aunt Lettie gives a rambling grace, asking Jesus to watch over the soul and spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as over the Obamas, her own family, and Bruce and Caleb, and though Patrice has an inkling their dinner companions are Jewish, they seem to accept the blessing in the spirit in which it's intended. When Aunt Lettie is finished, Bruce raises his wine and says, "To tomorrow."

They all clink glasses. Aunt Lettie is having orange juice—she isn't supposed to drink because of her blood pressure medication—but Caleb actually is having wine. Though Patrice didn't say anything when Bruce poured Caleb half a glass, her surprise must have been obvious, because Bruce said cheerfully, "Studies show that teens who have alcohol with their parents have much less chance of becoming problem drinkers."

The spaghetti and clams aren't bad. For dessert, they polish off Aunt Lettie's lemon squares, and when Patrice says she'll wash the dishes, Bruce says, "I've got a better deal for you. I'll wash 'em if you keep me company."

She agrees, and he opens the second bottle of wine. (Does Aunt Lettie raise her eyebrows at Patrice before retiring to the bedroom, or is Patrice imagining it?) After the dishes are clean and Bruce has carried the trash to the dumpster behind the building, he comes back inside rosy-cheeked and says, "I have a sneaky plan. Have you ever seen the Lincoln Memorial at night?"

She shakes her head.

"How about if we let Caleb and Aunt Lettie baby-sit each other and we go for a stroll?"

"Wouldn't Caleb like to go?"

"Nah, he was already bitching about the cold today."

Is it the wine that makes her say yes? Not that she's the only one drinking tonight. As they walk through Dupont Circle, the restaurants and bars, which are allowed to stay open late for the inauguration, are crowded and noisy.

Bruce says, "One of the reasons I wanted to get you out of the apartment is I have an idea to run by you. When I was taking the trash out, I saw a grocery cart by the dumpster. Would it sound crazy if I suggested we get Aunt Lettie down to the Mall by pushing her in it?"

"What, like she's a sack of potatoes?"

"Bear with me a second," Bruce says. "It's not ideal, but when we walked to the White House today, I noticed it really took it out of her. If we're getting to the Mall early tomorrow morning, and then standing around for five hours, I'm concerned she's going to collapse. Now, have I mentioned how cool I think it is that Aunt Lettie knocked herself out to come to the inauguration? We should all have that spunk when we're her age."

"There's no way my aunt would agree to climb in a grocery cart and be pushed along the sidewalk for two miles. Besides, don't you think the cart must be some homeless person's prized possession?"

"The back of the building is closed off. It didn't look to me like a cart that's in active use."

"But it still must belong to someone."

"Patty, for Christ's sake, it's not a family heirloom! A grocery cart is by definition stolen goods."

It is in this moment of Bruce's frustration with her that Patrice recognizes the potential wisdom of his idea. Also, the kindness of it. Why should he care if Aunt Lettie gets exhausted tomorrow?

"She might be offended," Patrice says, "but I guess we ought to try. She could use a chair to climb in, I suppose. You haven't noticed a stepladder anywhere in the apartment, have you?"

"I'll poke around when we get back."

They both are quiet, walking down New Hampshire Avenue, and Patrice says, "I should have arranged to have a wheelchair for her, or I'm sure she's eligible for special transportation even if I'm not."

"Don't be too hard on yourself," Bruce says. "None of us knew what we were getting into here, right?"

At Washington Circle, they turn onto 23^rd Street, and the Lincoln Memorial first comes into view as they cross Constitution Avenue; they're approaching it from the side. People are milling around outside the monument as if it were the middle of a summer afternoon, and when she and Bruce have made their way around to the front, Bruce says, "Doesn't it give you goose bumps? What's his line from the Gettysburg Address—'a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.' That's the country we're meant to be, not this bullshit of the last eight years."

Patrice hesitates, then she says, "I guess I go between feeling really hopeful and really cynical. I want to be hopeful."

"What's stopping you?"

She laughs. "You mean besides common sense?

"All I know is I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right."

She is on the cusp of saying, Is that from a bumper sticker? but something makes her pause. She glances at Bruce's profile—slightly bulbous nose, bushy mustache—and she thinks that maybe he has a point. It's less because it really is true than because she wishes it were that, very softly, she says, "Yeah, I'd rather that, too."

Bruce turns then, his gaze meeting hers. "Are you cold?" he says. "You look cold." There is in his voice something protective, something private even. There's probably a gesture or a comment she could make now—it wouldn't need to be much—and he'd kiss her.

She doesn't do whatever it is. She considers it, and she doesn't rule it out for later (she has then an abrupt vision of herself visiting Nebraska, deplaning with a wheeled suitcase, drinking wine while Bruce prepares their dinner, riding around in his car—is Lincoln where the Sand Hills are, or is that a different part of the state?), but she decides to hold this possibility at bay for at least a little longer. Her brand new optimistic outlook doesn't have to be synonymous with impulsivity; she's still, after all, herself. "I'm not cold," she says. "I'm good." She gestures toward the brightly lit monument. "Should we keep going?"

****

She is hung over—hung over—on Inauguration Day. How can this be? She hasn't been hung over since business school! Yes, it's only 5 a.m. when she rises to shower before helping Aunt Lettie dress, but Patrice has no one except herself to blame for her dry mouth and pounding head. Bruce brings the grocery cart around from the back—Aunt Lettie didn't object at all when Patrice mentioned it, which seems a sign of just what a toll all this walking around is taking—and they do use a chair for her to climb into it because they never found a stepladder. She sits with her legs tented out in front of her, and at the last minute Bruce throws in a blanket for warmth, even though that means either he or Patrice will have to carry it after they ditch the cart. "You look as regal as Cleopatra," Bruce tells Aunt Lettie, and Patrice cringes, but only a little.

Although the sun hasn't yet risen as they make their way toward the Mall, already the streets are crowded—Patrice suspects a lot of these people never went to bed last night. People appear tickled by Aunt Lettie's mode of transportation. They hold up their hands for high fives or call, "Go, Granny, go!"

At the Mall, east of 14^th Street, they can see the long security lines, and they decide to abandon the cart. Bruce, who couldn't be more than 5-foot-8, basically lifts Aunt Lettie out, and Patrice has a momentary panic that both he and Aunt Lettie will end up flat on the pavement, but it doesn't happen. Surely it's too much to hope the grocery cart will still be there after the swearing-in; surely, if it wasn't already a homeless person's prized possession, that's what it's about to become.

The sun rises during the hour and a half they're in the security line, which seems to increase the temperature slightly. Once they're past security, Patrice grips Aunt Lettie's wrist as they weave through the crowd on the Mall, and they finally find a place with a Jumbotron view where three of them could comfortably stand and the four of them must bunch together. "Lean on me if you get tired," Patrice says to Aunt Lettie.

An a capella group that Patrice can hear but not see is singing "We Shall Overcome," and she feels in her chest an expansive happiness, an anticipation, of the sort she probably hasn't experienced since college. Her feet are freezing. An hour passes, another hour, and then time slows to increasingly shorter increments—35 minutes there, 10 here. The closer they get to the swearing-in, the more impatient Patrice grows.

It is 10 minutes to 11, then 5 to 11, 10 after 11. Patrice wants to see Barack Obama standing there with his hand on the Bible, she wants it official, no going back, a new reality. Also, she wants to see what Michelle Obama's wearing. She wants discrimination to end, and she wants to find a spotlessly clean porta-potty to use after the ceremony, and she wants her mother, wherever she is, to know about today. Under the big sky, in the cold morning, everything mundane and sacred blends, the past and the future, the immediate and the intangible, the individual and the crowd. All of her regrets, all of her hopes.

"Aunt Lettie," she says, and when her aunt turns, she says, "Thank you for getting me here."

"Baby, you're welcome." Aunt Lettie's expression is mischievous; she's holding up well. "Janet doesn't know what she's missing, does she? Squeezed into a two-piece bathing suit, having herself a piña colada."

All around them, for as far as Patrice can see, people in hats and scarves and gloves are waiting for the Bushes and the Obamas to emerge from the Capitol building; on the Jumbotron, even the dignitaries in their fancy clothes, who have actual seats up there on the Capitol steps, seem restless. It's unmistakable, Patrice thinks. Something big is about to happen.

By all means the speech, but first, if you will allow me, a few words also on the day itself. Washington, D.C., is in many ways a provincial town, still highly segregated and occasionally mutually suspicious. It has been much too easy to count the moments of civic esprit down the years. I remember the huge eruption of spontaneous enthusiasm that filled the rather dreary downtown streets about a quarter of a century ago when the Redskins won some pennant or other. The papers wrote then that at last the federal city was acquiring a character of its own, and I recall thinking that such boosterism was itself a bit pathetic and depressing and that it wouldn't be very long before the word Redskin became an occasion for local acrimony. (It wasn't very long, either.)

The morning of Tuesday, Jan. 20, found me on a jampacked Metro train, and then platform, so crowded that I could scarcely inflate my lungs. And yet I heard myself saying, as everyone inched forward, "not a punch thrown, not a purse snatched, not a pocket picked." And by the end of the day, so it had proved. Many, many hands had been extended, to visitors and fellow citizens, but not one raised in a hostile way. (Of course, it did cross my cynical mind that it would have been quite hard to run away from a crime scene in such densely packed conditions, but I then banished the thought.)

The fact that every normal action or movement took about 10 times as long as usual and the stop-time, slowdown effect of this eerie, shared imposition may have added to the sense of the aching passage of the moments as being "historic." Certainly this was not the quotidian stupidity of a "security" line at an airport, where time is merely being wasted (though of course the police bureaucracy did manage to spoil the day for many citizens by such tactics, with zero gain in public safety). It was, rather, the impression of having perforce to occupy the same democratic space as everybody else, not just in the District but in the United States.

I am a proud Sidwell Friends parent (all the young students there have been predictably "good" about not making any kind of fuss about the new arrivals, or indeed about the Biden grandchildren), and though of course the huge, warm crowd at ground zero on the Mall isn't precisely the same context, it does still call upon the same ethos. It may be a very big deal to have a black first family, but the less of a big deal that you make of it, the better you come to appreciate the fact of how big a deal it is. The first thing to say about the Obama inaugural, then, is that it followed this etiquette of understatement. Reserved for the very end of his remarks, and as a prelude to a ringing sentence from George Washington, the new president mentioned in passing that "less than 60 years ago" his own father "might not have been served at a local restaurant." Most people present didn't have a memory that extended that far back, and nobody alleges that Mr. Obama senior ever actually was insulted in this way in the nation's capital. How admirable, then, to remind us in this feline fashion of what we already "know," without making it a matter of self-pity. (And it'll be a cold day in hell, as someone has already pointed out, before the Kenyan electorate chooses a member of the Luo tribe as its elected president.)

Remember that only a few months ago we were being told that the "Bradley effect" would negate any attempt to elect Obama. (Before we agree to forget all about that, let's recall that nasty whispers of this sort were actually converted into political currency by the Hillary Clinton campaign.) Then it was argued that, should the Bradley effect prove too weak—and was there ever a candidate with an effect as weak as Mayor Tom Bradley?—the voting machines in Ohio would be rigged again. This proving insufficient as a means of stopping the Obama candidacy, it was flatly stated by many informal experts that the man would simply be shot before he could move his narrow, dusky behind into the house of President Lincoln*. And that's why I think the most heart-stopping sight of the day was the first couple, striding bravely and beautifully and confidently along Pennsylvania Avenue for all the world as if it were their wedding day. The boring bubble of "security" will certainly re-form and encrust itself around the peoples' choice, but still … Surely the whole citizenry deserves some credit for this?

Given the fact that it was revised and completed almost a week before it was delivered, Obama's decision to make a very minimal speech must have been deliberate. He promised almost nothing, raised few expectations, kept the tedious boilerplate ("We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord") to a decent minimum. On three points, though, he hit notes that deserve amplification. "We will restore science to its rightful place," is intended, I have some reason to believe, to reinforce or underline the president's emphasis on religious pluralism and on the inclusion (with a few days to go before the Darwin-Lincoln bicentennial) of the fast-growing number of "nonbelievers." That this has already drawn fire from the vastly overrated black churches is a good sign in itself.

Then one can hardly overpraise the repudiation, annexed from Franklin even if he may not actually have said it, of "the false choice between our safety and our ideals." This acted as a curtain-raiser for the important restatement of the ideals themselves:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

The president has a better grip on the English language than any of his living-memory predecessors, and it seems certain that he wrote at least 80 percent of this address himself. It's nice to be able to hold people to claims that they have written rather than read, and I look forward to doing so.

Correction, Jan. 27, 2009: Because of an editing error, this article originally referred to Obama's moving into the Lincoln Bedroom, when the intended reference was to the White House generally. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Most people know two things about Somalia: It has more pirates than any other place in the world, and it has no government.

The news media have fixed on these two identifying characteristics. The fifth or sixth paragraph of any 400-word wire story about Somalia will contain both the latest update on piracy and a reminder that since 1991 Somalia has not had an effective government.

Right now in Djibouti, a small, hot country on the Red Sea populated by ethnic Somalis, the Kempinski Hotel is full of people trying to solve these two issues—unfortunately, not together.

An electoral committee of Somali parliamentarians is examining the résumés and photographs of a dozen or so candidates who applied to become president of Somalia. The election is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 30, and many of the résumés arrived on Jan. 29. Being a citizen of a foreign country is no problem. The only prerequisite is an application fee of $2,000. There is not enough time for background checks, since the new president, whoever he may be, is expected at this weekend's African Union summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The piracy conference, meanwhile, boasts stakeholders from 22 countries in Africa and the Middle East. It's safe to assume they consider their project of negotiating legal procedures for prosecuting Somali pirates to be a higher priority than stabilizing Somalia through a legitimate presidential election. They are not the only ones.

The United Nations has directed the 30-day process leading to what they are calling an "election" for Somalia's sixth transitional president in 18 years. The new leader will almost certainly not be able to live or work in Somalia, nor will his parliament, because radical Islamists have taken over the country, following the recent withdrawal of Ethiopian troops.

So, it seems that nobody cares about democracy for Somalia, except the people who are currently stuck there having their hands cut off for theft, being kidnapped for ransom by their own government officials, dying of malnutrition in camps for "internally displaced persons," paying off teenage gunmen at roadblocks, being shot for watching movies, or getting stoned to death for the sin of being raped.

"The formation of another ghost government … is a cruel option for the Somali people," says Somali activist Mohamud Uluso in a mass e-mail titled, "Political Scam Serves No Purpose."

The West, represented by the European Union and the United States, would prefer to install a new transitional president as soon as possible to replace the transitional transitional president who replaced a warlord named Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed who blighted the country for four years with nepotist policies and gangsterism. Otherwise, claims a Western official, there might be a leadership vacuum.

Any thinking person would be confused by this suggestion. Doesn't Somalia already have a leadership vacuum? Isn't that why it has so many pirates?

The Somali parliament in Djibouti doubled its size this week—to 550—thanks to a hard-won U.N.-mediated peace agreement between moderate Islamist politicians from the Islamic Courts Union and the already existing "warlord parliament." (The ICU ruled Somalia briefly and with immense popularity in 2006 after a grass-roots rise to power, but they were routed that same year by an Ethiopian invasion and have since been living in exile.) The original 275 members of parliament have a hopeless track record. They tied with Burma as the worst-ranked parliament in the world.

Kenya, Ethiopia, and the European Commission created the parliament in 2004. Diplomats initially planned to host 350 elders—notable Somali ethnic leaders—who could represent the diversity of Somalia's clan-based demographics and pick a parliament. But the conference got out of control—1,500 people showed up, and it lasted two years at a cost of $11 million.

None of the participants was a legitimate ethnic leader, according to one diplomat present. "We had no real elders," he says. "The elders said, 'Go to hell, we will not participate in this.' So the 'clan notables' were warlords, and they're the ones who chose their [members of parliament]." The warlords were allowed to elect themselves, and they did so.

On Jan. 28, the Daily Nation, Kenya's newspaper of record, published a story on the progress of Somalia's presidential election in Djibouti. At the bottom of the piece is a lone comment from Somalia, like a cry from the dark. It reads: "550 MPs!!! What the heck is wrong with us? … Are we going to feed these lunatics or rebuild this war ravaged country? … We need competent leaders, not like the current ones, they will lead us into hell." Sadly, this reasonable man can't vote.

Throughout his election campaign, Barack Obama promised that the United States would "engage" friends and foes alike, particularly in the Middle East where the Bush administration had sought to isolate Iran and Syria. His rationale was that "if America is willing to come to the table, the world will be more willing to rally behind American leadership" to address global problems, including Iran's nuclear program.

The Bush administration also began with an impulse to "engage" states in the Middle East with which it was on strained terms. In February 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell traveled to the region to convince Iraq's neighbors to approve "smart sanctions" against Saddam Hussein's regime. Powell won a promise from Syrian President Bashar Assad that he would turn Iraqi revenues from oil pumped through Syria's pipelines over to the United Nations. Assad never complied, and Powell ended up with egg on his face. The thrill of engagement was foiled by the region's realities.

This makes Obama's promise of engagement interesting to watch. The president has been welcomed by political "realists," whose aim has been to take U.S. foreign policy back to the dispassionate pursuit of national interests, free from the supposedly ideology-driven ways of the Bush years. This amoral approach has jarred with Obama's rhetoric of moral righteousness—demonstrating that U.S. presidents, including Bush, usually blend morality and amorality when shaping U.S. behavior overseas. However, that doesn't explain how Obama will differ from Bush in handling hard-nosed recalcitrants such as Iran and Syria.

Engagement, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. Talking to Iran or Syria just for the sake of talking, or to be different from Bush, will only give both states what they desire while bringing the United States few advantages. However, engagement now seems unavoidable, and it is disturbing that Obama's foreign policy advisers have provided few clear answers to two very basic questions surrounding this near certainty: What does America intend to get out of a dialogue with Iran and Syria? And what leverage does the Obama administration have to achieve its objectives?

For the moment, it is the United States that is in the position of wanting to talk and that is pressed to do so quickly, meaning it must get the process rolling with concessions of its own. The administration wants to open up to Iran before the Iranian presidential election this June to decrease hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election chances. It is also in a hurry to test Iranian intentions in the nuclear dispute before Tehran's building of a nuclear device becomes irreversible.

Such thinking is understandable, but is it realistic? Playing domestic Iranian politics is a bad idea. Iran's leadership is united over the nuclear program, with policy set by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Tehran will be delighted to go along with a dialogue to buy time, knowing this would make it difficult for Obama to suddenly switch to war mode if he fails to alter Iranian behavior. And if he has to rely on U.N. sanctions and military intimidation again, Obama would be acting like Bush.

That's why any U.S. opening to Iran must be thought out in complex, wide-ranging terms. The Iranians can play on several game boards simultaneously, and they have adeptly guarded against an attack on their nuclear installations by setting up multiple walls of retaliatory threats regionally. These have included striking against U.S. troops in Iraq or against pro-American Gulf states, which, with the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, could send oil prices skyrocketing. And Lebanon's Hezbollah has said that if Iran were bombed, it would fire rockets at Israel.

Does the Obama administration have a comprehensive scheme to counter this? Doubtless it is looking at contingency plans, but nothing during the campaign suggested the president had an integrated strategy. So much vigor was put into denouncing Bush that Obama never really told us how he would be different. To persuade Iran to change tack, the administration will need to coordinate Arab and international efforts to grind away at Iran's power throughout the Middle East. That means combining coercion and dialogue—not relying exclusively on talking.

One proposal circulating in Washington is to weaken Iran by engaging Syria. The logic is that normalized U.S. relations with Syria will encourage Assad to break with Iran and with nonstate actors such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Iranian and Syrian interests can diverge, particularly over Arab-Israeli negotiations. However, the Syrians know a good thing when they see it. Assad is courted by the United States and European states only because of his dangerous liaisons and his ability to destabilize states around him. If he were to abandon these, Syria would turn into a secondary state. Indeed, until now, Assad has not willingly yielded on any of the issues important to him, whether over Lebanon, Gaza, Iran, or Iraq.

For Syria, the main appeal of a dialogue with Washington is the opportunities it will create to reimpose its hegemony over Lebanon, which provided the Syrian regime with regional relevance. Assad never accepted his army's departure from the country in 2005 under international pressure after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. There is little doubt the Syrians were behind the crime, but they believe that warmer ties with Washington will push the international community to find Syria an exit from the tribunal being set up in the Netherlands.

The Bush administration recalled its ambassador in Damascus after Hariri's killing, a decision the new administration may soon reverse. Obama's vagueness on how to safeguard Lebanese sovereignty is worrisome (as was Bush's), because Damascus has spent the last three years violating every U.N. resolution destined to achieve that end. Lebanon was a verifiable success for George W. Bush. By turning engagement into a fetish without grasping its damaging consequences if badly conceived, Obama might harm not only the United States but especially those in the Arab world unwilling to be stifled by Iran and Syria.

You've probably heard stories of swooning foreign reporters, breathless international coverage, fawning headlines in many languages—and I can confirm that it's all true. Having found myself at a London newspaper stand the day after the inauguration, I can attest to what many British and European newspapers chose to run on their front pages that morning: full-page photographs of President Barack Obama, most taken so as to show that crowd of 2 million people below him, all with triumphant headlines in large letters on top.

The rejoicing was not entirely unanimous, of course, not least because the frothy press coverage itself provoked some backlash. One British friend told me that while he'd enjoyed watching the inauguration, "this salvationist acclaim for a political redeemer worries me, since it shows the depth of the almost-universal despair." Similar rumblings were heard elsewhere, too.

Yet there was also another, more negative category of foreign response to Obama's inauguration that is worth noting, not so much because of what it tells us about our new president, but because of what it reveals about the responders. A number of international observers eschewed the general adulation and concluded, simply, that the entire event—the election, the inauguration—was a hoax.

Look, for a typical example, at Pravda.ru, the Russian Web site that succeeded the organ of the Soviet Communist Party. Writing in the spirit of the times past, one of its authors informed readers last week that Obama's presidency was a sham. After all, he "became the president because one needed a scapegoat during hard times of the crisis," and he will not last: "[I]f Obama does not manage to extricate the nation from the crisis in two or three years, the Republicans will unveil their real candidate, and Obama's presidency will finish earlier than expected." The American president is, in other words, merely a temporary placeholder—a description that makes him sound remarkably similar to the current president of Russia.

But Pravda.ru was not alone. One Chinese academic wrote that many of his compatriots were confident that the "impossible" election of Obama would be disrupted by "something dramatic, similar to John F. Kennedy's assassination." In the wake of the inauguration, one high-ranking official shifted the line somewhat and denounced the process, calling on China to build defenses against the "erroneous" ideas of Western democracy (Chinese television having been wary enough of these erroneous ideas to censor Obama's inaugural address, even as it was being broadcast live).

Al-Qaida has been looking to discredit President Obama, too, mostly with nasty insults (he's a "hypocrite," a "killer," even a "house Negro") but also describing him as a frontman for the secret Zionist conspiracy. "This is Obama," said Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's No. 2, "whom the American machine of lies tried to portray as the rescuer who will change the policy of America."

I have, of course, chosen these quotations selectively: There were plenty of Chinese and Russian bloggers and journalists who wrote enthusiastically about the inauguration or at least didn't think it was a giant coverup. As the Washington Post has pointed out, the very harshness of al-Qaida's language may even reflect the fact that the U.S. president is being welcomed so warmly in much of the Islamic world.

Yet there will always be some who believe his election had to have been manipulated, simply because in their countries elections are always manipulated. The very idea that a relatively young, relatively unknown member of an ethnic minority could become president of the United States simply makes no sense in China, where national leaders are elderly men who have spent decades in the service of the Communist Party. Nor is it logical in Russia, where the outcome of elections is always known well in advance and transfer of power always takes place under the shadow of secret conspiracy. Nor, of course, could it ever seem plausible to the jihadist fringe, a group whose members are defined by the fact that they believe "change" is something you achieve with mass terror.

Nor even does the election make sense to some Americans (type "Obama" and "hoax" into your search engine of choice and see what I mean). Still, most of us have gotten used to the idea that electoral outcomes cannot always be determined by the political establishment in advance. We've also elected, in recent memory, improbable presidents from Arkansas and Georgia; have survived presidential resignations and impeachments; have gotten used to (even blasé about) black men and women running our foreign policy. One's perception of the present is shaped by one's experience of the past, and our experience is that democracy, at least when it works, is messy and unpredictable—which is precisely why it seems so implausible to others.

I'm sitting at my desk examining a $10.95 jar of South River Miso. The stuff is delicious, marked by a light, lemony tang. The packaging, by contrast, is a heavy-handed assurance of purity. The company is eager to tell me that the product I've purchased is certified organic, aged for three weeks in wood (sustainably harvested?), unpasteurized, made with "deep well water," handcrafted, and—the designation that most piques my interest—GMO free.

GMO refers to "genetically modified organisms." A genetically modified crop results from the laboratory insertion of a gene from one organism into the DNA sequence of another in order to confer an advantageous trait such as insect resistance, drought tolerance, or herbicide resistance. Today almost 90 percent of soy crops and 80 percent of corn crops in the United States sprout from genetically engineered seeds. Forty-five million acres of land worldwide contain genetically engineered crops. From the perspective of commercial agriculture, the technology has been seamlessly assimilated into traditional farming routines.

From the perspective of my miso jar, however, it's evident that not all consumers share the enthusiasm. It's as likely as not that you know GMOs by their stock term of derision: Frankenfoods. The moniker reflects a broad spectrum of concerns: Some anti-biotech activists argue that these organisms will contaminate their wild cousins with GM pollen and drive native plants extinct. Others suggest that they will foster the growth of "superweeds"—plants that develop a resistance to the herbicides many GMOs are engineered to tolerate. And yet others fear that genetic alterations will trigger allergic reactions in unsuspecting consumers. Whether or not these concerns collectively warrant a ban on GMOs—as many (most?) environmentalists would like to see—is a hotly debated topic. The upshot to these potential pitfalls, however, is beyond dispute: A lot of people find this technology to be creepy.

Whatever the specific cause of discontent over GM crops, popular resistance came to a head in 2000, when the National Organic Program solicited public input on the issue of whether they should be included. In response, sustainable-food activists deluged officials with a rainforest's worth of letters—275,000, to be exact—beating the measure into oblivion. Today, in the same spirit, environmentalists instinctively deem GMOs the antithesis of environmental responsibility.

Many scientists, and even a few organic farmers, now believe the 2000 rejection was a fatal rush to judgment. Most recently, Pamela Ronald, a plant pathologist and chair of the Plant Genomics Program at the University of California-Davis, has declared herself one such critic. In Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, she argues that we should, in fact, be actively merging genetic engineering and organic farming to achieve a sustainable future for food production. Her research—which she conducts alongside her husband, an organic farmer—explores genetically engineered crops that, instead of serving the rapacity of agribusiness, foster the fundamentals of sustainability. Their endeavor, counterintuitive as it seems, points to an emerging green biotech frontier—a hidden realm of opportunity to feed the world's impending 9 billion a diet produced in an environmentally responsible way.

To appreciate how "responsible genetic modification" isn't an oxymoron, consider grass-fed beef. Cows that eat grass are commonly touted as the sustainable alternative to feedlot beef, a resource-intensive form of production that stuffs cows with a steady diet of grain fortified with antibiotics, growth hormones, steroids, and appetite enhancers that eventually pass through the animals into the soil and water. One overlooked drawback to grass-fed beef, however, is the fact that grass-fed cows emit four times more methane—a greenhouse gas that's more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide—as regular, feedlot cows. That's because grass contains lignin, a substance that triggers a cow's digestive system to secrete a methane-producing enzyme. An Australian biotech company called Gramina has recently produced a genetically modified grass with lower amounts of lignin. Lower amounts of lignin mean less methane, less methane means curbed global warming emissions, and curbed emissions means environmentalists can eat their beef without hanging up their green stripes.

Another area where sustainable agriculture and genetic modification could productively overlap involves nitrogen fertilizer. A plant's failure to absorb all the nutrients from the fertilizer leads to the harmful accumulation of nitrogen in the soil. From there it leaches into rivers and oceans to precipitate dead zones so choked with algae that other marine life collapses. In light of this problem, Syngenta and other biotech companies are in the process of genetically engineering crops such as potatoes, rice, and wheat to improve their nitrogen uptake efficiency in an effort to diminish the negative consequences of nitrogen fertilization. Early results suggest that rice farmers in Southeast Asia and potato farmers in Africa might one day have the option of planting crops that mitigate the harmful effects of this long-vilified source of agricultural pollution.

Animals, of course, are just as modifiable as plants. Livestock farmers have been genetically tinkering with their beasts for centuries through the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding. They've done so to enhance their animals' health, increase their weight, and refine their fat content. Breeding animals to reduce environmental impact, however, hasn't been a viable option with the clunky techniques of conventional breeding. But such is not the case with genetic engineering.

Case in point: Canadian scientists have recently pioneered the "enviropig," a genetically modified porker altered to diminish the notoriously high phosphorous level of pig manure by 60 percent. Like nitrogen, phosphorous runoff is a serious pollutant with widespread downstream consequences. But with the relatively basic insertion of a gene (from E. coli bacteria) that produces a digestive enzyme called phytase, scientists have provided farmers with yet another tool for lessening their heavy impact on the environment.

When commercial farmers hear about GM grass, increased nitrogen uptake, and cleaner pigs, they're excited. And when they hear about other products in the works—genetically modified sugar beets that require less water and have higher yields than cane sugar; a dust made from genetically modified ferns to remove heavy metals from the soil; genetically modified and edible cotton seeds that require minimal pesticide use—they're also excited. And they're excited not only because these products have the potential to streamline production, but also because GM technology allows them to play a meaningful role in reducing their carbon footprint.

However, with the exception of the modified sugar beets, the GMOs mentioned in this article are not currently on the market. The cutting-room floors of research laboratories all over the world, in fact, are littered with successful examples of genetically engineered products that have enormous potential to further the goals of sustainable agriculture. Demand for these products remains high among farmers—it almost always does—but food producers fear the bad publicity that might come from anti-GMO invective.

Given the potential of these products to reduce the environmental impact of farming, it's ironic that traditional advocates for sustainable agriculture have led a successful campaign to blacklist GMOs irrespective of their applications. At the very least, they might treat them as legitimate ethical and scientific matters deserving of a fair public hearing. Such a hearing, I would venture, would not only please farmers who were truly concerned about sustainability, but it would provide the rest of us—those of us who do not grow food for the world but only think about it—a more accurate source of scientific information than the back of a miso jar.

On his first day in office, President Obama kept his most important campaign promise and began the process of closing Guantanamo. But this eliminates only the most visible part of the U.S. torture bureaucracy. In order to ensure that the atrocities of Guantanamo aren't visited upon the world by future administrations, Obama must also eviscerate the structures that enabled and supported torture. At the top of a long list is the U.S. military's secretive torture school, known as SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

Founded in the aftermath of the Korean War to train U.S. servicemen to withstand enemy interrogation, the school was central to the development of the notorious "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo. It was the SERE program that sent instructors and staff psychologists to Guantanamo shortly after 9/11 and provided the technical expertise on tactics like water-boarding. As Jane Mayer put it in her study of U.S. torture policy, The Dark Side, "SERE is a repository of the world's knowledge about torture, the military equivalent, in a sense, of the lethal specimens of obsolete plagues kept in the deep-freeze laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control."

I served in the Marine Corps in the 1990s, and I attended SERE as a young lieutenant in November 1995. I have since been to Iraq three times (as a reporter), and I can attest that the school isn't relevant to the threats American soldiers face abroad. It resembles more of an elaborate hazing ritual than actual training.

While I was in the school, I lived like an animal. I was hooded, beaten, starved, stripped naked, and hosed down in the December air until I became hypothermic. At one point, I couldn't speak because I was shivering so hard. Thrown into a 3-by-3-foot cage with only a rusted coffee can to piss into, I was told that the worst had yet to come. I was violently interrogated three times. When I forgot my prisoner number, I was strapped to a gurney and made to watch as a fellow prisoner was water-boarded a foot away from me. I will never forget the sound of that young sailor choking, seemingly near death, paying for my mistake. I remember only the sound because, try as I might, I couldn't force myself to look at his face. I was next. But for some reason, the guards just dropped the hose on my chest, the water soaking my uniform.

I was incarcerated at SERE for only a few days, but my mind quickly disintegrated. I became convinced that I was being held in an actual prisoner of war camp. Training had stopped, from my point of view. We had crossed over into some murky shadow land where the regulations no longer applied. I was sure that my captors, who wore Warsaw Pact-style uniforms and spoke with thick Slavic accents, would go all the way if the need arose.

Based on my conversations with recent graduates of SERE, it's clear that the school continues to inflict on trainees the techniques I experienced, such as sensory deprivation, extreme confinement, and exposure to loud music and recordings of wailing babies. According to congressional testimony given in November 2007 by Malcolm Nance, a former SERE instructor, they still water-board at SERE. If water-boarding is torture, then why are we still doing it to U.S. servicemen? Yes, enlistment in the units that attend SERE is a voluntary act, but must it entail the signing away of basic human rights?

The question is especially pertinent because America's enemies haven't used SERE's techniques of "mind control" since the Korean War. No doubt some military officials will argue that SERE has never been more necessary than it is today, given that there is no front line in the war on terrorism. Our troops are in constant danger of being captured, as in the kidnapping of two soldiers from the 10^th Mountain Division near Yousifiyah, Iraq, in May 2007.

But a review of the experiences of American servicemen captured in Iraq and Somalia shows that our enemies don't water-board their captives. Nor do they have the resources to mount a program of systematic sensory deprivation and humiliation, as we did in Guantanamo and in the American prison at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base. In fact, our soldiers need training from SERE based on an entirely different premise, as illustrated by the experience of Michael Durant, the helicopter pilot who spent several weeks in captivity when he was captured by Somali fighters during the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" raid. Durant survived by befriending his captors and forcing them to see him as a fellow human being. SERE conditions servicemen to expect nothing but the worst from their captors; Durant's life depended on his ability to understand his captors and find ways to manipulate them psychologically.

At the same time, the problem with SERE extends far beyond its questionable relevance to the threats that the war on terrorism pose to American soldiers. The school, which all pilots and special-forces soldiers attend, unintentionally serves to legitimize the use of torture by U.S. personnel in the field. In at least one documented case, special-forces soldiers in Afghanistan modeled their interrogations on the SERE training they received. The unit, the "20^th Special Force Group," forced prisoners to kneel outside in wet clothing and repeatedly kicked and punched prisoners in the kidneys, knees, and nose if they moved, resulting in the death of one detainee, according to Mayer's book.

The experience of torture at SERE surely plays a role in the minds of the graduates who go on to be interrogators, and it must on some level help them rationalize their actions. It's not hard to imagine them thinking, Well, if I survived this, then it's OK to do it to this guy. This acceptance of abuse from up high down to the lowest levels is the root of our military's torture problem. Unlike other Western militaries (Britain's, for example), ours thrives on sometimes-cartoonish authoritarianism and contrived rites of passage (like those hazing scandals that continually plague all the service academies). To young, impressionable soldiers, it is a too-short mental leap to the depredations of Abu Ghraib, as evidenced by a 2007 Army Times poll showing that 44 percent of enlisted Marines thought torturing a detainee was OK under certain circumstances. As John McCain said of torture in 2005, "It's not about them—it's about us."

Because the operation of SERE is entirely a military matter, its role hasn't received anything like the attention of the legal machinations that licensed the Bush administration's abuses at Guantanamo. But unless we stop torturing our own servicemen and training them how to torture others, unless we close SERE and retrain its instructors, Guantanamo could happen again.

In March 2007, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Poland had to pay 25,000 euros to a woman who was prevented from having an abortion she needed to save her eyesight. When Alicja Tysiac, a severely nearsighted Polish mother of two, became pregnant for the third time in 2000, a series of ophthalmologists told her that she risked going blind should she bring another baby to term. But Tysiac couldn't get the authorization she needed to get around Poland's abortion restrictions. She had the baby and, as predicted, lost nearly all of her eyesight. But in winning her case before a European forum, she became part of a small cadre of women who are helping to forge a definition of abortion as a human right under international law.

The overseas battle over funding for family planning is a familiar one: In what has become a kind of ritual marking the arrival of a new party in the White House, Barack Obama last week lifted the ban on American aid to family-planning groups involved with abortion abroad. Little noticed in the United States is that abortion jurisprudence—the court cases that define rights and restrictions for the procedure—has increasingly gone global.

In the last four years, in addition to Tysiac's case, women and their lawyers have brought abortion actions before the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates human rights violations in the Western hemisphere. Several times, women who've been denied abortions have won both compensation and an acknowledgment that their rights were violated. For feminists worldwide, this represents a great victory, since it elevates women's rights and safety above the often-sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty. Though back-alley abortions are largely a matter of history in the United States, botched terminations kill scores of women globally—nearly 70,000 annually, according to the World Health Organization. When governments don't respond, international courts can offer women another avenue of redress.

Yet as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts that enforce them with something of the frustrated anger that American conservatives sometimes direct at the federal government. "Abortion proponents cannot win elections on these issues, so they have to go through the least democratic bodies in the world, the United Nations, for instance, and the courts," says Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a pro-life organization active at the United Nations.

To be sure, no international court has ruled that countries must allow abortion on demand. These courts are, however, increasingly mandating that when countries restrict abortion, they allow a number of exceptions, grounding their findings in various human rights treaties. The cases date from 2005, when the U.N. Human Rights Committee ruled that Peru had violated the rights of a 17-year-old girl who was forced to carry to term an anencephalitic fetus, which was missing most of its forebrain and unable to survive outside the womb. The committee, which monitors countries' compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ordered Peru to pay reparations and to establish a framework for women to access therapeutic abortions.

In 2006, in the settlement of a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Mexico agreed to pay a 13-year-old rape victim who'd been prevented from terminating her pregnancy—and was by then a 19-year-old single mother—$40,000, plus a stipend for her son's education. A few months after that, Colombia's Supreme Court struck down that country's total abortion ban on the grounds that it violated both Colombia's Constitution and international law. "Sexual and reproductive rights of women have been finally recognized as human rights," said the court. "As such, they have entered the realm of constitutional law, which is the fundamental ground of all democratic states."

Such reasoning is making its way into legal documents worldwide. Recently, an African Union treaty became the first human rights covenant in the world specifically to include abortion rights. Abortion is highly restricted in most African countries; still, the treaty calls on state parties to "protect the reproductive rights of women by authorizing medical abortion in cases of sexual assault, rape, incest, and where the continued pregnancy endangers the mental and physical health of the mother or the life of the mother or the foetus." When Kenya's vice president spoke out in favor of ratifying the African Union's women's rights treaty, however, an op-ed headline in the Sunday Standard newspaper called the agreement a "Blatant Case of Neo-Colonialism."

More such clashes are on the horizon. A group of Irish women is challenging their country's abortion ban before the European Court of Human Rights. And in a case that's likely to get lots of attention, Nicaragua, which banned all abortion in 2006, may soon find itself before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. It was Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, eager to return to power and hoping to co-opt his former foes in Nicaragua's Catholic Church, who championed the ban. Now, the same American conservatives who once backed the Contras insist that it's unfair for other countries to pressure the Sandinistas to change their ways.

For liberals, the globalization of abortion law presents other contradictions. These cases pit feminism and multiculturalism, both cherished values on the left, against each other. The struggle is over abortion, but it's also over something bigger. When women's rights and cultural freedom collide, who prevails, and who gets to decide?

As of this week, Washington, D.C., has its own state quarter and its best shot in memory at gaining the right to vote for one full-fledged member of Congress. Such a bill is currently working its way through the House and Senate. If the measure passes, there's a good chance the Supreme Court will strike it down as unconstitutional. But Congress should still pass and President Obama should still sign the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act of 2009 as a major step toward ending the "taxation without representation" of D.C. residents.

Supporters of D.C. voting rights have pushed for years to get a bill like this through Congress. (D.C. residents already have a delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on committees but when it counts can't vote on final bills.) The district's supporters came close in 2007 with a measure that also would have created a new congressional seat for Utah (which was next in line among the states, given congressional reapportionment earlier this decade). Despite this neat attempt at partisan balance (a Democrat for D.C., a Republican for Utah), Republicans filibustered the measure after a threatened veto by President George W. Bush. Things are different this time. President Barack Obama co-sponsored the 2007 version of the bill, and the current one in the Senate is worded identically. There's a chance supporters can muster 60 votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster.

If that political battle is won, the war will shift to the courts, where it faces uncertain prospects. The constitutional claim against the D.C. Voting Rights Act is that Congress lacks the power to create a new congressional seat for the district. There's a strong textual argument for this position, advanced by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley and others. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that "[t]he House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states …" and there's no question that Washington, D.C., is not a state. Congress cannot amend the Constitution through ordinary legislation simply by calling D.C. a "state," and therefore the D.C. act is ostensibly unconstitutional. Supporters like Turley have backed up their arguments with extensive historical analysis based on the Framers' intent in giving the District of Columbia its odd status.

Perhaps surprisingly, some conservative heavy hitters (who tend to favor textualist and originalist interpretations of the Constitution) nonetheless have come out in favor of the constitutionality of the measure. Ken Starr has argued that Article I elsewhere, in what's called the District Clause, authorizes House representation for the district by providing that "[t]he Congress shall have power … to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over the District of Columbia. Professor Viet Dinh, who worked as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, has made similar arguments that Congress' power under this Clause is plenary, and he backs it up with his own analysis of the Framers' intent.

The debate also centers on an obscure 1949 Supreme Court case, National Mutual Insurance Co. v. Tidewater Transfer Co. Tidewater considered the constitutionality of a 1940 congressional statute, which provided that federal courts should consider residents of Washington, D.C., as coming from "states" for purposes of "diversity jurisdiction." (That's the legal framework that allows federal courts to hear cases arising under state law when a resident of one state sues the resident of another.) In a fractured decision, the Supreme Court upheld the 1940 law, despite an earlier 1805 Supreme Court ruling holding that D.C. residents could not be considered residents of states for diversity jurisdiction purposes.

Three of the justices in the majority in Tidewater relied on Article I's District Clause in reaching their conclusion, and supporters of the current D.C. voting rights legislation say Tidewater supports their position that Congress, broadly speaking, has the power to treat D.C. as a state. Opponents counter that there was no majority opinion in Tidewater and that even the three justices who relied on the District Clause would have found the current voting rights legislation unconstitutional. These justices "took pains to note the limited aspect of their holding" as not extending to fundamental rights. The nonpartisan and well-respected Congressional Research Service read Tidewater this way in a 2007 report, noting that at least six of the Tidewater justices "authored opinions rejecting the proposition that Congress's power under the District Clause was sufficient to effectuate structural changes in federal government" and suggesting that perhaps all nine justices would have agreed on the unconstitutionality of the D.C. bill.

If the current D.C. voting rights law is indeed unconstitutional, then the only way to get D.C. a full House member is the way that gave district residents the right to vote for president: a constitutional amendment that would either make D.C. a state, give it a member of Congress (and possibly two senators) without making it a state, or merge D.C. back into a neighboring state, such as Maryland. But constitutional amendments are extremely difficult to pass, requiring a vote of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states. With a country preoccupied by the most serious economic troubles of our lifetimes and two wars, voting rights for D.C. is not at the top of the list. Despite broad public support for some form of voting rights for D.C., the forces of inertia are strong.

This is precisely why Congress should pass the current law, even if it is likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court. Rejection by the court would put the issue on the front burner. Obama could then push for quick passage of a constitutional amendment in Congress and the states. He could remind people that many of our most important advances to voting rights have come through constitutional amendment, including enfranchisement of African-Americans, women, 18-year-olds, D.C. residents (in presidential elections), and those too poor to pay a poll tax to vote in federal elections.

The lack of voting rights for residents of Washington, D.C., is an example of what law professors call "constitutional stupidities." Given this country's commitment to equal voting rights for all, there's no legitimate policy reason to deny congressional representation to the District's residents. If that's right, then the only argument I can see against a vote for the D.C. bill is that it could be viewed as violating the oath taken by members of Congress and the president to uphold the Constitution. But with legitimate arguments by credible legal scholars in favor of the bill, the constitutional question is not settled. Members of Congress can vote for D.C. voting rights in good conscience. Then we'll see what happens next.

Earlier this month, the Department of Justice and Manhattan's district attorney announced that Lloyd's TSB Bank will pay a $350 million fine for illicitly funneling Iranian and Sudanese money into the U.S. banking system. The British financial giant stripped identifying information from its clients' wire transfers for as much as a decade, allowing the Iranians to covertly buy a large quantity of tungsten, a material vital in building long-range missiles.

But Lloyd's wasn't convicted of any crime. It didn't go to trial, take a plea deal, or even get indicted. Instead, the bank and prosecutors agreed on what's called a deferred-prosecution agreement. If Lloyd's pays its fine, cooperates with prosecutors, and keeps its nose clean for two years, it will never be formally charged.

Along with their close cousin, the nonprosecution agreement, deferred prosecutions became the norm for punishing corporate crime under the Bush administration. The growth has been rapid: 37 such agreements were publicly announced in 2007, compared with only 11 during all of the Clinton years. The list of malfeasant companies that have skipped off without indictments includes blue chippers like Boeing, Merrill Lynch, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. As Hogan & Hartson defense attorney Peter Spivack observed in an American Criminal Law Review article last year, the government has not filed criminal charges against a single major publicly traded corporation since 2003 without opting for a deferred-prosecution agreement first.

Now that the Bush Justice Department's top brass has decamped for the private sector, it might seem reasonable to expect that the new Obama DoJ will start charging big companies for the crimes they commit. But that's not likely. Given the power that deferred prosecutions give prosecutors, and the fear that corporate trials do more harm than good, Obama's appointees aren't likely to change course. That might be pragmatic, but it's not the end to corporate exceptionalism that Obama proposed on the campaign trail.

The Bush administration didn't so much create deferred prosecutions as allow them to proliferate. First used with corporate defendants by U.S. attorneys in the early 1990s, the agreements are conceptually akin to pretrial diversion programs, in which prosecutors agree to drop charges against cooperative, low-level scofflaws. (In a run-of-the-mill criminal case, for example, a minor narcotics offense might be overlooked if the suspect agrees to complete a drug-treatment program and rat out his dealer.)

Substitute a Fortune 500 firm for the junkie, and you've got the basic elements of a corporate deferral. By agreeing to cooperate, a company saves itself the crippling publicity and business sanctions that a trial or conviction would entail. Meanwhile, prosecutors can use the threat of filing the indictment to compel the company to clean up its act, accept an outside monitor, or provide damning evidence against specific employees.

By heading off proceedings before they reach the courthouse, deferred prosecutions strip judges of the oversight role they would have over a plea deal or probation (or, far more rarely, a trial). The legal process then becomes a largely unrefereed negotiation between two parties, one of which carries a big stick.

Despite this obvious advantage for prosecutors, the practice didn't really take off until after the corporate accounting scandals earlier in the decade, in which convictions sometimes proved pyrrhic victories. Prosecutors won a conviction against accounting giant Arthur Andersen for shredding Enron auditing documents, but within a few months, the disgraced firm surrendered its accounting licenses, laid off more than 20,000 American employees, and ceased to exist.

Whether Arthur Andersen's collapse was caused or merely hastened by its felony conviction is debatable. But the subsequent economic carnage led U.S. attorneys to seek a gentler way to snuff out corporate wrongdoing. Deferred prosecutions provided exactly that.

Internal Justice Department guidance encouraged prosecutors to use the agreements to leverage their authority. In a 2003 memo to U.S. attorneys, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson suggested that prosecutors could demand that a company waive its attorney-client privileges and cut off payment of its employees' legal fees. The policy didn't last: Thompson's successor declared the tactics off-limits after a federal judge found that prosecutors violated defendants' right to due process.

But that didn't address all the criticism of the use of deferrals. Business watchdogs like the Washington-based Corporate Crime Reporter have warned that treating companies as "too big to indict" makes them less respectful of the law. Corporate white-collar attorneys like Spivack argue, on the other hand, that it's sometimes the other way around—the threat of prosecution can result in fines and conditions beyond what a court would ever impose on a company if it were convicted. "Companies will go to great lengths to avoid the symbolic process of prosecution," says John Coffee, a securities-and-white-collar criminal-law professor at Columbia University.

With no judge to referee, prosecutorial whim can play a large role in the terms of a deferral. Companies have agreed to all kinds of novel conditions to get a deferral in recent years, such as creating 1,600 jobs in Oklahoma or installing slot machines at New York racetracks. Sometimes, the terms of deferred prosecutions seem to be heavily influenced by the personal inclinations of prosecutors themselves. Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now running for governor of New Jersey, has been among the more creative: He required Bristol Myers Squibb to endow a $1 million chair of legal ethics at his own alma mater, Seaton Hall Law School. And in 2007, he awarded a no-bid, $27 million-plus monitoring contract to retired Attorney General John Ashcroft—his former boss.

The size of that contract, along with an accompanying whiff of cronyism, led to another DoJ memo reining in the use of monitors, a congressional inquiry, and an ongoing Government Accountability Office review. According to Kristy Brown, a GAO assistant director, one of the questions the agency hopes to answer is whether such arrangements have been the result of "two-sided negotiation" or simply rammed down companies' throats. The GAO should release its findings sometime this summer, which would provide an opportune time for the Obama Justice Department to put its own stamp on the process if it wished.

But no one is anticipating that the spirit of change will result in a repudiation of deferred prosecutions. For starters, the president's choice to lead the Justice Department is partly responsible for the agreements' entrenchment. In 1999, then-Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder issued a memo to U.S. attorneys suggesting that a company's cooperation and the well-being of its employees and shareholders were legitimate factors to consider when deciding whether to press charges. While it didn't make waves at the time, it provided a legal foundation for the Thompson memo and the subsequent boom in deferred prosecutions.

Even if the Obama Justice Department were inclined to end that boom, Coffee points out, the parlous state of the economy would prevent prosecutors from seeking convictions against companies snared by the financial crisis. No U.S. attorney wants to be remembered as the prosecutor who pushed an already ailing company off a cliff.

In other words, the weaker a misbehaving company is, the better its lawyers' bargaining position. It's never been possible to put a corporation in jail. For the time being, even branding one a felon may be practically off-limits.

The condition of the U.S. economy can be described generously as bleak. But while unemployment is on the rise and the Big Three automakers struggle to remain afloat, the business of making people well seems relatively insulated. While some discretionary health care sectors are not growing, such as LASIK eye procedures and plastic surgery that patients pay for out of pocket, most health care workers still have jobs and can afford the occasional $4 latte.

But the health care industry is no oasis. The very problems that brought our country to its financial knees are still at work today in health care. It comes down to the disordered competition that exists in both the mortgage and health care industries.

If you pick up your college econ textbook, you'll read all about Adam Smith and how competition is fundamentally good. When companies compete, it results in a better product for the consumer: McDonald's competes with Burger King to make a better, cheaper hamburger. Problem is, in both the old, defunct mortgage business and current health care industry, the "invisible hand" fails to produce low-cost, high-quality, sustainable products.

In the mortgage industry, this competition failure produced the banking crisis. During the housing bubble, banks competed with one another to sell risky mortgages that had a high likelihood of default. Now, entire neighborhoods have been left nearly deserted because of waves of foreclosures. In health care, competition similarly fails to produce better community health. Instead of competing with one another for the best outcomes, providers compete for patients with the most profitable diseases. Hospital care for cancer and heart surgery makes more money than hospital care for diabetes, pneumonia, or mental health. While all these services get reimbursed, some bring in more cash than others—in effect, cancer care is like gold while diabetes is like silver.

As a result, form follows finance: Gilded diseases get the best care while the silver diseases are given lesser priority. (Ever notice that hospitals have hardwood floors in some areas, like the cancer units, while general medicine gets linoleum?) Mining gold generally means doing high-volume elective procedures and state-of-the art care—the stuff patients think will make them better in a short period of time. Mining silver involves primary and preventive care, like managing blood pressure. Because it's less lucrative to mine silver, even patients with comprehensive insurance are made to wait for doctors' appointments and often get bumped to E.R.s for regular care. In Redefining Health Care, economists Michael Porter and Elisabeth Teisberg detailed how this gold-mining scheme interferes with creating the best health outcomes because it devalues certain treatments and marginalizes patients with particular diseases. Improperly treated diabetes can be just as lethal as untreated cancer, but while hospitals roll out the red carpet for cancer patients, diabetics get the shaft.

E.R. patients make less money for the hospital than elective admissions. Therefore, running an overcrowded E.R. is a passive form of cherry-picking: By restricting the influx of these second-tier patients, the hospital can focus on the gilded cases by preferentially reserving space for surgical and cancer patients at the expense of others who suffer for hours in E.R. hallways. This is perfectly legal and increases profits but does not produce a healthier overall community. The University of Chicago Hospital has taken gold-mining to the next level, according to reports: The Urban Health Initiative is designed to actively cherry-pick by shipping out "routine cases" (read: less profitable) from the E.R. to local community hospitals so they can reserve inpatient beds for more complex patients (read: more profitable). But there has been some push back by regulators: Government officials may actually challenge the hospital's "nonprofit" tax status. And, as of this month, Massachusetts hospitals will no longer be able to use ambulance diversion (which is also profitable) to divert E.R. cases to other facilities.

And just as mortgage companies used adjustable-rate mortgages to convince homebuyers they could afford homes they couldn't, health care is rigged to promote overuse at the expense of the consumer. This overuse comes in two forms: the excessive testing and limitless treatments by doctors and the voracious demand for these services by patients. Many of the health care services that people want and doctors recommend really have no proven value—like the full-body CT scan that Oprah bought. The patient doesn't really bear the brunt of the cost for most health care services—the insurer does—but these practices inflate premiums for everyone. There's no downside for doctors who order unnecessary tests, and no one really watches what doctors prescribe unless they are handing out narcotics like Percocet or directly hurting people. Most doctors practice conscientiously and do what they think is in their patients' best interests, but the point is that the system encourages the delivery of as many services as possible. More liver transplants equal more money.

Neither medical care nor mortgages are fundamentally bad. But there are too few checks in the system to prevent people from getting the equivalent of a crappy burger.

How can health reformers learn from the mortgage industry? One solution is paying for health care outcomes instead of health care services. Under this system, if the doctor makes you better, he gets paid—otherwise, no dough. But reimbursing on outcomes is problematic because it is difficult to know who should have gotten better but didn't, and who would have gotten better even without treatment. Doctors who take harder cases would look like they were bad at their job and maybe get paid less, possibly creating incentives for refusing harder cases.

Another concept is the Federal Health Board (touted in a new book by the incoming secretary of health and human services, Tom Daschle). This board would be similar to the Federal Reserve and make nonpartisan recommendations on which medical tests and treatments Americans should get (i.e., which will be reimbursed). But critics of his plan worry that many treatments that actually do work don't have a lot of science backing them up. While this government scrutiny on medical care would likely tamp down costs, it could also result in the rationing of services.

Yet another proposed solution is the medical home, where primary-care providers would get special incentives to manage and coordinate chronically ill patients. When we get sick, it can be quite a challenge to navigate the system and manage the myriad specialists. The medical home might make the lives of the chronically ill easier and reduce system costs by preventing expensive hospitalizations.

But, ultimately, what needs to happen is an overhaul of the structure of the system. Just as financial reform is needed to ensure that mortgage companies don't hand out loans to those who cannot afford them, health care reform should focus on aligning what patients demand (to be and feel healthier) with health care reimbursement. An ounce of prevention is a lot cheaper than a pound of cure. Healthy diet and exercise are better than getting a heart stent and spending a week in the hospital after a heart attack. We need to reform the health system now so taxpayers don't get saddled with another trillion-dollar bailout.

Like the carpet in my room at the Club Hotel, the Spirit of Davos is getting a little frayed this year. In most years, the mood at Davos is not gregarious friendship—this is Switzerland, after all—but at least it's civility and politesse. In the real world, when a CEO or private equity big shot doesn't want to talk to a reporter, his PR person will (sometimes rudely) say no. Here, the CEOs themselves will make pleasant chitchat, give you an off-the-record quote or two, and move on. Davos is like a large, mobile country club. And there are certain things country-club members just don't do to one another—like embarrassing one another socially or financially. (Ahem, Mr. Madoff.)

But rising financial and geopolitical stress has made it difficult to maintain a veneer of civility at the 2009 Davos. The big news from last night? A well-attended forum on the Middle East, featuring Shimon Peres of Israel and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ended in a storm of controversy. Erdogan left the stage in a fit of pique, arguing that Peres' impassioned defense of Israel's Gaza offensive—at one point, he asked Erdogan how Turkey would respond if it were attacked in a similar manner—was "in a manner not in line with … the spirit of Davos." He was also angered that moderator David Ignatius of the Washington Post had tried to keep him within prescribed time limits, while Peres had spoken at length. Erdogan said he'd never return. Two things: First, Turkey and Israel are supposed to be allies. Second, droning on beyond allotted time frames isn't rude at Davos. It's a sign of a Davos Man's virility. That's what people do here. They talk—a lot and at length. If people angered by the inadequate speaking time allotted them and the overgenerous speaking time allotted rivals were to start boycotting the World Economic Forum en masse, next year's edition could safely be held in the Club Hotel's bar.

The less-than-generous spirit could be seen elsewhere, too. I had dinner with a group of executives in the airline, shipping, and auto industries, where (alert: name-drop warning!) I was seated near Nissan's worldly and sharp CEO Carlos Ghosn. During the evening, an Indian industrialist, prefacing his remarks by saying that he didn't want to criticize a competitor on the record, dished about how one of India's best-known industrial names had made a series of poor decisions and would probably need a bailout.

Make no mistake, the good-time Charlies are still here. At a paparazzi-packed lunch on philanthropy, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair provided a double shot of charisma, bonhomie, and humor. But they made introductory remarks and quickly left together. Shorn of their offices, Clinton and Blair have been reduced to bit players on the global stage. And so the spirit of these cuddly politicians, who craved affection, no longer dominates. Instead, the large geopolitical presences here are brooding, and standoffish—Chinese premiere Wen Jiabao and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Even though we're in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, schadenfreude is a sentiment generally frowned on at Davos. Rather, the powerful and wealthy congratulate themselves for taking time out of their busy schedules to ponder the plight of the less fortunate. One of the unofficial Davos events is the "Refugee Run," a simulation of life as a refugee, complete with hostile, armed rebels, power outages, and barbed wire. (My politically incorrect first thought on reading about the event: I don't need to travel 4,000 miles to see shellshocked people living hand-to-mouth. I work for a media company.) And yet, in the hallways and in the plenary sessions at the private dinners and in the informal cocktail hours, there has been an avalanche of schadenfreude over the travails of Wall Street. At a dinner Wednesday night, Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his gray beard set off by a black turtleneck, was positively giddy over the failure of Lehman Bros.—not just because he may have profited from the volatility in the financial sector but because it gave this preening smart guy great pleasure to see so many stupid people who had enjoyed unwarranted success fail. His next book should be a memoir: The Gray Peacock. Ah, the spirit of Davos.

For centuries, historians have debated whether history is propelled by Great Men (and Women), human forces of nature who bend events and systems to their will, or by vast impersonal forces (communism, capitalism, globalization) that render even the most powerful of us a mere reed basket floating in a massive river. There's no session on the subject at the World Economic Forum in Davos. But at least with regard to finance and business, the consensus seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.

Ordinarily, Davos is a Great Men kind of place, as the motto of this year's gathering implies: "Shaping the post-crisis world." The people who show up here—political leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, musicians, and, above all, businesspeople—have all shown an ability to impose themselves on history. Otherwise, they wouldn't be invited. And yet in the many discussions held here about the recent global financial debacle, the question of human agency is shunted to the side.

At a CNBC event yesterday, groups of 10 to 12 people sat at tables and mooted three questions: Which policy assumption failed? Which regulatory failure proved to be the largest systemic shock? And which market failure proved most damaging? The answers were obvious: poor regulation of the shadow banking system, mispricing of risk, the failure of models. But there was very little talk about the people who helped design and justify the systems, the mispricing, and the models. At one point, someone in the crowd stood up and said: "It's intriguing nobody is to blame. In other industries, there are consequences if you make toxic products that hurt people. Policy makers need to make it clear that there are serious consequences for that type of behavior." Big applause! And yet aside from the odd mention of Alan Greenspan and an oblique reference to Robert Rubin, the former treasury secretary who became a senior executive at Citigroup, there was little talk of individual players who had responsibility.

An all-star dinner that included bravura performances from behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (brilliant and charming), historian Niall Ferguson (brilliant and charming), and Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb (brilliant and narcissistic) focused on the dramatic events of mid-September 2008. It was off the record, but Taleb asked journalists to please quote him. While not naming names, Taleb had nasty things to say about traders and exulted at the fall of Lehman Bros. But beyond that, the talk was mostly of systems that didn't work and the nameless minions who simply couldn't help themselves. Most of the talk was of the models and the market. And today, at a lunch that was testimony to the transformative power of the individual—it included Great Men Bill Gates, serial entrepreneur Richard Branson, and Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Yunus, the father of micro-lending, who talked about philanthropy and capitalism—Gates stumbled when asked about the failures. "Here we had some severe imbalances that led to, when people finally looked at their savings rate, you got the knock-on effect," he fumfered before mentioning Keynes and Soros. "I don't think we can find the villain and point at him and say, Aha, he did it."

The dismissal of human agency is ironic, but also predictable. Just as financial markets in the United States privatize profits and socialize losses, Davos and other conferences like this privatize success (by chalking it up to individuals) and socialize failure (by blaming it on large systemic problems).

The preferred strategy at Davos is to simply ignore failure. By and large, screw-ups don't make the agenda. It's just not that sort of place. If you screw up, you don't get invited, and you don't show up. This explains why I couldn't see a single economist or official associated with the Bush administration on the roster, and why there are very few American bankers at Davos this year. As John Thain's career at Merrill came to a close, he suffered the ultimate indignity: Bank of America told him it wouldn't be a good idea for him to come to Davos. The only thing worse than being attacked is being ignored. You don't matter anymore. You're not even worth mentioning. As World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab put it: Davos is not a place for "has-beens."

Ultimately, the "blame the system" ethos will undermine the spirit of Davos. The notion that large forces—cheap money, liquidity, mispriced risk, inefficient markets—are responsible for success or failure is an affront to Davos Man, who believes that his prominence is due to merit and hard work.

Watch Daniel Gross' dispatch from Davos:

How can smart bankers be so clueless? Wall Street has been transfixed this week by the antics of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. While the firm was encountering difficulty in early 2008, he spent $1.2 million renovating his office. In September, when it became clear Merrill couldn't survive as an independent entity, he arranged a deal to sell Merrill to Bank of America. Thain agreed to stay on and run the investment-banking operations of the new firm. Merrill's continuing losses threatened to sink Bank of America, which earlier this month received another $20 billion in bailout funds and a commitment by the Federal Reserve to backstop up to $118 billion of other assets. And yet Thain carried on like a Master of the Universe, jetting off to Vail for a couple of weeks, plotting a trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, and rewarding executives with billions in bonuses—handed out in December, before the merger officially closed, to prevent Bank of America from putting the kibosh on the payments.

There was more outrage Monday when it was reported that Citigroup, which has morphed from the nation's largest private-sector financial institution into a hobbled giant dependent on taxpayer funds, was about to close a deal on a $50 million jet. And the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that many recipients of bailout money were spending millions of dollars lobbying the federal government.

As Lehman Bros. showed, there are good reasons to avoid letting failed banks go bankrupt. But as these three episodes show, there are also downsides to conducting bailouts outside of bankruptcy and without a formal change of control. When a company files for Chapter 11 (which is getting so crowded, we might need to rename it Chapter 12), the ownership structure changes: Creditors typically supplant the old stockholders. But the series of deals that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke hammered out for the finance industry has mostly diluted existing stockholders without formally wiping them out. As a result, management has continued to act as if it still reports to the representatives of the shareholders (their handpicked board members) rather than to the people who are providing them with the rescue billions they so desperately need (you and me). And so they continue doing the things that executives do: lobby governments, buy jets, and pay bonuses.

These banks and financial institutions aren't quite dead. But without taxpayer support, they wouldn't be alive. Policy types have warned that if we don't act dramatically, we might risk repeating Japan's experience of the 1990s, in which a desire to avoid foreclosing on delinquent companies led to the emergence of "zombie companies"—firms that couldn't really pay their debts, didn't have the wherewithal to invest, and yet opened for business every day. The problem today with Wall Street, and with many banks, is that they don't quite realize their business models are defunct, that they don't have an independent life absent government support.

In The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment's character is terrified because he sees dead people walking the streets, working, going to school, playing, seeing patients, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer alive. I get the same feeling today watching CNBC, reading the newspapers, walking through midtown Manhattan and counting the Town Cars idling outside the headquarters of investment banks. Like John Thain, there are lots of people who continue to act as if they are living, breathing, Wall Street players, oblivious to the fact they've been reduced to nicely dressed corpses.

"Everything Must Go!" blares a bright-yellow sign at the Circuit City store on Broadway and 80^th St. in Manhattan, N.Y. The revolving doors whir with curious customers looking for bargains. As can be inferred from the huddles of dejected employees wearing bright-red Circuit City polos, this store will soon be closing, along with the other 566 outlets of the nation's second-largest electronics retailer, leaving 34,000 people unemployed. Circuit City must liquidate some $1 billion in merchandise by the end of March.

There was a time, not so long ago, when a company like Circuit City would have stuck it out by filing for Chapter 11. A Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing gives companies breathing room from creditors in order to regroup and relaunch. Circuit City started down this path in November, but in mid-January it decided that rehab was too tough and threw in the towel. Sharper Image, Linens 'n Things, retailer Steve & Barry's, and the department store Mervyn's all filed for bankruptcy with the intent of reorganizing. And all have wound up liquidating. "The reason we're seeing liquation rather than bankruptcy from so many retailers is because people are hopeless," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute. "We're still looking at a very bad year in 2009 and probably most of 2010, so it's very difficult to be optimistic about reorganizing and coming out of it stronger."

Liquidation has become the corporate analog to residential foreclosures—with banks slow to restructure mortgages to help out shaky borrowers and borrowers quick to "mail in the keys" to the bank when the value of their house plummets. Foreclosures rose 79 percent in 2007 and spiked another 81 percent in 2008 to a record 2.3 million households. "It wouldn't surprise me if we approach 3 million households in 2009," said Rick Sharga, senior vice president of RealtyTrac, which compiles foreclosure data. At the same time, hedge funds, which helped foment the boom, have started mailing in their own keys. If a fund suffers losses in a year, the managers can't start earning lucrative performance fees unless the fund returns above its high-water mark. Rather than soldier on, many operators have opted to simply fold, returning money to investors.

Companies, homeowners, and money managers willing to quit rather than fight is both a symptom of the nation's deep economic woes and emblematic of the challenge the Obama administration faces. More than a mere "economic crisis" is facing Barack Obama. Our "Yes, We Can" president is going to have to fix a "No, We Can't" economy. In his inaugural address, Obama noted he was taking office "amidst gathering clouds and raging storms." That's almost an understatement. The macroeconomic numbers have been simply horrible, with job losses mounting, sales data plummeting, and the already frayed safety net coming undone. Several states' unemployment funds are in danger of being depleted. The crisis has rendered the last several years something of a lost decade. By the end of 2008, stocks had fallen back to where they were in 1997. Household net worth dropped from its peak of $62.6 trillion in the third quarter of 2007 to $56.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2008, below the level of 2005. The economy is losing jobs at an appalling rate.

The pessimism is most evident in the troubled sector that relies most on faith: lending. Champion Mortgage used to run ubiquitous advertisements that promised: "When Your Bank Says No, Champion Says Yes." Now all lenders seem to be saying no. In October 2008, about 85 percent of domestic banks reported having tightened lending standards on commercial loans, according to the Federal Reserve, while 70 percent said they had tightened standards on prime mortgages.

The challenge for Obama is twofold: dealing with the crisis of confidence and dealing with the crisis of economic reality. If housing doesn't stop imploding, the confidence businesses (i.e., credit) won't recover. But without the return of confidence, the credit markets will plunge further into dysfunction, hampering a recovery in housing and in every other industry. Through word and deed, Obama can try to exhort Americans to remain in the game. When Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the White House, he declared a bank holiday, putting a brake, for the moment, on the process of creative destruction. But FDR's most powerful tool may have been his rhetoric of reassurance, expressed so clearly in his fireside chats.

Of course, staged events and stunts frequently fail. John D. Rockefeller, who kept his financial affairs to himself, conspicuously invested in stocks after the 1929 crash. "Believing that the fundamental conditions of the country are sound, my son and I have been purchasing sound common stocks for days," he said. (Entertainer Eddie Cantor's response, "Sure, who else had any money left?") Obama's declaration that he would freeze salaries of top White House aides, saving $443,000 in the first year, is less than a droplet in the bucket. What's more, the markets and consumers have become increasingly immune to Beltway reassurance, especially since so much of it has been false.

But some words can carry weight, especially if Obama manages to do what Bush and his colleagues have failed to since the problems started in the summer of 2007: to declare a comprehensive set of principles and plans and follow through on them. "If you want to restore confidence, we have to stop improvising," says Desmond Lachman, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. A strategy is emerging. The stimulus package, likely to be Obama's first significant piece of legislation, will include a mix of traditional measures intended to buffer economic distress and make consumers feel a little more secure (extending unemployment benefits, expanding Medicaid's coverage of children, creating jobs through infrastructure spending, and providing aid to stricken states).

But to halt the process of foreclosures and forced sales and to stop lenders from forcing liquidation, more unorthodox measures may be required. In the past year, government backstops have prevented death spirals in several markets that function as the plumbing for the corporate sector, such as the commercial paper market. If the Federal Reserve were to, for example, guarantee debtor-in-possession financing, it might put a halt to quick liquidations.

There are also signs that government action may be spurring the private sector to put the brakes on foreclosures. Last July, when the FDIC took over failed California bank IndyMac and its huge portfolio of 65,000 delinquent loans, FDIC staffers developed a streamlined loan-modification plan and aggressively reached out to borrowers. The first 8,500 modifications that the FDIC made produced an average of $49,000 more value than if they had been foreclosed—a savings of $23 million for lenders. The FDIC's modification plan is being applied to other cases, most notably as part of the agreement the U.S. government made with Citigroup in late November to backstop $306 billion of loans. "I think we're finally seeing a lot of mortgage servicers coming around to the fact that they can't use old processes to deal with this problem," said Michael Krimminger, special adviser of policy to the FDIC chair.

The private sector seems finally to be heeding one of FDR's maxims: "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Congress is considering a controversial law that would let bankruptcy judges, rather than banks themselves, cut interest rates for homeowners at risk of defaulting. In an effort to assure Congress that such measures aren't necessary, some banks have become more proactive in modifying loans. After the success of an early effort last fall by JPMorgan Chase to modify loans, the giant bank announced in mid-January it would step up efforts to include the larger portfolio of loans that it services. The program, targeted to cover a little more than $1 trillion dollars in investor-owned loans, has slowed the foreclosure process on more than 80,000 homeowners since October, staving $22 billion in foreclosed properties.

Obama's speech was judged by many to have been a somber assessment of a bleak period and to have lacked some of the jaunty Happy Warrior spirit of FDR. But FDR's first inaugural wasn't full of happy talk. "Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment," he said. And if you read between the lines of Obama's address, you can detect some Depression-era blithe spirit poking through the gloom. "Starting today," Obama said near the end, "we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." Fans of the Great American Songbook will recognize this as a paraphrase of Dorothy Fields' lyrics to the Jerome Kern tune "Pick Yourself Up." The song, a paean to self-belief, bouncing back, and not giving up—an affirmation of Yes, We Can—was featured in Swing Time, a 1936 confection that starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirling their way gracefully through the gloom.

Reporting by Newsweek's Matthew Philips and Jessica Ramirez in New York and Daniel Stone in Washington. A version of this article appears in Newsweek.

Quick: Think about Renée Zellweger's erect nipples! Not in the mood, you say? Seems a bit early in the day to have that image foisted upon you? Well, not 10 minutes into the new romantic comedy New in Town (Lionsgate), the director, Jonas Elmer, demands that you not only ponder said image for a full minute and a half but laugh at it repeatedly. Chortling at Zellweger's nips, embarrassingly visible beneath her sweater in the Minnesota chill, is just one of many burdensome tasks required of the viewer of this fish-out-of-water love story. The toughest of all: caring about any of the characters in this smug, check-off-the-boxes comedy.

Lucy Hill (Zellweger) is a movie career woman of a familiar type. Like Diane Keaton in Baby Boom or Tina Fey in Baby Mama, she lives in a posh but sterile urban apartment, travels with too much designer luggage, condescends to rural dwellers, and has no time to slow down and pay attention to what really matters (in those movies, babies; here, tapioca). Lucy is dispatched from her home base of Miami to New Ulm, Minn., to "streamline" (read: downsize) a food-processing plant. Her first night there, after enduring the nipple mishap, she's fixed up with the local union rep, Ted (Harry Connick Jr.)—a disastrous encounter that ends in an exchange of insults about "beer-drinking truck guys" and uppity city women. Brittle snob meets sanctimonious rube: I smell romance!

Maybe it's just my native Zellweger animosity speaking, but I don't know when there's been a romantic-comedy heroine as relentlessly unpleasant as Lucy Hill. Baby Boom and its formulaic offspring may have been retrograde, arguably anti-feminist comedies, but at least they featured women who were struggling to balance career success with human relationships. Lucy Hill is Type A, as in asshole; she picks her high-heeled way through the icy streets of New Ulm as if walking in excrement and treats her secretary, the provincial but kindhearted Blanche Gunderson (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), with such horrific snobbery that it's hard to accept the plot convention by which they eventually become friends. When Lucy's car gets trapped in a snowbank on a remote farm road and Ted happens along to dig her out—thereby saving her from potential death by hypothermia—her first response is not, "Oh my God, thank you," but "Watch the hands, buster." Why is this woman worth saving from the snow, much less building a movie around?

There's one scene in which Zellweger, softened by firelight and given a rare scrap of humanizing dialogue, summons some of the squinty charm that she brought to Jerry Maguire and the Bridget Jones movies. (I won't speculate on the degree to which her face has since been immobilized by something other than the Minnesota cold.) And Connick Jr. isn't without appeal, even if his ultracasual, "Am I on camera?" manner blends strangely with Zellweger's taut artifice.

The residents of the Gopher State should mount a class-action lawsuit against Lionsgate Pictures for making them look like a bunch of holiday-sweater-wearing, snickerdoodle-baking dopes. Still, what few surprises there are here come from the supporting cast, especially J.K. Simmons, looking uncharacteristically working-class (and uncharacteristically large) as the plant's plain-spoken foreman.

One thing I'll say for New in Town, lest I come off as ungraciously as Lucy Hill herself: The movie does establish a vivid sense of place, with the countryside near Winnipeg, Manitoba, standing in for the barren Minnesota landscape. When Lucy gets stuck in that snowbank, the frigid expanse that surrounds her looks genuinely threatening, and the town's main street, its paneled diners, and VFW halls, seem unidealized and real. This is exactly the kind of one-company town that has been devastated by the recession, which makes it all the more insulting that this fictional plant's woes are healed by having the boss lady and the union leader playfully spray each other with tapioca on the production floor. For many Americans, the only believable part of New in Town may be its ominous premise: There's a rich jerk in town, and she's come to take away your job.

Slate V: What the critics think about New in Town and other new releases

Last November, an inebriated 24-year-old with the woefully apt name of Kyle Drinkwine was found by police in the back of a Wisconsin alley, his hands covered in blood. According to testimony compiled by the Smoking Gun, Drinkwine had spent the evening unwinding at Emma's Bar, a local watering hole that was hosting a karaoke night. Shortly after performing an Eminem song, he allegedly became so enraged by another patron's version of "Holy Diver"—the 1983 anthem by heavy-metal patriarch Ronnie James Dio—that he assaulted the singer and his friend and fled when police arrived. "This had started … over one's ability to sing karaoke," notes the arrest report, which reads like a Mike Judge novella.

Drinkwine's sad, stupid plight wasn't an isolated incident: In August 2007, a Seattle man was assaulted onstage during a karaoke rendition of Coldplay's "Yellow," while last December, a San Diego man encored his karaoke set by walking toward the crowd and attacking an audience member. And in Asia, there's been a string of karaoke-bar stabbings and shootings, including a horrific incident in Bangkok in which eight amateur singers were murdered by their neighbor, reportedly due in part to his hatred of John Denver's "Country Roads."

As someone who's performed, miserably, at karaoke bars worldwide—including a three-day stint aboard a Finnish "karaoke cruise ship"—I was perplexed by these attacks. After all, I've survived countless moments of sanity-needling karaoke without ever once resorting to violence, even when it would have been justified; there's no greater example of self-restraint than sitting in a sweltering Bangkok beer garden, watching a drunken Polish man deflower Starship's "We Built This City." In 10 years and seven countries, the only karaoke-related tension I've ever experienced took place in a Long Island bar, where a stewing townie grimaced all the way through my overly emphatic version of Van Halen's "Jump." (I left shortly afterward, so as not to give him the chance to beat me with a garnish tray.)

One explanation for this uptick in karaoke rage is that karaoke bars bring together several socially combustible elements. Fill a room with 30 or so exhibitionists, ply them with alcohol and wireless microphones, and it's only a matter of time before all the forced interaction results in conflict. Indeed, when the first karaoke machines were exported from Japan in the late '70s and early '80s, many communities in Asia and India shunned the devices, fearing they'd attract undesirables. Marketers responded by convincing local educators that karaoke could be used to improve literacy—or, more ingeniously, by pitching American prison wardens on the idea of using karaoke to soothe gang-related animosity.

Not sure how that worked out. But if all it took to instigate violence were excessive booze, egos run amok, and an open forum, every wedding reception and trivia-night contest in America would end in a Farkable brawl. What's interesting about these karaoke attacks is that they sometimes come down to little more than song choice: The attacker either hates the song to the point of physical rage or loves the song with such fervor that he or she will lash out in its defense. So the reasons why karaoke performances sometimes work up to a violent crescendo have less to do with how we interact with one another and more with how we interact with music.

Think back to the records you loved during high school, that four-year labor camp of self-actualization: Some may still resonate today, but a lot of them sound dated and naïve because you deployed them mostly to help establish some desired persona, whether it be rebel, rake, or faux-poet. I listened to a lot of noisy, caustic music in my senior year, even though I'd attended an Indigo Girls concert only two years prior. At the time, I regarded a slight of my favorite bands—the ones whose logo I'd pinned to my jacket or written on my notebook—as a slight of me.

Historically, this music-as-proxy phase wanes after adolescence. But our musical preferences now define our personalities in almost every aspect of our day-to-day, presumably grown-up lives. Each ringtone, each embedded MP3 player, each customized ZIP-file mix is an unsubtle broadcast to those around us, letting them know who we really are. (Few artists have fostered this quite like Beyoncé, whose career was built on to-the-point self-declarations—"Diva," "Irreplaceable," "Beautiful Liar"—that happen to sound fantastic even when crackling from a cell-phone.) Band-logo patches and concert T's have been replaced by Facebook widgets and custom iPod sleeves.

And, it appears, replaced by our karaoke selections. Granted, not every karaoke performance is a three-minute glimpse of the id. But often, songs are chosen for what they convey about the singer, either through lyrics (Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'N' Roll"), through attitude (anything by Kid Rock or Pink), or through some unspoken yet widely understood subtext: One of the reasons Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" is an extremely popular karaoke song is not that the singer necessarily likes big butts—though this could be true—but because the singer wants to be known as wacky and carefree. I've seen people bond, flirt, and even reconcile with one another through song choices. So if karaoke songs really are projections of our personalities, it's fitting that these personalities sometimes clash, too.

But why karaoke bars? Aren't there slightly more dignified locations in which to cold-cock a stranger? While it would be foolish to downplay the effects of alcohol, it also certainly doesn't help that so many aspiring singers tend to practice on the Internet, where even the most vicious criticism is tempered by anonymity or distance or both. As a result, karaoke performers are often unaccustomed to the sort of live-action cultural criticism that can arise from the front row at 2:15 a.m. on a Saturday, which is why so many of these karaoke-bar attacks (at least, the ones in America) are sudden and ill-conceived, minor tiffs that quickly get out of control. No one seems to quite know what they're doing. They're amateurs, in every sense of the word.

Sadly, I fear that these incidents are only going to increase in the coming years: Thanks in part to the popularity of American Idol, more bars are hosting karaoke nights now, and the jockeying for slots has grown increasingly competitive. The raw nerves and idiosyncratic personalities that help make karaoke bars so appealing are also what make them so volatile. This may be bad for bar owners, but if fear of karaoke rage helps keep the song queue to a minimum, it's great news for needy exhibitionists such as myself.

Dear Patty and Sandy,

I'm your average twentysomething with a boyfriend and friends and a desire to give my time to charitable causes I believe in. I'd very much like to volunteer with a friend, but we're all busy in our different ways. How can I convince a friend that getting together once a week to volunteer at a soup kitchen will bring us closer and benefit our community at the same time?

—Claire

Patty:

Claire, I bet that at least one of your local food pantries has evening hours—and serving there once a month with your friend would not only fill an obvious need but allow you to work side by side with other volunteers while learning a lot about your community from the clients that you serve. If that doesn't appeal to your friend, find out what organizations or issues she is already passionate about—what gets her going when she reads the news; what causes does she give to at the office or around the holidays? Compare that list to your own and find a way to focus whatever volunteer or community-action work you pursue as a duo around one of those shared issues. That will make your volunteerism a natural extension of your life, learning, and friendship.

Sandy:

I think it's a great idea to volunteer with friends, especially if that means you'll be prone to do it more often. I try to volunteer a morning a month with a rotating group of friends and colleagues and find it's a great time to catch up on what's going on in their lives and benefit our community at the same time. That said, my group is made up of women who independently decided to volunteer and just happen to be able to do it together. Cajoling, and even guilting, your friend may work, but she may end up embarrassing you when she routinely misses her shift or ends up dropping the gig a month later.

Once a week may be a hefty commitment for lots of twentysomethings (and everyone else!), so why not start by asking your friend to come with you to a one-time volunteer day and see whether you can get her jazzed about it? Sites like Volunteer Match, Idealist, and even Craigslist have good ways to search for opportunities in your area. Or if you feel like you could benefit from some human contact as you choose your cause, there are volunteer centers in almost every community. As my mom said, finding something that you both find interesting and fulfilling could certainly help energize her. Do you both love kids? The beach? Africa? Use this shared interest to find something that works for both of you.

Another idea is to step back from the idea of direct service and volunteer by working on a campaign for a candidate or piece of legislation you care about—or by bringing together a group of friends to talk about different issues. I have a friend whose book club focuses on reading timely, socially conscious books. Actively engaging yourself and those around you in discussions about the world can be just as important as direct service … though it may not satisfy your desire to interact with those in need.

Do you have a real-life do-gooding dilemma? Please send it to ask.my.goodness@gmail.com and Patty and Sandy will try to answer it.

In our ongoing effort to do better ourselves, we're donating 25 percent of the proceeds from this column to ONE.org—an organization committed to raising public awareness about the issues of global poverty, hunger, and disease and the efforts to fight such problems in the world's poorest countries.

What superlatives shall we settle on in memorializing John Updike, dead today of lung cancer at age 76? It is possibly true that he was the best Talk of the Town writer The New Yorker will ever have, though saying that feels like a heresy against James Thurber. Was he the dominant novelist-critic of his generation? That's even truer, though Cynthia Ozick turns out dense and mind-expanding essays, whereas Updike was foremost a reviewer with exceptional antennae. To consider the 1,700-odd pages of his Harry Angstrom saga—the bounding tetralogy of Rabbit books and their limping postscript—is to find yourself considering a work with an excellent claim as the Great American Novel, but you'd be forgiven for preferring to spend time with four or five Very Good ones.

Updike's most enduring legacy exists at the level of the sentence. If you count swinging Saul Bellow as a Canadian, Montreal-born, and also class Vladimir Nabokov as a transnational, all-transcending anomaly, then Updike is, line for line, without peer, the finest American prose stylist of the postwar era: meticulous, crystalline, and luminously hyperrealist, his opulent language hanging on austere forms. Even his bad writing—and the consequence of his three-pages-per-day prolificity is that there's no shortage of it—sparks with phrases that send the heart skittering.

The precision is painterly in the way of photorealism, except when it's cinematic. (Updike once said that he imagined Rabbit, Run as a movie, with the present-tense narration intended to catch the fluidity of filmic motion and the opening basketball-court scene "visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits.") The grace of the style is such that the felt ecstasy of composition renders even descriptions of physical desolation and emotional grief intoxicating. Martin Amis, Updike's only rival as a post-Nabokov virtuoso, wrote that "having read him once, you admit to yourself, almost with a sigh, that you will have to read everything he writes." Nicholson Baker, another scintillating miniaturist, embarked on the memoir/homage U and I despite not having read even half of Updike's books. Do writers as inimitable as Updike leave heirs? Or just addicts?

It also must be said that, on the subject of sex, Updike could be the worst writer Knopf has ever known. David Foster Wallace, in a review of Toward the End of Time that sized up Updike as a "phallocrat," counted 10 and half pages devoted to the protagonist's thoughts about his penis, and that cannot be a record. Anyone with the stamina to get through Brazil, a beachy retelling of the Tristan and Isolde myth, will discover at least as much space fruitlessly expended on the hero's "yam." Last month, Updike justly earned a lifetime-achievment prize in the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. He clinched it with a passage in the new Widows of Eastwick that includes—avert your eyes, children—the following sentence: "Her face gleamed with his jism in the spotty light of the motel room, there on the far end of East Beach, within sound of the sea."

This is a very rare kind of dreck, the sort that can be secreted only by a brilliant professor of desire, and it cannot be separated from the masterly understanding of lust and physical love Updike displays everywhere from Couples to "A&P" to a review of Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. The same refinement of sensibility that kept Updike marvelously attuned to the motions of a mind in heat could have a way of aestheticizing sexual experience to awkward effect. One of this magician's very best tricks was to address this problem in the stories gathered in The Complete Henry Bech. There, in a collection starring a priapic novelist who was Updike's counter-ego, the author's exquisite mind reconciles itself with the farce of the flesh. The voice is not quite like anything else in Updike's expansive oeuvre, and the reader feels himself safe in the hands of the funniest writer never to make a career of comedy.

The New Yorker, Feb. 2

"Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it," concludes a profile of JFK's daughter, who tried unsuccessfully to be named to Hillary Clinton's vacated Senate seat. Plenty are to blame, including Kennedy's allegedly clueless PR firm and imperceptive reporters. But perhaps this moment was meant to be flubbed: "Kennedy's friends are always saying how normal she is, and it appears that they are right," the author says. "Normal people do not run for the Senate." ... A profile of Mohammad Tabibian, a Duke-educated economist who is one of Iran's "most important reformers," highlights his belief "that a free market can co-exist with social ideals." Founded on a "Marxist-Leninist reading of Shiite theology," the Islamic republic has long preferred populism to free enterprise. But as decades of destructive economic policies have left "the educated middle class ineffective, unmoored, and nearly irrelevant," a free-market consensus has slowly emerged.

New York, Feb. 2

The dishy cover story dissects Caroline Kennedy's brief and failed pseudo-campaign. New York Gov. David Paterson turned "what could have been a moment of triumph" for himself into a "slapstick fiasco"—seven long weeks of erratic, confounding behavior and media showboating, and an ending no one fully understands. As for Kennedy, the previous political noncombatant "ended up as sullied as any lifelong politician," a victim of her "almost Victorian idea of rectitude" and a failure to "come to terms with the fact that the reason she was in line for the job was that she was, well, a Kennedy." ... A column maintains that Barack Obama is leaning toward the center. Several Cabinet appointments seemed "almost designed to alienate progressives," and some pro-labor policy planks didn't survive the journey from change.gov to whitehouse.gov. Unifying a divided nation "will require [Obama] not just to appear to reach out rightward but to actually … you know, do it."

Newsweek, Feb. 2

An essay casts Obama's inaugural address as a call to service in which the "definition of being an American" was "based on what you do, not who you are." The author argues that Obama's spiel about being a "civic republican"—always "a tough sell in fiercely individualistic America"—was especially out of style from the late 1960s to today. For that reason, the speech helped Obama's broader goal of moving the country beyond "the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation." ... Fareed Zakaria says that Obama's top priority should be to jolt bank lending. Real-estate-backed assets need to be removed from balance sheets, even if yet more taxpayer dollars must flow to the financial industry. "The American public believes that we have already spent far too much money on bailing out the banks," Zakaria writes. "But the economic fact is that we have not spent enough."

Weekly Standard, Feb. 2

An article examines the 2009 Virginia gubernatorial contest, "the first big political race of the Obama era." A sullied Republican brand and an influx of minorities and urban professionals into the state's northern region have pushed this once reliable GOP commonwealth into the blue column. But what if state attorney general and putative GOP candidate Robert McDonnell—a Catholic, socially conservative veteran who is "the quintessential Northern Virginia businessman"—prevails in November? Then "his formula—conservative principles, minority outreach, and a problem-solving message—will become the model for Republicans trekking back from the political wilderness." ... Editor William Kristol says the GOP's direction "requires serious rethinking in fundamental areas." To that end, he calls for "tons of political entrepreneurship" and "heterodox ideas." "There should be vigorous debate," he argues. "Disharmonious disarray is in the short term much less of a danger than a false and stultifying unity."

The Nation, Feb. 9

A piece calls for a re-examination of "the dominant role of the market in our society." Commerce, the author argues, must be put "in its proper place, where it serves our nature and needs rather than manipulating and fabricating whims and wants," and the federal government under Obama must enact policies to help put it there. The author recommends creating a Cabinet-level arts position, reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent, and speeding the democratization of information technology. ... An article distinguishes between the Gaza War's "battlefield winner"—clearly Israel—and the victor in the "legitimacy wars," which, due partly to alleged Israeli war crimes, will likely be Hamas. Comparing the situation with the struggle over apartheid, the author predicts that world opinion will ultimately confirm the Palestinian group's success, even if "Hamas is not the African National Congress, and Israel is not South Africa."

Emily Dickinson's poems have a distinctive interplay of mystery and clarity. Her way of making phrases and sentences, and of stretching them across lines of verse, attains a clarity less like that of a contract or scorecard than the clear meaning of a facial expression, or a hand gesture, or a carriage of the whole body—whether as in the little movements of ordinary life or as in a dance.

"I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl" presents those ordinary, domestic, and personal actions of the body as a dutiful surface overlaying a mystery: a time, "some way back," when life delivered an unspecified blow so severe that existence stopped.

That great loss has left a great, invisible hollow. Despite the absolute emptiness—or because of it, she says—daily actions are performed "precisely" and with "scrupulous exactness" by one who keeps on living after life actually has closed. (Dickinson's poem No. 1732 begins "My life closed twice before its close.") There's a religious overtone to speaking of life as having a "Reward" and an "Errand"—errand, a wonderfully humble little word opening onto a great expanse! But as if to limit that overtone (or to make clear that this feeling is not exactly Christian resignation), the poem also includes a much different vocabulary: "Science" and "Surgery" and "Telescopic Eyes." Audaciously, she declares that the protective veil of the ordinary provides a shield for the sake of Science and Surgery—"not for ours."

The movement of the poem through its taut, suspended phrases merits the adjective "Telescopic": Here is a work of art that artfully, rapidly telescopes between kinds of scale—"the very least" and the "infinite," a shawl on the shoulders and a bomb at the bosom. The central, generative wound remains mysterious, a silence that gives conviction to Dickinson's series of extreme—yet, in their way, understated—assertions that this wound is absolute.

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—

Life's little duties do—precisely—

As the very least

Were infinite—to me—

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—

And throw the old—away—

I push a petal from my Gown

That anchored there—I weigh

The time 'twill be till six o'clock

I have so much to do—

And yet—Existence—some way back—

Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—

We cannot put Ourself away

As a completed Man

Or Woman—When the Errand's done

We came to Flesh—upon—

There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—

Of Action—sicker far—

To simulate—is stinging work—

To cover what we are

From Science—and from Surgery—

Too Telescopic Eyes

To bear on us unshaded—

For their—sake—not for Ours—

'Twould start them—

We—could tremble—

But since we got a Bomb—

And held it in our Bosom—

Nay—Hold it—it is calm—

Therefore—we do life's labor—

Though life's Reward—be done—

With scrupulous exactness—

To hold our Senses—on—

…………................……—Emily Dickinson

Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Robert Pinsky read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

When I worked at the library at Colorado College, I quickly discovered the job had few perks. The free book loans on demand were little better than subprime mortgages when you realized anyone could get them. The only "exclusive" benefit was the chance to keep manuscripts the library threw out. Usually, I had a limited selection of titles, like Proceedings From the Third Workshop on Genetics of Bark Beetles and Associated Micro-Organisms. But occasionally I stumbled across a gem. Rummaging through a bin of discarded books one day, I saw an unusual spine: "CHENEY The Evolution of Presidential War Powers 1988."

In 1988, while Dick Cheney was Wyoming's sole representative in the House of Representatives, his daughter's senior thesis was quietly published in Colorado Springs. The 125-page treatise argued that, constitutionally and historically, presidents have virtually unchecked powers in war. Thirteen years before her father became vice president, she had symbolically authored the first legal memorandum of the Bush administration, laying out the same arguments that would eventually justify Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, wiretapping of American citizens, and, broadly, the unitary theory of the executive that shaped the Bush presidency.

The Eisenhower Executive Office Building may be bereft of Dick Cheney, but his steadfast efforts to consolidate power around the president have left the scales of power tipped toward the executive. Then there is the force of Cheney's grim, blunt personality, felt even as he attended the inauguration in a wheelchair: His name will stand for the ideas he promoted well into the future, and his daughter's thesis offers an eerily prescient image of the presidency as Cheney believed it should be.

Though less known to the public than her sister, Mary, arguably the most prominent gay Republican, Elizabeth is the elder daughter of Dick and Lynne Cheney. After graduating from Colorado College, she took a job in the State Department before going to law school, and was eventually appointed as one of the chief diplomats for the Middle East in 2002.

Elizabeth Cheney begins her survey at the Constitutional Convention. Contrary to today's middle-school mythology, she tells us, fear of enabling a tyrannical monarch was not foremost in the Founding Fathers' minds. Rather, they did not want to repeat the failure of the Continental Congress' attempts to manage the war for independence. Our constitutional architects, she argues, believed they could not "foresee every possible future use of American armed forces" and, as a result, wanted a commander in chief endowed with great latitude in wartime.

For Cheney, Thomas Jefferson established the path presidents would and should take when dealing with Congress. In engaging American warships against Barbary pirates, Jefferson "chose to inform Congress of his actions at his own convenience." When he did, he fabricated an attack on an American ship to secure their support.

Cheney sides with the president whenever he clashes with Congress over war powers. Following an escalation in the Vietnam War ordered by Lyndon Johnson, she notes, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, based on questionable information, to provide cover for the president. Nevertheless, both he and Richard Nixon after him believed that the resolution provided no "legal basis for their action because they presumed all the authorization they needed was in the Commander and Chief [sic] clause."

Time and again, Cheney contends that in times of war, presidents since Washington have justifiably redefined their authority to preserve the country, and she is scornful of any who challenge that authority. As Congress challenged presidential authority toward the end of Vietnam, she casts them as scapegoating the executive. "As public support dwindled so did congressional willingness to accept responsibility," she writes, "Congress set about to blame the only two men who couldn't escape responsibility." For someone who has vested so much faith in executive wisdom, she is surprisingly unwilling to hold it accountable.

From beginning to end, it's clear that Cheney looks upon the model of the powerful executive approvingly. Her most forceful conclusion is that the Founders "certainly did not intend, nor does history substantiate, the idea that Congress should legislate specific limits on the President's power." To ensure American security, it needs to recognize that the "nature of military and foreign policy demand the 'unity of a singular Executive.' "

One cannot help but see echoes of this conclusion in the administration in which her father was so influential. The Bush White House repeatedly embraced the philosophy of acting first and asking for approval later, especially on issues that involved the power of the purse. They embraced a position that Cheney found repeatedly in history: "The president's duty to protect national security sometimes come before his responsibility to keep Congress informed."

This crusade against oversight was not new to Dick Cheney. In November of 1987, just six months before Elizabeth submitted her thesis, a report he commissioned following the Iran-Contra affair argued that "[c]ongressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism."

For Cheney, apparently, the Constitution and rule of law are no more of a check on this unitary power than Congress. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and imposition of military tribunals present no legal dilemma to her. "To assert that the Constitution is a shield of protection 'for all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances,' " she writes, "is to deny the nation the right of self-preservation. There have been and will be times in the experience of the country when constitutional provisions will of necessity be suspended to guarantee the survival of our democracy." The Supreme Court's chief justice was wrong in declaring his actions illegal in Ex Parte Merryman because his power "was actually an assertion of the power of the people."* How he divined that will of the people, Cheney does not explain.

On the first page of her paper, above a neat signature in blue ink, she attests, "On my honor I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this thesis." Her father may not have written her thesis, but before and after its publication, he held unwaveringly to its ideas. As a report on an exit interview the outgoing vice president gave with CBS notes:

While Cheney could not say whether any action by a president in wartime should be considered "legal," he pointed to historic precedents for presidents taking extra-legal measures in order, he said, to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

That statement could well have been printed on the cover of his daughter's thesis.

Correction, Jan. 30, 2009: This article originally referred to Ex Parte Merryman as a Supreme Court case. It was a circuit court order written by Roger Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who was sitting on the circuit court at the time. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

When President Obama's economic recovery plan passed the House along partisan lines Wednesday, 244-188, some Democrats expressed surprise that not a single Republican voted for the bill. "Not one person felt his or her district needed to have any of this assistance?" one Connecticut Democrat told the New York Times. "That can't be."

Of course not. Republicans have acknowledged as much. In notes jotted down during a Tuesday meeting with Obama, one GOPer noted: "We expect the vast majority of House Republicans to oppose the package tomorrow, but we are optimistic that after the bill passes the House there may be a real opportunity for a bipartisan package." In other words, we will come around. But at this moment, unanimous opposition was the smartest stance House Republicans could have taken—both politically and ideologically.

Voting against the bill was good politics because it shows that the GOP can't be persuaded by charm alone, presidential or otherwise. Sure, Republicans risk coming off as stubborn in the face of Obama's ostentatious magnanimity. But at this stage, there's nothing wrong with playing hard to get. There will be time for bipartisan necking later.

Another advantage is that the vote makes Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor look good. The fact that zero out of 178 Republicans broke ranks shows a united, disciplined front. On a symbolic vote like this—one of the first of the 111^th Congress—sending a signal is more important than reaching an immediate compromise.

Lastly, voting against the stimulus is win/win for Republicans. If the package succeeds at reviving the economy, it won't be in the short term. (And even in the long term, success will probably be less tangible than its cost.) If it fails, they can say, I told you so. Meanwhile, many of them are looking for political cover after voting for the October bailout, which hasn't exactly been a roaring success.

Still, the ideological argument for opposing the stimulus may be even better. Put yourself in the shoes of a vulnerable House Republican up for re-election in 2010. Your constituents may be skittish about the idea of spending $850 billion, but they want to see some sort of action—especially if they live in Iowa or Michigan, which are hemorrhaging jobs by the day. (Before the inauguration, 53 percent of Americans supported Democratic efforts to craft a stimulus package, and an even larger majority supported infrastructure spending.) At the same time, you want to be able to say that you have been a loyal member of the opposition, with an instinctive skepticism of Big Government. (Leaving aside, for the moment, what you said and did for the eight years leading up to now.)

The best path forward, then, is to express skepticism, hold Obama's feet to the fire, fight for changes like more tax cuts and less spending on birth control (done and done), and then finally sign on. See, for example, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley's insistence on including a provision that keeps the alternative minimum tax from falling on middle-class families. Consider that many Republican districts will benefit from massive government spending—highways, wind energy, and expanded Internet access all help rural areas—and it may be hard to say no. (It's no coincidence that Dems are targeting Grassley, who is up for re-election in 2010.) As long as Republicans can show they put up a fight, that's cover enough.

For more evidence that some Republicans will come around, look at the alternative bills offered Wednesday. One of them proposed $445 billion in tax cuts, with less spending than the Democratic bill. But the Democratic bill already includes at least $273 billion in tax cuts for individuals and businesses. By the time negotiations are over, it's easy to imagine that number creeping up to the $445 billion Republicans requested. Yes, the spending projects may still turn off many Republicans. But they won't be able to say there weren't sufficient tax cuts.

Both sides like to claim the mantle of bipartisanship while insisting that the other side is obstructing. Boehner claimed Wednesday that "[t]he onus is on Speaker Pelosi. She needs to meet with us. She needs to open her doors. We need to begin to work truly in a bipartisan fashion." That could be pure posturing. But if incentives mean anything—and to Republicans, they do—the pledge of eventual bipartisanship may be legitimate.

Barack Obama had a drinks party at the White House on Wednesday night. He invited congressional leaders of both parties for cocktails at 7:30. In his relentless push for his stimulus plan, he's apparently not going to let them out of his sight. He was with the same people on Tuesday, just a few days after he'd met with them at the White House. The cocktail invitation could be a polite gesture—they hosted him Tuesday on the Hill, and he wants to return the favor; or it could be a stratagem—after being with them so much, Obama realizes that everyone could use a good drink. Or it could be a philosophical statement: Sobering times do not necessarily require everyone to be sober.

This is a notable departure from Obama's predecessor, whose relationship with Congress was notoriously chilly and whose relationship with the bottle ended at age 40. But it connects him to a rich presidential tradition that goes back to the Founders, who drank heavily after signing the Constitution.

It's good news. First, drinking in moderation leads to an equitable distribution of the humors, and we want our president to be healthy. Second, among adversaries, drinking promotes relaxation and laughter. I doubt it will lead to an agreement on the size of small-business tax cuts in the recovery package, but a few drinks might shave off a few layers of posturing. All of the guessing at motives will decrease. Without so much chest-thumping, the two parties may even get to genuine points of disagreement faster. As a community organizer, Obama knows the power of getting everyone to recognize themselves in one another. What better way to do that than over a few drinks? (Those who disagree should stop wondering why they are lonely at parties or aren't invited at all.)

Bush famously did not drink, and though drinks were served in his White House and the president often wistfully referred to his drinking past, the easy and relaxed atmosphere of the cocktail party was not a theme of his tenure. I remember once hearing John Ashcroft, Bush's first attorney general and a devout Christian and teetotaler, discussing with an aide whether to serve any "intoxicants" at a fundraiser. (It was always funny to hear the press criticized for cozying up to Bush officials at cocktail parties. There weren't any.)

Senate historian Don Ritchie reminds me of some other presidential habits. Harry Truman favored bourbon and branch water. (As vice president, Truman had just arrived to have a bourbon with House Speaker Sam Rayburn when he got the call that FDR had died.) When he was president, LBJ came to the Capitol on several occasions for an after-work drink with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen.

I am tired of comparisons between the Obama administration and the Kennedy and Roosevelt administrations, but when it comes to drinking, let's encourage them. FDR won the presidency on a platform of ending Prohibition. Every evening, including during the war, Roosevelt mixed drinks in the Oval Office from behind his desk, before him a tray equipped with whatever he needed for the martinis or old fashioneds he was mixing. "He mixed the ingredients," recalled author Robert Sherwood, "with the deliberation of an alchemist but with what appeared to be a certain lack of precision since he carried on a steady conversation while doing it."

Though Kennedy was not a big drinker, the cocktail culture that grew around his administration was exciting. "Every party had at least a few senators or cabinet officials and a few big-time press people. It was all off the record and a lot of business got done," Fred Harris, a former Democratic senator from Oklahoma, recounted to me. "The war on poverty and federal aid to education and civil rights, we hadn't had yet the urban riots and the war in Vietnam was no bigger than a man's hand. There were new and exciting programs and new and exciting people."

After Kennedy, LBJ carried on the presidential carrying on, though in his own inimitable style. Joseph Califano tells the story of drinking while riding around Lyndon Johnson's ranch. "As we drove around we were followed by a car and a station wagon with Secret Service agents. The president drank Cutty Sark scotch and soda out of a large white plastic foam cup. Periodically, Johnson would slow down and hold his left arm outside the car, shaking the cup and ice. A Secret Service agent would run up to the car, take the cup and go back to the station wagon. There another agent would refill it with ice, scotch, and soda as the first agent trotted behind the wagon. Then the first agent would run the refilled cup up to LBJ's outstretched and waiting hand, as the president's car moved slowly along."

The great cautionary tale of presidential drinking, of course, is Nixon. He was both a drunk and a reminder to be suspicious of presidents when they have us over for drinks. After the Watergate story broke, Nixon and his aides decided they needed to humanize the president in the press, so they invited some key reporters over to have cocktails. The gambit was a disaster because Nixon was so socially awkward. Before he was president, when Nixon hosted parties at his home, he used cocktail mixing to replace conversation. He would pop up before his invited guests, offer them a drink, and then disappear to the bar again. Periodically, he'd pop in again to encourage everyone to have another, before returning to the bar.

When he drank alone, Nixon could throw his back into the task. This is why, in many accounts of late-night conversations by former aides, the president comes off as barely coherent. Once the British prime minister was on the phone, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger had to intercept the call. "Can we tell him no?" Kissinger asked the White House operator. "When I talked to the President he was loaded."

The other famous presidential drunk was Ulysses S. Grant. When he was a general, however, his drunkenness worked in his favor. When informed that Grant drank whiskey while leading his troops, Lincoln reportedly replied, "Find out the name of the brand so I can give it to my other generals."

Historically, there have been more heavy drinkers in Congress, which seems natural not only because there are more of them but also because they cared enough about bourbon to declare it the national spirit. Herman Talmadge, an alcoholic who sought recovery from alcoholism while in the Senate, once said, "Alcoholism is as much of an occupational disease among politicians as black lung is among coal miners—you can get it just by breathing the air."

Many members of Congress drank heavily for years without disclosure, but there are also the famous cases, like Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House ways and means committee, who wound up bombed and in the Tidal Basin with his stripper girlfriend. Sen. John Tower's drinking habit kept him from being confirmed as secretary of defense. (That led to the appointment of Dick Cheney—a man more likely to throw a drink in your face.)

The old-style drinkers whose whiskey bottles rattled in their desk drawers are largely gone in Washington. Everyone cares too much about how they look—now the addiction in Washington, which Obama seems to suffer from, is working out. No politician wants to be photographed with a drink in his or her hand, and there aren't many places to go in politics anymore where you aren't being photographed. Though as a candidate Obama joked now and then about an instance in which he'd had too much wine, his cool demeanor (his drinks don't need ice) suggests he's not likely to go overboard. He won't need Mail Goggles on his fancy new BlackBerry.

Too much familiarity between politicians can be as dangerous as too much drink, of course. But let's not mistake my approving tone, or Obama's White House cocktails, for more than it is. Partisanship and substantive ideological differences will continue long after the jiggers and shakers are put away. No one is going to get co-opted after a few drinks. We're as likely to see that as we are likely to see the new president and Mitch McConnell staggering together down Pennsylvania Avenue.

Return to article

Correction, Jan. 29, 2009: The piece originally and incorrectly stated that FDR's second drink was a bourbon orange blossom. Eric Felten, the author of How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well, offers the correction on FDR's favorite drink:

His two drinks of choice were, yes, Martinis (gin, natch), but not "Bourbon Orange Blossoms," a drink that doesn't really exist. You may have been relying on William Seale's history "The President's House," [I was] but he makes a mistake in describing the bourbon and orange drink that FDR would make. FDR's favorite drink (even above the Martini) was the Old Fashioned, which is made with bourbon or rye, sugar, bitters, and (optionally) muddled orange slices and a cherry. FDR included orange slices, and instead of muddling, he would squeeze the orange slice into each glass. Thus Seale's confusion—he must have looked up what a drink with orange juice was, and found the Orange Blossom (a Prohibition drink of gin and orange juice) and then assumed that what FDR was making was an Orange Blossom with bourbon, and thus called it a Bourbon Orange Blossom.

When Air America Radio launched in 2004, the American left was ailing: Republicans controlled all three branches of government, protests against the Iraq war were going unheeded, and George W. Bush was on his way to re-election. What the left needed, the logic went, was its own Rush Limbaugh—someone to spend all day, every day, kicking the GOP down the stairs. Thus was born Air America. Two years later, it filed for bankruptcy.

In retrospect, the lesson is simple: You can't just copy the other team—you have to come up with your own strategy.

The Republican Party now faces a similar quandary. Its outgoing president is among the most unpopular ever. The race for party chairman is a sideshow. And, worst of all, the Democrats' online infrastructure—from blogging to e-mail lists to fundraising—makes its Republican counterpart look like a cup-and-string apparatus. Part of the blame falls on John McCain and the RNC, who failed to build an online empire when they had the chance. But there's also a hole at the grass-roots level. Where the left has Daily Kos, MyDD, ActBlue, MoveOn, the Huffington Post, and an army of local and state blogs, the right has Pajamas Media, RedState, the Weekly Standard, and the National Review Online. Whereas the Dems have the largest e-list of donors and volunteers ever assembled, the Republicans have, well, a smaller one.

A few new sites have stepped into the void. Rebuild the Party has outlined a 10-point plan that emphasizes online organizing and technology and persuaded all but one RNC candidate to sign on. The Next Right launched in May 2008 as an open-door forum for "wired activists" to share ideas, recruit candidates, and plot strategy—not unlike Daily Kos, although the Next Right rejects that comparison. (This week, the Next Right announced "Project Battleground," a loose network of state blogs.) Conservative writer and former Bush speechwriter David Frum helms the New Majority, a group blog dedicated to ginning up fresh ideas. As far as fundraising, Slatecard, which raised $650,000 for Republicans during the 2008 election cycle, will relaunch next summer. Even Tucker Carlson has a new site in the works, although it's more news-based than "Whither conservatism?"

Some Republicans figure that now that the power dynamic has flipped, so will the innovation. "The left did so well online because they were storming the castle, and the right had trouble because they were governing the castle," says Web strategist and Next Right co-founder Jon Henke. "Governing the castle is difficult and not really as much fun. It's not conducive to the online environment." The genius of the netroots was to take the three Ms—"messaging, mobilization, and money"—outside the traditional party channels, thereby accruing power. There's no reason the Republicans can't do that too, Henke argues.

But the Air America question remains: Can the right simply imitate the left's success? Or does it need to follow Karl Rove's advice—to concede Web 2.0 to the Dems and focus on Web 3.0—and reinvent the game once again?

"I think one big mistake in politics is to look at something that succeeded and say, Let's do it again," says David Frum. To repeat the success of the netroots, per Frum, would be to create a massive network of blogs whose collective shrieks generate enough volume—and cash—to get noticed.

But that formula is outdated, Frum says. "For the last 16 years, we've had presidents who have been pretty centrist in their politics but highly divisive and provocative in their political tactics." In that climate, whoever yells the loudest wins. But Obama is "someone we haven't seen since Reagan," says Frum. "Someone with a strong ideological message but delivered in a less inflammatory way." Obama's critics need to match his tone. "It would be a big mistake to raise the decibel level," Frum says. "I think in politics as in television, whoever loses his temper first loses."

If you don't believe him, look at the fuss over Obama's birth certificate. The more Obama's detractors shouted, the sillier they looked. Part of the problem, says Frum, is the "deep asymmetry of American political culture. … Say someone on the left calls for the assassination of George W. Bush—he gets a book contract from Farrar, Straus and Giroux." (For the record, it was Knopf.) "Now suppose someone calls for the assassination of Barack Obama. It's Dallas, 1963, and we're all guilty." As a result, conservative sites are terrified of what their commenters might say. (Neither NRO nor the Weekly Standard has comment sections.) "We are held more responsible for our lunatics than the left is held for their lunatics."

The solution, Frum says, is to use a scalpel, not a bullhorn: "What is required is not just to point and shriek outrage, but close study, close reporting, close monitoring of what the Obama administration is up to." That could be sifting a budget for pork, criticizing the raising of CAFE standards, or picking apart the rationale behind closing Guantanamo.

Another reason the right can't simply imitate the left is there's no "unifying grievance" like the Iraq war—at least not yet. For one thing, Obama hasn't done anything particularly controversial. "There's no fuel in the stove yet," says Joe Trippi, who was Howard Dean's media guru in 2004. Recall it took years for the left to rack up enough beef—Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 recount, the Iraq war—to forge a coalition. "The right can build all the tools it wants, but without a narrative and a rallying point for action, it will be for naught," wrote Patrick Ruffini in his mission statement for the Next Right. The stimulus package offers the right a compelling target. But it has yet to be voted on.

Other elements have to align, too: The "rightroots" will need a Howard Dean—someone to harness their energy in the political realm. The name that came up most in conversation was Sarah Palin. McCain's online donations exploded when he introduced her in August, and she still boasts a passionate online following. The right also has to match the left's extreme locality—i.e., get people jazzed about small races as much as big ones. To that end, the revamped Slatecard will include a recommendations feature not unlike Netflix's or Amazon's. If you liked this Senate candidate, you'll love this candidate for Spokane city comptroller! And last, they need their own news. Talking Points Memo has reinvented muckraking from the left. The right needs it own investigative shop. If Tucker Carlson's site doesn't fill the void, someone else should.

The "rightroots" could still be a long way off. For one thing, Obama simply isn't Bush. "I think there's a lot of passion in the country to throw partisanship out the window," says Trippi. That fact "could be a decelerator." Plus, by pledging to create the "most transparent administration ever," Obama makes the muckrakers' jobs easier—and harder. In his first week, Obama fired off a memo to agency heads urging openness and a directive to loosen FOIA standards. Sure, people will find information that's embarrassing to the administration. But if the administration wasn't trying to hide it, the exposés won't have the same outrage factor.

There's also a lurking downside to all this connectedness, which is that the Internet could, in the words of one Republican official, "do more harm than good." "There seems to be a major fracture developing between ultra-conservatives" and moderate libertarians in the party, he explained. If one group—say, the Christian right—decided to mobilize online and hold the party hostage, they could very well splinter the GOP.

In other words, the Web isn't just a force for unity; it's a force for division, too. This much was evident on the Democratic side during the campaign, when Obama had to fight back an online rebellion over his stance on retroactive immunity for telecom companies. But in the end, Democrats were so desperate for victory that they unified. It may take years for that sense of desperation to seep into the GOP.

Whatever happens, it has to occur organically, says Henke. That's not easy for Republicans, who are used to top-down organization. It requires ceding control. It also requires listening. But if the party is going to tell a story about the Obama administration, it has to come from the bottom up. "Organic" … "ceding control" … "bottom up." This should be interesting.

Some possible new slogans for the Obama administration:

"Yes, we might."

"The buck stops in my general proximity."

"Failure is not an option, except when it can be sold as a mere strategic retreat."

I recognize that such slogans might be a hard sell, since optimism, success, believing in oneself, defying the cynics, having gobs of that "hope" stuff, and general indefatigability are the hallmarks of the Obama Age. But someone's got to take a stand on behalf of defatigability. Enough with the optimism! Who speaks for failure?

Anyone with a thimble of brains knows that despair is an essential element of a healthy emotional armature. There's nothing sadder than someone who gives in to hopelessness in situations where that should have been the starting point. It rankles me that, somewhere along the line, words like quitter and loser and hysteric started to sound like pejoratives. You call it defeatism; I call it managing expectations.

Yes, there was a lot of fanfare and pomp and hoohaw a week ago when the new president stood on the West Terrace of the Capitol, looking out at a crowd of, what, about 1.8 million people, not counting the 100,000 or so purple-ticket holders trapped in the Third Street Tunnel. And, yes, he's young, handsome, smart, hip, and has a gorgeous family and a reliable jumper from beyond the arc. No question, he is now the most powerful person on the planet. But he can't let this go to his head.

That's because failure is inevitable in any presidential administration. Failed presidencies are one of our last thriving industries. If the president can't inflict failure upon himself, there are legions of people who will do it for him. Failure is literally part of our constitutional infrastructure. Our government is designed to be nugatory. Our Constitution was written in such a way as to turn even the best idea into a watered-down compromise in a House-Senate conference committee that will subsequently be mired in bureaucratic red tape and eventually annulled by an obscure federal judge.

Even the Bill of Rights is a list of things government can't do. Compared with our Constitution, the Ten Commandments are a call to hedonism.

Obama did seem to acknowledge, in the first few minutes of his inaugural address, that our nation is in dire circumstances and that things will get worse and that people may want to start curling into the fetal position immediately. He had that nice phrase about "the winter of our hardship." And then there was this wonderful passage: "Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights."

Why not end the speech right there? What a great walk-off line. Keep it short, simple, shattering. Leave 'em weeping.

But no, the president continued onward into the fairyland of hope and possibility, declaring "an end to the petty grievances," which certainly made me wonder how I'll occupy myself in the years ahead. At this point in American history, it may just be best to say that, soon enough, we will all be living in the woods, stalking squirrels, and foraging for tubers. At least then no one will be able to accuse you of overpromising.

It has always been hard to define bipartisanship in Washington. Is bipartisan legislation simply a bill that wins a certain number of votes from the minority party? Is a bipartisan politician simply one who disagrees with his or her own party? And in Barack Obama's Washington, the term may be even harder to define. He delivered an inaugural address sharply critical of his predecessor, and then as soon as he was done, he turned around and hugged him.

Now that Obama is working on his first big piece of legislation, we'll get a more concrete view of the new shape of bipartisanship in Washington. Before he was sworn in, Obama told his congressional allies that he wanted broad Republican support for the stimulus package. Obama also told Republican leaders in early meetings that he knew he could ram through legislation on a simple party-line vote but that he didn't want to do that.

Now some Republicans, such as House Minority Leader John Boehner and Sen. John McCain, have said they intend to vote against Obama's plan. How will Obama respond? In the face of increased opposition, how much will Obama work for bipartisanship as an end in itself? Will he agree to GOP modifications to buy votes, or will he accept puny GOP support because he knows that, in the end, voters are more interested in action than whether he lived up to some standard of bipartisanship that he set for himself? (From the loophole he created in his ethics policy, we know that he is comfortable with exceptions to his own rules.)

For their part, Republicans have to figure out how willing they are to buck an extremely popular president who has the gifts to convince the public that his opponents are acting in their political self-interest. Republicans who seek to use Obama's own promises of bipartisanship against him also have to overcome the perception that Obama has been making a genuine effort to reach out (with the exception of the Rush Limbaugh distraction), which is exactly what voters want from him.

Obama will be at it again Tuesday as he heads to Capitol Hill to meet with Republican leaders. Last Friday he had them over to his house. It's just one of the many ways in which he has kept his promise to act differently. (His staff has been working just as hard.) But Republicans are asking for more. They want him to actually adopt some of their ideas. In this, they echo a Democratic criticism of George W. Bush, who Democrats said would smile and be nice to them but never take up their ideas. Bush's view of a bipartisan, said Democrats, was someone who believed in what Bush did.

To some Democrats, Obama has already capitulated to Republicans by agreeing to nearly $300 billion in tax cuts in the stimulus package. That doesn't really count as the product of give-and-take with Republicans, though, since Obama campaigned on tax cuts and his top economic advisers, like Christine Romer, are pushing the substantive case for the benefit of tax cuts. To show that Obama was adopting GOP ideas, press secretary Robert Gibbs singled out the net-operating-loss tax provision as a GOP-inspired item that Obama had been convinced to include.

That's not a great example, and not only because the phrase "net-operating-loss tax provision" will put people to sleep before they even get a chance to hear how wonderfully bipartisan it is. The item also has broad existing Democratic support. Democrats offered it up last year in the stimulus package along with other items in the current plan for small-business expensing and depreciation.

Whether Obama and his team are open to any new GOP ideas won't matter much if he gets a strong number of Republican votes. Will he get 15 Republicans in the Senate to match the 15 Democrats Bush won on his first tax-cut vote? Or will he get the 43 that Bush won for the No Child Left Behind legislation?

It's hard to know at this point, because so many of the interested parties are still finding their roles. Some Republicans are objecting strenuously because they want to show their constituents they're alive and defending party principles. Republican leaders are also trying to get as much as they can out of the new guy. (The press, for its part, loves conflict, and so we're on the lookout for anything that might look like a genuine clash.)

A lot of this rumbling could disappear when it comes to a final vote on a bill aimed at helping people who are really hurting. Obama aides assume at a minimum that Republicans would be committing suicide if they pushed their opposition too far. That's also why Senate Democrats think members of the GOP Senate leadership are acting more reasonable than their House counterparts. One senior Democratic leadership aide pointed me to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's speech on bipartisanship last Friday: "He said all of the right things."

The political risk for Obama is not whether a lack of bipartisanship will keep his bill from becoming law. He's going to get his stimulus package. What this battle will show is just how Obama does the hard things he doesn't absolutely have to do—how he maneuvers around the immovable problems of partisanship, posturing, and the omnipresent presidential temptation to clobber your opponents when you can. Obama will tell us something by how he treats the Republicans he defeats. Will he declare them mindless Rush Limbaugh drones or say that while he disagrees with them, he doesn't challenge their motives? That, after all, is Obama's view of President Bush. Perhaps after the stimulus bill passes, he can schedule a group hug.

Last Thursday, Jan. 22, the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News capitalized on a flub by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to "out" the identity of a background briefer.

As the Morning News' Todd J. Gillman wrote, the White House press corps assembled at noon Thursday to attend a "background briefing," the topic being President Barack Obama's executive orders that will close secret prisons and Guantanamo. (see the transcript.) Under the standard rules, no cameras were allowed and comments could be attributed only to senior administration officials.

Shortly after the backgrounder, press secretary Gibbs convened an on-the-record session with the White House press corps and television cameras, and taking questions about the executive orders, he referred to "Greg" three times. "Intriguing," wrote Gillman in italic. "Who is this mysterious 'Greg,' folks watching on TV might wonder."

Times reporter Jeff Zeleny was less coy about Greg's identity. Seeing as Gibbs had invoked the first name repeatedly in a way that "all but identified the mysterious briefer," Zeleny wrote that the man Gibbs was talking about was the provider of the earlier backgrounder, White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig.

Chafing at all the background subterfuge, Zeleny wrote: "Does an administration that has pledged to be the most open and transparent one ever really need to have routine briefings be on background, by an official who can't be named?"

The quick answer to Zeleny's question is the same as the long answer. No. Neither journalism nor readers are served by the background briefing conventions. Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank wrote smartly about the evils of White House background briefing in an April 6, 2004, piece (alas, not on the Web).

Attacking the Bush administration specifically, Milbank wrote:

The notion of speaking "on background" has been around for decades, allowing reporters to get senior administration officials to speak candidly, and sometimes critically, about their boss's policies. But somewhere along the line, administrations learned to turn background backward. The White House now organizes authorized background briefings almost weekly, in which officials are cloaked in anonymity. It appears from these sessions that the anonymity is not to protect officials who say something negative—but to shield them from embarrassment for sounding like cheerleaders.

Rampant backgrounder abuse at the Bush White House caused Washington bureau chiefs to petition press secretary Scott McClellan in 2005, begging him to end them. As Editor & Publisher's Joe Strupp reported, the chiefs griped about one energy backgrounder given by conference call just before a Bush energy speech. Reporters were denied the identity of the deputy press secretary doing the talking. The chiefs also groaned about the frequency with which officials would speak to print reporters in background briefings and then go on the record for broadcasters.

Officials at the CIA and State Department often defend backgrounders as a way to explain covert operations or complex events coherently for reporters without committing a diplomatic faux pas. But those are a separate case. When White House officials justify backgrounders as necessary because the device wicks the personality or baggage of the giver out of the briefing, leaving only the pure statement of government policy behind, they're not even fooling themselves. Nobody can play Jedi mind games on their own mind—the speaker always inhabits his own speech. And, besides, anybody who really wants to know the identity of the backgrounder can dig it out. In the case of Greg Craig, his name was in the mass e-mail announcing the briefing sent to the White House press corps. If the White House press corps knows, the press knows, if the press knows, the Hill and lobbyists know.

The only people left in the dark are citizens and readers. Why can't we trust them with the identities of background briefing? As long as it's a new administration, why not turn on a few lights?

******

I've never written an entire column about anonymice and not used the word. I feel great about myself. Send your expressions of self-esteem to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Greg in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

With Feb. 2 fast approaching, superstitious weather watchers are awaiting news as to whether Punxsutawney Phil—or their groundhog designate of choice—will see his shadow. In 2004, Timothy Noah investigated how one actually determines whether a groundhog notices his shadow, a trail that led him back to pre-Christian pagan rituals. His original article is reprinted below.

Granted, a skeptical inquiry into the reliability of Punxsutawney Phil as weather predictor would at first blush seem as pointless as investigating delivery of babies by stork or candy via the Easter Bunny. Unlike the latter two examples, though, the Groundhog Day myth lacks internal logic. You can, at least theoretically, observe a stork dropping babies from the sky or a bunny hopping around with a basket handle in its mouth. But how can you tell whether a groundhog has seen his shadow? It's as problematic, in its own way, as Princeton philosopher Peter Singer's argument in his famously controversial essay, "Heavy Petting," that bestiality is permissible provided the donkey consents.

After further inquiry, Chatterbox is able to report that it isn't strictly necessary that the groundhog see his shadow; merely that he cast one that others may see. The determining factor, then, is whether it's sunny or cloudy on Candlemas Day, an early Christian feast day commemorating the baptism of Jesus that involved a lot of candle-bearing and therefore, inevitably, the casting of many shadows. Like many other Christian festivals, Candlemas co-opted an earlier pagan rite, and nowadays Wiccans are much keener about celebrating it than most Christians.

Candlemas folklore, which begat the less exalted Groundhog Day folklore, is paradoxical, apparently by design. If the sun is shining—a sign often taken to mean the weather's getting warmer—there will be six weeks more of winter. If the sun isn't shining—a sign often taken to mean that it will remain cold and snowy or wet—then winter's over, or almost over. This superstition gave rural people much mystery to dwell upon during the chill nights of February and March, which was greatly preferable to having them get schnockered. According to an old Scottish rhyme,

If Candlemas Day be dry and fair,

Half the winter's to come and mair.

If Candlemas Day be wet and foul,

Half o' winter's gane at Yule.

Germans apparently carried with them to rural Pennsylvania a variation involving what has alternatively been described as a badger or a hedgehog "seeing" its shadow, and upon arrival transferred that superstition to groundhogs (which, incidentally, are the same thing as woodchucks). The reading must be taken around dawn, because that's when woodland creatures awaken. That also avoids the difficulty of positing a shadow at noontime on a sunny day. But of course, the animal is superfluous. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you don't need a groundhog to tell which way the sun is shining (or not shining).

Punxsutawney (whose name derives from a Native American phrase meaning "town of sandflies") claims pre-eminence in groundhog-based divination, apparently because during the past 118 years the town has put more effort into it than anybody else. The 1993 hit movie Groundhog Day—which, disappointingly, was filmed in Woodstock, Ill.—cemented Punxsutawney's claim in popular culture. But some locales prefer to deploy their own groundhogs. Staten Island, for example, favors "Staten Island Chuck," who lives at the Staten Island Zoo. (Who knew there even was a zoo on Staten Island?) This year Chuck did not see his shadow, even though, according to Newsday's Amanda Y. Barrett, it was clear and sunny. Perhaps the call was made in order to cheer up a borough whose most famous asset, the Staten Island ferry, has been associated lately with a ghastly accident that killed 10 people in October and, more recently, with the suspected suicide of monologist Spalding Gray.

Staten Island Chuck's optimism, along with that of Jimmy the Groundhog in Sun Prairie, Wis., differs with the official view. On Gobbler's Knob, Groundhog Club President Bill Cooper pronounced at 7:27 a.m. Feb. 2 that Punxsutawney Phil had seen his shadow, foretelling six more weeks of winter. This appears to be in line with the National Weather Service's winter storm warning for tonight and its forecast that temperatures won't get above 32 degrees in Punxsutawney through the rest of this week. (It's not expected to be much better on Staten Island.)

Even if the sun isn't shining, predicting six more weeks of cold weather would seem always to be the safe call, given that the vernal equinox occurs reliably every March 20. In keeping with that reality, Punxsutawney has predicted six more weeks of winter more than 90 percent of the time going all the way back to 1887. But Mother Nature can't abide the timid, especially when they come bearing Official Souvenirs. According to the Stormfax Almanac, Punxsutawney's six-week prognostication has only been correct 39 percent of the time. As is true of so many other things, you'd do better to flip a coin.

Bruce Springsteen unveiled his 16^th studio album, Working on a Dream, on Tuesday. Rolling Stone gives the album five stars and calls it "the richest of the three great rock albums Springsteen has made this decade." In 2005, Stephen Metcalf examined Springsteen's legacy and explained why he still loves the Boss. The piece is reprinted below.

In his early live shows, Bruce Springsteen had a habit of rattling off, while the band vamped softly in the background, some thoroughly implausible story from his youth. This he punctuated with a shy, wheezing laugh that let you know he didn't for a second buy into his own bullshit. Back then, in the early 1970s, Bruce was still a regional act, touring the dive bars and dive colleges of the Atlantic coast, playing any venue that would have him. As a matter of routine, a Springsteen show would kick off with audience members throwing gifts onto the stage. Not bras and panties, mind you, but gifts—something thoughtful, not too expensive. Bruce was one of their own, after all, a scrawny little dirtbag from the shore, a minor celebrity of what the great George Trow once called "the disappearing middle distance." By 1978, and the release of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the endearing Jersey wharf rat in Springsteen had been refined away. In its place was a majestic American simpleton with a generic heartland twang, obsessed with cars, Mary, the Man, and the bitterness between fathers and sons. Springsteen has been augmenting and refining that persona for so long now that it's hard to recall its status, not only as an invention, but an invention whose origin wasn't even Bruce Springsteen. For all the po-faced mythic resonance that now accompanies Bruce's every move, we can thank Jon Landau, the ex-Rolling Stone critic who, after catching a typically seismic Springsteen set in 1974, famously wrote, "I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Well, Bruce Springsteen was Jon Landau's future. Over the next couple of years, Landau insinuated himself into Bruce's artistic life and consciousness (while remaining on the Rolling Stone masthead) until he became Springsteen's producer, manager, and full-service Svengali. Unlike the down-on-their-luck Springsteens of Freehold, N.J., Landau hailed from the well-appointed suburbs of Boston and had earned an honors degree in history from Brandeis. He filled his new protégé's head with an American Studies syllabus heavy on John Ford, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. At the same time that he intellectualized Bruce, he anti-intellectualized him. Rock music was transcendent, Landau believed, because it was primitive, not because it could be avant-garde. The White Album and Hendrix and the Velvet Underground had robbed rock of its power, which lay buried in the pre-Beatles era with Del Shannon and the Ronettes. Bruce's musical vocabulary accordingly shrank. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, gone were the West Side Story-esque jazz suites of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. In their place were tight, guitar-driven intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus songs. Springsteen's image similarly transformed. On the cover of Darkness, he looks strangely like the sallower cousin of Pacino's Sonny Wortzik, the already quite sallow anti-hero of Dog Day Afternoon. The message was clear: Springsteen himself was one of the unbeautiful losers, flitting along the ghostly fringes of suburban respectability.

Thirty years later, and largely thanks to Landau, Springsteen is no longer a musician. He's a belief system. And, like any belief system worth its salt, he brooks no in-between. You're either in or you're out. This has solidified Bruce's standing with his base, for whom he remains a god of total rock authenticity. But it's killed him with everyone else. To a legion of devout nonbelievers—they're not saying Bruuuce, they're booing—Bruce is more a phenomenon akin to Dianetics or Tinkerbell than "the new Dylan," as the Columbia Records promotions machine once hyped him. And so we've reached a strange juncture. About America's last rock star, it's either Pentecostal enthusiasm or total disdain.

To walk back from this impasse, we need to see Springsteen's persona for what it really is: Jon Landau's middle-class fantasy of white, working-class authenticity. Does it derogate Springsteen to claim that he is, in essence, a white minstrel act? Not at all. Only by peeling back all the layers of awful heartland authenticity and rediscovering the old Jersey bullshitter underneath can we begin to grasp the actual charms of the man and his music. A glimpse of this old bullshitter was recently on display when Springsteen inducted U2 into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame on March 14. Springsteen had recently caught the new iPod commercial featuring the Irish rockers. "Now personally, I live an insanely expensive lifestyle that my wife barely tolerates," the old BSer confided to the audience of industry heavyweights, adding,

Now, I burn money, and that calls for huge amounts of cash flow. But, I also have a ludicrous image of myself that keeps me from truly cashing in. You can see my problem. Woe is me. So the next morning, I call up Jon Landau … and I say, "Did you see that iPod thing?" and he says, "Yes." And he says, "And I hear they didn't take any money." And I said, "They didn't take any money?" and he says, "No." I said, "Smart, wily Irish guys. Anybody—anybody—can do an ad and take the money. But to do the ad and not take the money … that's smart. That's wily." I say, "Jon, I want you to call up Bill Gates or whoever is behind this thing and float this: a red, white and blue iPod signed by Bruce 'The Boss' Springsteen. Now remember, no matter how much money he offers, don't take it!"

Every now and again, the majestic simpleton breaks character, and winks; and about as often, he works his way back to subtlety and a human scale and cuts a pretty great song or album. From the post-Landau period, the harrowing masterpiece Nebraska is the only record you can push on the nonbelievers, followed by the grossly underrated Tunnel of Love. The Oscar-winning "Streets of Philadelphia," an account of a man with AIDS slowly fading into his own living ghost, is the equal of any song he's written. In 1995 Springsteen produced The Ghost of Tom Joad, the culmination of a 15-year obsession with Woody Guthrie, whose biography he had been handed the night after Reagan defeated Carter, in 1980. The album is stronger than its popular reception might lead one to believe. "Across the Border" and "Galveston Bay" are lovely and understated and bring home the fact that Springsteen—a man who wrote monster hits for acts as diverse as Manfred Mann, the Pointer Sisters, and Patti Smith—remains a skilled melodist. Nonetheless, the record is a little distant in its sympathies, as if Springsteen had thumbed through back issues of The Utne Reader before sitting down to compose.

His new album, Devils & Dust, is a sequel to The Ghost of Tom Joad. It's mostly acoustic and intimate in scale; but Springsteen appears to have taken criticism of Tom Joad to heart, and Devils & Dust is warmer, and in patches, fully up-tempo. It's hard to describe how good the good songs are. The title song is classic Springsteen—"a dirty wind's blowing," and a young soldier may "kill the things he loves" to survive. And on "Black Cowboys," Springsteen unites a visionary concision of detail with long lines in a way that channels William Blake:

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes, here in Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, it fell hard and dark to the ground. It fell without a sound. Lynette took up with a man whose business was the boulevard, whose smile was fixed in a face that was never off guard.

Though initially signed as a folkie, Springsteen has never been much of a technician on the acoustic guitar, compared to, say, the infinitely nimble Richard Thompson. But on Devils & Dust there's a new comfort with the instrument; and he decorates many of the songs with a lovely, understated filigree. Ah, but how hard the lapses in taste! The strings and vocal choruses used to punch up the sound are—what other word is there?—corny. Next to, say, Iron and Wine, Devils & Dust too often sounds like a chain store selling faux Americana bric-a-brac. One always suspects with Springsteen that, in addition to a blonde Telecaster and "the Big Man," a focus group lies close at hand. The album is suspiciously tuned in to two recent trends, the exploding population of the Arizona and New Mexico exurbs; and the growing religiosity of the country as a whole. Devils & Dust is very South by Southwest—Mary is now Maria, there's a lot of mesquite and scrub pine, and one song even comes with a handy key to its regional terminology (Mustaneros: Mustangers; Pradera: Prairie; Riata: Rope). It's also crammed with Biblical imagery, from a modern re-telling of the story of Leah to Christ's final solacing of his mother. The first is a silly throwaway; the second is a fetching, Dylan-inspired hymn that ends with the teasing rumination, "Well Jesus kissed his mother's hands/ Whispered, 'Mother, still your tears,/ For remember the soul of the universe/ Willed a world and it appeared.' "

The high watermark for Springsteen commercially, of course, was 1984, when "Born in the USA" somehow caught both the feelings of social dislocation and the euphoric jingoism of the Reagan era. Landau's mythic creation, the blue-collar, rock 'n' roll naif, has never held such broad appeal since. In recent years, Springsteen has settled into a pattern of selling a couple million albums (Born in the USA sold 15 million) to the Bruce die-hards. A clue to who these people are can be found in Springsteen's evolving persona, which is no longer as structured around his own working-class roots. On a short DV film on the CD's flip side, Springsteen says he tries to "disappear" into the voices of the migrant workers and ghetto prisoners whose stories make up Devils & Dust: "What would they do, what wouldn't they do, how would they behave in this circumstance, the rhythm of their speech, that's sort of where the music comes in." With Landau nowhere in evidence (he's thanked, but excluded from the album's formal credits), it is up to Springsteen alone to impersonate the voices of the dispossessed. The pupil has finally surpassed the master.

Nonetheless, here I am, starting to hum its tunes, growing a little devil's patch, hitting the gym, and adding a distant heartland twang to my speech. (My wife, meanwhile, curls up on the sofa in shame.) You old bullshitter, you got me again.

If the Super Bowl goes into overtime for the first time ever, it's fairly certain who will be victorious: the team that wins the coin toss. In the first round of the playoffs, the Chargers beat the Colts 23-17 in OT, marching down the field for a touchdown after winning the toss. In the 14 overtime games that produced a winner this season, the coin-toss victor won 10 of the games, more than 70 percent. Since 2002, the team that's gotten the toss has won more than 60 percent of overtime games.

Chess faces a similar problem—it's generally regarded as an advantage to play white. But the chess world has long had a solution: Take it in turns and play a lot of games. That's easy for the chess guys—they have all the time in the world, and more forgiving TV schedules. College football has a similar philosophy, giving each team the ball at the opponents' 25-yard line and alternating possessions until someone breaks the tie. But the NFL's competition committee, which pondered the overtime problem in depth in 2003, decided to stick with the status quo of "sudden death."

With a little ingenuity, there is a way for overtime to be both fair and fast. One solution is usually associated with cake-cutting: one person divides, the other chooses which half to take. In a football overtime, the divide-and-choose rule would dispense with the kickoff and just give the ball to one side. The coin-toss loser would decide how far forward the offense would start—say, the 30-yard line. The coin-toss winner would then decide whether to take possession or let the coin-toss loser have the ball at the 30. The nice thing about these rules is that they would naturally adapt to the game's changing dynamics. The current system, by contrast, seems to have been fair when introduced in 1974, but as field-goal kickers became more accurate, possession has become more valuable.

"Divide and choose" isn't perfect. The coach who divides is at a small disadvantage, because what he does gives a hint about his thinking and his concerns—all sorts of imponderables from his kicker's form in training to the morale of his defensive lineup. The other coach, however, can keep his cards to his chest until the last moment.

An even more elegant solution to the overtime problem was proposed in 2002 by Chris Quanbeck, an electrical engineer (and Green Bay Packers fan). Quanbeck's idea was to auction off possession of the ball in the natural currency of the game: field position. The team that was willing to begin closest to its own goal line would receive the privilege of possession.

Football's number crunchers reckon that this "privilege" turns dubious about 15 to 20 yards away from your own goal line. That is, the expected value of having the ball so far back is negative—it's more likely that your opponent will score before you do. But it's not clear that the same would be true in overtime, when teams would be attempting to get within field-goal range rather than trying for touchdowns. If this system were implemented, it might take a couple of seasons for a consensus to develop about how far back is too far back. Still, everyone would be trying to work that out from a position of equal ignorance.

The auction idea puts the emphasis on the skill and judgment of the head coaches and their backroom staff—exactly where it should be. And it has some subtlety. For instance, having a powerful defense has an unexpected advantage in an auction: Because the other coach will fear your defense, he's more likely to drop out of the auction and concede possession to your offense in a favorable field position.

After Quanbeck and his brother Andrew worked out the details of their overtime proposal, they wrote letters to various NFL owners and coaches in 2003. They won some attention—including an expression of interest from the NFL's head of officiating, Mike Pereira—but no changes in the rules of the game.

One person who did notice the Quanbeck proposal was Columbia University economist Yeon-Koo Che, a leading light in the theory and practice of auction design. Che wrote not to the NFL but to the economics journals and proved that "divide and choose" was much fairer to the loser of the toss than the current system. But what interested Che and co-author Terrence Hendershott was whether an auction might be even fairer than "divide and choose." They concluded that it would be, because the auction is completely symmetric—unlike with the "divide and choose" method, neither coach is forced to make the first move, so nobody has a built-in advantage. For Che and Hendershott, then, "divide and choose" partly solves the coin-toss problem; the auction fixes it completely.

While it's easy to see why the game's authorities don't want to mess with a successful formula, I'm guessing that the overtime auction would prove intuitive and popular. Just imagine the possibilities for stagecraft. The Quanbecks suggested that the referee could act as an auctioneer, calling out the field position in 1-yard increments. The first coach to throw his red challenge flag wins the ball at whatever yard line the ref last spat out. Or perhaps the two head coaches could come to midfield with sealed bids, with the envelopes to be opened by a cheerleader representing each team—a gridiron version of Deal or No Deal. Now doesn't that sound way better than calling out heads or tails?

The Arizona Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald is Jerry Rice on fast-forward, a receiver with baseball gloves for hands who outruns, outjumps, and outmuscles defenders. Not only will Fitzgerald be the best athlete on the field in Super Bowl XLIII, he also makes for the most irresistible story for idea-starved sportswriters. That's because his father, longtime Minnesota sportswriter and radio host Larry Fitzgerald Sr., will be watching the big game from the Raymond James Stadium press box. In the last two weeks, the Washington Post's Michael Wilbon, USA Today's Jarrett Bell, and ESPN's Rick Reilly, among others, have written up the Fitzgeralds, reveling in the serendipity of a sportswriter raising a world-class jock.

Wilbon, Bell, and Reilly lay out much of the same material. All the stories note father and son's shared grief over the loss of Fitzgerald Jr.'s mother to cancer, as well as Fitzgerald Sr.'s belief that it's inappropriate to cheer in the press box—even for your own progeny. "You've known me long enough to know I'm not going to show up with pompoms," Fitzgerald Sr. says to Wilbon. "I understand there's no cheering. … I'm there as an objective journalist," he explains to Bell. Reilly, too, fixates on Fitzgerald Sr.'s objectivity, writing:

[I]t's going to be murder for Larry Sr. not to violate that no-cheering-in-the-press-box rule.

"I won't cheer," Fitzgerald says. "I'm going to stay objective. I've come too far to suddenly show up in the press box with pompoms. But if you could put a monitor on my insides, you'd find a whole fan club in there."

If it were my son, I'd go into the bathroom every three minutes and scream into the blow dryer, but not Fitzgerald. He's so old school he's going to be two people during the big week, parent and sportswriter, and never the twain shall meet. "I'm not crossing any lines," he says. He'll take Larry Jr. to dinner at night off the record and interview him during the days on, the first sportswriter anyone can think of to ever cover his own son in the Super Bowl. "I'll be at his interview table, trying to get my questions in, just like everybody else."

All of these stories create an image of a sportswriter obsessed with journalistic etiquette, a reporter who pounds out scrupulously honest, evenhanded, undemonstrative copy. Once you dip into Fitzgerald Sr.'s collected works, however, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Reilly and his cohorts haven't read a word the man has ever written.

Fitzgerald Sr.'s column in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, a weekly African-American newspaper, is less a work of journalism than a proud parent's scrapbook. Judging by the last two issues, the Spokesman-Recorder doesn't run straight game stories, meaning that Fitzgerald Sr.'s columns represent the bulk of the paper's writing about football. As such, the Spokesman-Recorder sports section is essentially a Larry Fitzgerald Jr. tribute page—since 2003, the elder Fitzgerald has written about his son at least 23 times.

Last week, on the occasion of the Cardinals' victory in the NFC championship game, Fitzgerald Sr. argued that no one "has played better in these playoffs than Fitzgerald. ... [He] has raised his game each and every playoff game like the great athletes he grew up watching: Michael Jordan, Kirby Puckett, Kevin Garnett, Jerry Rice, Randy Moss and Cris Carter." The previous week, he wrote that the highlight of Arizona's win over Carolina was "the remarkable prime-time performance of wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald Jr." In both articles, more than half of the copy is devoted to detailing Fitzgerald Jr.'s exploits; in neither story does the author disclose that he's writing about someone who shares his DNA.

Although there are a few exceptions, the vast majority of Fitzgerald Sr.'s articles lack any kind of disclosure, instead identifying Fitzgerald Jr. as a local boy made good. Even so, I wouldn't go out of my way to criticize Fitzgerald Sr. if Bell and Reilly didn't build him up as a media ethicist fit for the chairmanship of the Poynter Institute. (Wilbon gets a pass, as his piece doesn't belabor the point.) After all, he's writing for a small paper where most of the readers are probably aware of the columnist's filial ties to the receiver. It's also hard to argue with what Fitzgerald Sr. has been saying—it's true that nobody has played better in these playoffs than his flesh and blood. It's easier to find fault with Bell and Reilly, who've concocted a fable about the impartiality of a man who basically acts as his son's PR rep. Fitzgerald Sr. might not cheer in the press box, but he fashions the written-word equivalent of minutes-long standing ovations.

Why does Reilly want us to believe that the author of 2004's "Fitzgerald shines at workout" ("The consensus is that Larry Jr. should have won the 2003 Heisman Trophy") and 2008's "Arizona's Larry Fitzgerald hits all escalators" ("He is just 24 years old, and he's already one of the best in the game today") is "going to be two people during the big week, parent and sportswriter, and never the twain shall meet"? I suspect it has something to do with that sportswriterly tendency to turn good people into faultless paragons of virtue. The point isn't that Fitzgerald Sr. is a bad guy because he failed to disclose a relationship. It's that he's always happily blurred the very line that Reilly et al. say he refuses to blur.

Thankfully, there are some sportswriters who can tell a story without feeling compelled to sanitize it. Joe Lapointe's thoughtful, well-researched piece on the Fitzgeralds in the New York Times ignores the no-cheering-in-the-press-box canard and restores a handful of other complicating details that Wilbon, Bell, and Reilly buffed out of their accounts. Lapointe explains that his mother's passing was especially hard on Fitzgerald Jr. because they were estranged at the time. He also takes note of the recent domestic violence accusation by the mother of the wide receiver's young son.

"No matter what happens on Sunday," Lapointe concludes, "Larry Sr. will evaluate his son's performance not as a journalist but as a parent." After paging through Fitzgerald Sr.'s articles, that sounds about right. Further confirmation of where the sportswriter and father's priorities lie came during last Thursday night's college basketball game between Purdue and the University of Minnesota. At the start of the second half, the ESPN cameras caught Fitzgerald Sr. studying the game from press row, a sportswriter completely in his element. He was wearing his son's Arizona Cardinals jersey.

I can tell you exactly when I began hating the Arizona Cardinals, and it wasn't when they came to Foxborough in December, took one look at the falling snow, and decided they would commit public consumer fraud for the balance of the afternoon. No, it was sometime midway through the BCS national championship game between Oklahoma and Florida. For those of you who missed it, Fox television announcer Thom Brennaman treated Florida quarterback Tim Tebow in a fashion that I am absolutely sure violates the anti-stalking statutes in at least five states. At one point, Brennaman said, "If you're fortunate enough to spend five minutes or 20 minutes around Tim Tebow, your life is better for it." And then he said, after Tebow got nailed for a taunting penalty, "That might be the first thing he's ever done wrong." This is the kind of stuff for which the Eternal Word Television Network was, ah, created, and Thom Brennaman made Mother Angelica look like Kathy Griffin.*

This happens a lot in football. The game is afflicted by announcers who spend an awful lot of time wrapping football in the Great American Family Values comforter. They festoon it with jingoistic baubles and cheap patriotic gewgaws. And all of this is to place the game's fundamental destruction and brutality on some higher plane than that occupied by people who simply beat the crap out of one another in bars on a Friday night. This is how we end up with Thom Brennaman treating the national collegiate football championship game as though he were the Chad and Jeremy correspondent for Tiger Beat back in the day. This is also how we are going to be inundated with mendacious swill over the next two weeks on the subject of what a great story the Arizona Cardinals are.

(Before we go any further, you, there, Larry Fitzgerald? You can leave the room now, because none of what follows applies to you. You're having the most significant postseason any nonquarterback has had in about 20 years.)

We're going to hear about how they magically transformed themselves at the end of the season. We're going to hear about the remarkable comeback of Kurt Warner. We're going to hear about how marvelous it is for the National Football League that a Super Bowl championship is within the grasp of a team so thickly dripping with obvious mediocrity that it's a wonder Charlie Sheen isn't playing left guard. We are going to hear all of this because the NFL and its broadcast partners operate on the very simple premise that everybody who reports—or follows—their sport on television is a paste-eating moron.

This simple fact is that the very presence of the Arizona Cardinals in the Super Bowl is at best a fluke and, at worst, a disgrace. They played in a landfill of a division. They won their two playoff games because Jake Delhomme of Carolina turned the ball over six times and because the Philadelphia Eagles all looked at the newspapers last Sunday and discovered they were in the NFC championship game again. The Cardinals are a glorified Arena Football League team with a soft defense and a running game unworthy of the name. They are in the position that they're in because the NFL rigs its season worse than any carny rigs his wheel. For all the macho posturing of its principal propagandists, between the jiggering of the schedule and the conniving of the draft and the socialistic revenue schemes, and the desperate grab for any mechanism that will flatten out the differences between really good teams and really bad ones, the NFL is the league that comes closest to the biddy soccer league philosophy of making sure that everyone gets a trophy.

That's what the Arizona Cardinals are: the National Participation Ribbon.

The only proof anyone should need came in the 15^th game of the season, when Arizona visited New England. It already was clear this year that the Cardinals were even money to finish in the middle of the pack of any league that played in the upper latitudes, with the possible exception of the Ivies. Send them north out of the pleasure dome that the Bidwills blackjacked out of the state of Arizona, and the team did things like give up 56 points to the New York Jets, playing such shoddy defense that Brett Favre threw for six touchdowns. This, of course, ignited another outbreak of hot and steamy Favre love from the easily smitten television press corps, so we have the Cardinals to blame even for that. In Foxborough, however, in December, they simply quit.

The Patriots scored on nine of their first 10 possessions. The score was 31-0 at halftime. There was no compelling empirical evidence that the Arizona defense ever had left the desert. Jack Molinas went to jail for going into the water less obviously than the Cardinals did that day. It was every bit as phony an outcome as any pro wrestling show's, and the essential moral difference between that game and a game in which a team actually was shaving points was negligible at best.

Bear in mind over the next week that this game will be cited as the "pivotal" moment in the Cardinals' miracle run to the Super Bowl. Ken Whisenhunt—who sat most of his offensive weapons in that game—and his staff will be the subject of gooey encomiums for cracking the whip after the loss to New England. There will be loose talk about professionalism, and about how pride was appealed to at a critical moment. And since snow is a long shot in Tampa, they might even win the game, and then there will be more of it. And it will all be nonsense. Not even Tim Tebow could save this team's soul.

Correction, Jan. 28, 2009: This piece originally referred to the Eternal Word Television Network's "late Mother Angelica." While she no longer makes live appearances on the air due to her ill health, Mother Angelica is still living. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a certain bliss to this; if you've got a pile of letters that demand well-composed, delicate responses (say you're explaining to your boss why you ordered that $85,000 rug), unplugging the Internet can be the fastest way to get things done. That's why offline access is a killer feature—it destroys your last remaining reason for suffering through a desktop e-mail program.

Google's not alone in providing this option. Microsoft's Windows Live Mail, Yahoo's Zimbra, and the mail app made by the Web startup Zoho, among other services, also provide some measure of untethered e-mail access. For now, Google calls this addition "experimental"—you've got to turn it on explicitly, and the company is asking users to report any bugs—but I found it easy to set up and a delight to use.

To get offline access, you first need to download and install a small program called Google Gears (except if you're using Google's Chrome browser, which comes with Gears built in). Then, after you enable Gmail's offline capability, the system will download two months of your most recent messages, which should take 30 minutes to an hour. Now you're good to go: When you're offline, type www.gmail.com into your browser, log in—yes, Gears enables you to log in even when you don't have a Web connection—and there's your e-mail. Though I work from home and rarely find myself away from a hot Wi-Fi connection, I shut off my router and parked myself on my couch for about an hour yesterday. I loaded up Gmail on my laptop, and it responded seamlessly—I could read, search through, and respond to any message I'd received during the last two months, all through the familiar Web interface. Eureka! I'll never again be mailless on a plane, a subway, or anyplace else where you don't have the Web but do have a lot of time to kill.

Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it's a good time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else). Over the last few years, we've seen many programs shifting from the first category to the second—now you can get spreadsheets and photo editors online, though they're still not as good as programs hosted on your computer. But e-mail has crossed the line completely. Hosted services like Gmail are now the most powerful and convenient way to grapple with a daily onslaught of mail. If you're still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac's Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you're doing it wrong.

The shift has been a long time coming. On July 4, 1996, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, two techies who met while working at Apple, launched Hotmail, the first free e-mail service on the Web. The date wasn't accidental—from the beginning, Web-based e-mail sought to liberate people from the strictures imposed by traditional providers (ISPs, universities, and employers, all of whom required some official affiliation before they gave you an e-mail address). Hotmail would give an inbox to anyone—you could even sign up for multiple addresses—and pretty soon it was impossible to find a soul who didn't e-mail.

But it was a terrible hassle to actually use Hotmail—which Microsoft purchased in 1997—or the rival e-mail systems built by Yahoo, AOL, and the various other Web portals that dominated the last tech boom. Back then, Web-based e-mail was a great idea executed poorly. Internet connections, Web browsers, and Web-design technologies were slow and flaky; you waited an eternity to load up a message, you could easily lose a draft of a long e-mail if something went amiss with your modem, and you had a limited amount of storage space. Web e-mail was a redoubt of amateurs. If you were serious about your inbox, you kept it on your desktop.

Desktop e-mail presented its own challenges, though. People who were serious about e-mail tended to archive all their messages. But desktop e-mail apps performed poorly when overloaded with mail; Outlook, for instance, crawled to halt if you stuffed it with just a few tens of thousands of messages, which for some people is only a few months' worth. What's more, keeping all your mail in one place was both annoying and not very safe. You couldn't easily check your messages on multiple computers. And what if you wanted to switch to a new computer? Or what if a power surge crashed your drive? As a journalist working during the Internet bust, my particular worry was getting a pink slip. If my boss suddenly asked me to turn in my company-provided laptop, all my e-mail—both professional and personal correspondence going back years—would be gone.

By the time Gmail launched in summer 2004, I was desperate for an alternative to Outlook. (I had tried pretty much every other desktop e-mail app.) From the moment I logged on, I found it liberating. Gmail's interface was quick and intuitive, unlike any other major online service at the time. (Gmail did borrow some design ideas from Oddpost, an ahead-of-its-time Web e-mail app developed in 2002; Yahoo bought Oddpost in 2004.) Gmail was the first to display multiple messages on the same subject as threaded conversations—a design idea that user-interface experts had long been saying would make e-mail easier to use. Switching to Gmail also freed me from worrying about how I preserved my mail—Google, whose servers are much more secure than my own computer, was taking care of backups for me.

What separates Gmail from its rivals is a basic design philosophy: It's built for power e-mailers. Late last year I visited the Gmail team at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Keith Coleman, Gmail's program manager, told me that from the beginning, Google aimed to build something suitable for people who got a ton of mail—because in the future, everyone will get a ton of mail. Gmail's main features are all catnip for folks who find themselves buried under the weight of their inbox. There's a search engine worthy of the Google name, a slate of keyboard shortcuts that make organizing your messages brutally efficient, and a crowdsourced spam detector that keeps out unwanted messages. Best of all, Gmail is fast—you can switch between messages and folders quicker than you can in any other e-mail program, even desktop-based systems. Coleman told me that the team is constantly measuring and tweaking the responsiveness of its interface. (The software gives coders a readout of how long, on average, various tasks take to complete.) The Gmail managers are also gaga over user-interface tests: Before instituting any major feature, developers bring users into a whiz-bang lab outfitted with cameras and eye-tracking software to see how people react to the new stuff.

Lately Coleman and his staff have been improving Gmail at a breakneck pace. They added a way to let people chat by voice and video, and they put out "themes" that personalize the appearance of your e-mail screen. Last summer, they launched Gmail Labs, a repository of add-on programs that run alongside Gmail. Offline access is one of these many Labs features; you can also add a to-do list, buttons to send people quick canned responses, a mini-program for sending text messages to cell phones, and a "gadget" for monitoring your Google Calendar and Google Docs from your e-mail. All these add-ons were created by Google programmers, but Coleman says that Gmail is also experimenting with letting outside developers add stuff. Google seems to be trying to create more than just a great e-mail program; with all these add-ons, Gmail is becoming a sort of e-mail platform whose users benefit from the best ideas in mail management.

And that gets to what's so exciting about being a Gmail user right now. The app keeps getting better. You might say that's true of desktop systems, too; Outlook is not as clunky as it was five years ago, and, no doubt, it'll be better five years from now. But so will Gmail—and because it's online, you'll get those improvements faster, and without having to install any software. Now that you can use Gmail anywhere—even when you're beyond the reach of broadband—there's no longer any reason to suffer.

Two years ago, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a developer at Microsoft, unveiled an application called Photosynth. In a fantastic presentation, he showed how the software can assemble a collection of digital snapshots taken at a certain place—say, all the Flickr photos of the Notre Dame Cathedral—into a grand, three-dimensional environment. What's more, Photosynth lets you pan and zoom through the resulting scene as if you're a director scouting out locations. On a large video screen, Aguera y Arcas showed how Photosynth had stitched together hundreds of tourist photos into an image of the Western Facade of Notre Dame. Then he clicked on the snarling gargoyles hanging above the main archway. The software zoomed in on that section—Photosynth had quickly selected the best Flickr photo of the gargoyles and smoothly shifted the 3-D scene to show where that single snapshot appeared on the face of the cathedral.

The demo seemed magical, conjuring a whole new way of collecting the thousands of photos that each of us now produce during our lifetimes: Imagine being able to review your Grand Canyon vacation not as a static slide show but as a tour of the 3-D environment produced by your and everyone else's pictures. "This takes data from the entire collective memory of what the earth looks like," Aguera y Arcas told the crowd. "All of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent—greater than the sum of their parts."

Microsoft launched Photosynth last summer, but the Web application had its real coming-out party at the inauguration. Though no one has really counted, you probably wouldn't be too off the mark in guessing that the 1 million or 2 million people who gathered to watch Barack Obama take the oath of office produced tens of millions of snapshots—making it one of the most photographed events ever. As part of their inauguration coverage, both CNN and MSNBC invited viewers to submit their photos to Photosynth. These contributions produced dozens of 3-D scenes—called "synths"—at various locations across Washington during inaugural weekend. They're absolutely mesmerizing.

For instance, here's a synth that combines more than 100 photos taken at the Lincoln Memorial concert on the Sunday before the inauguration. (You might need to download a special viewer to get these synths to show up in your browser; they worked fine for me on a PC using Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.05, but your experience may vary.) You start off with a low-res picture captured by someone way in the back—the memorial can be seen as a tiny square in the distance, far beyond the reflecting pool and a sea of people. But you can move deeper into the picture—click around the center of the image, and you zoom into a shot taken by someone a few hundred yards closer to the action. Now you can see the memorial and the reflecting pool, but you're still pretty far away. Click once more, and you move into someone else's snapshot, in which you can just make out Lincoln's statue. And on and on you go: As you click, you fly deeper and deeper into the crowd, flowing through photos taken by folks successively closer to the stage. Eventually you come to a sharp, detailed picture of Obama and Lincoln alone on a vast platform; you're close enough now to read the memorial's inscription. But, of course, people who were this close didn't just snap photos of the stage—they also turned around to capture the throngs of people behind them. Photosynth lets you do so as well. Click to the left of the picture, and you see the other direction—the scene Obama saw from the platform.

There is something vaguely embarrassing—even narcissistic—about our new era of mass photography. Because we're always carrying cameras, we're moved to document every moment of our lives—sometimes to the exclusion of actually experiencing that moment. Take a look at this picture of Barack and Michelle Obama at one of the inaugural balls. Everyone in the audience has a hand up with a cell phone pointed at the stage, but nobody is actually looking at what's going on. The scene is puzzling: If the guy next to you is taking a picture—one that you can be reasonably sure will end up on a photo-sharing site somewhere—why do you need one, too? But we do this often these days. Win Butler, the lead singer of the band Arcade Fire, once told Terry Gross that he and his band mates have stopped going out into the crowd to perform because nobody pays attention to them—everyone's got their cell phones and cameras in front of their faces.

The genius of Photosynth is that it takes advantage of the psychosis of digital photography. The software collects similar pictures that, by themselves, aren't very interesting and builds an entirely new kind of image, what you might call a social photograph. Ordinary photos show you an event as one person captured it. A synth is a scene as seen by everyone. Look at this synth assembled by CNN, titled "The Moment." The network asked people to send in their snapshots of the moment Obama held up his hand and took the oath. There are now nearly 700 pictures in the synth, and together they give you an incredibly detailed picture of what took place that morning. It's not just one person's view—you can see the event as people in every part of the crowd saw it. There are sharp photos from CNN's professional photographers and blurry pictures from people using cell-phone cams, all shot from every conceivable angle around Obama—his left and right, below him, even behind him. Looking at the synth is even better than having been there live—this way you see everything.

Five years ago, I spotted a pair of images online that forever shook my faith in photographs. The pictures showed an American Marine, Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux, standing with two smiling Iraqi boys in the desert. The photos were identical, except for one detail. In one, the boys held up a cardboard sign on which someone had scrawled, "Lcpl Boudreaux saved my dad. then he rescued my sister!" In the other picture, the boy's sign read, "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my dad. then he knocked up my sister!" The military had investigated Boudreaux for misconduct—they suspected he'd been making fun of the kids by forcing them to hold up a sign they didn't understand—but Boudreaux proclaimed his innocence. I contacted a half-dozen photo analysts, and none could say definitively which photo was real and which was doctored.

Of course, people have been questioning the authenticity of certain photographs ever since photography began. But many professional photographers I spoke to saw the mystery of the Marine as a sign of the modern-day decline of photography as a journalistic pursuit—in the Photoshop age, you could dismiss any photo as false, which meant no photo would stand as proof that something actually occurred. Fred Ritchin, a former photo editor at the New York Times, told me at the time: "You can say Tiananmen Square happened—there was a video, there was a massacre. But if we typically disbelieve the evidence of a photograph, then when the Chinese government says there's no massacre, what are you going to hold up against that?"

But there was one person I spoke to who was more optimistic about photos entering the digital age. Pedro Meyer, a Mexican photographer who's known for his liberal use of Photoshop, pointed out that people around the world now snap billions of pictures every year. True, any single photo can be doctored—but in the future, Meyer believes, we'll get at the truth of what happened at any particular event not by looking at one photo, but by looking at the amalgam of hundreds. How will you know whether a massacre occurred if a tyrant Photoshops the evidence? Because we'll be able to combine the many undoctored pictures—even if they're all blurry cell-phone pictures—into a composite picture of the scene.

At the time, I was skeptical of Meyer's idea; it seemed a bit dreamy to think you could patch together small pictures into something resembling the truth. Now that I've seen Photosynth, I'm a believer.

Troy from New York on the line. Thanks for taking my call. Here's the question: With the vicious downturn in the economy, there's been an upswing in personal-finance TV. Should we be bullish or bearish about shows in which the public phones in to wheeze and vent and plead for counsel? Buy, hold, or sell?

On Saturday, the Fox Business Network introduced Your Questions, Your Money Live (10 a.m. ET), a four-hour program that takes queries—"Should my 77-year-old mom do a reverse mortgage?"—in between drive-by policy evaluations and tributes to entrepreneurial gumption. The host, Dagen McDowell, and her panelists sit in a circular space sunk into the floor of the studio, nesting on curved, red sofas heaped with throw pillows, which is to say that the set of Your Questions, Your Money has an air of Your Wife, My Swing Party. Or it would with the addition of a shag rug and the removal of the numerous video screens on which white and orange blobs creep across something abstractly Neoclassical. The images are most explicable as a reflection of viewers' fantasies about a river of lava overrunning the Treasury Building.

Sometimes, as when the talking heads went off on tangents about the Glass-Steagall Act, the show proved too smart for its own good. At other points, it was too dumb for anyone's. When a caller announced a crackpot plan to load up on Ford stock, one expert retorted, "I don't like to make bets on stocks unless I know something special about what's going on inside of that company," a strategy Ivan Boesky used with decidedly mixed results. For that matter, Fox Business could do its part for unemployment figures by hiring someone to manage the folks who screen the calls. This might help weed out the likes of Jean from Montana, who angrily conflated the estate tax and eminent domain, and Shawn from Florida, who begged to know why stimulus-package money didn't go directly to home-electronics consumers. (Down in the little pleasure pit, the panelists managed to recast the latter query as "How do TARP funds help small businesses?") McDowell presided with a commanding smile and a voice like Virginia sweet tea. Her own taste in soft drinks is rather fashionable. While interviewing the co-creator of Honest Tea, she spluttered, "I actually have a bottle of it open in my hand!"

Contrast McDowell's rush-week grin with the D&D-club countenance of Clark Howard, an Atlanta-based radio veteran whose Clark Howard Show popped up on the weekend schedule of HLN (formerly CNN Headline News) in January. Howard complements a great face for radio with a wonderful larynx for print. "I have this whiny nasally voice," he recently told his hometown paper, displaying the self-knowledge that has enabled him to convert his dweebiness into a successful shtick. "Today's economy can make you feel like a 98-pound weakling," he said in an intro last week, standing there with his shapeless polo shirt tucked into his colorless khakis. If you pay attention to Lewis Skolnick here, he'll mold you into a Charles Atlas of the checkbook: "You're going to be in charge!" He brought empowerment to what sounded like sensible advice about private mortgage insurance, trustee-to-trustee rollovers, LED light bulbs, and the best way to exchange currency for a trip to Wales, though he never did address the matter of why you'd want to go to Wales in the first place.

After a 10-month hiatus, On the Money (CNBC, weeknights at 10 p.m. ET) returned in August with the urgently chipper Carmen Wong Ulrich as its host. The show's recent focus on investment scams, consumer rip-offs, and dastardly corporate behavior provides many an incongruous context for her high-decibel cheer. "Have you been a victim of fraud?" she twinkled this week. "We wanna hear about it!" It would be interesting if the pundits who gather at Ulrich's curvilinear desk were issued pompoms. When a naturopathic doctor with a slumping practice called in to ask whether he should liquidate his IRA to pay off his mortgage, they first told him to quit that noise, then addressed the downtrodden tone in his voice: "As your attitude plummets, you're screwed." They told people who'd lost their life savings to crooks to seize their victimhood as a chance to educate others. All the while, the phrases live responsibly and protect yourself flipped around at the bottom of the screen. What if every show on television adopted the same graphic? How would it affect the texture of Rock of Love Bus With Bret Michaels?

And what is there left to say about Ulrich's CNBC colleagues in the call-in game? Saturday Night Live's Kristin Wiig has definitively captured the ochre-tinged host of The Suze Orman Show (Saturdays at 9 p.m. ET) in all her grating superiority and alien mannerisms, and the show's Web site excerpts the disgracefully compelling "Can I Afford It?" segments so that pleasure-seekers, unmolested by Orman's other huffings, can experience the game-show tingle of waiting for her to endorse or scorn a caller's material desires. On Mad Money (weekdays at 6 p.m. ET), Jim Cramer continues apace as the hardest-working man in business-show show business. ("Irrepressibly gratuitous" is how he correctly identifies his arm-waving, ear-splitting, stock-picking side-show act in the current Esquire.) Even in these times of distress, almost every caller still salutes Cramer with a bellowed "boo-yah!," though Warren in Florida surely spoke for many last Monday in qualifying his as "a very scared and reluctant boo-yah!" Cramer has frequently screamed about food-related stocks this week. Tupperware is a natural buy in a time of increased home cooking, of course, and, as a side benefit, selecting that theme has allowed him to waggle crab legs and breadsticks at the Steadicam, giving a rest to a favorite recent prop, a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929.

The antithesis of Jim Cramer, perhaps the antidote to Jim Cramer, is The Dave Ramsey Show (Fox Business, weekdays at 8 p.m. ET), which remains the most remarkable program on any business-news channel. Where Orman's viewers call in seeking permission to buy Kate Spade pumps, Ramsey's are often seeking a firm hand to guide them out of debt, which they possibly accrued in co-signing for an ex-boyfriend's car loan. Where some shows analyze, or at least natter about, the economic-stimulus plan, Ramsey does not give a fig about it, telling one viewer, "I think it's funny and it's sad that you wait on government to fix anything in your life." He sells principles, as opposed to addressing problems ad hoc, and in doing so, he often acts as an on-screen grief counselor, a platitude-free positive-thinking coach, and an extremely likable dispenser of tough love. Ramsey's core idea—which used to look iconoclastic but now just seems like the common sense that it is—is to avoid debt at all costs. He preaches it in a humble, down-home, no-frills way that leaves his audience owing him plenty.

An inaugural address is a new president's best opportunity to put forward his vision of government. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson proposed an expansion of the federal role to counter economic and racial injustice: "In a land of great wealth, families must not live in hopeless poverty," he declared. In 1981, Ronald Reagan called for a rollback of Johnson's Great Society: "It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed," he contended.

Reagan didn't really make the federal government smaller, but he did check its growth. Every president since has searched for some way to tackle problems without making government bigger. In 1989, George H.W. Bush exhorted voluntarism, or, as he put it, "a thousand points of light." In 1993, Bill Clinton proposed a new social compact in which government would "offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all." In 2001, George W. Bush reprised his father's theme of altruism, noting that "compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government."

In 2009, looking out over the largest crowd ever assembled in Washington, D.C., Barack Obama framed the issue in terms of simple efficacy. "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works—whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified," he said. "Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end."

This view is in keeping with Obama's nonideological approach to politics. To most of those listening, it surely came across as an expression of our new president's unsentimental good sense. Yet on rereading the speech in the less euphoric light of the next day, that passage seemed insufficient as a governing philosophy and, if taken for one, rather troubling. "Whatever works" is less a vision of the public sector's proper role than a place-holder for someone who has yet to figure out what he thinks that role should be.

Obama's pragmatic liberalism risks blurring execution with intention, means with ends. To take his illustrations, either it is up to the commonweal to provide a minimum income to retired people, to offer health insurance to everybody, and to increase income equality—or it isn't. Most liberals would say these are legitimate responsibilities of government. Most conservatives would argue that they aren't. On income security for the elderly, we've had an overall social consensus since the New Deal. On health care, a consensus may be emerging after decades of national ambivalence. When it comes to growing income inequality, a newer problem, there is no consensus at all. But we must decide what government's goals are before considering the subordinate questions of what works and how much we can afford.

Where government cannot do something more effectively than the private sector, such as allocate private capital to maximize economic growth, it shouldn't try. But more often, we face a complicated interplay of social ills and imperfect government responses. There are programs that succeed, programs that fail, and lots in between. The same program can work and not work at different times. Social Security flourished for decades, became unsustainably costly in the 1970s, was restored to viability in the 1980s, and has since become problematic again. That the programs that constitute the war on drugs have mostly failed isn't a decisive argument for legalizing heroin and cocaine.

Obama's vagueness about the federal role comes at a moment when clarity is especially needed. Our government is about to become bigger, more powerful, and more expensive to deal with a sprawling economic crisis. Washington will take on responsibilities it hasn't shouldered in 75 years, such as directly alleviating unemployment and perhaps nationalizing banks. Many who would ordinarily reject such interventions on principle can justify them as misery relief, Keynesian stimulus, or emergency management. But some see in the expansion something further-reaching—a redefinition of the government's relationship to markets transcending the current crisis.

A president facing this situation needs to know what's temporary and what's permanent, if only because of the tendency for the one to become the other. Urgent measures are liable to stick around long after the precipitating emergency is passed. There aren't many American homes left without electricity, but we retain a renamed version of the Rural Electrification Administration, a program initiated by Franklin Roosevelt as part of the New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 to modernize a backward region of the country still afflicted by malaria, remains with us as well. Expanding government is easy—shrinking it nearly impossible.

On the broader question of what Washington should and shouldn't do, Obama remains hard to read. He inclines simultaneously toward activist government and limited government, which is a tension, though not a contradiction. He favors universal health coverage, but without government taking direct responsibility for it. He is poised to propose cutbacks in our most expensive entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, to ensure their survival. Language elsewhere in his inaugural address suggests that he sees government as guarantor of opportunity rather than a provider of benefits, more Clinton's way than LBJ's.

But as he navigates the crisis, Obama would do well to figure out what he thinks about the fundamental question of government's role. He might begin by pondering some words of his model Abraham Lincoln, who in 1854 wrote, "The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves." Obama's test of practicality comes after Lincoln's test of principle.

A version of this article also appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.

Slate Deputy Managing Editor Rachael Larimore chatted live on Washingtonpost.com with readers about the Slate 60, our annual ranking of the previous year's top philanthropists. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Rachael Larimore: Greetings, everyone. Thanks for joining me to chat about the Slate 60 and the state of philanthropy during these difficult financial times. I look forward to taking your questions.

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New York City: Instead of simply encouraging more philanthropy, how about "responsible" philanthropy? Leona Helmsley left the bulk of her estate to her dog and for the care of "Dogs"? How does that help the human race or make the world we live in a better place?

Rachael Larimore: It would indeed be nice if there was a way to encourage the wealthy to steer their charitable giving to causes that were more "responsible." Indeed, a few years back, Slate published an article with ideas on how to give away $1 million.



Leona Helmsley's gift to her foundation to benefit dogs is not the first time this has come up. In 2002, there was a great deal of outcry because Ruth Lilly gave $100 million to Poetry Magazine.



I think there are a couple factors at play here. First, someone like Leona Helmsley, who had a reputation for being difficult, is not going to much care where people think she should leave her money. And secondly, everyone has a different definition of "responsible." Some people think it's giving to the poor, others think it's important to give to education, yet others think that the arts make the world we live in a better place. You can also see political divides—surely liberals and conservatives have different ideas of what kind of giving is "responsible."



For those who are upset that Helmsley left money for the care of dogs (and her dog, Trouble, received $2 million, not the $12 million originally reported), they can hope tha the foundation breaks with Hemlsley's wishes and finds its own causes.

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Washington, D.C.: Amid this recession, what types of nonprofits are going to see the biggest drops in donations for 2009? Could we see some nonprofits simply die out for lack of donations?

Rachael Larimore: Because we do this list annually, and won't see the results of 2009's giving until next year, it's hard to say. One thing we noticed this year in preparing the Slate 60 is that donors seemed to go back to more traditional forms of philanthropy. A huge share of the charitable gifts went to education, health care (to build hospitals and fund research), and the arts. We did not see as much innovation on the list as we usually do--donors who have caught on to trends like "venture philanthropy" and newer ideas like microfinance.



As to whether nonprofits might die out, it's certainly possible. Just yesterday it was reported that Brandeis is shuttering its art museum and selling off its art work because of budget shortfalls. Brandeis is one of the many institutions that has been hurt by the Bernie Madoff scandal, its president said.

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Chicago: We are a non-profit organization for an orphaned metabolic disorder called galactosemia. Our group struggles to raise funds for research. The government does not fund research because this disorder is so rare. How do we get charitable contribution to our organization?

Rachael Larimore: I would suggest research, research, research. Here the Internet can be a valuable tool. Many foundations have a Web presence that alerts people to its goals and the kind of charity it emphasizes. If you can find a foundation that focuses not just on health-related giving, but one that cares about little-known diseases, they will be more responsive than foundations that give to cancer research, or general medical causes.



There are signs that the wealthy are taking up where the government leaves off. Two donors on this year's Slate 60, Lorry Lokey and Lawrence Ellison, donated money to stem-cell research because they were concerned about the federal government's limit on funding.

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Washington, D.C.: Interesting that so many of last year's donations came as a result of the giver dying. Didn't Bill Gates's big donations come after he realized it's more satisfying to give while you're still alive? (I seem to remember Buffett taught him that.) He seems to recognize that you can't take it with you.

Rachael Larimore: That was one of the first things we noticed on the list, was the sheer number of bequests. I have to conclude that this is because of the recession. Without trying to sound flip or callous, the adage that "you can't take it with you" rings true here. Living donors, meanwhile, seem to have been scared off, perhaps, by the flailing economy. Donors might have decided to wait until their portfolios recovered before giving away large sums, or they might have decided to make smaller gifts that didn't qualify for our list.



I'm sure many of them do find it satisfying to give while they are alive, but the economic crisis has been frightening for everyone.



One note on Bill Gates. He has not made the list in recent years, but that does not mean that he's stopped doing his important philanthropic work. A few years we changed the way we counted, and we no longer list gifts that are payments on previous pledges. Doing so results in double counting. If we did, you can imagine that Gates and Warren Buffett, who made an otherwordly pledge of $43 billion, mostly to the Gates Foundation, would be atop the list every year.

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Slate 60: Is this really the 13th year? Can you describe a little about how it got started, the methodology, and any trends that have become clear during that time?

Rachael Larimore: Whew, quite a question. I'll try to be brief. In Slate's very first year, our founding editor, Michael Kinsley, read remarks from Ted Turner in which Turner suspected the wealthy of holding onto their wealth, rather than giving it away while they were alive, because they didn't want to lose their spot on the Forbes 400 list. Kinsley thought Slate should play on that vanity and inspire the superwealthy to be competitive about giving money away, so he created the Slate 60.



The methodology has evolved greatly. Since Slate was hoping to inspire the living, for the first few years, we did not count bequests. And we counted only gifts, not pledges. The downside of the latter criteria caused us to avoid counting a huge pledge that Bill Gates used to get his foundation going.



From there on, we started counting bequests and pledges, so that we did not ignore some truly remarkable acts of philanthropy.



As for trends, there are some things that always hold true: People love to give to universities and hospitals and arts organizations. People love to have buildings named after themselves.



We've also witnessed and tracked the rise of "venture philanthropy"--giving modeled on the "venture capital" philosophy. The survivors of the various tech and dot-com bubbles have taken prominent places on our list, and they tend to be more innovative than some older, more traditional donors.



I hope that answers your question.

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Central, N.J.: Where are the "largest" contributions the combined contributions of many "small" contributors?

Rachael Larimore: In terms of the Slate 60 we track gifts made by the largest contributors and focus on individuals, so all of our contributions are from single people and not many "small" contributors.



We do have donors that focus on making smaller contributions to many, many organizations. For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave away $235 million this year, but divvied it up among 1,200 different groups. He announces some of his recipients but not others. But he did say that some of his gifts went to Johns Hopkins for a children's hospital, a group that supports cancer research, and a foundation that works to fight poverty.

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Chicago: Would you happen know how what percentage goes to charities outside the country and how much benefits the non-profits in the U.S.?

Rachael Larimore: I don't know, I'm afraid. In terms of the Slate 60, we track gifts made BY American donors, but while we can usually track down the amount of giving they've done, they are sometimes reticent to talk about all of the groups to whom they give money.



I did just find a story from 2007 that said Americans gave away $300 billion to charitable causes in 2006, and religious organizations were the top recipient, followed by education.



Interestingly, that story pointed out that Americans and the British give away the most, in comparision with GDP. But I can't tell you how much of that goes overseas.

_______________________

Rachael Larimore: I'd like to thank everyone for joining the chat today. A few closing thoughts.



One, while we can quibble about where donors send their money or wonder about their motivations, it's important to remember that the amount of giving recorded on the Slate 60 is but a fraction of the charitable giving that Americans do each year, and that the generosity can be truly staggering.



As such, I always look forward to working on the Slate 60, to see what some of our "regulars" have been doing, charity-wise, for the past year, and to see what kinds of innovative ideas some of the younger billionaires have come up with.



Thanks for chatting today, and thanks for your interest in the Slate 60.

I'm thinking of getting a big, new flat-screen TV so that my friends and I can watch the Steelers pummel the Cardinals in this Sunday's Super Bowl. But then I read that the EU wants to ban big plasma televisions because they drain so much energy. How do I choose a TV that won't kill the planet?

First off, it's a myth that the EU is "banning" plasmas—it's working on stricter energy regulations for all TV types. But, yes, TVs are getting thirstier, and the biggest, least-efficient plasmas can potentially use as much electricity as a refrigerator—traditionally the most power-hungry appliance in your house. But those are the sets at the extreme end of the market. If you shop carefully, you can get any kind of fancy new TV you want without dramatically increasing your energy consumption.

Let's first go over some terminology. There are four basic kinds of televisions. Cathode-ray tube, or CRT, televisions are the bulky machines you grew up with. CRTs are on their way out: Most major manufacturers don't even bother making them anymore. If you're looking for an upgrade, then, your options are liquid crystal displays, plasmas, and rear-projection microdisplays. Each uses a different method to produce images, with varying aesthetic results. The term flat screen simply refers to the size and shape of the machine; flat screens can be either LCD or plasma. (Rear-projection TVs, which are generally only available in very large sizes, are flatter than old-fashioned TVs but too heavy to hang on a wall.)

On average, plasma screens use the most energy—nearly three times as much per square inch as rear-projection TVs and roughly 20 percent more than LCDs. This rule of thumb isn't foolproof, though, because screen size and resolution are also major factors. CRT screens, for example, use about as much energy per inch as plasma screens—that's why a clunky CRT computer monitor is less efficient than a sleek, similarly sized LCD model.

Ten years ago, the average American color TV used 137 kilowatt hours per year, assuming seven hours of average daily use. An energy-efficient 42-inch LCD might require roughly double that amount—this Phillips model, which received the best energy rating in its category in CNET's extensive testing, clocks in at 233 kilowatt hours per year. A gain of 100 kilowatt hours isn't worth too much hand-wringing, considering that the average American household uses about 10,000 kilowatt hours annually. On the other hand, choose the least-efficient LCD on CNET's list—this 65-inch Sharp—and you're looking at a much uglier 1,491 kilowatt hours a year, or about 1.1 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent.

So where does this leave you, sports fan, standing there clueless in your local Best Buy? If your happiness truly depends on getting a massive TV—55 inches or larger—a rear-projection unit is the way to go. This 61-inch Samsung model will use a relatively dainty 437 kilowatt hours a year, assuming seven hours of daily use. Since rear-projection TVs are being pushed out of the market by plasmas and LCDs, now's the time to get one. By next year, they might be gone.

Otherwise, the Green Lantern suggests buying the smallest, lowest-resolution LCD you can live with—and keeping it for as long as possible. Because televisions last for about 10 years, the most significant environmental costs stem from electricity use on the consumer end rather than on the manufacturing end. But if you trade up at every Super Bowl, you'll quickly negate the benefits of choosing an energy-efficient model. So be realistic about your techno-lust: Don't scrimp on inches or clarity if it means you'll be back in the store in two years.

In choosing your specific TV, consult CNET's consumption ratings and look for models that meet the latest Energy Star 3.0 specifications. And when you do choose your new set, make sure you recycle the old one.

Of course, you can easily blow all that work if you get the thing home and then don't use it properly. Don't leave the set on in the background all day—that will double its electrical diet. And don't forget the energy costs associated with your components, like cable boxes and video game consoles, which many people forget to turn off when not in use. Your PlayStation 3 will guzzle about as much energy as this 46-inch LCD while you're dodging cops in Grand Theft Auto; if you leave the device on after switching the TV off, it'll continue to use the same amount. You should also keep your peripherals plugged into a single power strip, so you can turn them all off with one click—and that will have the side benefit of keeping your media center from sucking out too much standby power when its components are turned off but still plugged in.

You also need to consider the picture setting. Most high-definition televisions offer at least two options: a super-bright setting for electronics-store showrooms ("retail" or sometimes "dynamic" or "vivid") and a dimmer one for standard home use. The difference between the two can be huge—CNET found that this 50-inch Panasonic plasma used almost three times as much energy in "vivid" mode as it did in standard: 1,366 kilowatt hours a year versus 488 kilowatt hours a year. While you can't expect to get such extreme savings with every set, it's always worth adjusting this setting.

Finally, lots of recent press reports have focused on the use of nitrogen triflouride (NF₃), a highly potent greenhouse gas, in the manufacture of "flat-screen TVs." (Actually, they're only used in making LCDs.) The Green Lantern agrees that NF₃ deserves more monitoring, especially now that greater amounts of it have been discovered in the atmosphere than previously estimated. But according to the University of California report that prompted the coverage, even if all the NF₃ produced annually escaped into the atmosphere, it would have only 0.44 percent as much impact on global warming as carbon dioxide does each year. Plus, NF₃ is used in all kinds of electronics; only a fraction goes toward televisions. So at least for now, the Green Lantern doesn't think NF₃ is a reason to avoid upgrading.

Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.

Of the many once-mighty American industries now on life support, from cars to banks to newspapers, few are struggling more than book publishing. Last month, the major publishing houses announced layoffs, pay freezes, and reorganizations. Even the leading publisher of Bibles—a countercyclical item if ever there was one—had to cut 10 percent of its work force.

The troubles of one print industry are spilling over into another. On Monday, Publishers Weekly laid off 7 percent of its staff, including its editor-in-chief. Today, the Washington Post confirmed a New York Times report that the Post will soon suspend "Book World," its Sunday book review supplement. The Times says that will leave only two major papers with stand-alone book supplements—the Sunday Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle Book section.

In response to the publishing world's troubles, historian and best-selling author Douglas Brinkley has floated what may be the most improbable bailout yet: a federal subsidy for book reviews. Brinkley told the Times, "Like public television, I think book review sections almost need to get subsidized to keep the intellectual life in America alive. … So if we can do that for radio and we could do it for television, why can't we do it for the book industry, which is suffering terribly right now?"

My heart goes out to my friends in the publishing world, and I'll miss "Book World" as much as the next guy. But if there's one stimulus idea that could put a smile back on Republican faces, Brinkley may have found it. A subsidy for critics would have every Republican in Congress dusting off Teddy Roosevelt's speech about how it's not the critic who counts, but the man in the arena. And since the Obama administration is demanding a rescue package based on what works, proponents of the Brinkley plan would have to acknowledge that from Savonarola to Joyce to Solzhenitsyn, the track record of government-sponsored criticism is not good.

Not that Republicans haven't put forward their own misguided literary stimulus plans over the years. At the height of the Gingrich revolution, Newt proposed paying students in housing projects $2 for every book they read. Ironically, his plan fell flat because of doubts that the government could be sure students had finished reading the books they got paid to read.

In the mid-1980s, before he founded Slate, Michael Kinsley came up with an ingenious scheme to solve both problems at once: stimulate the purchase of books and verify that buyers actually read them. Kinsley went into bookstores around Washington and inserted coupons redeemable for $5 in the back pages of trendy political best sellers. No readers ever claimed the prize, which he took as proof that people in Washington buy books to say they did rather than to read them. Kinsley's scheme proved how difficult it is to get the incentives right: The books were shovel-ready, but the stimulus was too back-loaded.

For the book world, like the auto industry and the newspaper business, the sharp economic downturn is accelerating painful changes that were already under way and were bound to hit in the next decade, anyway. Before the slump, Amazon and other online retailers put many independent booksellers out of business. Even if Tim Noah is right that Kindle sales aren't what Amazon claims, the ability to download any book instantly for less money will transform the way books are priced and consumed.

While the big publishing houses are struggling, the self-publishing industry is going strong. Books are the new blog: According to the New York Times, "The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them." Now you can upload your magnum opus to be published almost as easily as you can upload digital photos to print your own scrapbook or calendar.

At this rate, the entire literary experience will be like flying Southwest Airlines: If you want a book, you will have to write it yourself, publish it yourself, download it onto your Kindle, and read it yourself—and from now on, you'll even have to review it yourself.

Even so, this need not mean the end of the world for the publishing business. Industry pioneer Peter Osnos—who just published an off-the-shelf, easy-to-finish book that could single-handedly turn around the entire publishing slump if enough people decided to buy it right now—runs a project to help publishers make books available in a host of new ways, from e-books to printing-on-demand. Today, publishers spend a fortune to print twice as many books as they need, only to throw unpurchased ones away. New ways to deliver books will cut costs and make it easier to match consumer demand, which is good news for all authors, not just best-selling ones.

In its own way, the Bush administration tried its best to prime the publishing pump. Last month, Karl Rove revealed that he and Bush spent the past three years in a furious competition to see who could read the most books. It started, fittingly, with Team of Rivals. In 2006, the year Republicans lost the Congress, Rove out-read Bush 110-95. Rove went on to win the next two years, 76-51 and 64-40. That's an astonishing 436 books, which means Gingrich owes Bush $372 and Rove $500.

Obama and his team could meet or exceed Bush's speed-reading pace, but such a heavy course load comes at some cost. For 2008 alone, the $700 billion Treasury bailout package works out to $6.7 billion per Bush-Rove volume.

In any case, Obama doesn't need Douglas Brinkley's book review bailout plan or a nightstand groaning with new books to turn the business around. As the most successful author ever elected to the White House, Obama could save the publishing industry with the stroke of a pen—just by writing a book a year for the rest of his presidency. We wouldn't even need those $5 coupons.

Hi, Troy,

Gossiping about Oscar nominations during this historic inauguration week feels sort of like being one of the skanks passing notes in the back of the junior-high classroom while the star civics student gives a prizewinning oration. But you know what? He's going to be up there talking for four years, and Oscar season only lasts for one brief, sparkling, tawdry moment. So let's hide a movie magazine in our civics textbooks and skank out.

Scanning the list of nominees, I find myself in the odd position of feeling indignant on behalf of a movie I didn't like much, Revolutionary Road. I don't think I would mind this handsomely mounted yawner getting what amounts to a jumbo-sized dis—Leo not up for best actor, Mendes not up for best director, Justin Haythe not up for best adapted screenplay, the movie itself ignored for best picture—if it weren't for the alarming number of accolades beings heaped on Revolutionary Road's evil twin, The Reader. Everyone knew Kate would get a best-actress nod, and as a five-time loser, she still seems likely to win the category. But it somehow besmirches her honor to be recognized for the execrable Reader (aka Boohoo, I Bonked an Illiterate Nazi). And the fact that BIBAIN also snapped up noms for best adapted screenplay, best director, and best picture (it made a lot of critics' lists for worst movie of the year, and with good reason) only rubs salt into the wound. I guess Ricky Gervais, whose presentation at the Globes last week was the ceremony's high point, was right: Do a Holocaust film, and the awards will come.

What else? Masked fanboys everywhere must be blogging portentously in Gothic font about the lack of recognition for The Dark Knight. No best-picture nomination (gotta make room for those illiterate Nazis!), no best-director nod for Christopher Nolan or original screenplay for his brother, Jonathan. Indeed, the only nontechnical award the Caped Crusader is up for is best supporting actor for Heath Ledger. Which may be the ceremony's only real lock: The only surer route to Oscar credibility than making a Holocaust movie is being dead. In all due respect, Ledger's performance reigned—but so did Robert Downey Jr.'s in Tropic Thunder, which earned him that movie's only nomination. (What, no best makeup?) The total Gran Torino shutout seems to indicate some degree of Clint backlash, though Eastwood's The Changeling did wedge its way into the best-actress category (Angelina: "I want my son! Where is my son? This is not my son. Find my son.") as well as best cinematography and art direction.

Slumdog Millionaire, with 10 nominations (second only to Benjamin Button's 13), seems positioned to Hoover up every award in sight by virtue of being the cute, inoffensive crowd pleaser that no one hates (me included—I walked out with a warm glow that only gradually congealed into faint annoyance). Slumdog, and I mean this kindly, is the grandma movie in the lineup, and a lot of academy members vote the grandma ticket. Among only three nominees for best song, two are from Slumdog, which guarantees a couple of rollicking Bollywood-style production numbers at the ceremony. (But also seems likely to split the best-song vote, making Peter Gabriel's Wall-E ballad the default winner.) Would it have killed them to recognize Springsteen's lovely, spare theme for The Wrestler? Troy, do you have any three-legged dogs in this fight?

Dana

Hey, Dana—

Yes, we're skanks, agreed—yet I sense a symmetry between this morning's glossy announcements and Tuesday night's Obamathon. If you take away the Obamas' wedding-reception dancing, the made-for-TV balls played, in all, like a long and grinding awards show, complete with emotional reaction shots, self-laudatory mood, and Kanye West in an overly dandyish tuxedo.

I cannot shed a tear over the omission of Revolutionary Road; I have avoided seeing the film and am eager to take its snubbing as a sign that it's safe to continue avoiding such a patent sack of pretty, petty maundering. However, I shed several tears laughing at your alternate title for Stephen Daldry's The Reader—with The Hours, that director took an almost decent novel inspired by a modern classic and turned it into A Special Womanly Sadness. Daldry has something more valuable to the Academy than artistic vision: a knack for The Prestige. His three films have earned a total 17 Oscar nominations. Next on Daldry's plate is an adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel partly about escaping the Holocaust using magic tricks, so Michael Chabon's friends can go ahead now and send him a note of congratulations. Or condolences.

Yes, agreed, Slumdog Millionaire seems to have the momentum. The movie itself is all momentum, giddily and sometimes wonderfully—but how do you suppose its controlled rush will sit with the grandma set? And how many voters will join reasonable people in finding its hybrid of Dickensian melodrama and Bollywood melodrama a little too melodramatic? If I had a best-picture vote, I'd cast it for Milk. It's the squarest movie Gus Van Sant has ever made and not even his best of the year—that'd be Paranoid Park, about manslaughter and sinking dread and skate punks more graceful than gliding fish—but you take what you can get.

Besides, the morning offered a few glimmers of justice. With Melissa Leo's visibility raised by her best-actress nod for Frozen River, one excellent performer won't need to clock in so often on run-of-the-mill police procedurals. From my perspective, the best news of the morning was Penelope Cruz's nomination for her Frida-Kahlo-as-Sophia-Loren squalling in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as I'd vowed to quit watching movies if that perfect turn went neglected. It was nice for Richard Jenkins to get a nomination for The Visitor and even nicer that the movie was otherwise ignored, it being a middling entertainment about a white guy who has his soul restored by some brown people—less coherent than Henderson the Rain King, though notably less creepy than Baz Luhrmann's current ad for Australian tourism.

I notice that you didn't say anything about Frost/Nixon. Is that because no one is saying anything about Frost/Nixon outside of the immediate hearing of Grazer/Howard?

Hold that thought for a month.

Yours,

Troy

Dear Troy,

Don't misunderstand me on Revolutionary Road—I'm neither defending its artistic merit nor lamenting its under-recognition, and if it had earned a bunch of nods, I wouldn't be hollering "Whoo-hoo!" but mumbling "That figures." I guess I'm just puzzled at The Reader having barged its unsubtle way into so many big categories. If academy voters want to reward Kate Winslet for her entire body of work (and why shouldn't they, even if 33 is a bit young to start bemoaning your long-overdue Oscar), why overlook her obvious blue-chip project of the year, a beautifully crafted if somewhat lifeless movie, in favor of the morbid pandering of The (even more lifeless) Reader? The most likely answer—that a majority of academy voters simply enjoy morbid pandering for its own sake—is so dispiriting that I'd prefer to leave this an open question.

So, you're one of those people who thinks Paranoid Park is the great Gus Van Sant movie of 2008. There were a few of them at every year-end critics' meeting I attended, and I confess that I half-suspected they were just being deliberately contrarian. Not that Paranoid Park, a grim little young-adult morality tale set in the skate-rat culture of the Pacific Northwest, was a bad movie—just so slight that it disappeared from my memory within weeks of seeing it. The ambitious, sprawling, large-spirited Milk, on the other hand, is unforgettable. (And though it is a conventional biopic in some respects, can you really call it Van Sant's "squarest movie"? Wouldn't that award have to go to Good Will Hunting?) I'm with you: If I had a vote to cast for best picture out of these nominees, it would go to Milk. (But for best director, I might choose The Wrestler's Darren Aronofsky, who wasn't even nominated.)

As for Frost/Nixon: Like Doubt, it was a filmed play that didn't try to be more than that. (Well, in Doubt's case, director/playwright John Patrick Shanley tried a bit too hard but remained stage-bound.) Still, I enjoyed every dishy, talky, stagy moment of both Frost/Nixon and Doubt—and, as a theater-buff friend of mine likes to rant, what's so wrong with filming a play? Can't one of cinema's many tasks be to record theatrical performances that are worth preserving? Ron Howard is never going to give Renoir or Ozu a run for their money, but Frost/Nixon makes perfectly respectable filler for the best picture category (though it won't win), and Frank Langella's magisterial turn as Nixon certainly seems at home in the best actor category (though I'm pulling for Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn—Penn's performance is my favorite of the year, and wouldn't you like to see Rourke's acceptance speech?).

What gets on my nerves about the marketing of Slumdog Millionaire is the whole "little indie that could" rhetoric. That's annoying enough when applied to movies that are legitimate sleepers; still, at least Little Miss Sunshine and Juno were films by little-known directors that attracted larger and more loyal followings than anyone expected. But Danny Boyle is a long-established and popular British filmmaker who's had many hits in the United States (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, A Life Less Ordinary), and he's working with a cast of actors that includes Indian superstars Irrfan Khan and Anil Kapoor. If people want to laud the movie, fine, but let's not pretend it was constructed from duct tape and spit by the Little Match Girl.

Now, Frozen River—there's a movie that just about was constructed from duct tape and spit, shot on digital camera in rural New York State by first-time writer/director Courtney Hunt. I was very happy to see Melissa Leo get a nod for her fine performance as an impoverished single mother who starts smuggling immigrants across the U.S.-Canadian border to support her family. But I was thrilled, and surprised, to see Hunt's name appear in the best original screenplay lineup. Truth be told, I seldom think about the Oscars in terms of who "deserves" what—as Hamlet said, "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" (That line has always struck me as the setup for a Mae West-style riposte along the lines of "Hon, you can use me after dessert anytime.") The formula for winning an Academy Award is such a mysterious algorithm, some unquantifiable mix of strategy, luck, and the prevailing taste of the moment, that usually, to paraphrase the real Mae West, goodness has nothing to do with it. But when the name of an unknown talent like Hunt pops up on these nomination lists, you remember that even the academy, every once in a while, is capable of making the right call.

Go ahead, burst my bubble,

Dana

Dana,

I'm sticking to my guns about the relative squareness of Good Will Hunting and Milk, despite the maudlin qualities of the earlier movie—and, indeed, of any movie in which the hero must journey into the hairy arms of Robin Williams for a nurturing hug. The limitation of Milk is that its narrative follows Harvey Milk-as-martyred-saint with a grandeur so sweeping that his humanity sometimes gets brushed aside. When Penn and Van Sant show us the man himself, the film sings, but isn't he more often a symbol? And doesn't such a presentation traffic, at least a little bit, in the "morbid pandering" you shudder to think the academy adores? That august body will generally prefer the blare of any opera to the muted sound of a fine chamber piece. Maybe this is one reason why Angelina Jolie made the cut for her archetypal gnashing of the teeth in Changeling and why Sally Hawkins, a superbly realistic woman in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, did not.

Which bring us to the other Harvey of the hour. In yesterday's most scorching Oscar-nomination piece, Nikki Finke joined you and an overwhelming majority of sane people in expressing bewilderment at The Reader's big haul. The Weinstein Co. distributes the film, and some industry types are chalking up its success as another triumph of a storied awards-season machine. (Among the other wonders of Miramax's glory days, Weinstein once wrangled five nominations for Chocolat, that saccharine trifle equating human warmth with hot cocoa.) Finke, however, thinks the nominating votes for The Reader are actually votes against Weinstein: "This is a sympathy vote for Scott Rudin and Stephen Daldry and Kate Winslet for having to put up with that nasty oaf during the tortured post-production and release of the movie." The analysis may or may not withstand scrutiny, but the fierceness is stunning.

But not quite so stunning as your cynicism about Slumdog Millionaire's promotional life as "the little indie that could." Don't you know that Slumdog, like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno before it, is the property of News Corp.'s Fox Searchlight? And that News Corp. has long been admired as the Little Conglomerate That Could? How could you fail to be moved by an underdog story like that?

Finally, in saying you'd choose the unnominated Darren Aronofsky as best director, you open up a bottomless can of worms. This would be the place to start prattling on about whether the academy will ever grow unstuffy enough to recognize a superb cartoon like Wall-E in the best-picture category and whether it will ever get cool enough to nominate a complicated cartoon like Waltz With Bashir in the best-animated-feature-film category. The prattling would never stop, and we'd never have time to devote attention to the crucial matter of how best-original-song nominee M.I.A. will deploy her hipster-princess sense of style on the red carpet this Feb. 22.

Until then, I leave you to ponder who should accept the best-supporting-actor award Heath Ledger has been guaranteed to win. Director Christopher Nolan? Joker emeritus Jack Nicholson? The quartet of worthy co-nominees?

Yours,

Troy

"You wanted to see the real India? Here it is," the young Indian hero of Slumdog Millionaire tells an American couple, right after they find that their rental car has been stripped for parts. The winking come-on of Danny Boyle's Oscar-nominated hit is precisely that—see the real India—but this is a movie with a conveniently fluid notion of reality. In this fairytale vision of squalid poverty, the slums of Mumbai are bathed in golden light, and hardscrabble lives are energized by jacked-up camerawork and the cool, cosmopolitan pop of M.I.A. on the soundtrack. We see the real-world horrors that might befall a kid from these parts—begging syndicates, religious violence, abusive cops—but experience them simply as plot contrivances, hurdles to be cleared as we wait for him to get the girl and go from rags to riches while he's at it.

Slumdog is nothing if not a transglobal movie—funded with British and American money, shot entirely in India by a British director with a largely Indian cast and crew, from a script by a British writer adapting a novel by a London-born Indian author—and it's instructive to compare the reactions from around the world.

Premiering at the big North American film festivals at Telluride and Toronto last fall, Slumdog was crowned an underdog Oscar contender, a film that could go from barely getting a release (its original distributor, Warner Independent, folded last year) to the ultimate Hollywood jackpot, just as its hero, Jamal, makes his way from the slums to the biggest prize on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.

While the film won near-unanimous praise when it opened here in November, in the United Kingdom, thanks perhaps to residual colonial guilt, there were a few more dissenting voices. A columnist at the London Times called it "poverty porn," bringing up the question of exploitation that has largely been elided in stateside discussions.

And in India, where Slumdog opened last week, the debate has been vigorous. Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, the focal point of a key scene in Slumdog (he doesn't actually appear), wondered on his blog if the film would have received as much attention had it been made by an Indian director. Some locals have questioned its selective portrait of Mumbai, which ignores the middle class. Some slum residents, meanwhile, have taken exception to being called "slumdogs" (a term invented by screenwriter Simon Beaufoy; the original novel, by Vikas Swarup, is called Q&A). Despite all this pre-release publicity and mostly positive reviews, Indian audiences have so far stayed away.

It is understandable that the conversation has taken on a more serious tone in India, which has long been sensitive to depictions, by Indians and outsiders alike, of its lower socioeconomic classes. The great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray was criticized in Parliament for "exporting poverty." When the BBC aired French director Louis Malle's Phantom India, an epic travelogue that sought to capture the contradictions and complexities of Indian society, it led to a minor international incident, culminating in the expulsion of the BBC's New Delhi bureau.

The slums in Slumdog Millionaire are brighter and livelier than any we've seen before. Boyle is a gifted stylist and, for better or worse, an indiscriminate sensualist, the kind of filmmaker capable of finding tactile pleasure wherever he looks, from the junkie deliriums of Trainspotting to the cosmic reveries of Sunshine. For Boyle the director, the slums are above all an endless source of motion and color. The scene that best sums up his attitude comes early in the film, when young Jamal, stuck in an outhouse but determined to obtain Amitabh Bachchan's autograph, holds his nose and (in a nod to the famous toilet-bowl interlude in Trainspotting) gleefully dives into the outdoor latrine.

Some would argue that Boyle is guilty of aestheticizing poverty. That's a loaded charge, with its own problematic assumption about what poverty should look like. I would contend that the movie's real sin is not its surfeit of style but the fact that its style is in service of so very little. The flimsiness of Beaufoy's scenario, a jumble of one-note characterizations and rank implausibility, makes Boyle's exertions seem ornamental, even decadent. Beaufoy has suggested that Mumbai itself inspired this narrative sloppiness: "Tonally it shouldn't really work," he wrote in the Guardian. "But in Mumbai, not for nothing known as Maximum City, I get away with it." This is a corollary to the all-too-easy defense that Slumdog is awash in clichés because it is an homage to Bollywood movies. The resemblance, in any case, is superficial. Some of Slumdog's melodramatic tropes are Bollywood (and Old Hollywood) staples, but the limp dance number that closes the film lacks both the technique and the energy of vintage Bollywood.

If Slumdog has struck a chord, and it certainly seems to have done so in the West, it is not because the film is some newfangled post-globalization hybrid but precisely because there is nothing new about it. It traffics in some of the oldest stereotypes of the exoticized Other: the streetwise urchin in the teeming Oriental city. (The success of Slumdog has apparently given a boost to the dubious pastime of slum tourism—or "poorism," as it's also known.) And not least for American audiences, it offers the age-old fantasy of class and economic mobility, at a safe remove that for now may be the best way to indulge in it.

Eager to crank up the zeitgeist-y significance, the marketing machine at Fox Searchlight, which ended up buying Slumdog, told New York magazine that "the film is Obama-like," for its "message of hope in the face of difficulty." (Other journalists have since picked up on the meme.) Slumdog has been so insistently hyped as an uplifting experience ("the feel-good film of the decade!" screams the British poster) that it is also, by now, a movie that pre-empts debate. It comes with a built-in, catchall defense—it's a fairy tale, and any attempt to engage with it in terms of, say, its ethics or politics gets written off as political correctness.

A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film's evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared with the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados, set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, set in inner-city Los Angeles. It's hard to fault Slumdog for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is—a simulation of "the real India," which it hasn't bothered to populate with real people—is dissonant to the point of incoherence.

Just in case the recent flood of depressing economic indicators hasn't been enough to convey how great this recession really is, the Washington Post leads with more data that came down the pipeline yesterday. Sales of new homes plunged, 13,000 U.S. jobs were slashed, corporate earnings went deep in the red, and unemployment increased. The New York Times leads with President Obama harshly criticizing Wall Street bankers for receiving nearly $20 billion in bonuses last year even as the economy collapsed. "That is the height of irresponsibility," Obama said. "It is shameful."

The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with Illinois senators voting unanimously to remove Rod Blagojevich from office. He will now go down in history as the first Illinois governor to be impeached. USA Today leads with news that the Super Bowl will mark the first time that federal behavior-detection officers will be used at a major event. The Transportation Security Administration will be sending dozens of these officers, who normally work in airports, to join forces with local police and watch for suspicious behavior among the fans entering the Raymond James Stadium on Sunday. Civil liberties advocates worry that this sets a dangerous precedent. "If we're going to use this at high-profile sporting events, why not start using it on streets?" an ACLU analyst said. The Los Angeles Times leads with a judge ordering California officials to comply with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's order that state employees take two days off a month without pay. The move would represent "the biggest rollback of the state payroll in decades."

As bad as yesterday's news on the economy was, it's expected to pale in comparison with a report on how the U.S. economy did in the last three months of 2008 that will be released this morning. Many think it will show the economy contracted by as much as a 6 percent annual rate, the worst level since 1982. But even without that report, there was plenty of bad news to go around. New home sales tumbled 14 percent in December from the month before, and it was the worst month on record since the early 1960s. Another record was reached in unemployment claims. Around 4.8 million people claimed unemployment insurance for the week ending Jan. 17, the highest level since records began to be kept in 1967. Ford also made history by recording its worst annual performance ever with a $14.6 billion loss. Analysts are now predicting the economy won't recover until late this year, but many are holding out hope that things won't get much worse.

Obama criticized Wall Street bankers after he ended a private meeting with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Saying that "they should know better," Obama sounded "more like a frustrated schoolmarm than a president," notes the Post. But it seems clear that with his harsh words Obama sought to reassure lawmakers and the public that he is willing to impose more restrictions on executive compensation before the new administration takes any further steps to rescue banks. Sen. Christopher Dodd, the chairman of the Senate banking committee, said he will call executives to testify if it turns out that any taxpayer money was involved.

After impeaching him, Illinois senators held a second vote to bar Blagojevich from public office in the state. Blagojevich's troubles are far from over as he could still face federal charges of corruption and could go to prison. After boycotting the state Senate hearings for most of the week, he gave a speech before lawmakers voted. "I have done absolutely nothing wrong," he said. Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn became the state's 41^st governor last night.

The NYT spent the day with Blagojevich and paints an interesting portrait of a man who was clearly shocked and saddened by the turn of events but remained defiant. "We should have been more selfish, not selfless," he said. "It sounds probably perverse for me to say that based on what some people are saying about me. But it's true. My family, we didn't take advantage of all these things that people do."

Following up on a WP story from earlier this week, the WSJ fronts word that administration officials are looking into implementing a multipronged approach to stabilize the financial system that would involve buying banks' toxic assets and offering a guarantee against future losses. No decision has been made yet, but what does seem clear is that the Obama administration wants to put forward a "comprehensive" effort rather than the seemingly haphazard rescues that have been the norm.

There is still one central question, though, which readers will recognize as the same question that was being asked before TARP became a household acronym: How much will the government pay for the toxic assets? Now there's finally a hint that a roadmap is being created. It seems that what is being called the government "bad bank" would buy only assets that have already been heavily marked down. The other bad assets, which are a substantial amount and would include mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, "would be covered by a type of insurance against future losses." Many worry that the government will try to do too much and put together too many disparate initiatives that won't fit together smoothly. "You have to decide, 'Should I pay Peter? Should I pay Paul?' You do have to make some choices here," a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers said.

The LAT off-leads a look at how Republicans seem to be at a loss over how to respond to Obama's stimulus package and what they should be proposing as an alternative. Individual Republicans have lots of ideas, but there is no consensus on what their priorities should be or whether the government should get involved at all. "There is not a coherent Republican message at this moment," a former GOP House member said.

The WP fronts, and everyone covers, news that the Senate passed a bill to expand health insurance to low-income children. The State Children's Health Insurance Program would continue coverage for 7 million youngsters and would also cover an additional 4 million children by 2013. Significantly, the vote was 66 to 32, with only nine Republicans joining Democrats. Many had hoped that the bill would have broad bipartisan support and that it could pave the way for discussing larger health care issues. But many Republicans dropped their support of the bill, largely because of a new provision that allows states to enroll children of legal immigrants, when an earlier compromise had limited it to those who had been in the country for more than five years.

The NYT and LAT report that Obama is considering offering Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire the position of commerce secretary. The White House denies that Obama has narrowed the list to one candidate. But if Gregg takes the job, it could prove to be a political gift to Democrats because his replacement would be chosen by New Hampshire's Democratic governor. If the seat were to go to a Democrat, and assuming Al Franken of Minnesota prevails in the ongoing court challenge, Obama's party would have a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority.

The NYT fronts, and the WP goes inside with, news that the highest-ranking CIA officer ever convicted of espionage tried to continue to sell secrets to Russia from his jail cell via his 24-year-old son. According to court papers, Harold Nicholson was after a "kind of retirement 'pension' available to him in Russia." At first he tried to use fellow inmates to pass on information, but in late 2006, he apparently turned to his son. Russia was at least partly interested in finding out details about how Nicholson got caught to learn how other agents might avoid the same fate.

In a front-page dispatch from Tampa, USAT says that Super Bowl XLIII "has become the Recession Bowl." The crowds that usually precede the biggest sporting event of the year just aren't there, and many of the usual big spenders have either canceled or pared down their parties. Playboy, for example, has canceled its party for the first time in a decade. "With so many people out of work, budgets being bad and the bailouts, it almost seemed like, 'Should we be having a big party?' " a spokeswoman said. Ticket resellers aren't seeing as much interest, and some predict that some seats could drop to face value by Sunday. "You do sense and see the difference," former Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann said. "It looks like there are a lot of athletes in town with nowhere to go."

The House approved the $819 billion stimulus package, but President Obama's efforts to bring Republicans to his side didn't pay off. The bill passed without a single Republican vote, and 11 Democrats also opposed the measure. The Los Angeles Times declares that the package is "the largest attempt since World War II to use the federal budget to redirect the course of the nation's economy." The Washington Post specifies that the price tag is larger "than the combined total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far," and the Wall Street Journal points out the cost of the bill is "almost equal to the entire cost of annual federal spending under Congress's discretion."

The New York Times notes that the lack of Republican support for the bill "seemed to echo the early months of the last Democratic administration, when President Bill Clinton in 1993 had to rely solely on Democrats to win passage of a deficit-reduction bill that was a signature element of his presidency." But USA Today says that "Obama's chance of winning GOP Senate votes next week is better." Indeed, Obama suggested that he will welcome changes to the bill in the Senate that might attract more support from Republicans. And a few Republicans hinted that they might support the final version of the bill if some changes are implemented in the Senate, suggesting the unanimous voting was a tactic to get Democrats to pay attention to their demands.

Implementing some changes requested by Republicans has already pushed the total cost of the bill in the Senate to almost $900 billion. And that's bound only to increase. The WP details that senators are preparing new amendments to the bill that include a reduction in taxes on corporate profits earned abroad and brought back to the United States. There are likely to be more amendments in the coming days as a variety of interest groups are busy clamoring for a piece of the pie. The Senate is likely to vote on the measure next week, and Democrats continue to emphasize that they want to get the package to Obama's desk by Feb. 13, before Congress goes on recess for Presidents Day.

So, what exactly is in the package? Several of the papers, particularly the WSJ, do an admirable job of trying to enumerate the main aspects of the package, and USAT provides a handy outline. But, as the LAT summarizes, it ultimately "contains an almost-bewildering array of provisions, many of them funded at all-but-unprecedented levels." Whichever way you look at it, the bill would be a major change in the way Washington goes about trying to boost the economy. As the WSJ notes, whereas the Bush administration leaned toward tax cuts that benefitted those in the middle class and above, the tax cuts in this stimulus package focus on lower-income Americans. And that's without considering the dizzying mixture of spending that makes up two-thirds of the total cost and includes both short-term and long-term projects.

In a piece inside, the WSJ highlights that the final version of the package "could include dozens of special-interest provisions" that were championed by lawmakers to help their constituents. And lobbyists are working overtime to try to get senators to throw a little bit of stimulus their way. In typical sausage-making fashion, some things were added to the bill that don't even have anything to do with the economy. For example, one Democratic lawmaker added a measure to give federal workers more whistle-blower protections.

The WP devotes a separate front-page piece to a provision in the Senate version of the package that would require "all stimulus-funded projects use only American-made equipment and goods." It is turning out to be one of the most controversial aspects of the bill as many of the largest American companies are characterizing it as a war against free trade. There are fears that if the provision stays in the bill, it would lead other countries to retaliate against U.S. companies and might encourage similar measures around the world, which could usher in a new era of protectionism.

In a front-page analysis, the NYT's David Herszenhorn says that while it's clear that some of the stimulus "will start to be felt within weeks" of Obama's signature, estimating the package's effectiveness "is a far more complex calculation requiring almost line-by-line scrutiny of the 647-page bill." The increase in unemployment benefits and food stamps would almost certainly produce a quick jolt to the economy, and the aid that would be provided to states is also generally seen as an area where the stimulus could be effective. One of the big unknowns is the infrastructure spending, because it would generally take longer to implement. That could be good if the recovery is slow, but if the economy recovers quickly, these projects "could start just in time to compete with renewed private spending."

If there is one thing that was made clear this week, it's that partisan politics are alive and well in Washington, notes the LAT in an analysis piece inside the paper. While the approval of the bill was undoubtedly a victory for the new administration, it "also marked a victory of sorts for [Rush] Limbaugh and other conservative opinion leaders." In a tactic that dutifully followed the partisan playbook, Republicans focused much of their attention on some sections of the bill that were easy to mock. Limbaugh's power was in full view yesterday as one Republican lawmaker found himself apologizing after he criticized the radio host.

In an op-ed piece in the WSJ, Limbaugh writes that the "porkulus" bill is designed to "cement the party's majority power for decades." In a funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad moment, Limbaugh urges a bipartisanship approach to the bill, saying that since Obama got around 54 percent of the vote, then that same percentage of the stimulus package should be decided by Democrats, while the rest should "be directed toward tax cuts, as determined by me." The current crisis "is an opportunity to unify people, if we set aside the politics."

Moving on to another part of the ailing economy, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said yesterday that the administration is working on a plan to "repair the financial system." Geithner didn't release any details, but the WSJ hears word from officials that the Obama administration is looking at spending another $1 trillion to $2 trillion in its attempts to bolster financial institutions. And that huge figure might be optimistic. The NYT says some estimate it may take up to $3 trillion to $4 trillion to buy up the toxic assets currently plaguing banks' balance sheets. This, of course, would mean that the administration would have to go to Congress to ask for more funds since only $350 billion of the $700 billion financial bailout is still available, and some of that has already been earmarked for certain projects.

Just because financial companies across Wall Street lost billions of dollars and asked for help from Uncle Sam, that doesn't mean they didn't pay their employees enviable bonuses. The NYT reports that the New York state comptroller revealed that employees at financial companies received around $18.4 billion in bonuses in 2008, and that's without counting stock-option awards. Although far less than recent years, it was the sixth-largest bonus season on record. It's unclear whether the companies used taxpayer money to pay for the bonuses, but it's a distinct possibility.

The Food and Drug Administration issued "one of the largest food recalls in history" yesterday when it announced that all products made from peanuts processed by Peanut Corp. of America's plant in Georgia over the last two years should be thrown out, the Post reports on Page One. The dramatic move came after investigators discovered that the plant knowingly shipped salmonella-contaminated products a dozen times in 2007 and 2008. One lawmaker said she would ask the Justice Department to investigate whether criminal charges should be filed against plant officials. Eight people have died and more than 500 people were sickened by salmonella poisoning linked to the Georgia plant.

Although Obama has been in office for barely a week, he has already managed to change White House culture, notes the NYT. A photograph showing Obama sans suit jacket in the Oval Office shocked Bush administration officials, who were always required to wear one. Obama's advisers say the president likes it warm and has cranked up the heat (um, what about that global warming thing?), but it's clear the new president is less hung up on protocol than his predecessor. He is allowing staff members to dress "business casual" on weekends, roams the halls, and comes into work later and stays later than Bush did.

The White House's new occupant "was off to a quick start in fulfilling his promise to embrace Washington's ways," as the WP puts it, when he seemed obsessed about the fact that the school his daughters attend canceled classes after a 2-inch snowfall and freezing rain. "We're going to have to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this town," Obama said. Washington transplants often complain that schools are too quick to close for snow that would barely cause a traffic jam in other parts of the country. But many Washingtonians were not amused.

"[W]elcome to Washington, President Obama," writes Jeanne McManus, a former Post editor. "And thanks for the snow advice. I eagerly await August, to see if you can 'handle' a Washington summer. Remember: It's not the heat. It's the humidity."

All the papers give front-page play to the massive economic stimulus package that will come up for a vote in the House today, which USA Today says is President Obama's "first test of the bipartisanship he pledged in his campaign." Obama visited Capitol Hill yesterday to urge Republican lawmakers to support the $825 billion stimulus plan, but most Republicans are still unconvinced even as they were careful to praise the president for listening to their concerns. The New York Times goes with a two-story lead examining the stimulus package's effect on education as well as a look at how the bill would provide Democrats a fast-track way to fund many initiatives that have long been priorities for the party. The Wall Street Journal points out that the Senate version of the bill is now getting close to reaching the $900 billion mark.

The Washington Post leads with a look at how Obama's advisers are discussing several options to prop up the nation's financial system. They're all bound to be unpopular and, as a bonus, there's absolutely no guarantee that any of them will work. It seems the White House will try a combination of several programs instead of hoping that one plan provides the magic touch, which raises the risk that the response will be seen as haphazard. None of the ideas being discussed is new: a federal protection against losses backed by mortgages and loans, a new institution to buy up toxic assets, and an injection of taxpayer money into troubled firms in exchange for ownership, which could result in "nationalization in all but name." The Los Angeles Times leads with data that show more than 236,000 homes went into foreclosure in California last year, which is more than the previous nine years combined, and a record 404,000 borrowers defaulted on their payments. While previous foreclosures could mostly be blamed on people who took on mortgages they couldn't afford, now it looks like many of those who are defaulting are doing so because of the loss of a job or income in a state that now has 9.3 percent unemployment.

Obama spent almost three hours yesterday in separate meetings with House and Senate Republicans where he urged them to come together to support the stimulus package. "I do hope that we can all put politics aside and do the American people's business right now," Obama said. But Republican lawmakers were unconvinced. Republican lawmakers said the plan was too expensive and complained that Democratic congressional leaders had shut them out of the process. The White House made it clear that it is ready to compromise on some issues, and Democrats said they would drop a provision from the House bill that would have increased funding for contraception and family-planning services. The administration also suggested it would agree to a $69 billion proposal that would allow millions of Americans to avoid having to pay the so-called alternative minimum tax, which was folded into the Senate version of the bill.

The package that House members are expected to vote on today includes $550 billion in spending and $275 billion in tax cuts. Obama once again told Republicans he's willing to consider including more tax cuts for small businesses, but most GOP lawmakers signaled that wouldn't be enough to change their minds. Regardless, the Democratic majority in Congress makes it virtually certain that the package will be approved. Even if he didn't win them over yesterday, Obama may have wanted to build goodwill for a later date. The WP notes inside that the stimulus "represents the first step" in a "complex process that could cost many hundreds of billions in additional funding, and is likely to require Republican cooperation."

The WP's Dana Milbank says that while Obama "ushered in the post-partisan era" last week, it now looks like "the post-post-partisan era is already upon us."

In one of its lead stories, the NYT details that the $150 billion in new federal spending on "nearly every realm of education" would "more than double the Department of Education's current budget." This massive influx of aid has the potential to dramatically change the role that the federal government plays in education, an area normally controlled by state and local governments. Many are also raising concerns about how school districts will be able to spend so much money so quickly and wonder what will happen when the money ends in two years.

The NYT also notes that the stimulus package isn't simply a way to provide a boost to the economy, but also a way for Democrats to rewrite "the social contract with the poor, the uninsured and the unemployed, in ways they have long yearned to do." Quite simply, the package would allow Democrats to quickly fund programs without hearings or protracted debate.

That's not to say all Democrats are happy with the stimulus package. In a front-page piece, the WP says some Democrats think Obama is losing a golden opportunity to remake the American economy. Some say the plan should be split into two parts, one to provide immediate stimulus and the other, which would take longer to formulate, to look into ways that the economy can be transformed. "We need to think of it as a first step," Rep. Jay Inslee said. "The question is: Are we going to step up to the plate to sustain this effort?" The problem is that many Democrats fear that the appetite for new initiatives will wane after the stimulus bill passes.

"It's raining money," said Republican Rep. Michael C. Burgess. And all that cash has resulted in what the WSJ calls "a rough-and-tumble competition" between lobbyists from a variety of industries, including concrete, asphalt, shoes, and cattle, to name a few.

A key question of the stimulus package is how quickly the massive cash infusion will be able to make its way through the economy. The Congressional Budget Office released a report yesterday saying that 64 percent of the money would be spent within the first 18 months but also noted that due to interest payments its total cost could be more than $1 trillion.

The NYT's David Leonhardt writes while that pace may be "slower than ideal … it isn't terrible." Overall, the package "does pretty well by several important yardsticks." But the "one major flaw" that Leonhardt identifies is that it just isn't very original. Obama came into office pledging to change Washington, and the package could have gone a long way to change the way the government spends money. In the end, we're mostly getting a bunch of spending on existing programs. While that may reflect "the realities of political negotiations … it still is a missed opportunity in a few instances."

Amid all the hoopla surrounding Republican resistance to the stimulus package, it may have been easy to miss what a rare sight it is to see a president travel to Capitol Hill and even talk to reporters from the same spot where senators often hold their news conferences. When a president needs to talk to lawmakers, he usually does it on his turf. For a second "it might have seemed that Mr. Obama was back in the Senate," notes the NYT.

Another day, another lobbyist joins the Obama administration. USAT gives big play to news that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner chose a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as his chief of staff. The announcement came on the same day as Geithner announced new rules that aim to prevent the influence of lobbyists on the department. Patterson signed a pledge to recuse himself from issues relating to his former employer, undoubtedly a difficult proposition considering that Goldman Sachs received $10 billion from the financial bailout program, which, of course, is overseen by the Treasury.

The NYT gets word that the Obama administration intends to be much tougher on Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Whereas the Bush administration largely saw Karzai as an ally, he "is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan," reports the NYT, largely due to the rampant corruption that is present in his government. The new administration plans to focus on working more with provincial leaders while concentrating on waging the war against insurgents and leaving much of the nation-building to European allies. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called Afghanistan "our greatest military challenge" and warned against overly ambitious goals.

Most of the papers front the death of John Updike, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction who published more than 50 books over a career that spanned five decades. Although in recent years he had concentrated more on essays and art criticism, he will best be remembered as a chronicler of the middle class in America's small towns and suburbs. Updike "was arguably this country's one true all-around man of letters," writes the NYT's Michiko Kakutani, "a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization." The WP's Henry Allen says Updike "remains arguably the American writer who has evoked reality brilliantly more often than any other." He was 76 and had lung cancer.

In the NYT's op-ed page, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt write that newspapers should take a cue from colleges and universities and become "nonprofit, endowed institutions." Not only would it save newspapers, but the change would also shield them "from the economic forces that are now tearing them down." In addition, it would promote journalistic independence since newspapers would no longer face pressures from advertisers or stockholders. "Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance."

It was a depressing Monday for tens of thousands of workers as several big U.S. companies announced massive job cuts that illustrate how the Great Recession is hitting almost every corner of the labor market. The Washington Post says U.S. employers cut more than 55,000 jobs in what it calls "a staggering one-day toll." The New York Times reports that more than 75,000 jobs around the world disappeared yesterday. The Los Angeles Times adds it all up and notes that 187,550 jobs have been slashed so far this month, which is more than double the number in January of last year. And the pain is far from over. USA Today highlights that "far more job cuts are likely" in the near future, and some economists expect 3 million people will lose their jobs this year.

The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with the Senate confirming Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary with a 60-34 vote. Now that Geithner is in place, the Obama administration is expected to quickly outline its plan to prop up the financial system, which is expected to have a strong focus on helping homeowners. As early as today, Geithner is expected to announce new rules to limit the influence of lobbyists and special interests in determining who will get help from Uncle Sam.

Job losses are nothing new as companies have been laying off workers for more than a year. But these losses were once concentrated in companies related to the housing and finance industries. "Now the ax is falling across large swaths of manufacturing, retailing and information technology," points out the NYT. The WP notes that 22 of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones industrial average have cut jobs since October. No other company cut more positions yesterday than Caterpillar, which announced that 15,000 jobs would be eliminated by the end of this week and 5,000 more by the end of the first quarter. Among the other companies that announced job cuts were Sprint Nextel, which shed 8,000; Home Depot, which cut 7,000; and Texas Instruments, which made 3,400 positions disappear.

And that's only part of the equation. USAT points out that while the huge numbers from big firms may hog the headlines, smaller companies are also hurting and many are also resorting to layoffs in order to stay afloat. Indeed, in a front-page story about the layoff woes at a tile factory in Ohio, the WSJ notes that "tiny firms … have an outsized role in employment." More than half of private-sector workers are employed by companies that have fewer than 500 employees.

The new round of job cuts increased the pressure on Washington to pass the economic stimulus package. "These are not just numbers on a page," President Obama said as he urged lawmakers to act quickly. "These are working men and women whose lives have been disrupted. We owe it to each of them, and to every single American, to act with a sense of urgency and common purpose." But it's becoming increasingly unclear whether even a massive stimulus would be enough to get companies to start hiring.

Economists estimate that the stimulus package would save or create somewhere around 3 to 4 million jobs within the next two years. But, as the LAT points out, 2.6 million jobs were slashed last year, and 2 million more are expected to go the same way during the first six months of the year. The package "is as much psychological, to get people to think that even if we're in a recession, it's going to be temporary so I don't have to lay people off," an economist tells the LAT. The NYT also notes that even if business does improve in the next few months, it's unlikely that companies will rush to rehire workers because layoffs often spur companies to restructure their business models. "There is nothing in the economic tea leaves that suggest someone is going to be hiring," one economist tells the WP, "every aspect of this economy is in a free-fall."

Amidst all the depressing economic developments, there was a bit of good news from the unlikeliest of places: housing. The WSJ goes high with new figures that show U.S. home sales increased 6.5 percent from November, representing the biggest one-month jump in almost seven years. But no one thinks this means the market is headed for a comeback since it seems clear that buyers are taking the plunge largely due to the sharp decline in prices as sales of foreclosed homes were partly responsible for this surge. In all, 45 percent of homes sold in December were characterized as "distressed sales."

The WP fronts a harrowing account of the Israeli attack on Zaytoun, in the Gaza Strip, where at least 29 members of one family were killed over a period of two weeks. What happened in Zaytoun has become particularly significant in the narrative of the Israeli incursion into Gaza because the Red Cross concluded that by preventing rescue efforts to reach the area for several days, Israel "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law." Survivors say there is no way Israeli soldiers didn't know that wounded civilians were in desperate need of help. In fact, some say they tried to communicate the gravity of the situation to Israeli soldiers but were summarily ignored.

In a piece inside, the NYT says that even though the vast majority of Israelis supported the Gaza invasion, it looks like those who planned and executed the military operation aren't the ones who will benefit politically. With two weeks to go before elections, Israelis appear to have shifted "further to the right" in what appears to be a general belief that the government needs to take an even stronger stance against Hamas. Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party has kept its lead, and support has grown for the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party.

While most of the attention on the young administration has focused on its plan to close down the detention center at Guantanamo, the NYT points out that Obama has another tough decision to make regarding the prison that currently holds 600 detainees at Bagram in Afghanistan. By all accounts, the living conditions at Bagram make Guantanamo look like a nice place to be. Most of the prisoners at Bagram are suspected Taliban fighters who are being held indefinitely without charge. The detainee population in Bagram has increased "nearly sixfold" over the past four years, partly because the Bush administration largely stopped sending prisoners to Guantanamo in late 2004.

The LAT fronts the results of a depressing new study that says global warming will be with us for a long time to come, no matter what we do. Even if every country in the world suddenly decided to drastically cut back its carbon dioxide levels, it would still take 1,000 years or more to reverse changes in the climate that have already begun to take place. "People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years," the study's lead author said. "That's not true."

The recession may be in full swing, but that doesn't mean companies aren't willing to shell out as much as $3 million for 30 seconds of airtime during this year's Super Bowl, reports the LAT. Viewers will even be able to watch 2.5 minutes of commercials with special 3-D glasses. "There is no platform anywhere in the world that is as effective as this one," said Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation. "The Super Bowl is the single greatest shared American event."

But TV advertising on any regular old day is drying up. The WP's Paul Farhi points out that TV viewers in prime time are being subjected to an unusual number of infomercials. "It won't make most economists' radar screens," writes Farhi, "but the rise of such ads might be a leading economic indicator." As the price of airtime continues to plummet now that banks, automakers, and car dealers are cutting back, viewers are getting used to seeing the likes of Vince Offer of ShamWow fame.

If you're looking to charter a private jet for the Super Bowl weekend, there are still plenty available, notes the NYT. "It's sure not 2008 any more," the chief executive officer of Jets.com said.

USAT reports on a new study that suggests rhythm could be an innate ability that is "hard-wired into the human brain." Scientists discovered that babies as young as two days old can detect a musical pattern and appear to notice when the pattern is broken. Although further study is needed to come to any set conclusions, it could change the long-held idea that babies learn about music by listening to adults.

The Washington Post leads with word that Congress is likely to give the Federal Reserve broad new powers so that it can regulate the nation's entire financial system. The move would allow the Fed to demand information from a wide range of companies to make sure no one is taking on excessive risk that could imperil the financial system. The New York Times leads, and the Los Angeles Times off-leads, with news that President Obama will direct the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider granting permission to California and 13 other states to set auto-emissions and fuel-efficiency standards that are stricter than current federal limits. The move would represent a sharp break from the Bush administration, which had rejected states' requests for separate emissions standards.

USA Today leads with new Pentagon figures that reveal the number of roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan hit a record last year. The number of improvised explosive devices that exploded or were discovered increased by 45 percent, while the number of coalition troops that were killed by bombs more than doubled to 161. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide news box with a look at how business groups are stepping up efforts to get more tax credits into the stimulus plan, as a number of Republican leaders say they will not support the legislation as it is currently written. Obama will be heading to Capitol Hill this week to try to convince reluctant Republicans to support the measure. The LAT leads locally with a look at how there seems to be broad agreement among California lawmakers to cut $6 billion in spending to help deal with the state's massive budget shortfall.

While a number of federal agencies currently oversee the financial industry, none of them have a complete picture of the system as a whole. This blind spot became evident last year, when it wasn't until the last minute that anyone in the government realized the effect that the collapse of American International Group would have on the economy. Now, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank wants the Fed to be in charge of making sure the whole financial system is stable.

Although there's some talk that another agency could take on the role, it seems most experts agree there's little choice but to make the Fed responsible. That doesn't mean everyone likes the idea. There's some worry the move would concentrate too much power in one agency and could result in the Fed losing its much-cherished independence. And there's also concern that managing such a huge task could lead the Fed to take its eye off its main responsibility, which is to manage the nation's money supply.

Even though Obama won't directly order that the Bush administration rejection of separate-state standards for auto emissions be reversed, there's little doubt that the EPA will do just that after it completes a formal review process. The move would represent a defeat for the auto industry, which has vehemently fought against allowing different states to set their own rules and would have to invest heavily in new technologies to meet the stricter standards. By making the announcement so early in the new administration, "Obama is sending a signal about the importance his administration places on environmental matters," declares the LAT. But in failing to instruct the EPA immediately to grant the waiver to California, the new president is also indicating that he understands that the auto industry has concerns.

The Pentagon is planning to send 10,000 new armored vehicles to Afghanistan in order to deal with the heightened threat of roadside bombs. "We're losing the war," one military analyst tells USAT. "This shows a greater capacity on the part of the Taliban and other insurgents to cause more death, destruction and challenges to the legitimacy of the Afghan government." Indeed, as USAT mentions and the LAT notes in a front-page piece, Vice President Joe Biden yesterday warned that fighting in Afghanistan will become more intense and "there will be an uptick" in casualties.

As the new administration prepares to send more troops into Afghanistan, the LAT and NYT remind readers that they'll be going into a complex situation in which the distrust between locals and U.S.-led forces appears to be growing every day. There was a huge outcry yesterday in Afghanistan over a U.S. operation that the American military says killed 15 militants, while Afghan officials insist 16 civilians were killed. And that's only the latest example. Earlier this month, the U.S. military said 32 Taliban insurgents were killed in a nighttime raid, while Afghans say 13 civilians had been killed.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that any American operations that kill civilians end up "strengthening the terrorists" and he called for greater cooperation with local security forces. But American troops aren't too eager to share much information about future actions, out of fear that it would all get back to the Taliban.

The WSJ gives big front-page play to an in-house analysis revealing that lending fell at many of the country's largest banks even after they received a huge infusion of cash courtesy of Uncle Sam. Lending at 10 of the 13 biggest beneficiaries of the Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program fell 1.4 percent in what is seen as a clear signal that the plan hasn't been effective in thawing the frozen lending markets. "It has failed," a finance professor tells the WSJ. "Basically we have dropped a huge amount of money ... and we have nothing to show for what we actually wanted to happen."

In an analysis, the NYT's David Sanger writes that Democratic leaders are quietly looking at the possibility of nationalizing some of the country's biggest banks. Of course, no one inside the new administration is even uttering nationalization in public, and they're busy discussing other alternatives. But some think it might be the only way to get American financial institutions to start lending again. While some insist that nationalization would help the United States avoid Japan's mistakes of the 1990s, any suggestion that this could happen in the United States would certainly be met with stiff resistance from many lawmakers. "We think of [nationalization]," a financial historian said, "as something foreigners do to us, not something we do."

The Lunar New Year begins today, and as happens every year, there is a mass exodus of Chinese who head to their hometowns for the festivities. But for many of the 200 million who want to travel at this time of year, getting home will be no easy feat. Simply getting a hold of a railroad ticket can take several days and an incredible amount of persistence. The railroad ticket business is "corrupt and staggeringly inefficient," reports the LAT, which notes it's nearly impossible to get a ticket through the official channels. "Chinese are ordinarily reluctant to criticize their country to foreign journalists, but on the subject of railroad tickets they quickly let loose, often interjecting profanities."

The WP's Al Kamen reports that former President George Bush received some wonderful gifts from foreign dignitaries in 2007. French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave him a statue of a horse valued at $5,000, while Turkmenistan's president gave him a rug that is worth almost $2,000. Still, no one could top King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, who gave Bush a jewelry set valued at a cool $85,000. Sadly for Bush, he can't keep anything valued at more than $335. So perhaps former Russian President Vladimir Putin was being prescient, rather than cheap, when he decided that it would be a good idea to give Bush some books of English sonnets.

While most people fight tooth-and-nail to prevent prisons from settling into their towns, many communities have discovered they like having the inmates around and are trying to prevent them from leaving at a time when many states are consolidating and closing the facilities in order to save money, reports the WSJ. It's not that they love the inmates, exactly, as much as they love the cheap labor they provide. "Oh my goodness, gracious, they are such an asset," Selectwoman Terri-Lynn Hall of Charleston, Maine, said, "they are our public-works department."

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lead with, while the New York Times reefers, Barack Obama offering details of his economic stimulus plan. Obama said Saturday that the Democrats' package would protect unemployed workers from losing health care; help students pay for college; lower taxes and energy costs; and modernize roads, schools, and utilities. Republicans counter that it contains too much wasteful spending and too little in the way of tax cuts. But none of the reports contain any serious economic analysis of the plan.

All of the papers allow the politicians to dominate the debate over the stimulus, with the NYT and WP (which is not a fan of the package) featuring House Minority Leader John Boehner's predictable criticism. "We cannot borrow and spend our way back to prosperity," he said (for the first time in eight years). Obama, meanwhile, employed the politics of fear, warning that without his plan "a bad situation could become dramatically worse."

But the fight over the bill is largely over, with Obama telling one congressional Republican on Friday, "We just have a difference here, and I'm president." Still, as the LAT points out, the president wants to the pass the measure with at least a plausible claim of bipartisan support, while Republicans want to exert as much influence over the plan as possible without appearing obstructionist. So there may still be some small changes to the package before mid-February, when Democrats hope to pass it.

The NYT also leads with Obama and the economy, but focuses on the president's plan to tighten America's financial regulatory system. According to the Times, the administration plans "wide-ranging changes, including stricter federal rules for hedge funds, credit rating agencies and mortgage brokers, and greater oversight of the complex financial instruments that contributed to the economic crisis." Oddly, the NYT Magazine failed to ask Arthur Levitt, the former S.E.C. chief, about all this when it sat down to interview him (or at least it decided not to print his answer).

The WP reports that al-Qaida is peeved at Barack Obama. With polls showing the new president popular in the Muslim world, the terrorist group has resorted to hurling insults at him, even when they make no sense. The Post notes, "He was even blamed for the Israeli military assault on Gaza, which began and ended before he took office."

The NYT fronts a profile of Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff who, officials say, has calmed considerably. Ray Lahood, the new transportation secretary, says Emanuel has increasingly taken on the demeanor of his boss, whom he still teases—like when he told one congressman that he was too busy to talk and handed his phone to Obama.

The NYT reefers an article on the pope's reinstatement of four excommunicated bishops. The clerics are members of the Society of St. Pius X, a group which has rejected the Vatican's modernizing reforms, but which Pope Benedict has nevertheless sought to bring back into the Catholic fold. The Times does a good job of balancing analysis of the pope's troubling conservatism with the more sensational news that one of the bishops is British-born Richard Williamson, who as recently as last week denied the Holocaust.

The NYT and WP both publish reports from Kibumba, in eastern Congo, where one paper seems a little more optimistic than the other. The Times says, "If Kibumba is any indicator, the fierce rebellion in eastern Congo headed by Gen. Laurent Nkunda may be ending with his arrest." The Post agrees, but still focuses on the "prospect of more violence."

The NYT fronts an article on Swat, "a Delaware-size chunk of territory" in Pakistan, where the Taliban spreads terror over the radio, announcing the names of those they have killed and those they plan to kill.

The metaphor-happy Thomas Friedman nearly disappoints this week, but in the last sentence of his column, he manages to compare the Middle East peace process to a Rubik's Cube.

All the papers note that the pilot who landed a disabled US Airways jet safely in the Hudson River was given a hero's welcome upon his return to California on Saturday. Meanwhile, the NYT reports that the four-person staff of the Feather Identification Lab at the Museum of Natural History in Washington is trying to identify what type of bird struck the plane, causing its engines to fail. It's like a really geeky episode of CSI.

A smart, attractive man with lots of money? … The NYT Magazine's cover story tackles the age-old question: "What do women want?" But after 7,372 words and numerous clinical references to genital arousal, the answer is still frustratingly unclear. TP imagines that a similar article on what men want would be significantly shorter.

The Washington Post leads with a lightning-round survey of national economies, concluding that they're all getting worse faster than expected, particularly Britain. So is California: The Los Angeles Times leads with the state's staggering unemployment rate of 9.3 percent, up almost a percentage point from December, representing a loss of 78,000 jobs. The New York Times leads with President Barack Obama jumping into stimulus negotiations, seeking a final package that will act like jumper cables for the economy, flushing $825 billion through fast enough to make a real difference.

The Wall Street Journal leads with the news that Pfizer is set to acquire biotech giant Wyeth for a bunker-busting $65 billion, paying two-thirds of it in cash and the rest in stock. Pfizer needs the relatively debt-free company, which has several new products in development, as it faces the expiration in 2011 of patent protection on its main cash cow, Lipitor.

In meetings with both Republican and Democratic leadership teams, Obama worked to retain leadership of what could be the signature achievement of his first 100 days, putting his foot down on stimulus provisions, including tax credits for those who don't make enough money to pay income taxes. House and Senate Republicans are not united on this point or much of anything else, the NYT says, with some members continuing to fight while others—like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—try to meet Obama's attempts at compromise.* The WSJ plays up the partisan bickering of the proceedings more than the other papers, putting the hearsay "I won" comment by Obama in a subhead while the NYT and Post mention it in passing. The Journal also illustrates how although Obama was fast out of the gate in naming his Cabinet, Congress has given him more trouble than either of the last two presidents experienced. On the flip side, the Post fronts a strangely adorable picture of the thousands of new Obama appointees finding their way through federal office buildings, staffing up offices from scratch.

The NYT's off-lead story reveals that banks didn't stop asking for money after they got it, spending millions more to lobby legislators on various aspects of the bailout. That effort hasn't gone over well with some lawmakers; Sen. Dianne Feinstein took them to task for spending taxpayer dollars on lobbyists. Other lawmakers chose to lobby for their own home state banks: the Journal outs a pair of Illinois congressmen who put in an appeal for an institution that was in such bad shape that it didn't make the cut for aid, and later failed. Luckily for the banks, Congress and the president seem open to the idea of tossing even more money their way as losses continue to mount, with "trillion" on everyone's lips.

Which all makes this story about goats, which is also somehow about the Lehman collapse, almost too fantastic to digest.

Obama's commander-in-chief career has also started in earnest, with two strikes in Pakistan on suspected terrorist hide-outs. The administration is discussing tweaks to Pakistan's aid structure, which during the Bush years was heavily skewed toward the military over humanitarian funding. Meanwhile, the Post sketches out the minefield that Obama faces in dealing with Israel. As expected, he appointed former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East, whom some Israel activists fault for previous statements about the necessity of having a dialogue with the Palestinian leadership. But thus far, Obama has not broken from the Bush administration's line, repeating conditions for Hamas to meet before being considered a diplomatic partner. Hamas is just as strong as ever, despite having been bombed for 22 days straight. (Speaking of counterproductivity, check out the weekend Journal's retelling of how Israel fostered Hamas' growth from the beginning.) All of which makes it look unlikely that Obama will get around to Zimbabwe, where desperate refugees—many of them children—are fleeing to South Africa, a country that doesn't want them, either.

Following his announcement of the executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year, Obama issued another to repeal the global gag rule on federal financing for abortion providers overseas. He hasn't swung around so fast on federal funding for stem cell research, as the NYT's piece on the abortion order notes. Although the FDA just approved its first project using stem cell therapy—which does involve killing embryos—Obama is undecided as to whether to use his executive power to encourage such research or to let Congress write it into a law.

The new administration is also moving cautiously on greenhouse gas regulation: Obama is mulling what to do with an old fight left over from the Bush days, when the EPA denied California's request to place stricter limits on tailpipe emissions. Newly minted EPA administrator Lisa Jackson did not commit to a position in her confirmation hearings, and car companies have mounted a strong defense of the status quo. (In case you'd forgotten, the LAT fronts a reminder that it still sucks to be in the auto business.)

World, meet 42-year-old first-term Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Gov. David Paterson's pick to replace Hillary Clinton as the junior senator from New York. She's a politically savvy corporate lawyer with a political pedigree that's as much red as it is blue, and a short voting record that doesn't pin her as either. And in a credit to the way in which the NYT's Albany folks have been all over this story from beginning to end, the paper exposes just how badly the Paterson camp bungled the affair, ruining a year that was supposed to be the governor's display of competence to the country. The process turned into a public flap with staffers going rogue left and right, plus a considerable feat: angering the Cuomos, the Kennedys, and the Clintons in one fell swoop.

The NYT and the Journal both take a gander at how the credit crisis has hit nonprofits. The Journal focuses on the case of the Harlem Children's Zone, an ambitious early-education project that had started drawing as much as $15 billion annually in donations from Wall Street. Many of its biggest donors are now bankrupt, and another $2.7 million disappeared into Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The Times uses a broader lens, looking at nonprofits' troubles with securing credit from banks as well as their accustomed government financing.

And because it's Saturday … Hey, Wall Street Journal, got a Jersey complex or something?

Correction, Jan. 26, 2009: This story originally identified Mitch McConnell as the majority leader of the Senate. He is the minority leader. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

As anyone who has talked or e-mailed with me in the last couple of months knows, my obsession with Friday Night Lights has become sort of embarrassing. My husband, David, and I came to the show late, by way of Netflix, but were hooked after Episode 1. We started watching two, three, four in one sitting. It began to seem to me as if these characters were alive and moving around in my world.

David was happy with the football. I was into the drama. I worried about Smash, the sometimes-unstable star running back. I dreamed about Tyra, who was being stalked. When I talked to my own daughter, I flipped my hair back, just as Coach's wife, Tami Taylor, does and paused before delivering nuggets of wisdom. Once or twice, I even called David "Coach."

I was all set to watch Season 3 in real time when I heard, to my horror, that it might not get made. But then NBC cut a weird cost-sharing kind of deal with DirecTV, and the Dillon Panthers are back in business. The episodes have already aired on satellite, but I don't have a dish. So I'm just now settling in for the new season.

But did I miss something? The field lights are on again in Dillon, Texas, but the whole town seems to be suffering from a massive bout of … amnesia. The previous season ended abruptly, after seven episodes got swallowed by the writer's strike. For Season 3, the writers just wipe the slate clean and start again. Murder? What murder? Landry is back to being the high-school sidekick, and we can just forget that whole unfortunate body-dragged-out-of-the-river detour. Tyra got a perm and is running for school president. Lyla Garrity's preacher boyfriend, rival to Tim Riggins, has disappeared.

Over the last season, the show was struggling for an identity. It veered from The ABC Afterschool Special to CSI and then finally found its footing in the last couple of episodes, especially the one where Peter Berg—who directed the movie adaptation of Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights and adapted it for TV—walked on as Tami Taylor's hyper ex-boyfriend. In Season 3, the show is trying on yet another identity. Mrs. Taylor has suddenly turned into Principal Taylor. With her tight suits and her fabulous hair, she is Dillon's own Michelle Rhee, holding meetings, discussing education policy, and generally working too hard. Meanwhile, Coach keeps up the domestic front, making breakfast for Julie with one hand while feeding baby Grace with the other.

This strikes me as a little too close to home, and not in a way I appreciate. The beauty of Friday Night Lights is that it managed to make us care about the tiny town of Dillon. It drew us in with football but then sunk us into town life. The show took lots of stock types not usually made for prime time—a car dealer, an arrogant black kid, an ex-star in a wheelchair, a grandma with dementia, a soldier, lots of evangelical Christians—and brought them to life. It was neither sentimental nor mocking, which is a hard thing to pull off.

Now I feel as if I'm looking in a mirror. Tami is a mom juggling work and kids and not doing such a good job. Coach is trying his best at home but screwing up. The only town folk we see in the first episode are Tim's brother and Tyra's sister, drunkenly falling all over each other in a bar—the sorriest, white-trashiest bar you can imagine. Our heart is with Tyra, who, just like the children of the show's upscale fans, is trying to go to college. The final, inspirational scene of the episode takes place in a racquetball court. At least Smash has the good sense to note that it's the whitest sport in America.

That said, Friday Night Lights would have to do a lot to lose my loyalty. Just the fact that there was a high-drama plotline centered on the Jumbotron is enough to keep me happy. It's one of the show's great gifts, humor in unexpected places. Like when Tim's brother, looking half drunk as always, tells him Lyla will never respect him because he's a "rebound from Jesus." I'll give this season a chance.

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Hey there, Hanna and Meghan,

While we're complaining, isn't this the third year that some of these characters—Tim, Lyla, Tyra—have been seniors? The producers seemed to be dealing with this small lapse in planning by bringing on the soft lighting and lipstick. Tim looks ever more like Matt Dillon in The Outsiders (not to sound like that thirtysomething mom who was shagging him in the first season).

But I'm letting these objections go. I fell for this opener once Coach and Mrs. Coach had one of those moments that make their marriage a flawed gem.

You're right, Hanna, that the Taylors seem more like a typical two-career family as we watch Eric tending the baby while Tami comes home at 9:45 at night, tired from her new job as principal. Also, her sermon about how broke the school is descended into liberal pablum (real though it surely could be). But it's all a setup for a sequence that makes this show a not-idealized, and thus actually useful, marriage primer. He tries to sweet-talk her. She says, with tired affection, "Honey, you're just trying to get laid." Then she realizes that he's signed off on a bad English teacher for their daughter Julie and starts hollering at both of them. Oh, how I do love Tami for losing her temper, snapping at her teenager, and yelling loudly enough to wake her baby. And I love the writers for bringing it back around with a follow-up scene in which Mrs. Coach tells her husband she's sorry, and he says, "I could never be mad at my wife. It's that damn principal." Way to compartmentalize.

Much as I appreciate Tami, I'm puzzled by a weird gap in her life: She doesn't have girlfriends. I know that her sister showed up last season, but that doesn't really explain the absence of female friends. In fact, it's a pattern on the show: Julie's friend Lois is more a prop than a character, Lyla never hangs out with other girls, and although Tyra occasionally acts like a big sister to Julie, she doesn't seem to have a close girlfriend, either. Does this seem as strange to you as it does to me? In Lyla's case, I can see it—she often acts like the kind of girl other girls love to hate (and I look forward to dissecting why that's so). But Tami is the kind of largehearted person whom other women would want to befriend. The lack of female friendships on the show has become like a missing tooth for me, especially when you consider the vivid and interesting male friendships (Matt and Landry, Tim and Jason, even Coach and Buddy Garrity). It's revealing in its absence: No matter how good the show's writers are at portraying women—and they are—they're leaving out a key part of our lives.

A question for both of you: What do you think of the surly version of Matt Saracen? I'm starting to feel about him as I felt at the end of the fifth Harry Potter book: past ready for the nice boy I thought I knew to come back.

Emily

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Hanna, Emily,

For me, the genius of Friday Night Lights is the way it captures the texture of everyday life by completely aestheticizing it. The handheld camera, the quick jump-cuts, the moody Explosions in the Sky soundtrack laid over tracking shots of the flat, arid West Texas landscape all add up to a feeling no other TV show gives me. And very few movies, for that matter. Then there's the fact that FNL, more than any other show on network TV, tries hard to be about a real place and real people in America. This is no Hollywood stage set; it's not a generic American city or suburb; the characters aren't dealing with their problems against a backdrop of wealth, security, and Marc Jacobs ads. Most are struggling to get by, and at any moment the floor might drop out from under them. In this sense, the show is about a community, not about individuals. Football is an expression of that community.

That's why, Emily, I don't find surly Matt Saracen annoying; I find him heartbreaking. After all, his surliness stems from predicaments that he has no control over: a father in Iraq (how many TV shows bring that up?) and an ailing grandmother he doesn't want to relegate to a nursing home. Like many Americans, he finds himself acting as a caretaker way too young. And because he's not wealthy, when his personal life gets complicated—like when his romance with his grandmother's sexy at-home nurse, Carlotta, goes belly up—he loses it. (OK, I thought that story line was kinda lame; but I was moved by the anger that followed.) But your point about the lack of female friendships on the show is a great one. It's particularly true of Tami. (We do get to see a reasonable amount of Julie and Tyra together, I feel.) Like Julie, I had a principal for a mother, and one thing I always liked was watching all her friendships at the school develop and evolve.

It's also true, Hanna, that the first episode of this season hammers homes its themes—Tami's an overworked principal with a funding problem; Lyla and Riggins are gonna have trouble taking their romance public; and star freshman quarterback J.D. is a threat to good old Matt Saracen. But for now I didn't mind, because there were plenty of moments of fine dialogue, which keep the show feeling alive. Like the scene in which the amiable, manipulative Buddy hands Tami a check and says in his twangy drawl, "Ah've got two words for you: Jumbo … Tron!" (Tami, of course, has just been trying to meet a budget so tight that even chalk is at issue.) Later, at a party, Buddy greets Tami in front of some of the Dillon Panther boosters—who are oohing and aahing over an architectural rendering of the JumboTron—by exclaiming, "Tami Taylor is the brain child behind all this!" Ah, Buddy. You gotta love him. He's almost a caricature—but not.

What keeps a lot of these characters from being caricatures, despite plenty of conventional TV plot points, is that ultimately the show portrays them in the round. Coach Taylor, who has a way with young men that can seem too good to be true, is also often angry and frustrated; caring and sensitive, Lyla is also sometimes an entitled priss; Tim is a fuckup with a heart of gold (at least, at times); and the raw and exposed Julie can be a whiny brat. In this sense, ultimately, I think the story FNL is trying to tell is fundamentally responsible, unlike so many stories on TV. When the characters make mistakes, they suffer real consequences. Think of Smash losing his football scholarship. I sometimes think the weakest feature of our entertainment culture is a kind of sentimentality about pain, if that makes sense—an avoidance of the messiness of life that manifests itself in tidy morals and overdramatized melodramas.

But what could make FNL better? I'm hoping for more football and atmosphere and fewer overwrought plotlines. Will the J.D./Matt Saracen face-off help this story, do you think? And, finally: Can the writers of the show figure out how to dramatize games without making them seem totally fake? It feels like so often in the last five minutes of an episode we cut to a game-that's-in-its-final-minutes-and-oh-my-God-everyone-is-

biting-their-nails …

Meghan

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That's it, Meghan. What the Sopranos accomplished with tight thematic scripts and the Wire accomplished with a Shakespearean plot, FNL pulls off with moody music and some interesting camera work. It's not that these shows transform brutal realities into beauty. They just make them bearable by packaging them in some coherent aesthetic way that calls attention to itself. And the result is very moving.

The inside of Tim Riggins' house, for example, is a place that should never be shown on television. It's a total mess, and not in an artsy Urban Outfitter's catalogue kind of way. There's that bent-up picture of a bikini beer girl by the television and yesterday's dishes and napkins on every surface and nothing in the refrigerator except beer. This is a very depressing state of affairs for a high school kid if you stop to think about it. But whenever we're in there, the camera jerks around from couch to stool to kitchen, in perfect harmony with the chaos around it. So it all feels comfortable and we experience it just the way Riggins would—another day in a moody life.

I think part of the reason Peter Berg doesn't see these characters from such a distance is that he seems deeply sympathetic to their outlook on life, particularly their ideas about the traditional roles of men and women. The men are always being put through tests of their own manhood and decency. The boys have Coach, but hardly any of them has an actual father, so they are pushed into manhood on their own. Almost all of them have to be head of a household before their time, with interesting results. Matt is decent but can't fill the shoes. Riggins is noble but erratic. Smash is dutiful but explosive.

Emily, that insight you had about Tami is so interesting, and it made me see the whole show differently. At first I thought Peter Berg must love women, because they drive all the action and make all the good decisions. Then, after what you said, I realized that for the most part, the women exist only to support the men. They are wives or girlfriends or mothers but don't have many independent relationships outside their own families. Judd Apatow's women are a little like this, too. It's a male-centric view, and helps explain why a Hollywood director would be so in tune with the mores of a small conservative town.

It's also why this season could get interesting. As the principal, Tami is stretching the show in all kinds of ways. Buddy has shed his vulnerability and is back to being the town bully. Coach is stuck in the middle. All kinds of potential for drama.

Meghan, thank you for reminding me of all the good reasons why Matt Saracen is a heartbreaking nice boy rather than a feel-good one. And now Episode 2 reminds us as well. Matt's grandmother doesn't want to take her medication, and the only way he can make her is to become an emancipated minor so that he can be her legal guardian, instead of the other way around. And then what exactly happens when it's time for him to go to college? No good answer. As, indeed, there wouldn't be.

One of the luxuries of adolescence is that you don't have to assume responsibility for the people in your family. Matt knows what it means to take this on. In the first season, he let Julie see him pretend to be his grandfather so he could sing his grandmother to sleep. Now when she asks whether emancipation means that he gets to "vote and drink and smoke," he brings her down to earth: "No, it means I get to take care of old people."

This is one of the moments that, for me, capture the strength of this show: In Dillon, kids with hard lives and kids with easier ones get a good look at each other, which doesn't happen all that much in our nation's class-segregated high schools. Lyla, Tim, and Tyra had one of those across-the-class-divide moments in this episode, when Lyla tried to get Tim to help himself with his college prospects at a fancy dinner and failed. Tim then came home and sat down in boxers to TV and a beer with Tyra while his brother and her sister snuck in a quickie (off-camera in the bedroom).

I was glad to see that the writers are back to making Tyra and Tim and their weary, beery sense of their own limitations the center of our sympathy. Maybe Tyra will make it out of Dillon, but not by acting like the Zeta girls in The House Bunny. And it seems entirely in keeping with Tim's fragile nature that Buddy Garrity could destroy his confidence with a few slashing sentences. Speaking of, one of the honest and realistic assumptions of this show is that when teenagers date, they have sex. So I gave Buddy points when he warned his daughter away from Tim in a speech that ended with "Lyla, are you using protection?"

But enough about character development. Let's talk about some football. I entirely agree, Meghan, that FNL generally gives us too little gridiron, not too much. But in this episode, there is a lovely sequence on the field. Coach Taylor is testing Smash before a college tryout, and the former Panther star is cutting and weaving just like old times—until Tim levels him. We hear the crack and thud of the hit, and, for a moment, Smash lies heavy and still on the ground. In this show, when a player goes down, the dots connect to the paralyzing hit that put Jason Street in a wheelchair. But Smash gets up, his rehabilitated knee sound, and it's a moment of blessed relief, because now we can go on rooting for him to regain his chance to … play in college and turn pro? To write the sentence is to remember how long the odds are for such an outcome and to rue the role that the dangled dream of professional sports ends up playing for a lot of kids.

Given Jason's broken spine, you can't accuse Friday Night Lights of pretending otherwise. But what do we think about the way its best characters revel in the game and make us love it, too? I ask myself the same question when I watch football with my sons knowing that I'd never let them play it. In the nonfiction book on which the show is based, author Buzz Bissinger writes of a player who wasn't examined thoroughly after a groin injury: "He lost the testicle but he did make All-State." There are also kids who play through broken arms, broken ankles, and broken hands and who pop painkillers or Valium. Across the country, high-school football is also associated with a frightening rate of concussions. Would you let Coach Taylor anywhere near your boys?

Indeed, Emily. It's a hallelujah moment when we're back to Tim, Tyra, Matt, the lovable, evil Buddy, and all the other things I treasure about FNL. This episode made me very hopeful about the rest of the season. I especially liked the Smash subplot and how it ties together what happens on the field with what happens off. Smash, who graduated but lost his college scholarship, is having a hard time remembering how to be Smash. Without the Dillon Panthers, he's just a kid in an Alamo Freeze hat who goes home every night to his mom. And that just about summarizes the driving theme of the show. On the field, class, race, and all the soul-draining realities of life in a small Texas town get benched. But off the field, you can have clear eyes and a full heart and still lose.

Despite their best efforts, Matt, Tyra, and Tim just can't seem to transcend. Instead of gender differences, what's emerging strongly this season is, as Emily points out, class differences. All the couples in the show are divided along class lines, setting up lots of potential for good drama. There's Tyra and Landry, Lyla and Tim, and possibly Julie and Matt again. Emily, you pointed out that great moment in the car where Julie and Matt have such different ideas about what the future holds. Buddy gives us another such moment, when he lectures Lyla about dating Tim: "Tim Riggins going to college is like me teaching yoga classes." (I'm having trouble getting that image out of my mind, of Buggy Garrity teaching yoga classes. Buddy in downward facing dog. Buddy ohm-ing. Buddy saying "namaste" to his ex-wife in a spirit of love and peace.)

Then, of course, there's the absolutely awful moment when Tim orders squab, rare, at the dinner with the new freshman quarterback J.D.'s posh Texas socialite family. This was reminiscent of one of my favorite scenes in The Wire, when Bunny Colvin takes Namond and the other kids out to a fancy restaurant, after which they feel ever more alienated from their better selves.

I have high hopes for J.D. in this regard. He turns the Dillon Panthers formula on its head. His father is hellbent on mucking up the field with privilege and influence. He's a serious test for Coach and for Matt. Can't wait to see what happens.

One question, though: Does it seem right to you that Tim Riggins would use the word schmooze? Seemed out of place to me. (Ditto their conversations about Google.) It's not that I think he's "retarded," as he puts it. It's just that until now, the show has been intentionally claustrophobic, locking us in the town, never letting us see what's on Tim's TV (unlike, say, Tony Soprano, whose TV is always facing us). So we've been led to believe that Dillon reception doesn't pick up the CW or VH1 or any other channel that might infect teenage lingo.

Hanna, Emily,

One thing I've been thinking about is Friday Night Lights' distinctive brand of male sentimentality. This show seems singularly designed to make men cry. Its lodestars are comradeship on and off the field ("God, football, and Texas forever," I recall Riggins toasting with Jason Street in the very first episode); a modern blend of paradoxically stoic emotionalism (epitomized by Coach Taylor); and a recurrent, choked-up love of the tough women who make these men's attachment to football possible. This may be the West, but in Dillon, Texas, John Ford's American masculinity has been diluted with a cup of New Man sensitivity.

Take this episode's key scene between Matt Saracen and his grandmother: Debating whether to take his ailing grandmother to an assisted-living home, Matt is shaken when she suddenly tells him how great he was in his last game. She spirals into loving reminiscence:

"You've always loved football, Matty. I remember when you were two years old you were trying to throw a football, and it was bigger than you were. And you were such a sweet baby, such a sweet, sweet baby. But here you are all grown up and taking care of everything. I don't know what I'd do without you. I don't know. Matthew, I love you."

"I know. I love you too, Grandma."

"You're such a good boy."

"If I am, it's only because you raised me."

The scene is very well-played—we haven't talked much about the show's acting yet, it suddenly occurs to me—replete with pauses and tears and a final hug between the two. But the emotion derives from a move in the script that occurs again and again in this series: A man is having a difficult time when his mother, his grandmother, or his wife describes how much it means to her that he is taking care of her, or accomplishing brilliant things on the field, or just plain persevering. Smash has had moments like this with his mom. Coach has moments like this with Tami. And here Matt is reminded of his duty—to take care of his grandma, even though he's 17—when she speaks about his masculine prowess, first as a tough little boy throwing a ball "bigger than you were" and now as a tough teenager trying to navigate another task much bigger than he is.

Friday Night Lights has gotten more sentimental over the years, I think, not less, and it has also embraced its women characters more than ever. (I'm not sure I think they really play second fiddle to the men, Hanna—though they once did.) The show is about relationships now; its investigation of male honor has made a quarter-turn to focus largely on male honor as it pertains to women. (Even wayward Tim Riggins has been domesticated.)

In this regard, the show is far more incantatory than realistic (to borrow Susan Sontag's labels for the two main types of art). That is, it trades on magic and ritual more than on gritty realism, even while it often pretends to be grittily realistic. And so while it does talk about class, unlike many network TV shows, and while it does portray a place that's geographically specific, as I mentioned in my last entry, it's also offering up a highly stylized story that is intended, I think, to serve as an emotional catharsis for men, while winning women over by showing that men really do have feelings, and it's going to translate them into a grammar we can begin to understand.

I like this episode, but it strikes me that we've come a long way from season one, when there was a bit more edge on things. (Remember how it almost seemed that Riggins was racist?)

And we're definitely a long way from Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights, on which the series and the movie are based. That book—so far, at least; I'm only 150 pages in—has plenty of sentimentality about the power of athletic glory to alleviate the mundanity of life off the field. But it also stresses the meanness and nastiness that fuels the talent of so many of the actual Panthers Bissinger met. Not to mention the racism that pervaded the town. On this show, we rarely see that meanness; Riggins used to embody it, but now he's a pussycat, trying on blazers to keep Lyla happy. On the field, it's the team's pure-hearted sportsmanship that makes it so lovable, not any player's manly violence. After all, their locker-room mantra is "Clear eyes, full hearts can't lose." And in Matt Saracen they had a scrappy quarterback underdog who really wanted to be an artist. Even J.D. is small and—can't you see it in those wide eyes?—supersensitive.

I love FNL, but sometimes I wonder: Is the show becoming simply too sentimental about its characters?

Meghan

You're right, Meghan, to call FNL on its spreading dollop of sentimentality. Doesn't this often happen with TV shows in later seasons? I'm thinking of The Wire (at least Season 5), and probably The Sopranos, too. You can see why the writers would be pulled in this direction. The friction of the initial plot line has been played out. As the writers—and the audience—get to know the characters better, do we inevitably want them to become better people? Even if that comes at the price of narrative tension and edge?

The best way out of the mush pit, I suppose, is to introduce new characters, who in turn introduce new friction. That's what J.D. is all about this season. If you're right that there's a puppy dog lurking behind his wide eyes, then the show is in trouble. On the other hand, if he's merely a two-dimensional touchdown-throwing automaton, that's going to be awfully pat—the Matt vs. J.D. contest will be good, humble working-class vs. evil, proud, and rich. I hope we get something more interesting than that.

In the meantime, a complaint from me that I see a reader in "the Fray" shares: Why does this show keep flunking TV Drama 101 by tossing characters without explanation? First Waverly, Smash's bipolar girlfriend, disappears. Now Jason Street, whom we last saw begging an appealing waitress to have his baby after a one-night stand, is AWOL. What gives? Will Jason show up later this season, child in hand?

One more thing for this week: Another Frayster who says he (I think he) wrote for the show in the first season reports that Tami initially did have a girlfriend, played by Maggie Wheeler. But she got cut. More here. And more from us next week.

President Barack Obama's decision last week to revive the Freedom of Information Act was a good first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge for a "new era of open government."

Here's an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file FOIA requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads, "Sorry, no such documents exist."

A 2005 report by the National Archives and Records Administration—which was declassified just this week under a FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University—concluded that, in an era when nearly all records are stored on hard drives, rather than typed on paper, the raw bits of history are evaporating.

"Electronic records," the study found, "are generally not disposed of in accordance" with federal regulations. In particular, many e-mails are "being destroyed prematurely," for several reasons.

First, some officials write e-mail on their personal computers—perhaps for convenience, perhaps to evade the rules—and fail to turn in those files. Second, "because electronic records are less tangible than paper records," the report notes, officials "often do not consider them to be records needing to be filed and retired properly." Third, in many offices, the job of "records custodian" rotates frequently; it is often left vacant for a long time; and when the vacancy is filled, National Archives officials aren't notified so that they can come to train the new gatekeeper. In short, expertise has greatly declined. Fourth, the number of records custodians has also declined "substantially over the past decade."

Finally—and this is simply stunning—the National Archives' technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives "is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides."

This is a huge lapse. Nearly all internal briefings in the Pentagon these days are presented as PowerPoint slides. Officials told me three years ago that if an officer wanted to make a case for a war plan or a weapons program or just about anything, he or she had better make the case in PowerPoint—or forget about getting it approved.

And now, it turns out, all those presentations may be lost to the ether.

It used to be worse. The report notes that the National Archives only "recently"—it doesn't say how recently—revised its procedures so that it could accept e-mail with attachments, scanned text documents, PDFs, digital photos, and Web content. (And Obama's aides were shocked when the White House wireless system shut down the other day.)

The National Archives is developing an "Electronic Records Archive," so that it can finally deal with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. But, according to the study, that is being "planned for implementation in the next seven years." (Italics added.) The study was written four years ago; so, assuming the program is still on track, it will be up and running three years from now, when Obama's first term is almost over.

Meanwhile, the study urges all agencies to keep their electronic records in a safe place. Good luck on that one.

In June 2003, I wrote a Slate column, called "The End of History," that expressed some of these worries. I quoted at some length an Air Force historian named Eduard Mark, who had launched a one-man crusade to draw attention to this disaster. He remembered an incident from the early '90s, when he was researching the official Air Force history of the Panama invasion, which had taken place only a few years earlier. At the Air Force operations center, he found a small Mac computer on which officers had saved all the briefings. Someone was about to throw the computer out. Mark stopped him just in time and printed out the briefings. "Those printouts I made," he told me, "are the only copies in existence."

The authors of the 2005 National Archives report write in their introduction that my Slate column was what inspired them to look into the issue. Since I'd quoted an Air Force historian, they decided to focus on the Air Force as their case study. Over two months, they visited 15 branches of Air Force headquarters, asking questions and examining all records. These were the offices centrally involved in military planning, weapons acquisition, international arms sales, budgeting, public affairs—the gamut of substantive issues.

They, in effect, affirmed Mark's charges and concluded that the situation had not improved in the two years since he'd talked to me. In fact, because the use of electronic records had spread ever wider in the interim (and is likely to spread still further), the problem has only intensified.

It's worth noting that, by all accounts, the Air Force is better at keeping records than the other branches of the military. A former Navy historian tells me that the Navy is much more lackadaisical.

Back in the old days, before the mid-1980s, Cabinet officials and their assistants and deputy assistants would write memos and hand them to a secretary. The secretary would type them on sheets of paper, backed by two or three carbons, then file the carbons. Periodically, someone from the National Archives would stop by with a cart and haul them away for posterity.

And so, historians researching the roots of the Vietnam War, the Cold War, or many other wars going back much further in time, could go to the National Archives, search the index, and retrieve the relevant documents.

When tomorrow's historians go to write the chronicle of decision-making that led George W. Bush to invade Iraq and Afghanistan—or Bill Clinton to go to war over Kosovo or George H.W. Bush to fight the Gulf War the way he did—they may find there's not much history to plumb.

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The National Security Archive (not to be confused with the National Archives or the National Security Agency) is one of the leading private research agencies when it comes to identifying, declassifying, analyzing, and disseminating once-classified documents. It is able to do this in part because it's well-funded and staffed by experienced attorneys who get their way (sometimes) by suing the Pentagon, the CIA, or whichever agency controls the documents they want. In this case, one of their lawyers spotted a reference to the National Archives study, titled "Records Maintenance and Disposition in Headquarters Air Force Offices," dated January 2005, in the footnotes of a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. They requested a copy of the report through FOIA; they received a (slightly redacted) copy just this month. Knowing of my interest in the subject, and seeing the reference to the 2003 Slate column in the study's introduction, Bill Burr, one of the NSA's chief researchers, sent me a copy. To read the entire study, click here to download the PDF.

Every language attracts a special kind of student. Spanish speakers are lazy and charming. Those who have mastered French are sometimes chic and always sybaritic. Hebrew attracts the committed; Turkish, the committed and complicated. Adventurers are drawn to Arabic, and Mandarin is for brainiacs who love a challenge—so much so that they often abandon the language altogether once they've got it down. And Japanese? Japanese speakers are serious, serious people. Of course, all languages demand tedious, diligent study, but there's something about Japanese that calls out to those who are quiet, kind, and, often, spiritual. People who would rather kneel on a tatami mat contemplating a calligraphy scroll than, say, slump on a sofa watching Gossip Girl.

I always fancied myself too frivolous for Japan. Going there would be like visiting a library—a quiet, orderly place where nothing much happens. A world unto itself with lovely things to look at but nothing much to do. I love libraries; I just didn't want to spend my vacation in one. All that politeness stressed me out. There seemed to be a million rules—take your shoes off here, wear these slippers in the bathroom and nowhere else—and I didn't understand any of them.

I started to rethink this position when I realized that my recent holiday destinations—wonderful, envy-inducing places all—had started to blur together. In my recollection, dinner in Dublin was just like lunch in Moscow, albeit with 50 percent less gristle. That great bookstore in Madrid really wasn't all that different from the Barnes & Noble a few blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y. As I surveyed the living room—I happened to be perched in front of the TV set at the time of this epiphany—my vacation souvenirs stared back at me reproachfully. The memento I'd purchased in an Amsterdam museum shop was a close cousin of the keepsake I'd bought at a Barcelona gallery. Sure, each knickknack featured some iconic image of the city or country it was supposed to represent, but all those tasteful trinkets could have rolled off the same assembly line in Kansas or Kenilworth.

Just then, I noticed a pile of books that my girlfriend had left on the kitchen table. (Did I mention that I've lived with one of those kind, serious students of Japanese for nearly a dozen years?) One book was a series of profiles of "Edo craftsmen," elderly Japanese men (and a few women) who had turned their backs on the modern age—and apparently the law of supply and demand—to devote themselves to pursuits such as kabuki calligraphy, kimono tailoring, and the construction of household shrines.

They were a gutsy bunch of bad-asses, these shokunin. In Japan, a land of conformity, it takes determination to renounce the necktie and business suit of the salaryman in favor of coarse cloth work clothes. Some shokunin appeared to have given up human company altogether: The photos showed old men working alone; occasionally two balding heads shared a tiny room. The stories about them fit the Japanese stereotype of respecting one's elders—most of the gray-haired masters had taken up tools decades earlier at their father's request—but there was also a dose of obstinacy in their choice of career. You think kimono-crest printing went out with the dodo? I'm (barely) living proof that you're wrong.

The second volume, Blue and White Japan, design guru Amy Katoh's mash note to the nation's signature color scheme, is one of those seductive design books that have you ready to trade in your set of Crate & Barrel dishes for a collection of chipped, unmatched china after just one flip-through. You'll also want to discard your store-bought tablecloth in favor of an improvised covering pieced together from farm rags. Apparently, I had two options for acquiring these must-have objects: a lifetime of flea-market browsing or a visit to Katoh's store in Tokyo.

I needed a pack of tissues to get through Old Kyoto, the final book in the stack. Focusing on "family establishments that have been in business for at least a hundred years, and in some cases for over ten generations," it's a collection of obituaries-in-waiting disguised as a guidebook. Pretty much all the shopkeepers Diane Durston profiles would qualify for Medicare, and one entry about a charming cask and bucket maker concluded with a heartbreaking postscript: "Tomii-san, unfortunately, had no son and no apprentice to carry on his honorable trade. He passed away in 1998, leaving a hole in the heart of the Nishijin district where the bright red buckets out front (his only 'sign board') were once a famous landmark." I used to think that the best guidebooks made you want to race to a destination before it's "spoiled"; this one left me desperate to get to Kyoto before anyone else died.

It's not as if I really needed any casks or buckets, but like a lot of people whose work life is hyperactive, I freak out when faced with the unstructured days of vacation. Perhaps heading to Japan with a purpose—tracking down some of these men who make things with their hands, often with the same tools their great-grandfathers used, and figuring out what drives them to live the lonely life of a traditional craftsman—would help me understand more about my own attitudes toward work and vocation.

I had also heard a lot of good things about Japanese television.

My first contact with traditional Japanese crafts left me cold. The 55^th Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition, housed under fluorescent lights on the seventh floor of the massive Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo, was antiseptic and unengaging: The exhibits—fine pottery, intricate wooden boxes, elaborate kimonos—were exquisitely made, but they were a little too perfect for my taste. I had more fun wandering around the sprawling food hall in the store's basement. A visit to the Japan Traditional Crafts Center in the Ikebukuro neighborhood was another ice bath. All very pretty and informative—accessible, too, with display information provided in English—but far too museumlike.

The JTCC has worthy ideals. Founded in 1979 by the ministry of economy, trade, and industry, the exhibition is intended to promote traditional crafts, commonly known as mingei. The Mingeikan—a Tokyo folk-art museum founded by philosopher Soetsu Yanagi—defines mingei objects as "the work of anonymous craftsmen, produced by hand in quantities, inexpensive, to be used by the masses, functional in daily life, and representative of the region in which it was produced." Perhaps it's inevitable that when government agencies—or private enterprises, for that matter—try to champion humble crafts, they suck the life out of them. One of the most dispiriting outings of the entire trip was a trek to the Kyoto Handicraft Center, whose brochures were on display in every outpost where a foreign visitor might venture. It's the kind of depressing place that makes you wonder if the guidebook writers had been bought off: The otherwise excellent Lonely Planet Kyoto City Guide called it "the best one-stop emporium in the whole of Kyoto," but the place filled me with sadness. Commercially, it was a smart enterprise—lots of vendors housed under one roof, English-speaking staff, credit cards accepted (an astonishingly rare practice in Japan, other than at the big department stores), shuttles to and from the downtown hotels. The booths were stuffed with goods, but everything felt like it had come off a conveyor belt. Still, even in the midst of all the schlock, the spirit of the shokunin endured: While package-holiday tourists pounced on cheap yukata and ugly T-shirts, a pair of woodblock printers quietly carved and inked, unmolested by the horrors surrounding them.

Back in the capital, Masaharu Moriya of Moriya Bamboo exemplified Yanagi's ideal of the unknown craftsman. He was a man of few words. My minutelong questions, followed by two minutes of the interpreter's rendering, would inevitably be answered: "Yes," "No," or "A little, perhaps." Still, I never had the feeling that he was evading my queries. He was shy and apparently unused to gaijin schlepping out to his studio, located an hour from the city center. He provided the facts of his life—he was inspired by his father, who worked with bamboo, though not professionally; he has been in business for 30 years, 15 at the current location; he tried other lines of work, but this was "the most suitable"—but when it came to philosophy, vocation, the soul-harmonizing joy of shaping bamboo, he had nothing to say.

Feeling bad that I was keeping Moriya from his work, I asked him to show me what he does. He virtually skipped to the workshop. Within seconds, he had whipped off his sock so that he could grasp one half of the springy bamboo with his right foot. In less than two minutes of splitting and stripping, he turned three lengths of bamboo into 12 strips, and 30 seconds later, he had woven six of the strips into the base of a basket. Even as he worked swiftly with a tool that must've been sharp enough to take off a toe, he kept an eye on the cars zooming down the highway outside his studio.

My visit to Moriya Bamboo came about halfway through a three-week trip, and by that point I had clear expectations about what I'd find in the store attached to a craftsman's workshop: a few exquisite but expensive objects—the cost easily justified by the time devoted to producing them, the materials used, and the rare opportunity to buy a beautiful object direct from the hands of its creator. Moriya's store was completely different. Visitors could step up to a shoes-off fancy furniture section or find a few delicate items intended for use in Japanese tea ceremony, but the bulk of the haphazardly displayed stock was practical, rustic gear—baskets, brooms, and housewares; traditional winter boots—priced for country folk rather than visiting urbanites. There was even a selection of cheap souvenirs and wooden toys that a child could blow his pocket money on.

These days, according to Moriya, people aren't using traditional bamboo products for their intended purpose, and with Japanese agriculture in decline, a lot of the things he makes end up in galleries and museums as exemplars of traditional products. What looked like a grass-skirt ensemble turned out to be a traditional bamboo raincoat, but it won't be used to keep farmers dry as they toil in the fields—it was made to decorate the walls of a restaurant that is trying to establish a traditional vibe.

Despite the effects of urbanization, the bamboo business seems sound. When 67-year-old Masaharu retires, his son Koichi will take over, and, judging from the quantity of raw materials stacked out back, the order book is healthy. Of course, it's hard work. It was Sports Day, a national holiday, when we took our jaunt out to the workshop in Aobadai. The trains out of Tokyo were packed with liberated office workers heading to the country for a day of hiking, but the Moriyas were at their posts, splitting, shaving, and shaping bamboo.

There are two ways to transform bland white cotton into the rich, deep blue that you see everywhere in Japan: with chemicals or through the occult art of aizome, natural indigo dyeing. According to Hiroshi Murata, president of Kosoen dye works, once chemical dyeing was invented 100 years ago, U.S. producers abandoned the Polygonum tinctorium plant. Americans are practical people, and chemical dyeing made sense: Naturally dyed indigo fabric is more expensive and much more trouble to produce. Still, Japanese people were attached to the superior quality of aizome, so a few manufacturers persevered. A determination to do things the difficult way seems to be what drives Hiroshi and his younger brother Noriyuki. "Normal people would give up," he told me. "But we continue."

It was late on a Saturday afternoon when we arrived at the Kosoen workshop in Ome, a green-hilled city about 80 minutes and 20 years from downtown Tokyo. Noriyuki was bounding around the workshop mixing up a giant vat of dye. Wearing Wellington boots as he sloshed overflowing buckets of water to rinse the floor, Noriyuki, who is 48, looked like a joyful toddler playing in the rain.

Many steps are taken on the journey from flower to fabric, and the good folks at Kosoen took pains to explain them all on the company Web site. Like a great chef, a superior dyer must understand the science he sets in motion when he combines alkaline and acidic ingredients, and he must be sensitive enough to know when to stop stirring the pot. Similarly, just as proximity to heat and blade takes its toll on a cook's fingers, Noriyuki's blue hands are testimony to his vocation. The navy tint extends to his wrists, as if he's wearing gloves; his long fingernails shine a rich indigo more intense than any polish could produce. As the man at the helm of the color wheel, he literally has a finger in every pot.

There was something very familiar about the Kosoen demonstration. I'd seen another, almost-identical presentation about indigo dyeing when I visited the Kano Dye Pits in Nigeria. In West Africa, where the electricity supply is unreliable and capital is unavailable, going organic seemed practical, but why—apart from bloody-mindedness—would citizens of the most technologically advanced nation on earth choose a method fraught with so many difficulties?

Let's review the challenges. The raw materials are scarce—only a handful of Japanese farmers still grow the Polygonum tinctorium plant, each year producing just 1,000 bags of sukumo, the fermented dried leaves that are to indigo dyeing what grapes are to winemaking. Only well water can be used in the natural dyeing process—the chlorine in town water would kill the delicate bacteria—and to keep the bacteria happy, dyers must eschew air conditioning in summer and heating in winter. And for all that discomfort, the financial risks are high: The raw materials Noriyuki tosses into the vat for each batch of dye—sukumo, sake, wheat bran, ash, and lime—cost at least $3,000, but if the chemistry doesn't take, and the microorganisms don't thrive, the whole thing is a write-off.

Why take the risk? Hiroshi's answer is that this work is okufukai—it presents a profound, almost existential challenge. A third Murata brother operates a chemical dyeing shop, but Hiroshi and Noriyuki prefer to maintain the connection with old Japan, to struggle stubbornly to bring beauty from bacteria. And, of course, they are proud of the quality of color that only natural indigo dyeing can produce. Amy Katoh says that Kosoen "produces a youthful blue that whistles with fresh air and sunshine." My azure palette isn't refined enough to offer a review, but I'll always remember Noriyuki-san's grin as he dipped his big blue hands into the dye vat to test the mixture. "You have to taste it to see when it's right," he laughed, sticking a finger in his mouth.

In Kyoto, Kenichi Utsuki, the owner and artist in residence at Aizen Kobo, is more of a proselytizer than a businessman. Utsuki subjects anyone who wanders into his workshop and store in the Nishijin District to a lecture on the natural indigo-dyeing process (complete with laminated handouts), a sit-down show-and-tell of his collection of indigo fabrics from around the world, and a tour of his operation. I would have found it obnoxious if he weren't such a true believer. He evangelizes for natural indigo, touting its ability to repel mosquitoes and snakes, its resistance to fading, and its durability. In a way, though, that durability is a liability: The costly ingredients and the painstaking dyeing process, with its repeated cycles of soaking and air-drying, make the products relatively pricey (around $70 for a scarf; $35 for a napkin-sized piece of blue cotton). Still, as at Kosoen, the subtle variations of shade made everything seem desirable—I wanted to take things home just so I could point to them and say, "See, that's blue."

Kenichi's wife, Hisako, designs tasteful garments for the family business, but they weren't my kind of thing. I was tempted by the samu-e suits, loose-fitting garments favored by farm workers and craftspeople, but they failed the Q-train test: Whenever I'm tempted by a "foreign" garment, I try to imagine myself wearing it on the New York subway. No way. Eventually, though, I did purchase my own bit of indigo. Days later, when we made our pilgrimage to the Blue & White store in Tokyo, I couldn't resist buying a bag made from fabric dyed in Hiroshima. It smells a little gamey (no wonder mosquitoes give natural indigo a wide berth), and it lacks the zips and security features that life in an American city seems to demand, but I was sold when the sweet shop assistant told me I looked "suteki"—stylin'—when I slung it over my shoulder.

When I was a child, the entire family would gather at my grandmother's house for two annual occasions: Boxing Day dinner and the Miss World pageant. For the latter, we'd all study the form conveniently provided by that morning's paper, then gather around the television to cheer our favorites and wager on the winner. My strategy was simple: I always favored Miss USA. One year, though, the organizers insisted that all the contestants get into the spirit of the "national costume" segment of the show. You see, while Miss India sported a sari and Miss Japan shuffled onstage in a kimono, the Brits and the Americans usually wore some variation on business casual involving miniskirts and go-go boots. That year, their outfit had to reflect national tradition. I've managed to block whatever culturally inappropriate outfit the American wardrobe department came up with, but Miss United Kingdom's rendition of a beefeater is forever seared into my cerebral cortex.

I tell you all this to explain why the Japanese attitude toward the kimono unsettles me so. All the years of that questionable family ritual make it difficult for me to think of it as anything other than a costume. Yes, generations of Japanese—men and women—woke up and put on a kimono every day of their lives. But even though Frenchwomen used to dress like the cast of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and America's Founding Fathers wouldn't leave the house without a powdered wig, the only time you'll see those clothes in Paris or Philadelphia today is during a movie shoot.

Kimonos aren't exactly common in modern Japan, but every day I was there I saw at least 15 kimono-clad figures, almost all women. It wasn't the raw numbers that surprised me; it was how normal it seemed. Women in kimonos eat breakfast in coffee shops, they strap-hang on crowded trains, and they poke about in 100-yen stores. Other Japanese people don't pay the slightest bit of attention—it's as if they haven't noticed that the person next to them happens to be swathed in several thousand dollars' worth of beautifully tailored silk. As a gaijin—a foreigner—I attracted more attention than these women, and I can guarantee that I was far less interesting to look at.

In Spain, when a woman dresses up for a bullfight or the neighborhood fiestas, everyone compliments her appearance. True, anyone who doesn't offer a piropo will get an earful, but you don't sing praises out of politeness—you do it because she looks great. In England, mockery is the most likely response to a spiffy outfit, but at least it's a reaction. The Japanese nonchalance contravenes the laws of nature: When a bird primps its plumage and does a little dance, attention must be paid.

The Japanese seem to love uniforms—parking-lot attendants are kitted out like generals, guys who pick up trash wear full-dress blues—so perhaps kimonos are just another kind of uniform, a way of establishing that the wearer belongs here, that she hasn't lost her connection to her nation's history. Making a fuss would question that connection, rendering it invalid.

I thought about all this when we went to see Takaki Nagashima in Kyoto. I'd first caught sight of him at a seminar in New York, where he was teaching U.S.-based Japanese women about obis—the ornate sashes used to tie kimonos. On that sweltering day in August, Nagashima sat at the end of a long table unfurling bolt after bolt of astonishingly luxurious fabric, the very picture of opulence.

Although Nagashima is not an unknown craftsman—he's a salesman, not a shokunin, and his family's obis proudly bear the company shoushi, an identifying seal—his line of work is just as steeped in tradition and just as endangered. His family's obi-making business, Nagashimasei Orimono, is based in the Nishijin—a textile center for more than 1,000 years—and I asked him to give my girlfriend and me that classic travel experience: the factory tour.

Nagashima showed up at our hotel decked out in a gorgeous steel-blue kimono, and everywhere he went, the man turned heads. He is a one-man kimono-and-obi-promotion campaign—young, attractive, and used to being stared at. Our first stop was the company besso, a special house where executives take guests to discuss business or negotiate deals away from the office. It was spectacular—even though we were in a dull, residential neighborhood, as soon as we passed through the gate, the modern world fell away—but it was also somehow emblematic. Every room seemed to include a feature, such as a weaving technique or a type of wood from a tree that could no longer be harvested, that was threatened or already extinct. Even the garden was endangered: These days, few gardeners know how to handle the maintenance of such a jewel.

At company headquarters—and later in the jam-packed, slightly anarchic factory—the impression was again of opulence: 300,000 colors of silk, stitches too tiny to be seen with the naked eye, and endless luxury. The Nagashimasei Orimono specialty is weaving with metallic threads that produce a shimmering fabric that moves like liquid gold or silver. The designs are intricate and complex—some are taken from traditional paintings—and the traditional Nishijin weaving process produces an almost three-dimensional effect. The workers—there are 40 in all—tend to be middle-aged; Takaki, at 35 the youngest person around and clearly accustomed to being treated like the prince of the family business, complained that these days young people aren't interested in learning these nontransferable skills, preferring office life and business suits.

Although there has been a bit of a kimono boom in recent years, thanks to a resurgence of interest in tea ceremony, overall the prospects aren't good. Kimonos and obis are expensive—an outfit can cost as much as a car—and they're delicate. Kimonos must be washed at least every 10 years, and all the stitches are removed for laundering, which means they must be reconstructed by a kimono tailor each time, a three-day job. Putting on a kimono and tying the obi is a complicated business, and women who don't wear them very often can forget the technique. Outside of weddings, funerals, and formal events, there just aren't many opportunities to don traditional dress—which might explain all the kimono-clad ladies enjoying the No. 2 breakfast at Beck's Coffee Shop.

Nevertheless, Nagashima is sure that kimonos and obis will survive because of the Japanese reverence for tradition. And, while there's a thin line between holding on to tradition and turning your back on the world, the Japanese women who walk around town in beautiful kimonos don't seem like Civil War re-enactors playing at history or buggy-riding Amish rejecting the internal combustion engine. They put on their kimonos and get on the bullet train as if it's the most modern thing in the world.

Master brush-maker Yoshio Tanabe spent the first 10 minutes of our acquaintance explaining why the appointment was futile: His knowledge of brushes, calligraphy, and the properties and characteristics of animal hair was vast, and my capacity for understanding was small. It was hard to argue—what could I possibly comprehend of his craft when I can't write a single Japanese character?—but he relented when I brought out a dog-eared photocopy of the chapter in Edo Craftsmen that profiled the family business and featured many shots of his photogenic father, Matsuzo. I was a fan! Besides, he'd just finished up a batch of brushes, so he had some time on his hands, and Tanabe Bunkaido, his little shop in the Nezu district of Tokyo, was empty. So, why not?

Later, I realized that reluctance was a family tradition. The only touch of color on the calligraphy-filled shop walls came from a vomit of primary colors in a small painting by Joan Miró. Apparently, the Catalan artist once came to the store while Yoshio's father was still alive, asking for brushes. Matsuzo initially refused the sale. His brushes were intended for calligraphy, not painting; what's more, he had intended to pass them on to Yoshio rather than sell them. But like his son the hesitant interview subject, he eventually relented, and Miró left the store with a parcel under his arm. (Yoshio speaks unsentimentally about his father, but he keeps a whole cabinet full of his dad's brushes in the store. At this point, they're probably too old to sell, but from the way he caressed them as he demonstrated their qualities, they're clearly among his most prized possessions.)

Yoshio Tanabe is such an imposing man—broad-shouldered and strong—that it's hard to imagine him spending half a century selecting, separating, and combing animal hairs, but that has been his life. He's a talkative, gregarious guy—after his initial show of playing hard to get, he spent two and a half hours answering questions and demonstrating his skills—and yet since his father died 20 years ago, he has worked alone in a small workshop behind the display cases, getting to his feet only for lunch or the bathroom. "When I was younger, I wondered why I had to do this," he admitted, indicating the cramped quarters.

To my Western way of thinking, "guilt" is the explanation. Matsuzo Tanabe, whose only schooling after the age of 7 had been his brush-making apprenticeship, pushed his son into the family business. Yoshio's rebellion was to insist that he be allowed to graduate from college before he moved into the workshop, but once installed, he never left. Nothing has changed in his five decades of brush-making. Is he bored, I asked. "Yes," he answered flatly, though he didn't seem to consider that such a terrible fate.

So, what is the reward? The accumulation of knowledge and the satisfaction of creation: "Making a brush is like calligraphy itself. When you really look at it, you can see the skill and all the work that's gone into it." And, of course, praise from the cognoscenti. "When a calligrapher says to me, 'Good brush!' I am satisfied."

Tanabe's wares are expensive. The cheapest thing he makes himself is a beginner's calligraphy brush of horse and sheep hair that retails for $60. (He also sells brushes made by former students of his father's.) The softer and rarer the hair, the more expensive the brush—and the greater the skill needed to wield it. One of the priciest pieces in the store is a $22,000 brush made by Matsuzo Tanabe from black Japanese horsehair; it took years just to collect the long, soft hairs it required. It seems churlish to wonder if art supplies are worth thousands of dollars; it's like asking if anyone needs a Patek Philippe when a Timex tells the time just as well. Nevertheless, a $1,000 brush wouldn't improve my kanji, and there can't be many calligraphers whose skills could cause a significant reduction in Tanabe Bunkaido's inventory.

Among the thousands of brushes displayed in the store are a few with ivory handles. Tanabe is slightly embarrassed by them—they're old, he stresses, not for sale—but where better for an endangered material than an endangered store? There's no doubting Tanabe's skill as a brush-maker, but it's hardly a growth industry. During our long visit, no one so much as looked in the store window, much less came inside. Computers and competition are killing calligraphy—these days, people print out labels rather than address New Year's cards by hand, and the private calligraphy schools that once taught Japanese youngsters the arcane arts of lettering have been replaced by cram schools where kids study for Japan's university entrance exams. Calligraphy schools have gone the way of abacus schools; they're no longer needed.

Perhaps that's why Tanabe seems sincerely unsentimental about the fate of the family business. Although it's hard to believe, he's 71. He has no children, and he never took on an apprentice. When he can no longer work, it will all come to an end. We guests—including interpreter Michiyo—exclaim how sad this is. Tanabe-san simply smiles. It's just how it is.

In the end, I'm not sure how much I learned about work from my visits with these men. I already knew how lucky I was. For all the talk of Japanese respect for tradition, the proud craftsmen seemed all but abandoned. But there was something positive about their isolation: the silence. My vacation was blissfully peaceful. I didn't watch any television while I was in Japan; since I couldn't understand the words, the noise felt offensive and clamorous. One Sunday afternoon, I even found myself kneeling in a teahouse, pondering a scroll. My host explained that the calligraphy described the sound of the wind moving through trees. Outside, it was quiet enough to hear the breeze.