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Sometimes timing is everything. Last week I wrote about the mysterious relocation of a pro-Barack Obama press release on Gov. Sarah Palin's Web site. (It's still there, just harder to find.) This week it was the Democrats' turn to bury a pro-Palin passage.

Palin's claim that she said, "Thanks, but no thanks" to Congress for the now infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" has been exposed as a lie. But there was a time when Democrats viewed her position more favorably. In the last few days, an anti-Ted Stevens site, funded by Alaska Democrats, deleted a Web page noting Palin's view that Alaska "had higher priorities" than the Bridge to Nowhere. Like Palin's praise for Obama, the page still exists—it's just harder to find:

Another bit of interesting Palin editing: After she was announced as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the right-wing Eagle Forum Alaska deleted Palin's pro-life answers to a gubernatorial questionnaire (see below). You can run, but you can't hide:

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign continues to edit its hyperactive Web site, which famously doubles as an online social network, allowing readers to make comments and even post entries. Is this such a good idea?

The majority of entries vanish into the system with few comments or readers. The value of these orphaned posts is little, but the risk is high (due to intrepid Googlers). What to make of this anti-Zionism blog, for example? Or, for that matter, the anti-Muslim content in the Palestine section?

Posts are deleted from my.barackobama, but it takes time. A hard-core anti-Clinton rant below stayed online for more than six months until it was deleted a few days ago. (The author continues to blog on the site.) Obama's site is constantly fending off "smears." Yet it also seems to attract a few itself.

Buzz. BUZZZZZZZZZ. There are so many buzz phrases in Thomas Friedman's new book that it practically vibrates in your hand. Code Green. Day-trading for electrons. Green is the new red, white, and blue. Subprime planet. Petrodictatorships. The Common Era, Friedman tells us, should be supplanted by the Energy Climate Era; the year is 1 ECE.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded asserts that artificially triggered climate change is a deadly threat to society. Rising global population, accompanied by rising rates of resource and energy consumption as the developing world grows affluent, may overwhelm both the Earth and the marketplace. Only fundamental change in energy production and use—"a whole new system for powering our economy"—can stave off disaster. Yet there's an upside, Hot, Flat, and Crowded contends: Radical change in energy use represents an opportunity for the United States to preserve its global economic leadership, by beating the world to clean-energy ideas that will sell.

Recently Friedman, in his influential New York Times column, has climbed aboard the green-energy bandwagon. The cynical view is that his embrace of max-PC alarums about global warming is Friedman's bid to make everyone forget he pounded the table in favor of an American invasion of Iraq. But let's take Hot, Flat, and Crowded at face value.

First, the author. Few who reach the top of any occupation have remained so hard-working, intellectually curious, and professionally conscientious. Despite considerable personal means, Friedman is in constant transcontinental motion, including to not-glamorous parts of the world, and constantly exposes himself to criticism by speaking at colleges. Most who achieve money or celebrity in the literary realm stop doing their own research and stop challenging their own assumptions. Friedman isn't like that. His work ethic helps make Hot, Flat, and Crowded provocative, rich, forward-thinking, and powerful.

Friedman's contention—first in a Foreign Policy article, now detailed in this book—that oil prices and democracy are inversely proportional is a breakthrough thought. When oil was $20 a barrel, he notes, Russia was becoming democratic; as oil prices rose, Russia reverted to autocracy. Bahrain is the first Persian Gulf state to move toward democracy, also the first Gulf state to deplete its oil reserves. Bahrain's leaders understand that freedom and education are needed to convert from oil kleptocracy to a modern productivity economy. Friedman shows that when, in the aftermath of 9/11, neither George W. Bush nor Congress took any action to improve fuel-efficiency standards and thus restrain U.S. oil demand, they set in motion a chain of events that has transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to the sheiks who support anti-Western and anti-Israel terrorism, and to Putin. Had Bush asked sacrifice of average Americans by a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax after 9/11, the money from the pump price run-up would have stayed here instead. The blowback effect of Bush's inaction against petroleum waste stands as one of the worst foreign-policy failures in U.S. history: a case Hot, Flat, and Crowded makes well.

Other parts of the book are less satisfying. Friedman expresses distaste at rising global population density—the long passport line at the Shanghai airport, the gridlocked road to the Moscow airport. He presents many examples of higher world resource demand, noting that even if America cuts back, reductions here will be swamped by increases elsewhere: "The biggest downside [of globalization] is that in raising standards of living, globalization is making possible much higher levels of production and consumption by many more people." Yet if resource trends and climate change are driven by rising population and rising affluence, which of these, precisely, do you propose to ban? I don't like crowding, either, but that is the world's fate for the next century or so, after which declining fertility is likely to cause population levels to fall.

Friedman embraces worst-case scenarios for climate change, warning not just of global warming but "global weirding." Yet his factual assertions are impossible to weigh, since Hot, Flat, and Crowded contains no footnotes or source notes. Friedman asserts, for instance: "In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R&D than the American utilities industry does." Good luck figuring out the "in fact" part. Supposing this Paul Harvey-like line is true, it is also silly, because utilities do not build power-plant systems—vendors such as General Electric and Combustion Engineering perform the technical R&D. Friedman devotes several pages to asserting that the strength of Hurricane Katrina was caused by greenhouse gases, a claim that is first sourced to "many climatologists," none of whom he pauses to name; later in the book, his authority is a climate analyst for the Weather Channel. That global warming causes strong hurricanes, however, is far from a settled scientific view. In May 2008, Science magazine reported that climate models suggest "a modest increase or even a decrease in the frequency and intensity of Atlantic tropical cyclones." (Subscription required for full text.)

Artificial climate change is real; even skeptics now call the danger scientifically proven. But Friedman, Al Gore, James Hansen of NASA, and others present climate change as some kind of super-ultra emergency. Global warming is a problem, one that must be managed via greenhouse-gas restrictions and a weaning away from fossil fuels. But in a world of poverty, disease, dictatorships, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, lack of girls' education, and more than 1 billion people without cleaning drinking water or electricity—climate change barely makes the Problem Top 10. Besides, the solution can't be a panicked pullback from the present economic system, though perhaps that system can be amended over the long term. Economic growth is needed to allow the world to afford environmental protection. At least for the next few decades, headlong resource consumption will be necessary to generate the capital that will pay for a clean-energy infrastructure.

Why does the cocktail-party circuit embrace claims about a pending climate doomsday? Partly owing to our nation's shaky grasp of science—many Americans lack basic understanding of chemicals, biology, and natural systems. Another reason is the belief that only exaggerated cries of crisis engage the public's attention; but this makes greenhouse concern seem like just another wolf cry. (Remember the electric power lines crisis? The beach needles crisis?) There also seems to be some kind of psychological compensation mechanism at work among corporate and Hollywood elites: that it's OK to be a runaway consumer so long as you theatrically denounce consumption.

Friedman's book-talk schedule for the first month alone of Hot, Flat, and Crowded promotion requires jet aircraft trips that, the calculator at Terra Pass estimates, will generate about 3 tons of carbon dioxide—the same as driving a Hummer for almost half a year. Friedman counsels, "[P]ersonally lead as environmentally sustainable a life as you can" but himself lives in a 11,400-square-foot mansion, whose carbon footprint may be visible from orbit. Rather than address this straight on, he squirms to paint his lifestyle green: In Hot, Flat, and Crowded Friedman calls his house only "large" and says he and his wife bought the 7.5 acres "to prevent it from being redeveloped into a subdivision. … [We built] a large house on one end and turn[ed] the rest into a parklike greenspace." Must depend on what the definition of like is, since this parklike space is hardly open to the public and appears disguised as a palatial lawn. Friedman claims his address "has become a refuge for deer, rabbits, birds, butterflies and a fox or two." He neglects to mention the nearby forest preserve—all homes in Friedman's neighborhood have deer and fox wandering their lawns. Friedman can't bring himself to admit he is lord of a manor and racing through more resources in his daily life than 10,000 rural Africans.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded is wise to say that American innovation is the best hope for a clean-energy future. The book is wrong to advocate a government-subsidized crash program of energy research—just as Barack Obama calls for $150 billion in alternative-energy subsidies. Government should regulate greenhouse emissions, then let the free market sort out the details, including by funding the research. Government's track record at setting goals is good; its track record at commercialization is awful. Wind-turbine application went nowhere in the 1970s and 1980s when federally subsidized; actual use has come since the 1990s, when the government bowed out and the private sector took over. Friedman extols various energy-saving gizmos about to become practical, such as inexpensive black boxes for home power management. They sound great—but no government-subsidized research ever would have produced them.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded goes off the edge of the flat Earth when Friedman maintains that if the United States could be "China for a day," then the central government could use coercion to make Americans live greenly. But suppose Congress had had dictatorial environmental power in, say, 1975. It would have banned natural gas use, as gas was then considered near exhaustion; today it seems the more gas power the better, because gas is much cleaner than petroleum. Give Congress dictatorial environmental power today, and it would freeze all our current problems into place—because the knowledge necessary to create an affordable clean-energy economy does not yet exist.

Friedman concludes Hot, Flat, and Crowded by proclaiming greenhouse damage could cause humanity to be "just one more endangered species." Better to consult history on this topic. Greenhouse gases are an air-pollution problem. Smog and acid rain, the two previous serious air-pollution problems, once were viewed as emergency threats. Then federal standards were imposed, and inventions and new business models were devised; now smog and acid rain are way down in the United States and declining in much of the rest of the world. And no international treaty governs smog or acid rain! Nations have adopted smog and acid-rain curbs because it is in their self-interest to do so. The same dynamic will take hold for climate change, not long after the United States finally imposes greenhouse-gas rules. Unquestionably the future is flat and crowded. Hot? Maybe not.

Max Holland, an investigative reporter and editor of the Web site Washington Decoded, has posted something interesting about Deep Throat, the famous Watergate leaker played by Hal Holbrook in the movie version of All the President's Men. For three decades, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein refused to identify this highly placed source. The mystery was finally solved in July 2005, when Vanity Fair published a piece in which Mark Felt, a onetime second-ranking official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said, "I'm the guy they used to call Deep Throat." Woodward confirmed it, then published a book about their relationship, The Secret Man.

A fair number of people (including me) had long figured Deep Throat was probably Felt, but before the Vanity Fair piece appeared, Woodward, Bernstein, and former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee had kept mum. A Deep Throat cult had evolved as Watergate junkies pored over public comments by the three men and especially over Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate stories and their best-selling 1974 memoir, All the President's Men. Even William Goldman's script for the movie became an object of intense study, because Woodward and Bernstein were known to have worked closely with the filmmakers. Yet even after Jim Mann, a former Post colleague of Woodward's, published a definitive piece in the June 1992 Atlantic that carefully laid out compelling reasons why Deep Throat had to have been an FBI official ("Deep Throat: An Institutional Analysis"), the Post maintained a stoic silence. It did the same in 2003 after a journalism professor at the University of Illinois named William Gaines took up a challenge Bradlee had laid down in his 1995 memoir, A Good Life ("it should be possible to identify Deep Throat simply by entering all the information about him in All the President's Men into a computer, and then entering as much as possible about all the various suspects") and concluded—erroneously!—that Deep Throat had to be Fred Fielding, deputy counsel in the Nixon White House. The Post didn't respond because the Post didn't play guessing games about Deep Throat's identity.

Or did it?

Holland has dug out of the archives a big, fat clue to Deep Throat's identity that the Post published way back on June 17, 1973, which happened to be the first anniversary of the Watergate break-in. The story appears to have been overlooked by every last Deep Throat sleuth. It went unmentioned in Mann's Atlantic piece, and it eluded Gaines' four-year Watergate document hunt.

It's easy to see why. The Post story Holland retrieved didn't carry a byline from Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. Its author was Laurence Stern, a much-admired Post writer who subsequently became assistant managing editor for national news. The headline was "Bureau Hurt by Watergate," but there was relatively little about Watergate in the piece, which focused on turmoil at the FBI since Director J. Edgar Hoover's death one year before. The Deep Throat hint was buried deep inside:

One highly placed FBI executive acknowledged that FBI agents may have been instrumental in getting the initial Watergate revelations into public print. Reporters who covered the case acknowledged the role of the agents in opening up the initial peepholes in the cover-up façade some administration officials were trying to erect.

"It wasn't a matter of getting rancorous leaks dumped in your lap," said one Watergate reportorial specialist. "You'd have to go to them and say, what about this or what about that? They'd respond, 'Yes, that's right.' I can think of one guy in the bureau without whom we wouldn't have gotten anywhere." [Boldface mine.]

Holland reports that he e-mailed Woodward and Bernstein to ask whether they remember talking to Stern for the story. (Holland couldn't query Stern because Stern died of a heart attack in 1979, when he was only 50.) Woodward replied that the story "does not ring a bell with me" and pointed out that at the time it was written, the Post had a dozen or so reporters on the Watergate story. Bernstein didn't reply at all, though after Holland sent him his published piece, Bernstein e-mailed back a noncommittal "Thanks, Max—interesting…."

Holland's story goes to great reportorial lengths to demonstrate why the "Watergate reportorial specialist" had to be Woodward or Bernstein—comparing the language with something the two told Timothy Crouse in The Boys on the Bus, collecting denials from the tiny handful of leading Watergate reporters who worked at other publications, etc. Of course, without Woodward or Bernstein saying, "It was me," the "Watergate reportorial specialist" can't be identified for certain. But common sense dictates there is a very high probability it was Woodward or Bernstein. Put yourself in Stern's shoes. You're writing a long story about chaos at the FBI since Hoover's death. You want to include a paragraph substantiating rumors that the bureau was leaking like a sieve about Watergate. You decide to interview a reporter on the Watergate story. The planet's two leading Watergate reporters happen to work a few yards away from you. They also happen to be pretty good friends of yours (Bernstein more than Woodward, in the recollection of Stern's son Marcus, now a reporter with ProPublica; his brother Christopher, now a reporter with Bloomberg, recalls seeing both Woodward and Bernstein around the house). Are you going to pick up your phone and ask some reporter for a competing news organization who his sources are on the biggest political story in Washington? Or are you going to stroll over to Woodward's or Bernstein's desk and do a quick interview with one of the guys who know best where the news media's information about Watergate is coming from? The question answers itself.

Stern's strong hint that Deep Throat was a G-man wouldn't have attracted much notice at the time. That's because:

a) It was no big secret that the FBI was leaking about lots of things, including Watergate. William Ruckelshaus, the acting director, admitted as much in Stern's story: "[S]ome of our agents were getting nervous about the pace of the Watergate investigation and probably talked to the press".

b) Nobody outside the Post—very possibly not even Stern—knew that Woodward had a secret highly placed source nicknamed Deep Throat. Throat's existence wouldn't be revealed until publication of All the President's Men a year later.

c) Even among the few who knew there was a Deep Throat, nobody except Woodward and Bernstein yet knew Throat's identity. Not even Bradlee. In A Good Life, Bradlee writes that he didn't ask Woodward who Throat was until "after Nixon's resignation [more than a year after Stern's story appeared], and after Woodward and Bernstein's second book, The Final Days [published nearly two years after that]."

After All the President's Men was published, "Who was Deep Throat?" became a favorite Washington parlor game. With the movie's release, the game went national. Did Stern tell friends and family, "I know who Deep Throat was, or at least where he worked"? Probably not. By then, the stakes were much higher. This was a source who'd helped bring down a president and was now officially mythologized as the very symbol of journalistic confidentiality. Also, Stern was rising in the Post management hierarchy and therefore was probably feeling a little less free-spirited. But Marcus Stern does remember attending with his father the Kennedy Center movie premiere of All the President's Men in 1976. Driving home afterward, Marcus recalls, the subject of Deep Throat came up. Who was Deep Throat, anyway? "I think the movie suggested it," his father replied. Laurence Stern then went on to cite something in the film—Marcus can't remember what—that indicated the filmmakers meant to hint that Deep Throat had worked for the FBI. In truth, the filmmakers had no idea who Deep Throat was or where he worked. Laurence didn't indicate, as best Marcus can recall, that he'd already spilled the latter secret in the pages of the Washington Post.

Suddenly, conservatives care about inequality.

In the Sept. 7 New York Times magazine, David Frum writes that inequality

taken to extremes can overwhelm conservative ideals of self-reliance, limited government and national unity. It can de-legitimize commerce and business and invite destructive protectionism and overregulation. Inequality, in short, is a conservative issue too.

It is inequality's secondary effects, not inequality itself, that worry Frum. Although "[w]e should be more troubled that the poor remain so poor," if that were all there was to it, Frum wouldn't see any need to do anything about it. Indeed, "[e]quality in itself never can be nor should be a conservative goal." Inequality puts itself on the conservative radar screen by doing something much, much worse than opening a chasm between America's haves and have-nots. It causes Republicans to lose elections!

"As America becomes more unequal," Frum explains, "it also becomes less Republican." Frum cites the examples of Fairfax County and Prince William County, both in Northern Virginia. As these counties have grown, they have grown more economically diverse, with poor immigrants at the bottom of the income scale and rich professionals at the top. To the extent that poor immigrants vote, they vote Democratic for the same reason poor people have voted Democratic for the past 70-odd years: the Democratic party favors government services for, and assistance to, society's most vulnerable members. Rich professionals vote Democratic, Frum writes, because in the 1990s, "Rubinomics"—i.e., the policies of Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin—"emancipated higher-income and socially moderate voters to vote with their values rather than with their pocketbooks." I'm more inclined to credit Reaganomics, particularly the virulent strain that took hold during the past dozen years or so, which decreed that the inheritance tax was so destructive to animal spirits that it had to be eliminated. I also suspect that the Democrats' emergence as the party of fiscal solvency played a role. But I take Frum's point. Wealthy professionals are more inclined to dislike the Republicans' drift toward extremism on social issues, the environment, and what Frum calls "assertive nationalism" (which I would call rash militarism and an arrogant, short-sighted disregard for our allies).

Frum's analysis assumes that the shrinking white working class has become a Republican stronghold. As I've observed before ("Who Is The Working Class, Anyway?") that may or may not be true, depending on whose definition of "white working class" you adopt. According to one view popularized by Paul Krugman, the white working class remains Democratic if you ignore the South, a region that the Democrats lost with the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. According to another view popularized by Thomas "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank, the Republicans have seized the white middle class nationwide by promoting reactionary values. Another caveat Frum himself makes is that while Democrats have been gaining on wealthy professionals, Republicans still enjoy an advantage at the very highest income brackets. Coincidentally, the super-rich are also the group whose income is growing the fastest. A bigger problem for Frum's analysis (and for the Republicans in general) is a recent study by the Pew Research Center For The People and The Press that found Democrats gaining ground on the GOP "across all income and education groups" (and especially among the "middle-income voters" Frum is counting on to vote Republican). All this adds up to the possibility that inequality, far from being an electoral disaster for the GOP, is at worst a wash, and possibly a plus. (If you happen to be Republican, dear reader, please don't let this get around.)

In their book Grand New Party, conservatives Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam similarly fret about inequality. Their approach to the problem is more complex than Frum's. It is also, I'm glad to report, motivated at least partly by sincere egalitarianism—especially as it relates (or, rather, fails to relate) to the excesses and inherent limitations of that great sacred cow, meritocracy. Those excesses are real but seldom acknowledged openly in the political realm, and Republicans have been using them against Democrats at least as far back as Richard Nixon's claim that the "silent majority" supported him. (See this Sept. 3 column by Frum in The Week, which can't quite decide whether to explain cheap anti-meritocratic partisanship or to express it.) Inchoate resentment of meritocracy's shortcomings is one subtext—admittedly, not the nastiest—to Republicans' baffling attacks on Barack Obama for doing what we all tell our children to do: Study hard in school so you can succeed in life.

Like Frum, Douthat and Salam are also concerned with secondary effects of growing inequality. They're particularly worried that rising inequality promotes support for the welfare state. "So long as Americans believe that the poor can rise by their own efforts (and the rich can fall)," they write, "they're likely to resist efforts to create a European-style nanny state that curtails independence in the name of universal security." That strikes me as imprecise. When I hear the phrase "nanny state," I don't think of the sort of income-support programs that Douthat and Salam appear to have in mind here. I think of the sort of safety regulations that we'd need even if society were magically to become perfectly egalitarian. Conservatives love to mock these rules in the abstract but seldom criticize them with much specificity because they do boring but vitally necessary things like set standards for meat inspection to make sure it won't poison you and impose design restrictions on automakers to maximize your chances of surviving a car crash. Rich people depend more on such protections than the poor, it seems to me, if only because they consume more. Douthat and Salam also cite inequality as one reason to oppose illegal immigration—not so much because it depresses wages but because the poverty of the immigrants themselves contributes significantly to income inequality in the U.S. Here Douthat and Salam more appropriately raise the issue of welfare payments and health insurance, which impose real costs on society (albeit ones that may be offset by the wealth created in the aggregate by their low-wage labor).

There are plenty of reasons to quarrel with conservatives' reasons to care about inequality. Perhaps the wiser course for liberals, though, would simply be to feel grateful that they do care—and to explore points of agreement on how to reduce it once the partisan warfare of the presidential election is done.

In the Sept. 10 "Culture Gabfest," Stephen Metcalf referred to the proprietor of the blog Naked Capitalism, Ives Smith, as a "he." Ives Smith is a woman.

In a Sept. 4 "Technology" column, Farhad Manjoo incorrectly referred to a Firefox add-on as Tabs Mix Plus. It is Tab Mix Plus. He also misstated that Firefox 3.1 is "available in beta." The current release is an alpha version.

In the Sept. 4 "XX Factor XXtra," Hanna Rosin misidentified W. Bradford Wilcox as a historian. Wilcox is a sociologist.

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 16 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the tabloid coverage of Sarah Palin's personal life, the new Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and the hyperquirky Microsoft ad featuring heroes from yesteryear Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

People magazine's Sarah Palin cover story.

Us magazine's article on Palin's pregnant daughter.

National Enquirer's Palin controversy article.

Hanna Rosin's Slate article on why Christian conservatives love Palin.

The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.

The Microsoft ad featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: Cycle 11 of America's Next Top Model and the show's first transgendered model, Isis.

Dana's pick: Gregory Curtis' book The Cave Painters.

Stephen's pick: the blog Naked Capitalism.

Correction, Sept. 11, 2008: In this podcast, Stephen incorrectly referred to the proprietor of Naked Capitalism, Ives Smith, as a "he." In fact, Ives Smith is a woman.

You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.

Aug. 27, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 15 with Stephen Metcalf, John Swansburg, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the merits and frivolities of Mad Men, the odds that Tropic Thunder will revive Tom Cruise's career, and the new documentary film Man on Wire.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The official Web site for AMC's Mad Men.

Troy Patterson's Slate assessment of Mad Men's appeal.

The official Web site for Tropic Thunder.

Dana Stevens' Slate review of Tropic Thunder.

Stevens fields questions and comments from Slate's readers about the touchy issues in Tropic Thunder.

The Man on Wire Web site.

Dana Stevens' Slate review of Man on Wire.

David Edelstein's New York magazine review of Man on Wire.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Julia's pick: Hunter S. Thompson's classic Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.

John's pick: Neil Diamond's latest release, Home Before Dark.

Stephen's pick: Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain.

You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.

Aug. 14, 2008

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 14 with Josh Levin, Stephen Metcalf, and Dana Stevens by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the Beijing Olympics and "The Redeem Team"; too-famous-too-fast Seth Rogen and his new film, Pineapple Express; and the death of comedian Bernie Mac.

(Update, August 18th, 2008: There was an error in this podcast. The song lip-synched at the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Games was not China's national anthem, but "Ode to the Motherland.")

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The official Web site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Slate's Olympics Twitter feed.

Slate's Olympics Twitter feed, explained.

Dana's review of Pineapple Express.

The Pineapple Express Web site.

The Original Kings of Comedy, which featured Bernie Mac's strongest stand-up.

The Bernie Mac Show, which featured the watered-down TV version.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Josh's pick: badminton at the Olympics.

Dana's pick: Mahmoud Darwish's book of prose poems, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982.

Stephen's pick: Isaac Hayes' albums Hot Buttered Soul and Black Moses.

You can reach the Culture Gabfest at culturefest@slate.com.

Posted by Amanda Aronczyk on Aug. 14, 2008 at 3:58 p.m.

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,

A few years ago my late husband and I made a video of ourselves. It features me performing oral sex on him. It isn't particularly hard-core, we are in shadow, and there is no "money shot," but it is obvious what is going on and who is involved. We had a wonderful marriage, and I enjoy watching this video and reminiscing every once in a while. My question is, how can I prevent my children from looking at it after I die? I don't want to destroy it, but I may not know when the end is coming. I can't think of any way of labeling it, or even telling them what is on it and asking them not to peek, that would keep them from watching it just out of curiosity. If they did watch it, would it harm them or make them think less of their parents?

—Keep It Private

Dear Private,

You do not have to deep-six your Deep Throat video, and it's a tribute to the erotic robustness of your marriage that you have this memento and that it brings you pleasure. You're right, we don't necessarily know when the end is coming, but often we get a warning, and if you do, you should dispose of the video then. But otherwise, keep it in an envelope labeled "Private" that you store with other personal effects. You can put a letter around the video addressed to your children and tell them you don't mean to sound tantalizing, but the video was just for you and your late husband, and if they are reading this letter, it means you weren't able to destroy it before your death. Write that out of respect for their parents, you ask that they toss the video without watching it. After that, if they can't resist this forbidden fruit, at least they've been warned of the knowledge that will come from partaking. If they look, your children will surely wish they had heeded that little voice that said, "You're about to pop a 'Mom and Dad Sex Video' into the VCR," but they will also never forget that their parents were really wild for each other.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: Girlfriend Fadeaway

Dear Prudence,

I come from a tight-knit family, but a recent incident has caused some serious strain between my brother and me. For the first few months of this year, a friend, "Alice," and I dated. Things were fairly casual, but I became pretty taken with her, and as time progressed we talked about getting more serious. So I was shocked to hear from a mutual friend that she had been secretly seeing my younger brother, and the two had fallen hard for each other. When I confronted them, they both admitted it and apologized for hurting me; since then, though, they have continued to date. Alice has also continued to try to be friendly with me, and, because we all have a lot of mutual friends, I'm around the two of them often. I can't help but feel betrayed and creeped out, and have told them that their relationship is hurtful and makes me uncomfortable. They say that I'm being unreasonable and trying to get in the way of their happiness, but it seems to me that they're being selfish and insensitive. Am I wrong to want my brother and Alice to cool it?

—Burned by Brotherly Love

Dear Burned,

Although it's not very good, you might want to rent Dan in Real Life, the Steve Carell movie about the guy who falls in love with his brother's girlfriend, and she with him. Sure, it's tense and awkward when the situation is revealed, but in the end everyone understands that, hey, you can't put the kibosh on love. Or you could contemplate the Blaise Pascal quote, "The heart has its reason which reason does not know," which Woody Allen paraphrased to explain why he was having an affair with the daughter of his longtime lover, Mia Farrow. OK, all this may not be making you feel better, and you're absolutely right that your brother and Alice acted like snakes, but they are happy together in a way that you admit you and Alice weren't. Sure, you'd like to get even by at least making them break up so as not to further remind you of your humiliation. Instead, you could decide that no matter what happens between your brother and Alice, you aren't going to feel humiliated anymore. You could start joking that Dan in Real Life isn't nearly as entertaining as your real life. Then you can wish your brother and Alice well and go looking for your own true love.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I am an older college student and I have become good friends with my neighbor, who has a similar background. While we have different perspectives on life and school (I am very grateful to have a "second chance" while she frequently complains about the obstacles she faces), I very much enjoy her company. The problem is that she's a closet racist—she and her husband have told me so—yet it rarely comes up, and they are not flamboyant about it. We live in student housing, which has a large proportion of foreign students. I love this and am happy that my daughter has the opportunity to play with kids from different cultures. My friend, however, has made it very clear that she does not like a 7-year-old African girl because she was "mean" to her son, who's around the same age. I witnessed the events that led up to this accusation, and the girl did nothing wrong. The girl is not welcome in my friend's house, and my friend has even tattled on the girl to me, presumably hoping I would not allow my daughter to play with her, either. How do I handle this? And is there a diplomatic way to point out to her that the "mean" girl is a product of her own racist imagination?

—Colorblind

Dear Colorblind,

Your friend is not a closet racist; she's a racist. After all, she and her husband acknowledged to you that they harbor racist views, but they are apparently savvy enough to know that going around campus in Klan wear is only going to make life more unpleasant than it already is, what with the place crawling with people of different pigments. After that confession, I find it hard to believe you could continue to enjoy her company, especially since you have seen her racism in action, directed against a 7-year-old child. You handle this situation by dealing with it directly. Tell your friend—maybe she will soon be only your neighbor—that you were deeply disturbed by her confession to you of her racist views, but you weren't sure how to react. Because it is unavoidable that you will see her constantly, and because you might get through to her better if you don't use a bludgeon, convey that you still feel much affection for her but that you find racism intolerable. Say that you can't keep silent over what you see as her bigotry toward her son's black playmate. Explain that you saw the interactions between the girl and her son, and what you observed was normal behavior for small children. Then tell her you simply can't support her in her treatment of this child.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

My biological grandmother died young before I was born. Of her many grandchildren, only my brother, who was a toddler when she died, ever knew her. My grandfather remarried shortly afterward. My cousins and I have known our stepgrandmother by only her first name, "Beatrice." Our parents do not call her "Mom" nor have they said, "This is your grandmother." My mother has hostile feelings toward her. My uncle told his sons that she is not their grandmother, and they will not call her that. At Christmas last year, Beatrice pulled me and my brother outside and asked us why we don't call her "Grandma." When my brother answered without hesitation that it is because she's not our biological grandmother, she replied that she was the only grandmother we knew. Her question, of course, upset our parents. Neither of them said anything to her because they felt that we responded properly. I understand her wanting to be my "Grandma" and that not every family has biological ties, with adoptions, divorce, etc. But I feel that if I refer to her as "Grandma," I would be forgetting the memory of my real grandmother. How should I deal with this?

—Confused Family Member

Dear Confused,

Unless Beatrice put strychnine in your late grandmother's coffee, you have presented no reason for the long-running hostility toward her. Perhaps your mother and uncle felt your grandfather remarried too quickly—or, worse, maybe Beatrice was part of your grandfather's life before your grandmother died. Even so, this cold war should have ended long ago. It's hardly a tribute to someone's memory to be forever frosty to the person who is making the surviving spouse happy. Beatrice probably should have brought this issue up with your parents before putting you on the spot, but maybe she knew how your parents would react. Your parents and uncle may never like Beatrice, but it is gratuitous for them to pass their animosity to the next generation. You all sound old enough to discuss this with your parents directly. Ask them why they remain so angry. Then ask yourselves, why not honor the only grandmother you have ever known by calling her "Grandma"?

—Prudie

For much of the recent past, Texans in general and Houstonians in particular have viewed hurricanes with a degree of machismo. No one was still around to testify to the power of the Great Hurricane of 1900, the one that destroyed Galveston Island and paved the way for Houston to replace it as a boomtown, and few storms that followed were anywhere near as devastating. Over time, in fact, Texans got used to staring down their storms; they committed to staying put, to covering their windows with plywood or marking them with menacing masking-tape Xs, and to hosting foolish if festive hurricane parties. Storms still wreaked havoc—upending trailers, creating widespread flooding, paving downtown Houston in skyscraper glass—but most people accepted them as a normal if problematic part of life here, like mosquitoes, humidity, and the Bush family.

Then came the 2005 hurricane season, with Katrina in August and, not quite a month later, Rita. Within a few weeks, Houston was overwhelmed with evacuees from one angry storm and then dodged another one that ravaged the state's southeast coastline, costing billions of dollars in damage and inspiring widespread nuttiness and worse as tens of thousands of Houstonians tried to flee at once with no discernable plan other than to "git." Whether residents attributed the cause of these disasters to global warming, god's wrath, or simple bad luck, one thing's for sure: Our attitude toward hurricanes has changed. Every big storm now arrives with a post-Katrina psychopathology, a kind of pre-traumatic stress disorder that can be likened to Kübler-Ross' famous stages of grief. As Ike rolls in, I'm watching it reach full strength. The stages are as follows:

1. Anticipation. This phase usually accompanies the arrival of hurricane season, the six months—that's half a year—from June 1 to Nov. 30. Symptoms include a disturbing excitement over the possible arrival of a deadly storm, as evidenced by an obsession with hurricane-tracking maps and various weather blogs, like skeetobiteweather.com, wunderground.com/tropical, and stormjunkie.com. This phase can be accompanied by an increase in hairsplitting arguments over a) who best remembers Hurricane Carla back in '61, b) the differences in mph between Category 3 and Category 4 storms, and c) whether the Houston Chronicle's weather blogger Eric Berger has surpassed legendary TV weatherman Dr. Neil Frank in the reporting of hurricane minutia. (Question from reader: "What do you think about the CLP5 model?" Berger: "It's not a model, it's a combination of climatological and persistence, hence the name Clipper. Discount it heavily. Let me put it this way, if a new model can't substantially beat the CLP5 model at forecasting it's tossed in the rubbish bin.")

2. Shopping. This phase usually shows up about a week before a storm's proposed arrival. It is precipitated by a futile search for the camping lanterns and flashlights purchased but unused during last hurricane season, followed by budget-breaking expeditions to Target and/or Walmart and/or RadioShack in search of storm "necessities" like bottled water (penny pinchers just fill the bathtub), esoteric canned vegetables that will never be eaten, five-day Igloo coolers, more flashlights, and, for gourmands like my friend and food critic Alison Cook, Parmalat boxed milk. (Cook doesn't settle for canned limas left over from Hurricane Rita: "Good wine is a must at my house," she recently blogged of her Ike preparations, "as are a couple of favorite cheeses and a loaf or two of excellent bread—the extra swaddled in heavy-duty aluminum foil and frozen, to be extracted from the freezer after the electricity fails.") As the storm gets closer, store shelves will resemble London after the Blitz. Don't even bother asking for a hand-crank transistor radio. This phase is often accompanied by Bargaining, as in, "If I spend $150-plus on hurricane supplies, the storm will go elsewhere."

3. Denial. Sets in as soon as the storm does not take the hoped-for turn to the north, south, east, or west—that is, doesn't go elsewhere. In this phase, locals note the clearness of the sky and ignore the stillness in the air. They also avoid well-meaning but anxiety-producing phone calls from faraway family and friends who want to know "how you are doing down there." Typical responses include "They always turn in another direction" and "I left last time, and nothing happened." Or, as one stubborn resident of Galveston told Eric Berger after the mayor declared a mandatory evacuation, "I ain't goin' nowhere. I'm not goin' to let them move me like they did for the last one." (The "last one" being Hurricane Rita, which left more than 100 people dead in Texas.) These days, deniers make theirs virtual by cracking Ike jokes on Facebook, e.g., "Y(Ike)s!"

4. Panic. Often concurrent with Stage 3 and can result from skipping Stage 2. Sufferers often exhibit symptoms while enduring endless checkout lines in ravaged Targets, Walmarts, etc., as they overhear shoppers' cell-phone conversations laced with false bravado. ("It probably won't make landfall as a Category 3.") Fistfights can erupt as gas stations run low on $3.50-per-gallon gas; catatonia can ensue when local weather reporting goes 24/7 (Those waves in Galveston? Still pretty placid 48 hours out!) and Houston Mayor Bill White stars in a funereal recitation of the ZIP codes requiring mandatory evacuation. Delusions can also be a problem—imagining you will still have Web access when the power goes out, for instance, or thinking you need to bring the gas grill inside when the kitchen stove is powered by… gas. Some will try to escape by calling the local Four Seasons Hotel (see Shopping, above) or various Texas Hill Country resorts, but by now they will all be booked.

5. Acceptance. This phase begins with a seemingly endless round of voice mails—on the recently exhumed nonportable phone—announcing closures and cancellations of virtually everything, including but not limited to school, psychotherapy ("Well, I could see you, but the elevators won't be working and the electricity will be off …"), yoga classes ("Namaste"), and the dinner party scheduled back in March. It is time to move the gas grill and potted plants into the garage. It is time to capture the semiferal cats with pillowcases and carry them into the newly renovated bathroom, which they will destroy. It is time to admit that the only thing on television for the foreseeable future will be drenched, wind-lashed reporters in very silly rain gear or spotlight-happy public officials, like Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. The only option now is to wish friends and even unpleasant neighbors good luck and batten down the hatches. Or, as the suddenly omnipresent FEMA operatives say, "Shelter in place."

LANCASTER, Pa.—The line to see Sarah Palin is the longest I have ever seen this side of security at JFK Airport. It starts at the front door of the Franklin & Marshall College gym; goes out to Harrisburg Pik;, turns right and heads all the way down the block, almost to Wendy's; then turns right again and snakes through the parking lot, doubling back on itself so many times that people standing in the line are actually heckling those of us who are still searching for its end. "You're not there yet!" someone cracks when I sidle into a gap that I'd mistaken for the end.

I eventually find the end of the line and fall into conversation with the family that slides right in behind me: an auto parts dealer with his wife and two young kids. They drove an hour from Wilmington, Del., despite not having tickets. Like most of the crowd, they're not here to see John McCain. They're here for Sarah.

So is the guy with the "Taxpayers for Palin" sign, the young women with the "You Go Girl" signs, and the many "Kids for Sarah Palin." More than a few moms are sporting some variant of the Palin look, with their new icon's boxy glasses and piled-up 'do. They contrast oddly with the Amish men in beards and straw hats who also dot the line. Someone asks the question everyone is thinking: "I wonder if this many people would have shown up just for John McCain?"

Good question. Lancaster County, Pa., might well be described as the base of the Republican base. Megachurches dot the landscape, but the original Amish and Mennonite and Church of the Brethren settlers (whose descendants are still going strong) make the Wasilla Assembly of God seem socially liberal. SUVs share the road with horse-drawn buggies, McMansion developments rub shoulders with Plain People farms not served by electricity, and they vote in overwhelming numbers for Rep. Joe Pitts, who chairs something called the "Values Action Team," which is basically the congressional wing of James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

But just a few weeks ago, you didn't see a whole lot of McCain signs around. And by and large, this is Sarah's crowd. She's the reason the two middle-aged ladies near me, members of a local symphony, called in sick to work today (which, in turn, is why they shoo away a TV reporter). There's a tiny gaggle of protesters, maybe half a dozen, preaching to the unconvertible. And as the 3:30 p.m. start time draws near, it's beginning to look like we might get stuck out here listening to them.

Soon enough a staffer delivers the Straight Talk: We're hosed. The fire marshals have said no more people can be allowed into the gym. Everyone sort of sags, and begins the long trudge over to the Auxiliary Viewing Area, where a JumboTron has been set up. Unfortunately, it's partly blocked by a fire engine and an ambulance, and a wall of Secret Service.

Inside, the rally has already started. We know this because of the tinny cheers emanating from the gym's side door. There is a moment of, dare I say it, bitterness. "I'm gonna vote for him anyways," says a heavyset man in a military cap. Then the screen flashes on, and there they are: Palin in her blood-red power suit, McCain standing next to her. She goes first, launching into a remixed version of her convention speech; in her squeaky, cheerleader-mom voice, its harsh sentiments come off as almost saucy. The crowd hoots and claps at the screen. McCain stands beside her like a man who doesn't know what to do with himself, blinking and waving to the crowd on cue with her applause lines. He seems quite happy to be her Denis Thatcher, and his own brief remarks almost seem an afterthought.

We can't really hear too well, the sound's been turned down so low, but still people clap and cheer. We're happy at last because we've realized we're going to get something far more precious: Palin and McCain will be coming out this side door, and we'll have our own private audience! The bad news is the Secret Service won't let anyone get close to the door. After more furious cell phoning and gesticulating, the Secret Service relents: We press forward to be individually wanded, then charge to our positions behind some metal barricades where we wait and wait, the excitement building as the sound system blares "Straight Talk" and that Toby Keith 9/11 song at tinnitus-inducing levels.

We wait some more. Finally McCain comes striding around from the back of the building, with a huge grin. But no Palin. The crowd cheers anyway, and even McCain seems pumped as he mounts the stage set up just outside the door. This must be like the old days for him, a rally of just a few hundred amped-up fans. I wonder if he misses those times, when he shot the breeze with reporters and mixed it up with the public and enjoyed having the spotlight to himself.

Up close, he seems like a different guy from the awkward and confused-seeming old gent we see on TV sometimes, the one who stumbles through his own speeches. He gives a quick pep talk in which he says, jokingly I think, "Kill the fire marshals!" That gets a big cheer.

Afterward he charges all the way to the end of the barricades, not afraid to wreck his shoes in the sodden mulch. His charge brings him very near. Up close, he's compact and full of surprising energy. I've been getting squeezed by a fiftysomething guy who's been using his 4-year-old granddaughter (I assume) as a battering ram, but now it pays off; I'm almost against the barricades. McCain is coming, his left hand floating into space toward me amid the surge of shoulders and limbs and cell phones and proffered hands.

I swoop in and take his hand in my right, overhand to his underhand, for a brief but firm squeeze. His hand is wrinkled but not rough, surprisingly soft, in fact, obviously well-manicured, and fragrant with lanolin. We make eye contact briefly, and there is an awkward moment when neither of us says anything. Then he moves down the line, giving the distinct impression that this might be the highlight of his day.

The Big Lebowski, the seventh of the Coen brothers' 13 feature films, begins when two goons break into the modest home of Jeffrey Lebowski and one of them pees on his rug. They've mistaken Lebowski, who calls himself "the Dude," for another, wealthier man of the same name. So the Dude seeks out this other Lebowski in search of compensation for his rug. That meeting does not go well. A few days later, though, the rich Lebowski offers the Dude 20 grand to deliver a $1 million ransom to men who claim to have kidnapped his wife. The kidnapping involves some German nihilists and a porn tycoon, plus a few others. It's a simple story, really.

Just released for a third time on DVD, The Big Lebowski has, in a decade, inspired a following to rival all cinematic cults, complete with annual festivals, monthly podcasts, and teachings to live by. At the heart of this denomination is the Dude, brilliantly incarnated by Jeff Bridges as a Zen slob whose three great loves are weed, white Russians, and bowling. And the Dude is indeed a fantastic character. Ten years on, though, the movie's most striking role belongs to John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: a hawkish, slightly unhinged Vietnam vet and the Dude's best friend and bowling partner. Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that's because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He's a neocon.

If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, "is gonna be a piece of cake"; in the original script, he calls it "a fucking cakewalk"); nostalgia for the Cold War ("Charlie," he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a "worthy fuckin' adversary"); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: "If you will it, Dude, it is no dream"); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin's given name and admits to having "dabbled in pacifism"). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter's imperialist side. "Dude has a rather, let's say, Eastern approach to bowling," he said in an interview. "Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny."

The Coen brothers present this bellicose figure "in the early '90s" (as an opening voice-over provided by a mysterious cowboy informs us) "just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-rackies." After the cowboy has spoken, the first words we hear come from the elder President Bush: "This aggression will not stand," he declares, responding to the invasion of Kuwait and appearing on a grocery store television while the Dude buys some half-and-half. Bush's threat of force frames all that follows. When Walter hears about the "carpet-pissers," he insists that the Dude draw "a line in the sand":

The Dude has his own politics—or once did, at least: member of the Seattle Seven, co-author of the "original Port Huron Statement" (not the "compromised second draft"). A student activist who's become a SoCal layabout, he contrasts neatly with Walter, a veteran who interprets everything through the lens of Vietnam. In other words, the Dude and Walter are on opposite sides of the American divide that opened during the 1960s. And while the Dude is the movie's hero, more or less, it's Walter who drives the plot. He tells the Dude to seek out the rich Lebowski. He accompanies the Dude during the ransom delivery and insists that they fake the handoff and keep the money. When the Dude's car is stolen, with the money in it, Walter tracks down the apparent culprit and brings the Dude along to interrogate him.

This last scene, if filmed today, would almost certainly be taken as an allegory about the younger Bush's war. The police have recovered the car, and the Dude has found, wedged between the seats, a page of homework belonging to one Larry Sellers. Walter figures out Larry's address and arrives at his house, the Dude in tow, the homework in a plastic bag. He then makes a brief presentation:

When Larry says nothing, Walter proceeds to Plan B: destroying the new Corvette parked outside—purchased, he assumes, using the money left in the car—with a crowbar. Actually, though, the Corvette belongs to a neighbor. Neocons everywhere can sympathize.

Is this eerie foreshadowing of the second Iraq war coincidental? Not entirely. The Coen brothers created a character with traits that run deep in American culture: unflinching righteousness and a tendency to violence. (He was largely based on John Milius, who wrote and directed Red Dawn, the Cold War-paranoia film that later gave its name to the military operation that captured Saddam.) This character confronts a situation that combines both injustice and the opportunity for material gain. He responds more or less as one would imagine. The Dude's pacifist leanings are no match for Walter's assertiveness: While the Dude's disposition may be admirable, he has little effect on the tide of world events. (Refugees from the 1960s can also sympathize.)

Within the world of the movie, though, the destruction of the bystander's Corvette is a fairly minor incident. Immediately afterward, we see Walter, the Dude, and Donnie—the third and least conspicuous member of the bowling team, played by Steve Buscemi—on their way home in the Dude's car, eating hamburgers and listening to "Oye Como Va." Watching The Big Lebowski today, one notices its insight into basic American attitudes but also the lightheartedness with which it's able to treat these attitudes. Donnie does die of a heart attack during a climactic showdown with those German nihilists, and one might call his death a casualty of Walter's aggression and the Dude's inability to reign it in. But his death quickly gives way to Walter and the Dude's reconciliation, at a makeshift funeral they hold for Donnie by the Pacific Ocean:

This gentle, comic conclusion came to mind while I watched the Coen brothers' new farce, Burn After Reading, which revolves around the misplaced memoirs of an ex-CIA analyst. The new film is a similarly sharp satire of American life, and there are parallels with the Lebowski plot: a greedy attempt at extortion, multiple schemes incompetently botched. The contrast in tone, though, is stark. There's no real friendship in the world of Burn After Reading, there's even less heroism, and paranoia abounds. No one mentions 9/11 or the war in Iraq, but these characters, like their audience, are living in a darker world. The cult of Lebowski, I've begun to suspect, has more than a little nostalgia in it—for a decade when one could poke brilliant fun at the national disposition and the stakes didn't feel so high.

The McCain-Palin campaign launched a Web banner ad on Sept. 3 asking supporters to "Invest in Victory" by donating to its "compliance fund." What's a compliance fund?

A loophole. Candidates like John McCain who participate in public financing must not accept private donations, spend more than $50,000 of their personal wealth, or exceed a government-specified spending cap—$84.1 million this season. (Barack Obama, by the way, is the first major party nominee to turn down government funds for the general election in the history of the public financing program.) But in the 1980s the Federal Election Commission decided on an exemption: It's OK to solicit private donations to help defray the cost of following the rules—like reporting where the campaign spends its money. Back in 2004, George W. Bush raised $12.2 million for his compliance fund while John Kerry hauled in $8.9 million. (There is no cap on total compliance spending during the general election.)

Historically, compliance funds were used primarily for legal and accounting services. But after the 2004 season, the Kerry-Edwards campaign requested an advisory opinion from the FEC on whether they could use excess compliance donations to pay off debts incurred from TV advertising. In 2007, the FEC held that since campaigns must tag disclaimers onto the end of any ad ("I'm John McCain, and I approve this message"), they could use compliance funds to pay for up to 5 percent of broadcast advertising. (The FEC initially considered allowing up to 13 percent, but a couple of commissioners balked, and the committee settled on 5 percent, which is a little under the amount of time eaten up in a 30-second ad by the "approval" line.) So while the McCain campaign can't use privately donated money to pay for the first 28.5 seconds of a given TV ad, it's kosher to use that cash for the last second and a half.

If a campaign diverts compliance funds improperly (by using such funds to pay for more than 5 percent of a TV ad, say), then the FEC can impose a monetary penalty or get the Justice Department on the case. For much of the past year, however, the FEC lacked a quorum, which means they have a long case backlog and won't be very sprightly when it comes to enforcement.

Since Democratic nominee Barack Obama declined public funding, he doesn't need to set up a separate compliance fund. The Obama-Biden camp can allocate money for compliance-related legal and accounting services from a general operating budget.

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

Explainer thanks Richard Briffault of Columbia University and David Donnelly of the Public Campaign Action Fund.

Hurricane Ike—which is expected to hit Texas on Friday or Saturday—has already taken its toll on Cuba, reportedly killing four people and damaging more than 200,000 homes. Like Hurricane Gustav two weeks ago, Ike also hit the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. What happens to detainees at Gitmo when a hurricane hits?

Unless it gets really bad, they stay put. In the words of a camp spokesman, "safe and humane care and custody" of detainees—a stated mission of the camp's commanders—requires protecting them from "the elements of inclement weather." The military maintains that the facilities currently housing the prisoners are capable of withstanding anything up to a Category 2 hurricane, according to the Miami Herald. As early as February 2002, camp officials also said that in the event of a catastrophic storm, detainees could be housed temporarily in old ammunition bunkers. (In 1994—when the base was housing thousands of Cuban refugees—the Department of Defense said bunkers at Guantanamo could hold as many as 14,000 people.)

That's not to say it's business as usual at Guantanamo during a hurricane. Aside from the detainees, regular residents of the base—mostly military personnel, contractors, and their families—follow a weather warning system that ranges in severity from Readiness Condition V (which is in effect for the entire hurricane season and requires that residents be generally prepared) to Readiness Condition I (which comes into play when a severe storm is less than 12 hours away). During the approach of Ike, the high-alert Condition I applied—all base leave and liberty were canceled, and nonessential personnel had to stay at home or take cover in hurricane shelters. (Most homes at the base are hurricane-resistant, but residents can take shelter in large buildings like the gym, elementary school, or bowling alley.) On Sunday, the hurricane preparations also meant a planned outdoor showing of Tropic Thunder was canceled, as the space was used to park bulldozers and other heavy machinery instead.

While Cuba is often hit by hurricanes, Guantanamo has never suffered extensive damage from storms; one possible reason is that the nearby island of Hispaniola acts as a buffer. By contrast, the treatment of prisoners during hurricanes has been far more controversial in Louisiana. In 2005, inmates from Orleans Parish Prison were not evacuated as Hurricane Katrina approached. As a result, prisoners were allegedly left in their cells as they flooded, many without food or clean water. (In some cases, the inmates weren't removed for as many as five days.) Orleans Parish used a different approach on the eve of Hurricane Gustav last month: Two thousand one hundred prisoners were bused to facilities located farther inland, and 171 inmates who had been either sentenced or were awaiting trial on nonviolent municipal charges were released. (Those who hadn't yet been tried were still required to report to court after the storm.)

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

Explainer thanks Navy Petty Officer Richard Lamb and Army Maj. Rick Morehouse.

When Barack Obama told a crowd at a campaign event on Tuesday, "You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," the McCain campaign swiftly took offense, claiming the analogy was directed at vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki countered the accusation, saying, "That expression is older than my grandfather's grandfather and it means that you can dress something up but it doesn't change what it is." Is the expression really that old?

The concept is an old one, but the phrasing used by Obama is rather new. Many porcine proverbs describe vain attempts at converting something from ugly to pretty, or from useless to useful. The famous maxim that "You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear" dates back at least to the mid-16^th century. Other old sayings play on the ludicrousness of a pig getting dressed up. "A hog in armour is still but a hog" was recorded in 1732 by British physician Thomas Fuller. As Francis Grose later explained in A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796), a "hog in armour" alludes to "an awkward or mean looking man or woman, finely dressed." Charles H. Spurgeon noted another variation in his 1887 compendium of proverbs, The Salt-Cellars: "A hog in a silk waistcoat is still a hog," meaning, "Circumstances do not alter a man's nature, nor even his manners."

The "lipstick" variation is relatively novel—not surprising, since the word lipstick itself dates only to 1880. The incongruity of pigs and cosmetics was expressed as early as 1926 by the colorful editor Charles F. Lummis, writing in the Los Angeles Times: "Most of us know as much of history as a pig does of lipsticks." But the exact wording of "putting lipstick on a pig (or hog)" doesn't show up until much later. In 1985, the Washington Post quoted a San Francisco radio host on plans for renovating Candlestick Park (instead of building a new downtown stadium for the Giants): "That would be like putting lipstick on a pig."

Ann Richards did much to boost the saying's political popularity when she used a number of variations while governor of Texas in the early '90s. In 1991, in her first budget-writing session, she said, "This is not another one of those deals where you put lipstick on a hog and call it a princess." The next year, at a Democratic barbecue in South Dakota, she criticized the George H.W. Bush administration for using warships to protect oil tankers in the Middle East, which she considered a hidden subsidy for foreign oil. "You can put lipstick on a hog and call it Monique, but it is still a pig," she said. Richards returned to the theme in her failed 1994 gubernatorial race against the younger Bush, using the "call it Monique" line to disparage her opponent's negative ads.

Since then, "lipstick on a pig" has spiced up the political verbiage of everyone from Charlie Rangel to Dick Cheney. John McCain himself used it last year to describe Hillary Clinton's health care proposal. And even though the folksy expression is one that sounds old (and connects back to genuinely old proverbs), it's not quite the vintage of anyone's grandfather's grandfather.

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

United Airlines saw a 76 percent drop in its share price Monday, after it was reported that the company had filed for bankruptcy protection. The news story turned out to have been six years old and had been erroneously picked up by the Google News service. It was then posted to the Bloomberg Professional network. In the words of duckcommander80 from Yahoo Finance's message board, who lost $19,000, "WHO THE HELL DO WE SUE???????"

It's not clear. Potential targets include the Tribune Co. and one of its newspapers, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (whose 2002 article triggered the sell-off Monday); Google (whose Google News service picked up the piece); Bloomberg; Income Securities Advisors (whose analyst posted the headline on the Bloomberg Professional network); and NASDAQ (which suspended trading at 11:30 a.m. but then refused to "bust," or cancel, the trades that happened during the time people were acting on the misinformation). United has announced a full investigation but says it's premature to discuss legal action. Spokeswoman Jean Medina said the stock drop "was a serious issue, and it's what happens when people are careless and don't check facts."

Still, if it's damages that United, or anyone else, is seeking, good luck. The law provides strong protections for Internet linkers, which seems to exonerate Google, Bloomberg, and Income Securities Advisors. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 unambiguously states, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." What about the original source of the news, the Tribune Co.? Yesterday it acknowledged that the link to the 2002 bankruptcy article was indeed pushed to the "most viewed" list on the Sun-Sentinel's site, which caught Google's eye. But despite this admission, the threshold for libel is pretty high. There has to be malicious intent, and mere negligence isn't enough. Public entities like United (as opposed to private individuals) generally have an even higher threshold; reckless indifference is not enough.

The woes for United may have been exacerbated by "stop loss" orders, which automatically sell off a stock as soon as its price falls below a predetermined level. This innovation can create efficiencies, and investors (and their agents) can occasionally have a life rather than track their stocks 24/7. But it can also, as in this instance, create a huge volume of sell orders without the shareholders even knowing what's going on. Although it's hard to track down the numbers, it's likely that United, with relatively low capitalization and high volatility, is of special interest to hedge-fund managers and day traders who are more likely to employ stop-loss orders. Combine that with quantitative trading; vendors serving the financial markets who provide text-based classification of the news; and other innovations, and you've got a market that functions with little human oversight.

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

Explainer thanks Sandra Baron of the Media Law Resource Center, Patrick Carome at the law firm Wilmer Hale, and Andrew Lo of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The world's largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider, was switched on in Switzerland on Wednesday. A few people worried that the LHC would cause the world to be swallowed up by a black hole, especially when it starts to operate at full force in the spring. What would happen if you fell into a black hole?

Your body would be shredded apart into the smallest possible pieces. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, who wrote the definitive account Death by Black Hole, imagined the experience as "the most spectacular way to die in space."

A black hole is a place where the force of gravity is so powerful that you would need to be traveling at a speed faster than the speed of light to escape its pull. Since nothing in the universe is faster than the speed of light, nothing that falls into a black hole can ever escape. The border at which gravity becomes strong enough to create that phenomenon is known as the "event horizon"; it marks the outer boundary of the black hole. (Until the 1940s, some scientists believed that matter crusted up on the event horizon and didn't fall in.)

Closer to the center, gravity is even stronger. If you were caught by the pull of a black hole, you would be sent into free fall toward its center. The pulling force would increase as you moved toward the center, creating what's called a "tidal force" on your body. That is to say, the gravity acting on your head would be much stronger than the gravity acting on your toes (assuming you were falling head-first). That would make your head accelerate faster than your toes; the difference would stretch your body until it snapped apart, first at its weakest point and then disintegrating rapidly from there as the tidal force became stronger than the chemical bonds holding your body together. You'd be reduced to a bunch of disconnected atoms. Those atoms would be stretched into a line and continue in a processional march. As Tyson described it, you would be "extruded through space like toothpaste being squeezed through a tube." No one knows for certain what happens to those atoms once they reach the center, or "singularity," of a black hole.

In a small black hole—like the one predicted by the LHC doomsayers—this dissolution would occur almost immediately. In fact, for all but the largest black holes, dissolution would happen before a person even crossed the event horizon, and it would take place in a matter of billionths of a second.

The more matter—and people—a black hole gobbled up, the bigger it would get. That could have the effect of making it less spectacularly deadly. As a black hole increases in size, the differences in gravitational force inside become less dramatic. If you fell into a truly gigantic black hole, the rate of change—and resulting tidal force—might not be enough to rip your body apart until after you'd crossed the event horizon.

If you fell into a large enough black hole, your last moments would be a little bit like being on the inside of a distorted, one-way mirror. No one outside would be able to see you, but you'd have a view of them. Meanwhile, the gravitational pull would bend the light weirdly and distort your last moments of vision.

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

Explainer thanks Ted Bunn of the University of Richmond and Edwin Taylor of MIT.

Aisha bint Abu Bakr, the favorite and youngest wife of the Prophet Mohammed, has long been a jewel of many facets. To medieval Sunni scholars, she was an ideal of submissive womanhood. To non-Muslims, a child bride. To Shiites, a betrayer of the prophet's legacy. To feminist Muslims, a scholar and political leader.

To this long list, novelist Sherry Jones, author of the controversial The Jewel of Medina, has added her own modern, Oprah-style twist: Aisha as a young woman on a journey of love, empowerment, and self-realization. Although Random House canceled the publication of Jones' book this summer for fear of violence, sparking a new round of debate about free speech and Muslim sensibilities, the book will be released, perhaps as early as October, by a small American publishing house, Beaufort Books, in addition to several overseas publishers.

Beaufort President Eric Kampmann told NPR he did not think the book would lead to violence, saying, "There are lots of worldviews in this country. If this should be published, it should be published in America." Whether the book will in fact lead to Cartoon Debacle II remains to be seen; a book by a non-Muslim woman that describes the prophet and his wife having sex certainly seems more inflammatory than, say, a teddy bear named Mohammed. But Muslims shouldn't stand in Jones' way. She is merely doing what they have been doing for centuries: interpreting Aisha in her own way.

The first to sound the alarm about the book's possible consequences was Denise Spellberg, a scholar of Islamic history at the University of Texas-Austin and the author of Politics, Gender and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of A'isha Bint Abi Bakr. Spellberg objected to Jones' historical license and to her depiction of Aisha making love to her husband, telling journalist Asra Nomani, "You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography." Ironically, however, it is Spellberg's own book that details how Aisha's story has been refashioned in so many ways over the ages.

So who was Aisha? Defining the life of anyone who lived 14 centuries ago is challenging, if not impossible. More than 150 years passed after Aisha's death before her first biographer penned the story of her life, so many "facts" about that life are simply educated guesses. She was married at 9 (some dispute this, saying she was actually younger or older) to the Prophet Mohammed and became his favorite wife. At 14, she was accused of adultery but was later exonerated by a divine revelation. She became a widow at 18 when the prophet died and was later a leader in a conflict that rent the Muslim world into Sunni and Shiite camps. After years of sharing the teachings of her husband, she died in her mid-60s.

For me, as both a questioning and an observant Muslim, Aisha is an exciting and yet disturbing figure, embodying many of my ambivalent emotions about Muslim history. I am both drawn to her spirited intelligence and upset by the contours of a life that involved early marriage, enforced reclusiveness while married to the prophet, and a sworn widowhood following his death. I'm hardly the only one conflicted about Aisha and what she represents about women and Islam. Spellberg points out that two 20^th-century Egyptian writers, feminist Nawal El Sadaawi and author Sa'id al-Afghani, see Aisha in drastically different ways. El Sadaawi portrayed her as part of a tradition of bold women who stand up for their rights, while al-Afghani called her "the perfect Islamic example for the exclusion of all Muslim women from any public role." For instance, during a battle for Muslim leadership in 656, known as "the Battle of the Camel," Aisha and her allies faced off with supporters of Ali, the fourth caliph, or successor to Mohammed, in a conflict that heralded centuries of Sunni-Shiite division. Some Muslims point to the fact that Aisha was on the battlefield, directing troops, to argue that women have a clear role in public affairs, including combat. Others counter that Aisha was on the battlefield in her howdah, or curtained palanquin, and was advised by her brothers—therefore, women are not fit for political or military command.

Aisha herself reported feeling jealous of the prophet's other wives, and when a Quranic verse was revealed that allowed Mohammed to choose which wife he would spend the night with, rather than following a schedule that gave equal time to all, she reportedly said (and I imagine her delivering the line dryly): "It seems to me that your Lord hastens to satisfy your desire." In this breathtakingly assertive way, she questioned the very validity of the prophet's revelation, suggesting that he was conveniently granted tailor-made exemptions that allowed him to do as he pleased.

That spirit of defiant inquiry inspires me. I have never sat easily with the idea of Mohammed having 12 simultaneous wives or concubines while others were restricted to four (to say nothing of how I feel about the allowance for four wives). Many of my fellow Muslims, however, argue that the prophet's unions brought heavy responsibilities and that Mohammed often married otherwise undesirable women who were older or widowed, or that he contracted these marriages for strategic political reasons. The fact remains that Mohammed was allowed more wives than anyone else. Leadership has its privileges, I guess.

Like other Muslims, I cherish the stories about how the Prophet Mohammed was patient and kind with Aisha: allowing her to play with her friends and her dolls even after she was married, running a foot race with her, watching a dancing exhibition with her even when he didn't like it himself. But all these small permissions happened in the context of a grown man granting favors to a preteen he took in marriage. Their union happened at a different time, when early marriage was, perhaps, acceptable, but it is nonetheless unsettling today. Scholar Leila Ahmed, in her now-classic 1992 book Women and Gender in Islam, argues that Mohammad's marriage with the young Aisha when his prophet-hood was well-established—in contrast to his first marriage to an older businesswoman before he became a prophet—"prefigures the limitations that would thenceforth hem in Muslim women's lives" and lead to a decline in public authority for women, though Ahmed largely blames Muslim followers, rather than the prophet himself, for this turn of events.

In relation to the prophet's other widows, however, Aisha lived an exceptionally active life after his death, and it is her vitality that seems to attract Jones, who told Altmuslim.com that she sees Aisha as part of an "epic couple." Her novel—from what I can tell from its prologue and a review made possible when Jones offered a copy of the unpublished book to a Muslim media outlet—takes one of the central stories about Aisha and turns it into a coming-of-age story in which a young girl trapped by circumstance finds both love and empowerment in embracing her fate.

Muslim historical sources say that Aisha broke off an engagement to marry the prophet. One of the central narratives of The Jewel of Medina is that Aisha secretly loved this ex-fiance and dreamed of escaping with him from her imposed marriage. According to tradition, Aisha was accidentally left behind in the desert while traveling one day; when she was rescued by a man, some accused her of adultery until a divine revelation said it was not so. Jones reinterprets this story to suggest that Aisha planned to meet with her lover in the desert, only to turn away from the temptation, embrace the love of the prophet, and realize that she alone can save herself. "The story is about her empowerment as a woman," says Jones.

The Jewel of Medina is more likely to be known as a bodice-ripper than to become a classic in the way that Anita Diamant's historical-fiction interpretation of Genesis, The Red Tent, did in spite of its religious detractors. But Jones may succeed, simply because of the high profile that comes with controversy, in bringing the story of Aisha to those who have never known her—and who may find their own reflection in her.

This summer, my husband and I didn't just move our kids to a new house in another city, prying them away from their neighborhood, their friends, their school, and their great-grandmother. We moved them from house to house over and over again. When our real estate agent convinced us to vacate our house in Washington, D.C., before trying to sell it (no clutter, no old furniture, no playroom in the dining room), we weren't ready to leave town. We looked into renting an apartment for the summer, but, luckily, various housesitting possibilities and visits with friends fell into place. Five of them, over two and a half months. Tack on a New England rental house in August, and you can see why we started calling ourselves the Wandering Jews.

None of this, I'm sure, would play well on the parenting advice channel. Minimize disruption and transition time, the experts say. Provide clarity and predictability, smooth the gears of change, reassure the kids that their lives still have order. Since we seemed oblivious to this obvious wisdom, it was left to friends and relatives to express awe (tinged with disapproval) about our odyssey. "I can't believe you've made the move so hard," one said, speaking, no doubt, for just about everyone else.

But maybe children don't need stability all the time. Maybe they can tolerate buffeting and moving around, as long as you don't turn into the Joad family, with all your possessions lashed to a rusted jalopy. Our kids started counting the number of beds they'd slept in this summer, and while I cringed at first, at some point I caught on: To them, some aspects of the upheaval were a bit of a lark. There was the sleek seltzer maker to sample in one house, the Calvin and Hobbes comics collection in another. This small discovery about house-hopping became my larger take on moving. Kids can handle it. Maybe not over and over again—I hope mine get to stay where we've now planted them. But moving, once or a few times, is not too much to ask.

This doesn't diminish the fundamental poignancy of the experience: You are asking your children, arguably, to treat all their relationships and points of reference as fungible. The morning we broke the news of the move to Eli and Simon, Eli burst into tears—big fat visible drops. Each of my misguided efforts to comfort him provoked a fresh outburst. "You'll go to a new school, you'll see, you'll like it" AGGGHHHH. "You'll have a new soccer team!" AAAUUGGGHHH. I was offering replacements. He was attached to the originals. That's, after all, what I wanted. I'd nurtured and encouraged the very sense of belonging that my husband and I were now ripping off like an old Band-Aid.

If you are the kind of parent who hates to see your child suffer, even for an instant, such moments are a torment. Yes, adversity is good for their small souls. But it's rotten to feel like you've had a hand in inflicting it. After my initial bumbling, I tried to tread more lightly and follow the kids' cues. We didn't talk much about moving when we didn't have to. We picked the new school that the kids themselves liked best. And we didn't let the summer's wandering descend into true disorder; the kids went to camp in June and July, and its competitive rituals and daily routine proved a salvation of distraction.

The big lesson of our move: It's a bad idea to circle back to the home you've abandoned. We kept visiting the house we'd moved out of for the most mundane reasons—to pick up the mail, to water the grass. It seems obvious in retrospect, but this was hard on the kids. There was their beloved back yard, cruelly off-limits because of the newly-laid bright green sod. There was the tree they used to swing from, the swing gone, the branch it had hung from cut away. One June day, a visit reduced Eli to curling up in the fetal position, and my husband and I realized that it was time to leave our old neighborhood for good. Staying across town went from being an inconvenience to a godsend. Kids live in fairly small and bounded worlds. A mile's breathing room was all we needed: a new local construction site to watch, a different park to explore.

The upside of the extended transition for my sons was that it separated the pain of leaving our house, of uprooting their small roots, from their arrival in a new place. By the time they got to say hello, the difficulty of saying goodbye was several weeks and houses in the past. When we pulled up to our new house in New Haven, Conn., in August, the kids were ready to be there. They nested by dumping out all their Legos on the floor and taking over a loft in the garage, perching their stuffed animals on the railing.

In New Haven, we benefited from stability of a sort: We have lived there before, and while the kids were too young when we left to remember the place clearly, they took to telling anyone who'd listen that they were born in New Haven. This really did seem to be a touchstone. Even better, of course, were the friends we'd stayed in touch with. Eli and Simon landed in the middle of blocks filled with kids, a handful of whom they knew well. And that's what they seemed to want most: to feel familiar, to know, again, who is around them and where they are. In the end, I don't think that means seeing people and places as building blocks that can be seamlessly exchanged and replaced. It means adding another layer, leaving the pieces of a kid's old life just underneath the surface.

At the end of our first week in town, I took Eli and Simon to the grocery store we shopped at when they were small. I don't think they remembered it, but they insisted they did. On the way home, Eli said, "I'm tired of people talking about us moving." I asked why.

Eli: "It's a little sad."

Simon, with exasperation: "And a lot booorrrring."

Eli: "I just want to be here."

Simon: "Yeah. This is where we live. Doesn't everyone know that by now?"

When my husband and I opted to build a home in a new development three years ago, we had control over the floor plan, the carpets, the countertops, even the wall color (tan or beige). But one thing was out of our control, and it was a biggie: With only one other house completed on our street, we couldn't glean any clues about the neighbors. There were no minivans, swing sets, or yards littered with toys—just empty lots. Would our new 'hood be full of kids, and, if so, would they be the right age to play with our 2-year-old son?

We lucked out. Within a few months, we had nine kids between the ages of 2 and 7 on our little street. (A streetwide baby boom later raised that number to an even dozen.) Everybody had a playmate or two their own age, and the cul-de-sac was often filled with kids on bikes and trikes. We socialized with our new neighbors and had impromptu cookouts. But we were most excited about the family who moved in next door—like us, they were from out of state, and they had a daughter a few months younger than our son. We bonded over our outsider status, getting lost on unfamiliar streets, and poking fun at the local delicacy, Skyline chili. But what really brought us together was that our Brandon and their Sammy became fast friends.

At 2, Brandon was just moving out of "independent" play and starting to understand the give-and-take of friendship. And I liked that he had a little girl for a playmate. Brandon's interactions with her were very different from those when he played with his cousins, all boys. The two would be laughing one minute, then crying about not wanting to share the next. As they turned 3 and 4, they went from being good buddies to being inseparable. They'd stay up late on the weekend watching movies, sneaking into the pantry to find snacks and falling asleep on opposite ends of the couch. And they were remarkably protective of each other—if a sibling or another friend was mean to one of them, the other would leap to the defense.

We thought it was cute when they told us they were married, at least until I went for my parent-teacher conference at preschool, and the teacher said she couldn't give Brandon the highest mark for playing well with others because there was one student he fought with constantly. "Who?" I asked, extremely concerned.

"Samantha," the teacher replied. "I don't know what it is, but they really act like a married couple." She explained they couldn't be separated. If one did need some time alone, the other would melt down, feelings hurt.

Alas, it was not a marriage meant to last. Samantha's dad accepted a job in another state, eight hours away. He moved in January, and the rest of the family stayed to finish out the school year. We had plenty of time to get used to the idea before we had to tell Brandon, but it was one of our first big challenges as parents.

What concerned me, beyond the thought of breaking the news to him, was that having a friend move away might be hard on him in different ways than if we were the ones moving. Sammy had new discoveries to look forward to—a new house, new friends, more time with her grandparents, who lived nearby. Brandon's life would be the same, except for a gaping hole.

We decided to wait until about a month before the move to talk with Brandon, since even that time span is an eternity to a 4-year-old. We pulled out a map, showed him where we lived and where Sammy would be moving, and explained that we'd try to visit. I'd been so nervous about telling him that when I did, my voice cracked a little and I almost cried. He looked at me sternly and said, "Mommy don't talk like that!" I'm still not sure if he was mad or sad. But the news took some time to sink in. And once it did, he had the perfect solution: "Mommy, can we move, too?" Even after several long conversations about how we had moved to Cincinnati so that we could be near his grandparents and cousins, he didn't quite get it. One day I showed him the picture of Sammy's new house from the online real estate listing, and he asked, "Where's the lot for us to build our house next door?"

We answered his questions the best we could—over and over—and we listened and gave him lots of hugs when he was sad. And we let him hang out with Sammy as much as we could, even indulging them with sleepovers.

And when the big moving day came, it was rather anticlimactic. We watched as our friends packed a few last things in the car, snapped some pictures, the kids hugged, and that was that. We were at my parents' house for dinner that evening when my cell phone beeped. Our neighbor had sent us a picture of Sammy with the text line, "Miss You!" I snapped my own picture and responded.

And it quickly hit me that kids today, even kids as young as 4 or 5, don't have to be traumatized by a move, because it's so much easier to stay in touch. When I was young and one of my friends moved across the country, we exchanged a few letters but rather quickly lost contact with each other. But between e-mail, cell phones (no costly long-distance bills!), and even Webcams (a trick we haven't tried yet), kids can maintain a semblance of friendship even over vast miles.

Brandon has adjusted well. On our way home from our summer vacation, we made a minor detour so that we could visit our former neighbors. Brandon was giddy at the surprise, and he and Sammy picked up right where they had left off. Back in Cincinnati, Brandon is still eager to have a best bud, though, and he's latched on to the little boy across the street who's the same age. And now that preschool has started, he comes home with stories about his classmates.

When we as parents are trying to impart life's lessons to kids—in this case, how to deal with losing a friend—I think it's important that we are open to the lessons we can be learning ourselves. Brandon soldiered on with his happy childhood, even though it was a little duller perhaps, and I got to learn that children can be stronger and more resilient than we give them credit for.

"Where the hell am I supposed to wear that?" This must be the question most frequently asked during Fashion Week by people who are not at the shows. The Spring 2009 fashion season began this weekend in New York, and before the big names showed—Marc Jacobs on Monday; Michael Kors on Wednesday—smaller labels likely known only to fashion junkies sent a parade of thoughtful but extreme looks down the runway.

At ThreeAsFour, we saw sensual, artfully draped clothes in a Georgia O'Keefe palette. (Some of the looks recalled Princess Lea, not such a bad thing to fashion people.) For men, Daughters by Obedient Sons presented amusingly twerpy suits. ("Twerpy" as in schoolboy uniforms, cut to adult sizes.) Both collections indicated that deep pastels and the continuing revival of the '80s slouch are in the air.

But if you are not a fashion junkie, why should you care? Fashion Week must seem as far from reality as Wasilla is from the Executive Office Building. You want me to wear a white leotard with a chiffon float? Where?

The odd thing about Fashion Week, though, is that mall-style megabrands are on the same calendar as design stars and cult favorites. Fashion Week is not always devoid of wearable clothes. This season, for example, look to the Gap. Presenting his first spring collection for the giant brand yesterday, Patrick Robinson, an industry veteran who became the Gap's head of global design in 2007, threw down an unexpected challenge to other big brands and design stars alike.

While Diesel—another major jeans brand showing this week—gussied up its popular denim with top hats and Hammer pants, Robinson did what the Gap ought to do: He showed stylish clothes that most people can afford. And in an era when high-ticket designers like Proenza Schouler feature only extreme, camera-ready fashion on the runway, saving the everyday jackets and skirts for the showroom, Robinson also proved that good-old American sportswear is more than a prosaic relic: It can also be cool.

Robinson's gallerylike presentation was packed with fashion power. Vogue's Anna Wintour previewed the 55 fresh-faced models before other guests arrived. Harper's Bazaar editor Glenda Bailey smiled brighter with each wide-leg trouser. So did Project Runway's Nina Garcia and designer Carolina Herrera.

Robinson, who created editorial magic for Perry Ellis before exiting in a dispute in 2003, seems the ideal savior for the once-innovative brand. He has designed for Giorgio Armani, Anne Klein, and Paco Rabanne. (Though those collections were not always well-received, he has remained popular in fashion circles.) More recently, he launched a capsule collection for Target. Perhaps most important, Robinson spent the better part of his career abroad and has a keen eye for street style, both of which should come in handy as he guides a utilitarian brand with global reach. It's easy to spot the parisienne in the offhand way he puts a look together.

Robinson's fall collection—his first—was shown in February, and the New York Times aptly called it: "Oliver Twist goes to a Nirvana concert." While that's not a terrible concept, skeptics wondered whether the Euro-ragamuffin look would appeal to consumers.

For spring, Robinson wisely went lively. He played with stripes—a Gap favorite—offering colorful, "Peanuts"-esque sweaters and bathing suits. A guy's pajama jacket and an office-worthy white knit blazer for women said "Buy me!" But Robinson's real success was to make the clothes current without losing the carefree spirit that ought to be Gap's signature. He's lightened up the weight of the T-shirts for fans of American Apparel's feather-thin knits and given the women's clothes occasional, delicate feminine details (a tiny tulle ruffle, a silk flounce) that have been recent fashion favorites but missing from Gap stores.

Altogether, Robinson seems to have set an ideal direction for the brand with his spring collection. On New York's runways, American sportswear—perfectly simple, chic, wearable clothes—is usually the territory of Michael Kors, but his "wheels-up" glamour offers aspirational style, not populist ease. Robinson's collection offered truly chic sportswear for everybody.

The question for the Gap is: Will "everybody" buy it? Lately, the company's stock has taken a beating; it filed a $1.14 billion loss on sales of $8 billion in 2007. Part of the problem is that blue jeans, long one of the company's mainstays, are no longer considered a basic: consumers now shell out hundreds for designer jeans rather than snapping up the Gap's workaday versions. And some fashion consumers have complained that the brand's bland stores don't reflect the slicker style of its advertising. A few weeks ago, the New York Times compared the brand with the sexier Abercrombie & Fitch, going so far as to do a bag count outside the recently spruced-up 5^th Avenue store one day in August. (Six Gap bags compared with A&F's 27 clocked in 15 minutes.)

Representatives of the Gap declined comment on whether a major brand overhaul all is in the works. With a planned 18 percent decrease in ad spending for 2008, it seems unlikely. But it would be a shame if Robinson's able work goes unsung, unnoticed, and unpurchased. If good design is not enough to right the ship, perhaps the Gap should also take a cue from its founders. Part of the original genius of the Gap (named for the generation gap) was that it knew how to get people to its stores: The original location, near San Francisco State University, was also a record shop, and in the early days, the records outsold the jeans. Perhaps shopping at the Gap should once again become an experience; the company could even sell CDs. The jeans might catch on.

During a week devoted to lavish parties and enormously expensive gowns, it can be difficult to remember that a recession may soon be upon us. So we grilled designers, stylists, and other insiders about how they plan to handle leaner times.

Simon Doonan, creative director, Barneys

"I'm from the Quentin Crisp school of thought. When the war broke out, he bought 10 pounds of henna for his hair. You have to be a showoff when times are hard. You owe it to yourself to get dressed up. You owe it to the people around you. A little szoush and sense of glamour creates a sense of optimism. The whole idea of being understated when times are tough? No! Put on your best Prada frock and eyelashes and go for it!"

Booth Moore, fashion critic, the Los Angeles Times

"I don't think enough designers are thinking about it. The clothes we've seen so far have been embroidered and beaded or very elaborate, and they only mean something to the top one-thousandth percent of the population. That being said, there are some midrange designers like Tory Burch who came at the right time, and they manage to make something that is wearable and attainable."

Thakoon Panichgul, designer, Thakoon (Michelle Obama wore a dress of his on the final night of the Democratic Convention.)

"I'm not worried about the recession. I'm worried about John McCain. He's up by 5 points and Cindy McCain was voted better dressed than Michelle Obama. I'm concerned."

Tim Blanks, fashion writer and TV commentator

"This is an election year in America, and the next election will be in 2012, the same year the I Ching and Mayan calendar end. It's bigger than the end. We're not only looking at a recession, we're looking at the end of fashion. We're looking at the end of life as we know it."

Wendy Schecter, stylist

"People will learn to love shopping in their own closets. It's true. There are things with tags still hanging on them or something in the back that everyone knocked off this season. It's always time to buy something new, but there's something to be said for reworking."

Ken Downing, senior vice president and fashion director, Neiman Marcus

"We work hard to find the best for our customer in the best economy as well as when it's less strong. We have to excite and entice her. She still wants beautiful clothes that are appropriate and unique. We're not telling her to trade down. She's not shopping as robustly, but she's still shopping. She's not looking for basic. She's not looking for simple. She's looking for clothes to excite her when she opens her closet."

Swaim Hutson, co-designer, Obedient Sons and Daughters

"We're still new and we're in a period of growth, so I don't know the difference. Fortunately, we're growing. We haven't seen people cutting back on us. Cross my fingers."

Jeffrey Kalinsky, founder, Jeffrey New York

"There is no recession in fashion. People are just more discerning with their purchases."

Steven Kolb, executive director, CFDA

"What do I think about what? The obsession?"

Robert Burke, Robert Burke Associates

"The recession is the best thing to happen for fashion. It makes designers do their best work. You'll see designers doing better work than ever before. Some may be careful, but there'll be no lack of creativity."

In The Best Man, the only useful or amusing film—or play—ever to have been set at an American political convention, Gore Vidal presents us with Joe and Mabel Cantwell (Cliff Robertson and Edie Adams in the 1964 movie version), who are a right-wing "family values" couple with a large and grisly brood. The two have the appalling habit of referring to each other as "Papa Bear" and "Mama Bear," and when it seems that Cantwell has the goods on his rival, William Russell, and is sure of the nomination, Mabel exclaims horridly that this means that "Papa Bear and Mama Bear and all of the baby bears are on their way to the White House." Can American cinema boast of a creepier moment? So tense was the casting of the movie that Ronald Reagan was apparently passed over for the role of President Art Hockstader—eventually played by Lee Tracy—on the grounds that he was insufficiently "presidential." In the event, Cantwell's crude attempt to paint his rival as mentally unstable is checked by the counterallegation that during the war he had indulged in gay sex on a military base—in Alaska, as it happens.

Vidal's Cantwell family was a nightmarish cross between the Nixon and McCarthy strains. I partly sympathize with all those who have been trying for a week to paint the former Miss Wasilla as a candidate from (fairly nearby, in Anchorage terms) Manchuria. However, as often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn't. Was she in the Alaska Independence Party? Not really. Did she campaign for Pat Buchanan in 2000? The AP report from 1999 appears to be contradicted by her endorsement of Steve Forbes. (Not great, I agree, but not Buchanan, either.) The most appalling thing I have unearthed so far is the answer that she gave to a questionnaire when she ran for governor in 2006. All candidates were asked "Are you offended by the phrase 'Under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?" Her response was:

Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers [it's] good enough for me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

The very slight problem with this—because it would truly be awful if Gov. Palin didn't know that the pledge itself dates from only the late 19^th century and that the unwonted insertion of the words "under God" was made in the mid-1950s—is that it is somehow funny. And it's also the sort of mistake that many people can imagine themselves making and thus forgive someone else for making.

I could well be wrong, but I think something similar is involved in the attempt to paint the Palin family as if it were Arkansas on ice or Tobacco Road with igloos and Inuit. Very well, she possibly has had her Troopergate and even trailer-park moments. But whom exactly did the Democrats drown in moist applause, for two nights running, in Denver? The most dysfunctional family ever to occupy not the vice-presidential mansion but the executive one. It's hard to imagine that there will be any more unwanted pregnancies or shotgun weddings when or if the Palins move to the Naval Observatory on Massachusetts Avenue, whereas with the Clintons, the very thing that made all Bill's friends turn white and pee green was that they made him the president, and he still wouldn't stop. For me, it is astonishing that the Democrats have been babbling all week as if this point isn't just waiting—indeed begging—to be made in riposte to their "opposition research."

Walter Dean Burnham, one of the country's pre-eminent Marxists, used to attract ridicule back in the 1960s and '70s by saying that Ronald Reagan would one day be president. He based this on various calculations, one of which was what I'll call the attraction-repulsion factor. Previous candidates of the right, from McCarthy to Nixon, indeed, had expressed powerful dislike and resentment of their foes. That can work, up to a point, but the problem is that if you radiate hostility, you also tend to attract it. Reagan didn't radiate it and also didn't attract it. He went on, in a genial enough way, to destroy the Democratic "New Deal" coalition. I don't think Gov. Palin has quite that sort of folksy charisma, but I am still not sure it's entirely wise to patronize her.

Interviewed by Rick Warren at the grotesque Saddleback megachurch a short while ago, Sen. Barack Obama announced that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem him personally. How he knew this he did not say. But it will make it exceedingly difficult for him, or his outriders and apologists, to ridicule Palin for her own ludicrous biblical literalist beliefs. She has inarticulately said that her gubernatorial work would be hampered "if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with god." Her local shout-and-holler tabernacle apparently believes that Jews can be converted to Jesus and homosexuals can be "cured." I cannot wait to see Obama and Biden explain how this isn't the case or how it's much worse than, and quite different from, Obama's own raving and ranting pastor in Chicago or Biden's lifelong allegiance to the most anti-"choice" church on the planet. The difference, if there is one, is that Palin is probably sincere whereas the Democratic team is almost certainly hypocritical. The same is true of the boring contest over who can be the most populist, and of the positively sinister race to see who can be the most demagogically anti-Washington. With this kind of immaturity right across both tickets, it's insulting to be asked to decide on the basis of experience, let alone "readiness."

Last Sunday, news came that Canada—sensible, quiet, some would even say boring Canada—will hold an election on Oct. 14, its third in four years. Those outside the country may wonder what the problem is; in Canada, after all, health care is free, the dollar is strong, same-sex marriage is legal, and the government had the good sense to stay out of Iraq. You might think of Canada as the un-America, where the only debate ought to be whether to spend the country's growing oil wealth on faster snowmobiles, bigger hockey rinks, or Anne Murray box sets.

But beneath the calm exterior, Canada's political system is in turmoil. Since 2004, a succession of unstable minority governments has led to a constant campaign frenzy, brutalizing Canada's once-broad political consensus and producing a series of policies at odds with the country's socially liberal, fiscally conservative identity. Canada is quietly becoming a political basket case, and this latest election may make things even worse.

Just scan the headlines. In June, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that Canada—for years the only G8 country to post regular budget surpluses—was likely to fall into deficit this year, thanks to a reckless cut to the national sales tax. In February, the government proposed denying funding to films and TV shows whose content it deemed "not in the public interest," sparking cries of censorship from a sector that has historically received public support. In 2007, a member of the governing Conservative Party proposed a bill that would reopen the debate over abortion, a topic that governments both liberal and conservative have avoided for decades.

The country is projecting its uncharacteristic behavior abroad as well. After decades of encouraging countries to increase their foreign-aid spending, Canada cut its own, from 0.34 percent of GDP in 2005 to just 0.2 percent last year. Long a beacon of human rights, Ottawa announced last fall that it would stop advocating on behalf of Canadians sentenced to death in other countries. And Canada is now the only Western country that still has one of its citizens held in Guantanamo, but Ottawa has refused to press for his release.

But nowhere is the rift between the old and new Canada more apparent than with regards to the environment. Canada was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the fight against climate change, and as recently as 2005 it was the Canadian environment minister who helped broker an agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. Then last December, at a U.N. conference in Bali to negotiate a successor to Kyoto, Canada executed a neat 180-degree turn, trying to block an agreement that set a target for future cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions. Of the 190 countries at the conference, only Russia supported Canada's position.

Left-leaning Canadians blame the country's predicament on the current Conservative government, which was first elected two years ago. They're right, to a point. The Conservative Party, formed five years ago in a merger of the country's two right-wing parties, is Canada's first experience with an anti-government, socially conservative party in the mold of Reagan-Bush Republicans. Its leader, Stephen Harper, who is now the prime minister, once called Canada "a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term."

But the Conservative Party wouldn't be in power, let alone willing to risk such divisive policies, were it not for the collapse of the country's most formidable political institution, the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberals have been Canada's left-wing standard-bearers since the country's independence in 1867. And just as Canada's right-wing parties were coming together, the Liberal Party was coming apart.

In early 2004, Canada's auditor-general found that under the Liberal government, public funds intended to promote the federal government in the province of Quebec had been diverted toward advertising companies connected to the Liberal Party in the form of inflated payments. In response, the prime minister called a public inquiry, which only prolonged the controversy.

In the 2004 election, the Liberal government was reduced from a majority to a minority. Nineteen months later, it lost power entirely, and the party's leader resigned. The Liberals then embarked on a long, fractious leadership campaign—leaving the party exhausted and broke, and tempting the governing Conservatives to introduce ever more draconian policies with little fear of the consequences.

As the Liberals work on rebuilding, Canada's other left-wing party, the New Democratic Party, has grown at their expense; the Green Party, long a fringe movement in Canada, gained its first member of parliament when an independent MP joined the Greens; and the Bloc Québécois, which shares many Liberal positions but advocates for Quebec's independence, remains a force in that province. The Conservatives may not represent the views of most Canadians, but with four parties fighting for the left-wing vote, the Conservatives might win simply by sliding up the middle.

Italians and Israelis may have learned how to function under minority governments, but Canadians are still working on it. If the current election ends in a third consecutive minority government, the polarization of Canadian politics will continue, and with it the brutal, zero-sum politicking that has left the country in convulsions.

If the last week is any indication, that polarization is only getting worse. On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Harper began the race by predicting "a very nasty kind of personal-attack campaign." Two days later, his party briefly released an ad that showed a bird defecating on the leader of the Liberal Party. So much for Canadians being nice.

Listen to the Gabfest for Sept. 12 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week's topics include the state of the presidential race to date, the Barack Obama campaign, and how the Sarah Palin phenomenon rolls on.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

John wonders if Palin will experience a fate similar to what became known as "Obama fatigue."

Emily says that with fewer than 55 days left before the election, it's time to talk about issues.

John discusses Fred Thompson, who recently criticized Obama by saying he must be "the first fellow in the history of presidential politics who thinks that running for president is a qualification for being president."

Several national polls now show Obama and McCain in a tie. The most recent was the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. Nevertheless, Obama is still ahead in the race for Electoral College votes.

McCain continues to express outrage over an Obama remark about putting lipstick on a pig. McCain claims it was an attack on Palin, although many commentators, including a number of prominent Republicans, disagree.

David chatters about the Slate feature "80 Over 80."

John discusses a new Web site from the Museum of the Moving Image called Living Room Candidate, which rounds up political ads dating back to 1952.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on Sept. 12 at 11 a.m.

Sept. 5, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for Sept. 5 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz talk politics. This week, they discuss John McCain's yawner of a convention speech, the power of Palin, and the Republican flip-flop from experience to change.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin used her convention speech to rally the troops.

David called Palin's speech rhetorically masterful but mean-spirited and vicious. Meanwhile, John McCain vowed to end partisan rancor during his address Thursday.

As far as Emily is concerned, there was no substance to McCain's speech, a view echoed by Barack Obama.

John points out that a CBS poll shows that the race between Obama and McCain is now a tie.

Emily says Palin is the tar baby of this presidential election: If Democrats keep verbally punching her, they will get stuck.

The three discuss the debate over Palin as working mom.

Emily chatters about her newly acquired koi. She says they appear to be multiplying at an alarming rate.

John discusses the season-opening loss of his beloved Washington Redskins, noting that the team has not done well since they moved to their new stadium, which opened in 1997.

David talks about Palin's high-school nickname, Sarah Barracuda, and how the Republicans got into trouble for using the Heart song of the same name Thursday night.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on Sept. 5 at 7 p.m.

Listen to the Gabfest for Aug. 29 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz wrap up the Democrats' big week in Denver. The news of John McCain's vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin came in during the taping, so the gabbers give their first impressions.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Andy Bowers on Aug. 29 at 4:18 p.m.

Aug. 22, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for Aug. 22 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:







You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes by clicking here.

John Dickerson, David Plotz, and special guest Terence Samuel talk politics. This week, the presidential race tightens going into the Democratic Convention, chaos continues in the Caucasus, and the Olympic Games wind down.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The presidential race has tightened this week, with John McCain moving within three points of Barack Obama in some polls for a statistical tie. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll shows Obama slightly ahead while the latest Reuters/Zogby poll shows McCain taking a lead over his Democratic rival.

McCain provided an opening for Obama this week when, during an interview, McCain could not remember how many houses he owns.

David points out that one of the big questions for the Democratic Convention, getting underway on Monday, is how the Clintons will behave. The convention presents a major opportunity for the Obama camp to show party unity heading into the November elections.

This week, President George W. Bush began talking about removing Russia from the so-called G-8. His call comes following Russia's invasion of Georgia. David mentions Daniel Gross' piece outlining the strong economic ties Russia has with Western nations and how this diminishes the possibility of a violent confrontation with the United States.

David mentions that he has watched the 1984 movie Red Dawn a number of times recently; he finds interesting parallels between the movie's Cold War paranoia and the current situation in Eastern Europe.

The three discuss the amazing performance of athletes from Jamaica, who have struck gold in this year's Summer Olympics. In particular, David says seeing sprinter Usain Bolt run is like watching a god, while Terry says watching Shelly-Ann Fraser run is more like watching someone fly.

John remembers an argument between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The discussion took place during a series of debates between the two men carried by ABC television.

Terence discusses a speech given by Sen. Hubert Humphrey at the 1948 Democratic Convention. He says that, in some ways, Humphrey's speech on civil rights started a process that has led to Obama's nomination.

David chatters about a battle underway in San Francisco over the installation of dedicated roadway lanes for bikers.

The e-mail address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com . (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Posted by Dale Willman on Aug. 22 at 12:13 p.m.

Game designer Will Wright has never been one for half measures. Wright's first hit, SimCity, released in 1989, set out to model the complexities of urban planning. Two decades later, he's moved on to a grander project. Wright's latest endeavor, Spore, tackles nothing less than life itself. You start with a single cell. Play long enough, and you'll evolve into an entire spacefaring society.

Transforming a blob of protozoa into a flock of Yuri Gagarins feels like a duty reserved for the almighty or, perhaps, epochal time. But it's nothing new for Wright. In the early 1990s, he released SimEarth and SimLife, precursors to Spore that covered similar ontological ground, putting the user in charge of developing life and planets. And then there was The Sims, the best-selling computer game franchise of all time, a virtual dollhouse that let you control the daily activities of cyberhumans. Wright has a knack for turning complex stuff into easily digestible entertainment. His new game, however, traffics in subjects most universities have multiple Ph.D. departments studying. By taking on evolution—and, by default, intelligent design—Spore wades into a roiling ecosystem.

So what happens when something as complex as human interaction or evolution gets reduced to mouse clicks? Naturally, distilling real life into a video game requires some simplifications. Wright, both by design and by necessity, takes artistic license with the intricate systems he models. His unique aesthetic sense has made him wildly successful. At the same time, it's turned several of his games into a battlefield for banner-waving geeks who are perpetually at loggerheads over the artist's agenda.

Take SimCity, in which players engage in municipal tasks such as zoning property, laying out power grids and streets, building police stations, and managing transportation. There's no city council or finicky court system. You play mayor, urban planner, and puppet master all at once—Rudy Giuliani's executive utopia.

While most SimCity addicts were busy building cities and then destroying them via earthquake, wonkier types were puzzling over the game's rules and value system. In a 1994 article in the American Prospect, Paul Starr referred to SimCity's "hidden curriculum." He noted that success required players to build cities on an industrial base, and he criticized the game's bias against mixed-use development. Private land values were pegged to the public budget, and the city's health depended on zoning and allocation of resources, which determined tax receipts. The underlying structure of the game was, in the words of Wright himself, a "capitalistic land value ecology."

Other critics questioned the absence of race, pointing out that simulating urban decay without taking ethnicity into account was unrealistic, if not manipulative. And then there were taxes. Raise them enough, and your citizens would riot. Every kid who played SimCity absorbed the underlying message: Taxes are dangerous. This was Milton Friedman in code. Still, it wasn't enough to satisfy conservatives. They said the game punished players for buying nuclear power plants while rewarding them for building mass transit. They grumbled that the game ignored the private market and depicted the state as the sole engine for urban growth. (For what it's worth, in the last year Wright has donated nearly $100,000 to Republican political causes. He backed Giuliani for president. He now supports McCain.)

The Sims, which came out in 2000, steered clear of policy issues. It did, however, raise questions about how to boil human behavior down to bytes. By the time The Sims 2 rolled out, the game's virtual inhabitants, who had different genetic backgrounds, could breed. This added heredity to the mix, and players learned to modify racial makeup and DNA. Some users even conducted studies in population genetics inside the game, tracking recessive and dominant alleles over generations.

The Sims, however, was never about modeling the descent of man or even human relationships. It focused mainly on the bureaucracy of life—the daily chores needed to keep your SimHuman from devolving into a slovenly, bankrupt outcast. But as usual with Wright's games, the approach didn't come without controversy. You don't make friends in The Sims—you acquire them. The more goods you amass, the more popular you become. The bigger the TV you stuff into your suburban palace, the happier you are.

"The constraints of consumer capitalism are built into the game's logic," wrote Ann McGuire, an Australian academic, echoing earlier complaints about the hypercapitalist SimCity. "The Sims distils and intensifies, through its underlying code, key ideological aspects of late capitalism: self, other, and time are all quantified and commodified. What the player is doing is shopping effectively in order to manage a life in the world."

It's hardly surprising, then, that Spore would be destined to provoke. Wright initially dubbed the game "SimEverything" because of the range of material it would cover. Months before the game came out, people started clucking on Internet forums. Would Spore take a scientific approach to evolution? Would it celebrate the tenets of intelligent design? Knowing Wright's history, it's no surprise that the answer is yes on both counts. It just depends whom you ask.

In Spore, players guide life through five different stages. Only the first two deal with evolution. You start as a cell, swimming around in a nutrient swamp, gobbling nourishment. The decisions you make from the start—whether to eat meat or plants or both, for example—set the course for your early development. As you progress, you earn "DNA points," opening up palettes of biological tweaks. Flagella help you swim faster. Spikes offer protection. That's evolution. But it's also where some people may see a divine hand. As the deity in this god game, your choices influence the game's outcome.

Some pro-I.D. groups have already targeted Spore as a possible educational vehicle. "It raises a lot of the questions we've been thinking about," Casey Luskin of the Intelligent Design Evolution and Awareness Center told me three months ago. "It has interesting pro-I.D. implications. ... I know of at least two video-game developers affiliated with this who are pro-I.D." Luskin wouldn't tell me who those developers were, but he did recently weigh in on the Discovery Institute's blog to list five reasons why Spore will destroy common objections to intelligent design. His conclusion: "Spore is a video game that is intelligently designed to allow users to create fantasy worlds where evolution really can take place." (If a game that lets you play god is intelligently designed, does that make Will Wright some kind of deity? Could he be Auðumbla, the icy cow of Norse legend that spawned the first gods by licking hoar frost?)

Spore's I.D. themes become more noticeable when you move onto land and into the "creature stage." Your goal here is to attain sentience. Your brain grows as you progress, interacting with other species through socialization, predation, or both. Particular behaviors put you on a path that opens up certain body parts. The range of options in the "creature creator" allows for an enormous variety of life—not as much as in nature, but a nice approximation. As it happens, intelligent design is good fun: You can spend hours with your critters, arranging spinal columns, attaching wings, and painting on polka dots. Or you can marvel at what other intelligent designers have dreamed up. Electronic Arts released the creature creator in June, and people have already cooked up millions of species, some elaborate and others obscene. (EA uploads your creations to servers and downloads other users' content into your world.)

At the same time, it's clear that Wright researched evolution. He appeared in a National Geographic Channel documentary called How To Build a Better Being, talking Darwin with evolutionary biologists and poring over fossils with paleontologists. He also consulted scientists who seem delighted, if mildly concerned, that their complex work is being simplified so dramatically. "Playing the game, you can't help but feel amazed how, from a few simple rules and instructions, you can get a complex functioning world with bodies, behaviors, and whole ecosystems," said Neil Shubin, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. Just as Casey Luskin thinks Spore could get people excited about intelligent design, some biologists think the game could have educational value just by making users think about science, like an entertaining hook into evolutionary biology.

But the science in the game is wafer thin. Despite some overenthusiastic prognostications in reviews—"Spore could be the greatest gaming tool ever created to disseminate Darwinistic ideas," says one critic—the game makes no room for random mutation, the real source of differentiation. And natural selection plays only a minor role. If you don't bless your beast with a mouth or hands, you won't fare well. Almost anything else goes. At one point, my creature's legs and arms were connected by useless and mechanically impossible minilimbs. I did just fine. In Darwin's world, I would have been a snack for a more efficient predator.

Once the evolution stages end, Spore morphs into a traditional and less-innovative strategy game. You form a tribe, then evolve into a civilization with a military, economic, or religious culture. I managed to go religious by doing exactly what the religious nuts in America do not: eating lots of veggies and playing nice with my neighbors. When I eventually founded a city, I flooded the planet with religious propaganda to forcibly convert the unwashed heathens beyond my walls. This element of the game has angered atheists. I can't imagine that it's going to make evangelicals too happy, either.

So it goes with Wright. He admits Spore is a game that deals with intelligent design. He acknowledges the religious component. But he takes pains to point out that it's a caricature of reality, like all his games. The final stage of Spore has you scooting around in a spaceship, exploring a universe populated with user-created content. That's maybe not so realistic, but it is enjoyable. It's important to remember that building a game based strictly on evolutionary principles would be a disaster. How would you play it? Perhaps you'd just end up watching a lab computer churning data.

What people see as agendas in Spore and The Sims and SimCity may merely be artifacts of what's required to turn a simulation into a game. An early prototype of Spore included mutations, but Wright said it wasn't engaging—users needed to make those tweaks. "When we put the players in the role of intelligent designer then people were much more emotionally attached to what they made," he says.

Ultimately, games are made to engage the people who play them. Provoking wonderment or debate is a good thing. Wright abstracts grandiose topics, and he does it well. Not enough game designers have the stones or the vision to try the same, which is why we get battered with endless versions of Madden NFL (also put out by Electronic Arts). In the end, that's also why Spore leaves such an impression. It's more than just fun. It's worth arguing about.

Welcome to the "80 Over 80," Slate's first-ever list of America's silver lions: fourscore elder statesmen, business leaders, and cultural icons who have remained influential into their ninth decade and beyond. We've ranked these still-twinkling stars according to their power and importance, with extra credit given for energetic achievements post-80 and for being really, really, really old. (We're looking at you, Studs Terkel.)

There's also a list of five "79ers to watch" over the next year—if these upstarts keep at it, they'll be a lock for next year's list. Finally, a selection of five seniors who "just missed"; each has in recent months taken his rightful place on a much bigger list.

Top "80 Over 80" honors this year go to John Paul Stevens, the oldest member of the U.S. Supreme Court and author of the majority opinions in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush. Truly a geezer among geezers, Stevens has demonstrated that he's still pounding the gavel with as much enthusiasm as a justice 10 or 15 years his junior. He may not be worth $18 billion like Kirk Kerkorian or have won a Nobel Prize or even a Pulitzer. But if the venerable justice were to die of natural causes tomorrow, every last American might feel the effects.

Congratulations, John, and hang tough.

Interactive feature designed and created by Holly Allen, Natalie Matthews, and Matt Dodson. Click here for complete photo credits.

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The jokes are hilarious: "Elderly Woman Destroys Internet," and "Google Launches 'The Google' For Older Adults" from the Onion. On College Humor, there's a regular feature about the idiotic things that parents do with computers. (A sample: "My dad thinks that the faster you click on the go button on Internet Explorer, the faster the Web page will load.") Alas, the stereotype of the technologically clueless oldster is unfair. It's only those old folks who never go online who say things like: "Can't you look it up on the Google?" According to the Pew Internet and American Life project, over-65 Web users are just as proficient as the young though less adventurous in the kinds of things they do. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised. Old people have lots of free time, an unhealthy obsession with their bodies, and arcane hobbies. They're practically teenagers.

The researchers at Pew released a report on "Older Americans and the Internet" in 2004, which found that 22 percent of seniors go online while "most seniors live lives far removed from the Internet, know few people who use e-mail or surf the Web, and cannot imagine why they would spend money and time learning how to use a computer." Sometimes I think that they are the lucky ones. More recent data from May 2008 show that 35 percent of seniors now use the Internet. E-mail is the top motivation for getting up to speed. Health information, checking the retirement account, and genealogical research are next in line. Seniors, rather poignantly, look up more spiritual and religious information than the younger demographics.

Seniors blossom into silver surfers if they have a family member who motivates them (pictures of grandchildren can be an awe-inspiring force) or, in the case of many men, if they had the Internet at work before they retired. Earlier this year, when John McCain confessed that, with respect to the Internet, he's "an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get," he proved himself to be an anomaly for a college-educated 65-plus white man. Seventy-five percent of his peer group can drive a browser.

All of these numbers will soon be dwarfed by what Pew calls the "silver tsunami." The baby boomers, aging into the senior bracket, have made wired seniors the fastest-growing demographic group online. How will this change the Web? As far back as 2002, usability expert Jakob Nielsen was offering advice on how to improve Web sites for the old. "Among the obvious physical attributes often affected by the human aging process," he writes, "are eyesight, precision of movement, and memory." He recommends using larger font sizes and avoiding "hierarchically walking" menus (such as Slate's) that require dextrous mouse-work. So perhaps the Internet will become some Large Type, easily clickable, grown-up version of itself. But what about the intangible effects of the silver tsunami? More golf swing videos on YouTube? More all-caps fireworks in Maureen Dowd's Times forum? LOL Rolling Stone?

The most likely scenario is more of the same. Boomers already sort of get the Internet. (How to spot a middle-aged Internet addict: They know who firedoglake is.) The coming tide of Web-centric seniors makes today's seniors unique. They are the last cohort to potentially buy computers and go online in a truly clueless manner. Moments like this one from the College Humor feature will go the way of carbon paper: "We decided to get my dad a new laptop, and his first words upon opening it up were, 'Thank God! All the keys are in the same place. I thought I was going to have to learn a whole new setup.' "

As with any burgeoning demographic, entrepreneurs are in a rush to exploit it. There's an old-people social networking hub called Eons and an old-people search engine called Cranky (associated with Eons). But old people don't need a chain-link fence to play behind, as they are prospering just fine on the real Internet. They've made their presence known on Facebook, with groups like "I am too old for Facebook—but I don't care" and "Oldies but Goodies." That last group bills itself as a place for "good, clean fun" with "NO SUGGESTIVE POSTS OR PICTURES PLEASE." It's a bit like stumbling into a Midwestern church social. Current games in the discussion area include changing the punch line for the old joke about the minister's parrot, something called "the Alphabet game," and "Finsih [sic] My Sentence With a Rhyme." Any time.

Seniors have also infiltrated that other realm of teen spirit, YouTube. After all, the Web cam, unlike grandchildren, doesn't leave to play Nintendo DS upon hearing the words: "Let me tell you a story. ..." The most famous cam-grandpa is geriatric1927, aka Peter Oakley. He's 82 and describes himself as a "widower living alone in the country in the middle of England." His first video showed an astute appreciation of how to succeed on YouTube: Flatter the YouTube community. Since then, he's racked up millions of views, endured a hoax video about his death, guested with the oldster pop choir the Zimmers, and showed off some nice sweaters—all without losing his humility or excellent diction.

What's striking about old people on the Internet is they seem to be having fun on there. The Internet is not work, nor is it networking, nor someplace to brand yourself. Seniors often do the amateurish, experimental things that made the Web so interesting in the first place, like, say lip-synching to "Chiquita Banana." They're communicating, telling stories, and putting the Internet in its place: just another part of a long, strange life.

Wrinkles are like new vocabulary words: Once you become aware of them, you notice them everywhere. Worry lines, laugh lines, frown lines, crow's-feet. Los Angeles, where I live, is a great city for wrinkle watching. True, in the enclaves of plastic-surgery enthusiasts—Brentwood, Beverly Hills, the sets of Hollywood films—there is nary a wrinkle in sight. But the city is also home to some of the crinkliest people you will ever see, their faces baked by the hot desert sun into relief maps of creases and furrows and crosshatching.

In the past few years, we have become quite sophisticated in our understanding of wrinkles and the various methods for erasing them. We are versed in the physical and social repercussions of unfettered aging—skin cancer, job discrimination, invisibility in a society that shamelessly values youth. Indeed, in 2007, 11.7 million Americans underwent some sort of cosmetic procedure (surgery, Botox, fillers, and the like), an 8 percent increase from the year before and a 457 percent increase from a decade earlier. Yet we also fear the sometimes-poor results of these endeavors: the blank foreheads of Botox, the wind-tunnel face-lifts favored by various actresses and socialites, the regrettable collagen sins committed by Melanie Griffith and Meg Ryan. Why do some wrinkles prompt people to seek surgery and others trouble them hardly all? What does the topography of a face say about a person? Why do we shun the lines we shun, and why do we keep the lines we keep?

Click here for a slide show on the aesthetics of wrinkles.

"Hope I die before I get old," sang 21-year-old Roger Daltrey in 1965—and 43 years later, he's still singing it. Rock 'n' roll has always been invested in a Byronic cult of blazing youth and beautiful corpses. But as tyros have turned into reunion-tour warhorses, rockers have had to come to terms with the ironies—and the indignities and the glories—of old age.

Other musical genres got there long before. Aging, mortality, saintly old women, dirty old men—these are perennial themes in pop and blues and soul. And, of course, country. Nashville's song factories have been churning out hits about the sunset years for decades. The No. 2 song on Billboard's country chart this week is Brad Paisley's "Waitin' on a Woman," a ballad about an overall-wearing coot who dispenses worldly wisdom from a bench in a shopping-mall food court.

Here, then, are 25 great songs about old people: honky-tonk ballads and Tin Pan Alley standards and French chanson and rumba and, yes, Jay-Z, who kicks off his ode to aging with grace with the AARP's favorite euphemism, boasting about "the maturation of Jay-Zeezy." There are paeans to beloved patriarchs, metaphysical musings on time's passage, and lots of anxious songs about diminished potency. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the finest, most touching music here was recorded by actual senior citizens. Turns out, dying after you get old has some advantages. You know what the man said about vintage wine from fine old kegs …

The greatest novelty-song singer of all time reflects on the hazards of sharing a house with a grumpy old man. "Who's the one that I adore/ Though he beats me to the floor?/ Old grand dad/ My old grand dad."

Bill Withers, "Grandma's Hands"

Bill Withers' bluesy 1971 paean to Grandma bores in on the details: gnarled, arthritic hands that soothe, scold, point the way, and punctuate pearls of wisdom.

Be good to dear old dad while he's still got his faculties. Soon he'll be stuck away "in a vine-covered shack in the mountains/ Bravely fighting the battle of time."

Published in 1873, this parlor ballad waltz was one of the most popular songs of the late 19^th century, a time when musical taste leaned hard toward the lachrymose. In this 1913 wax-cylinder recording, countertenor Will Oakland spares no warble in telling the tale of a love that outlasts the graying of hair and the sagging of flesh.

Jacques Brel, "Les Vieux"

"Que l'on vive à Paris on vit tous en province quand on vit trop longtemps." ("Though you live in Paris, you live in the provinces when you live too long.") As an accordion wheezes behind him, the legendary Belgian chansonnier spits out a mordant song-poem about the golden years. It's not a pretty picture: The old have voices that crack and apartments that smell of musty Bibles. They spend sunny days trudging through funeral processions for "an older man, an uglier woman." And their beloved household pets? Long gone: "Le petit chat est mort."

Elvis Costello, "Veronica"

"When I'm 64" is not Paul McCartney's best song about old age. McCartney co-wrote the music for Elvis Costello's brilliant, touching 1989 quasi-hit about an elderly woman slipping into senility. Money lines: "All the time she laughs at those/ Who shout her name and steal her clothes."

Pulp, "Help the Aged"

A cautionary tale for the carefree young from Britpop's foppish poet laureate, Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker: "Help the aged/ One time they were just like you/ Drinking, smoking cigs, and sniffing glue."

Jay-Z, "30 Something"

"Thirty is the new 20," crows Jay-Z, but he knows better: In hip-hop years, 30 is more like 75. But old age has its benefits: a handsome stock portfolio; "black cards, good credit and such"; and the wisdom not to trick out your car with spinner rims.

Toby Keith, "As Good As I Once Was"

"I ain't as good as I once was/ I've got a few years on me now," sings amiable good ol' boy Toby Keith. But when it's time to throw down in a bar brawl or roll in the hay with blond twins, he can still rise to the occasion—with a little help from Viagra, as the video makes clear. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

LCD Soundsystem, "Losing My Edge"

The aging hipster's lament.

Kitty Wells, "A Woman Half My Age"

"You say your love for me you've laid aside/ And she's rekindled flames you thought had died." Country's first big female star braves her man's midlife crisis with a stiff upper lip, promising, in the song's most heartbreaking lines, to take him back once his affair has run its course: "Come back and we'll tear out this tarnished page/ And we'll forget that woman half my age."

Steely Dan, "Hey Nineteen"

As hot as it is having a girlfriend 30 years your junior, it's kind of a buzz kill when she's never heard of Aretha Franklin. "Hey nineteen/ No, we got nothing in common/ No, we can't talk at all."

The raspy-voiced Southern soul hero delivers a homily on the perils of May-December romance. Listen and learn.

Tom Lehrer, "When You Are Old and Gray"

"Your teeth will start to go, dear/ Your waist will start to spread/ In 20 years or so, dear/ I'll wish that you were dead." The evilest old-age song ever written. Maybe the best.

Willie Nelson, "September Song"

On second thought: Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson's dark, glorious "September Song" is pop's definitive statement on aging. Here, Willie Nelson summons the full force of his taciturn ballad-singing genius, bearing down beautifully on the key line: "September, November …"

Frank Sinatra, "The September of My Years"

No singer aged with more dignity than Frank Sinatra, who in the 1960s and '70s transformed himself from roguish boulevardier to Lion in Winter—with a little help from his favorite songwriters, Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn.

The Grateful Dead, "Touch of Grey"

"I weeeeeel get by/ I weeeeel survive …"

Hoagy Carmichael, "Rockin' Chair"

Carmichael's great 1932 ballad—sung here by the songwriter himself some 24 years later—makes curmudgeonly codgerdom sound like an idyll. "Old rockin' chair's got me/ Cane by my side/ Fetch me that gin, son/ 'Fore I tan your hide."

Nas, "Can't Forget About You"

Or, "Rockin' Chair," the rap version: "There comes a day in your life when you wanna kick back/ Straw hat on the porch when you old perhaps/ Wanna gather your thoughts, have a cold one/ Brag to your grandkids about how life is golden."

Help the aged. "Just remember when you're young/ That to you, the time will come/ When you're old and only in the way."

Perpetual sad sack Stephin Merritt finds solace in time the avenger: "When you're old and lonely/ You will wish you'd married me."

In 2003, the late queen of salsa overhauled Gloria Gaynor's classic disco breakup anthem, turning it into an Ode on the Immortality of Celia Cruz. "My voice can fly," Cruz sings, "Can overcome any hurt/ Any time/ Any loneliness."

Johnny Cash, "We'll Meet Again"

The Man in Black turns the World War II-era anthem into a promise of reunion in the great beyond. The final track on Cash's final album. Get out the hankie for Cash's spoken-word verse that begins at the 1:32 mark.

The Zimmers, "My Generation"

Brilliant novelty-song stunt or ugly oldsploitation pop? The answer is in the ear of the beholder. This 2007 cover of the Who classic by an army of London pensioners certainly struck a chord, cracking the top 30 on the U.K. charts and going viral on YouTube.

Jimmy Durante, "Young at Heart"

Age ain't nothing but a number.

At age 100, I luxuriate in late sleeping, until 9:30 or 10 and once even till 11. Today, at my request, a friend is driving me to see Devon Avenue, eight miles north of the Chicago River. I live eight miles south of the river and have not seen Devon Avenue for years. It is a long ribbon of a street that used to be filled with Eastern European Jewish stores. Almost everything you could imagine. Now the stores are all Indian or Pakistani groceries, jewelry, books, money exchange, and stores with only Asian names. Many restaurants, with many unlimited lunch buffets. Women in saris on the sidewalks. We stopped at the imposing Viceroy of India for an unlimited Devon Avenue buffet, which was actually limited for Occidentals by spiciness.

Home, at 2. Then, at age 100, a nap.

Our local Hyde Park newspaper did an "Obama Advertising Supplement," apparently assuming his election and including photographs of presidential libraries. I called the editor to leave word that adjoining Woodlawn would be appropriate. Woodlawn was all white, then all African-American, and is now beginning to be mixed. I decided that after Obama is elected, I will pursue this with the Obama group and the University of Chicago. An Obama library would be a great asset to the university as a neighbor.

At 4:30, I go down to our grassy garden and talk with neighbors. Our co-op apartment building has about 60 small gardens, and today our gardens gave us tomatoes. I wish very much I could still garden. Also, I wish I could walk.

At 5:55, most of us go indoors to look at the news. I like BBC for a half-hour and then PBS.

After that dinner, reading, and bed by 9.

Retirement is a very busy time, because I no longer have a secretary or a clerk as an assistant. In other respects, it is a wonderful time—few deadlines, no pain, lots of fun.

I cannot live alone anymore. I have a capable, congenial caregiver, Tom Penados, five days a week and a good replacement on weekends. With that arrangement I can continue in my co-op apartment, still about the same as when my wife died last year. Without them I would have to find a nursing home.

Lately, I have been thinking often of my mother and dreaming of her. Why? My caregiver, who leaves my thoughts alone, cares for my dressing, hygiene, and food, as my mother did in my early years. So, I think of her often.

Today is the day for our co-op's annual garden party, for which residents prepare a table of delights. My 24-year-old grandson, who is a culinary artist and expert, prepared an attractive appetizer.

His presence in the apartment is itself a delight. Loss of a cherished spouse is irreparable, but the presence of an upbeat grandson helps my mood. My grandson's presence is a welcome home "activity."

Another pleasurable home activity is listening to Radio Classique as it comes from Paris through the Internet. The music is agreeable, but I am intrigued over and over by the commercials, the discussions, and the news reports. What fluent French! What wonderful French accents! How rapid! I thought I knew French. I listen to it now, attentive, and chastened but hopeful.

I wrote the authorities to suspend my lawyer license until my vision improves enough for me to read adequately. An illusion! At the garden party, a fellow co-op resident recalled my being seated at a table in the county law library with a pile of books and a yellow legal pad in front of me. I don't know how to use the present tools—computer, Internet, Google, etc. I have to let the law license go!

Thanks, FDR, for pushing Social Security, and thanks, LBJ, for Medicare. I wish I were mobile and could knock on doors for Obama, where needed in adjoining states. I spent much of many campaigns knocking on doors, and it hurts that Illinois is so solidly for Obama that I don't have to work here, and can't do so elsewhere.

I have made my visit to my heart doctor. Last time he told me to come back in two months. Today, he says cheerfully: "You're doing well. Come back in six months."

Six months! That's like getting a gold bond on my life. Not payable for six months, or later. I am exhilarated. I must rely on a whole set of physicians. Today's lively medical send-off stimulates me to write a haiku with a modest pattern at the end:

I owe them all so very much,

My life and fun and sense of ease

And welcome freedom from disease

My…

Cardiologist

Dermatologist

Ophthalmologist

And my … me-di-cin-nal generalist.

Exhausted by so much activity, I take my indispensable nap.

In the afternoon, I have a double pleasure. I pontificate about the election (to a reporter from Paris) and, besides, I do so in French. Pretty soon we lapse into English. I tell him that I think Obama will win and will do so by a big vote. I am perturbed by the hockey mom. She sounds so much like so many working young women that I fear defections.

It has been a long day. At 100, early to bed!

Twenty-four years ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in The Terminator, a movie about a cyborg—part man, part machine—sent back in time from the year 2029. He was young and buff, and the movie became his shtick. Campaigning for then-Vice President George Bush, he joked, "When it comes to the American future, Michael Dukakis will be the real Terminator."

Today, Schwarzenegger is 61, and the joke's on him. The cyborgs have arrived, and he's one of them. He's had a hip and two heart valves replaced, plus a femur repaired with screws, cables, and a metal plate. "This is what happens when you are the Terminator," he quipped. "They switch body parts."

In real life, cyborgs aren't studs from the future. They're old folks. As we age, our parts wear out. That used to mean immobility or death. Today, we can replace them. Bush had a hip switched out at 76, skydived on his 80^th birthday, and got the other hip switched out at 82. Barbara Bush has an artificial hip; Cindy McCain has an artificial knee. The right arm of Sen. Daniel Inouye, lost when he was a soldier in World War II, is gone for good. But the left shoulder, which wore out five years ago at age 79, has been replaced.

Millions of Americans are walking around with artificial body parts. According to a U.S. government report, from 1997 to 2005, the annual tally of hip replacements increased from 290,000 to 383,000. Knee replacements increased from 328,000 to 555,000. Throw in another 50,000 to 55,000 shoulder replacements and other "arthroplasties," and you're looking at 1 million surgeries per year. "The demand for these procedures is projected to double in the next two decades," says the report. The average artificial knee recipient is 66; the average artificial hip recipient is 70.

And that's just joints. Nearly 2 million Americans are amputees, thanks largely to diabetes. Around 2 million people worldwide, including Dick Cheney, have implants that monitor and regulate their heartbeats. Some 100,000 have cochlear implants, which restore hearing. Others have artificial hearts, heart valves, elbows, or spinal discs. And, of course, teeth.

This is only the beginning. Artificial hands, eyes, lungs, pancreases, and "bio-artificial" kidneys are well into development. The baby boom has aged into a bionics boom. The current global market for implantable defibrillators is around $6 billion. A study published two weeks ago calculates that 45 percent of Americans—135 million people—will end up with painful knee arthritis. Collectively, three corporations that specialize in implantable medical devices—Medtronic, Stryker, and Zimmer—already match the combined market value of General Motors, Ford, Sears, Dell, and Sony.

The industry is booming because it combines two things. One is the efficiency, versatility, and innovation of high-tech engineering. The other is the world's most powerful desire: to live longer and more comfortably. The market for replacement body parts is like the market for car or computer parts, except that your body is paramount, and you can't get a new one.

The merger of medicine with engineering is wonderful. But it also brings new problems. The first is that our technological reach exceeds our economic grasp. Depending on how you count, hip and knee replacements cost $15,000 to $30,000 or more. Prosthetic limbs can run $3,000 to $50,000. Cochlear implants cost around $40,000; implantable heart defibrillators cost $25,000; implantable artificial hearts go for around $250,000. Medicare covers 60 percent of hip and knee replacements and 80 percent of prosthetic limbs. Can we afford all these devices? If not, are we consigning some people to disability and death?

Second, the devices don't always work. Some spinal discs have flunked regulatory scrutiny. People with ceramic hips have complained of squeaking. Defibrillators have even been recalled due to bad wiring. You can fix a squeaky bike, but what about a squeaky hip? You can take a bum cell phone back to the store, but what about a heart implant? What do you do when the product you want to return is part of your body?

Even when implants work, they wear out, as most household devices do. Hip replacements often have to be repeated. Heart pumps can give out. Last year, Cheney had surgery to switch out the power components in his defibrillator because, as a press aide dryly explained, "the device's battery has reached the level where elective replacement of the device is recommended."

Bionic parts bring new privacy questions. Wireless devices will let your doctor monitor your health without even a phone call. Will they give your insurer the same access? And what about complete strangers? Earlier this year, researchers demonstrated that implanted defibrillators could be hacked.

Then there's the sticky question of turning off the machine. A life-support apparatus at your bedside is distinct from you. But what about an implant? If you want to die, and your defibrillator keeps shocking you back to life, can your spouse or doctor turn it off? Is that assisted suicide? Who has the right to terminate a Terminator?

Twelve years after The Terminator came out, another actor, Al Franken, offered a modest proposal: "Why not shoot the elderly into space?" That way, we could explore without worry. "I'm not saying we don't try to get them back," he joked. "We just don't make such a big deal about it." Today, another 12 years later, Franken, like Schwarzenegger, is an aging politician. And here's the punch line: We're not shooting the elderly into space. We're shooting them into time. We're testing cyborg gadgetry on them because they're the ones whose parts have worn out. If it works, they're exploring the future. And if it doesn't, no big deal.

Last week, the Republican Party nominated John McCain as its candidate for president. As you may have heard, McCain is no spring chicken. Having just turned 72, he would be the oldest man ever elected president of the United States if he wins. McCain's age has provided much fodder for the nation's political cartoonists and late night television hosts, who have mercilessly portrayed the candidate as a doddering coot.

Here at Slate, we take the subject of growing old more seriously. Heck, it's going to happen to all of us someday—if we're lucky. And so we have commissioned a series of articles on aging and the aged. We wanted to see the world through the eyes of our elders, to explore the ways in which old folks influence our economy, politics, and culture. To walk a mile in their Rockports.

Over the next three days, we will publish a range of stories about the elderly experience. Farhad Manjoo reports on new technologies designed to make Gram and Gramps better drivers. Michael Agger makes a study of senior citizens who, unlike John McCain, have flocked to the Web. Jacob Leibenluft, Slate's Green Lantern, determines whether old people are good or bad for the environment. Justin Peters explains why the best adult diapers come from Europe.

Elsewhere in the issue, Jessica Winter plumbs our fondness for geezer buddy movies like Grumpy Old Men and The Bucket List. Jody Rosen catalogs the greatest songs about aging and mortality, from Jay-Z's "30 Something" to the Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey." Sara Dickerman tells you what eating will be like when you're old. Witold Rybczynski explains why architects never retire.

Throughout the week, Slate will publish diary entries by Leon Despres, a former Chicago alderman, renowned for standing up to the city's political machine, who will explain what if feels like to be 100 years old. And finally, on Thursday, we will present "80 over 80"—our interactive list of the most powerful octogenarians in America. Who will be top dog? Sumner Redstone? John Paul Stevens? Elaine Stritch? With so many old folks still at the peak of their powers, it's going to be a tough call. Sorry, Sen. McCain—you've still got a few years left before you'll be in the running. We'll see what you're up to in 2016.

Tuesday

"Is Grandpa Bad for the Environment? Climate change and the aging population," by Jacob Leibenluft. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

Slate V: Calling John McCain Old (Politely)

"Best Friends Forever: Grumpy Old Men, The Bucket List, and the undying appeal of the old-buddy movie," by Jessica Winter. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

"A Visit to My Future: What happens when I try to live like a senior citizen," by Emily Yoffe. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

"The Oldest Profession: Why don't architects ever retire?" by Witold Rybczynski. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

Recycled: "A Visit to My Future: What happens when I try to live like a senior citizen," by Emily Yoffe. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

"Diary of a 100-Year-Old Man: Running across town for some Indian food," by Leon Despres. Posted Sept. 9, 2008.

Wednesday

"Pimp My Buick: Will new technologies make old people safer on the road?" by Farhad Manjoo. Posted Sept. 10, 2008.

"What's the Best Adult Diaper? That depends," by Justin Peters. Posted Sept. 10, 2008.

"The Senior-Citizen Cookbook: How your food needs will change as you get older," by Sarah Dickerman. Posted Sept. 10, 2008

"Diary of a 100-Year-Old Man: Dreams of My Mother, and a Visit From My Grandson," by Leon Despres. Posted Sept. 10, 2008

Recycled: "Naughty Nursing Homes: Is it time to let the elderly have more sex?" by Daniel Engber. Posted Sept. 10, 2008

Thursday

"Spend It While You Can: Turns out money can buy you happiness. But it buys more happiness when you're young," by Ray Fisman. Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

"Geezers Need Excitement: What happens when old people go online," by Michael Agger. Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

"Oh, the Wrinkles You'll Get!: The history and aesthetics of the lines on your face," by Amanda Fortini. Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

"The Pensioner's Playlist: The 25 greatest songs about aging and mortality," by Jody Rosen. Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

"Full Metal Socket: How seniors became cyborgs," by William Saletan. Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

"80 Over 80: The most powerful octogenarians in America." Posted Sept. 11, 2008.

We're frequently told, by news-you-can-use segments and bank ads hawking savings accounts, that Americans are not saving enough for their retirements. Yet just as often we're reminded that, given the fleeting nature of human existence, we should eat, drink, and be merry while we still can. Thriftiness is making a comeback in the wake of our latest speculative bubble, but some new evidence may help to tip the scales back in favor of the carpe diem approach to life. It turns out that money can buy you happiness—but young people get a lot more happiness out of their dollars than old people do.

Recent research by economists Amy Finkelstein, Erzo Luttmer, and Matthew Notowidigdo suggests that you'll get a bigger bang for your consumer buck by spending while you're healthy, before old age starts to take the fun out of life's indulgences. Their research is part of a larger academic enterprise attempting to understand what makes us happy. Economics is a field more associated with rational calculation than emotion, but there's an ever-growing subculture of "happiness economists." Just as mainstream economists spend their time figuring out things like gross national product—how much a country produces in dollar terms—these happiness scholars churn out numbers like gross national happiness (how much happiness a country produces).

It's relatively easy to measure things like corporate profits and trade flows. Measuring a person's psychic well-being is trickier, though happiness economists take a relatively straightforward approach: For the most part, they just ask people if they're happy. They then try to figure out what makes people say yes or no. Perhaps not surprisingly, money-obsessed economists have been fixated on whether higher incomes make us happier. And after much debate, their conclusion is that money does indeed buy happiness. Or, as an economist would put it, there's a positive marginal utility of consumption. People in rich countries say they're happier than people in poor countries, and in just about every nation, the well-to-do report being happier than their impoverished counterparts.

Of course, an extra dollar may not bring the same joy to all people. For some, happiness is only as far away as the next swipe of their Amex; for others, there's pleasure to be had in having nothing at all. It's also true that what makes us happy today might not do the trick tomorrow—the money-happiness connection may change throughout a person's lifetime.

How does ill health affect this relationship? Healthy people are happier than sick ones. That's obvious. But once you're sick, does money buy you more happiness or less? On the one hand, you can't enjoy your new Mustang convertible if you're laid up in the hospital. On the other hand, money can buy a lot of comforts for those suffering from debilitating illness (a full-time housekeeper; a nice, soft La-Z-Boy).

Finkelstein and her co-authors use the "Health and Retirement Survey," which follows a sample of retired persons, asking them questions about, among other things, income, health, and whether they agree with the statement "Much of the time I was happy during the past week." The study allowed the researchers to determine whether rich retirees say they're happier than poor retirees. And since the survey goes back to the same participants year after year, it's also possible to track a single person's happiness over time to see how it's affected by health.

The authors find that healthy retirees are a pretty contented lot—only 13 percent of respondents reported not being happy. The rich are happier—going from an annual income of $25,000 to $50,000 reduces the likelihood of saying you're unhappy by nearly five percentage points. But that's only if the respondents are healthy. The extra money has a much smaller effect on happiness for the sick and infirm—the authors calculate that the happiness effect of higher income is only about one-quarter as much for respondents with multiple chronic diseases. So, having a lot of money to throw around once you're retired is great … but only while you're healthy enough to spend it.

The researchers' findings reinforce claims that economists have made elsewhere that Americans aren't really undersaving all that much for their golden years. As Tim Harford has noted in Slate, since when you're retired it's possible to spend more time lining up for early bird dinners and clipping coupons, you don't need as much money to get by on. And if money isn't going to bring you as much happiness in your old age, that's further reason not to oversave. If you've always wanted to samba till dawn in Rio or see Angkor Wat at sunrise, do it now, when you're healthy and you know you'll still enjoy it.

The authors also have a surprising suggestion regarding health insurance: We'd actually be better off if insurance companies reduced the portion of medical expenditures they pay for. Your monthly insurance payments would end up costing you less, and while you'd shell out more for hospital stays and other medical expenses if illness struck, well, at that point you wouldn't be healthy enough to enjoy spending the extra cash anyway.

The authors' findings should be a wake-up call to those already in the midst of their golden years who still have their health but face increasingly unfavorable odds of staying that way. You really should treat yourself to that dinner at Chez Panisse you've been putting off for a special occasion. And what if you're young and fit? The odds of living to see another healthy day are stacked in your favor, but who knows what could happen tomorrow? It's not every day an economics paper gives you an excuse to spend your money and live life to the fullest. I'd say seize the moment.

In the summer of 2003, a retired salesman named George Weller, who was 86 and in poor health, slammed through several road obstructions that were set up around the popular Santa Monica Farmer's Market. Weller's Buick hit speeds of up to 60 miles per hour as it careened through the market, crashing into shoppers and stalls. He killed 10 pedestrians, his car coming to a stop only when a body became trapped underneath. Police determined that the carnage stemmed from a simple "misapplication" of the pedals: Weller had stepped on the gas when he'd meant to step on the brakes.

Weller's crash has become a symbol of the dangers of letting old people get behind the wheel. As people age—and especially as their health declines—their vision becomes impaired, which increases the chances they'll cause an accident. Aging reduces physical mobility and cognitive functions, slowing people's reaction time and limiting their capacity to process multiple sources of information simultaneously (for instance, the dashboard display combined with a picture of the road ahead). People of advanced age can also suffer severe mental handicaps that make driving extremely dangerous. In St. Petersburg, Fla., in 2005, a 93-year-old driver with dementia hit a pedestrian and then drove three miles with the body lodged in his windshield before he was alerted by a tollbooth worker that he'd been involved in a crash.

Despite such high-profile cases, road safety researchers have found that today's old drivers aren't very risky. Statistics on current road deaths show that people over the age of 65 are only 16 percent more likely to cause accidents than are people aged 25 to 64. Drivers under 25, meanwhile, are the most dangerous people on the road—they're 188 percent more likely to cause crashes than middle-aged adults.

Even so, carmakers—eyeing a huge market—are now installing a variety of technologies to make it safer for people to keep driving past retirement. Over the next two decades, America's roads will turn gray: By 2025, more than one-quarter of the nation's drivers will be 65 or older (elderly people currently comprise about 15 percent of drivers). These older drivers will be able to purchase cars that alert them to possible collisions, beep and yell when drifting from lane to lane, automatically adjust cruise control when they're following too closely, and apply the brakes when they're about to crash. But safety researchers are skeptical that smarter cars will make it safer to drive when you're old. While today's old drivers pose little risk, tomorrow's old drivers—in other words, you—seem likely to cause a lot more trouble. The reason? Grandma doesn't talk and text while driving. She doesn't play with the GPS navigator, she doesn't switch DVDs while changing lanes, and she doesn't apply eyeliner when making a left turn. You do. And you're not going to quit when you turn 65.

Bryan Reimer, a researcher at MIT's AgeLab, says that one of the main reasons that old people don't cause as many crashes as you'd expect is that they "self-regulate" their driving behavior as they age. Earlier this week, I took an online course offered by the AARP that's meant to help you brush up on the rules of the road. The course, which is taken by 750,000 people every year, features several videos of seniors discussing how they've adjusted their driving habits as they've gotten older. People say they drive more slowly these days, they choose not to drive at night (old people are more sensitive to glare), they watch road signs more carefully, they make fewer left turns. Older drivers are more prone to serious injuries when they're in a crash—a healthy 40-year-old can walk away from a crash that would kill an 85-year-old woman with osteoporosis—and research shows that many old people understand that: They drive cautiously because getting behind the wheel can be fatal. But drivers' self-regulation presents a conundrum for car manufacturers—by making their next generation of cars safer, are they encouraging the next generation of elderly motorists to drive less safely?

Old people in the market for a tricked-out ride could do worse than the 2009 Lincoln MKS, a Ford vehicle that will offer a smart cruise-control system that uses radar to track what's up ahead. The car sounds warning bells if you get too close to the vehicle in front of you, and if you still don't let up, the MKS will slow itself down to avoid a collision. Audi, Lexus, and Volvo also offer such cruise-control systems. Another similar technology can be found on many high-end cars—"pre-crash" systems that sound chimes, pump up your brakes, tighten your seat belts, and even adjust the seats in order to minimize the effects of an impending collision. Eero Laansoo, a human-factors engineer at Ford, told me that he foresees cars becoming much more "aware" of obstacles on the road. "The cars will actually start to react to the situations around them," he said.

But if you're driving a car that slows down when it detects another vehicle in front of you, you've still got to worry about cars to the left and right. AgeLab's Reimer says it isn't clear whether the new technology will make you more or less aware of these dangers. Since you no longer have to pay as much attention to what's in front of you, you could devote more of your attention to your blind spots and peripheral lanes. On the other hand, you could decide to devote more of your attention to your BlackBerry—in which case you'd be worse off than if your car didn't have smart cruise control.

Reimer doesn't have any data to say which scenario will play out. But for cultural reasons, he suspects today's baby boomers will choose their cell phones over safety. "They're going to self-regulate in a different way," he says. "They're going to be more willing to engage in secondary activities that the World War II generation wouldn't imagine engaging in. The World War II generation doesn't drive and talk on the phone. They would never consider that. They never did. The boomers have been doing it for years. Do you see them giving up that connectivity?"

Reimer isn't saying that new safety technologies will make roads more dangerous; they may very well prevent the worst types of crashes, such as the Santa Monica accident. But their potential is limited. This is a well-known paradox in car safety research, something called the "offset hypothesis"—people act more irresponsibly when they're driving cars they think are safer. Both anti-lock brakes and airbags were expected to reduce the incidence of car accidents. Neither did because people offset the potential gains in safety by driving more aggressively.

For years, car safety researchers have been calling for more frequent testing—or at least mandatory education—of drivers as they age. But for social and political reasons, few states have such requirements. Talk of taking cars away from old people is about as treacherous politically as angling to reduce Medicare or Social Security benefits. The discussion also raises all kinds of difficult public policy questions: If we prohibit old people from driving, will we provide better public transportation for them? Will we have doctors make house calls?

Laansoo imagines that in the very distant future, cars will hook into road sensors and satellites and become so "aware" of their surroundings that they "will take away a lot of the demand from the driver, and there's going to be an argument that it's not going to be quite as important for an older driver to have perfect vision or mobility." But until then, we might be in for some hairy times.

About 40,000 people die on the roads in America each year. As the driving population ages, Reimer says, we probably won't see a great deal more crashes, but because old people die more easily than young people, we could see more fatalities. That very danger, though, could spark changes in behavior—even distracted boomers may come to realize that staying alive on the road is more important than checking their e-mail.

Aging can be a cruel process. You get liver spots. You slow down. You start hurting everywhere. You take more pills than Janis Joplin in her prime.

But it's not just the physical aches and pains that get to you. Your dignity can begin to evaporate as well. There's the patronizing look from the waiter as you struggle to read a menu. The inability to perform simple tasks that were once executed with ease. The subtle erosion of your independence.

All of these problems are exacerbated when you start urinating in your pants.

The reality of the age-related regression to a state resembling infancy is never clearer than when you lose control of your bladder. You start buying clothes not so much for style or comfort as for how well they hide a telltale stain. At social events, you chart bathroom routes and exit strategies. Every long car ride becomes a chore, every airplane ride a potential disaster, every happy hour a decidedly unhappy hour.

According to the National Association for Continence, more than 25 million Americans suffer from incontinence or other bladder-control problems. (Nearly 50 percent of nursing-home residents are incontinent.) There are two types: stress incontinence and urge incontinence. People who are stress incontinent leak urine while coughing, sneezing, laughing, or lifting heavy objects. People who are urge incontinent have what is commonly known as an overactive bladder. For the urge incontinent, the need to void one's bladder—which can hold about 24 ounces of urine at its top capacity—can come suddenly and uncontrollably.

Wearing adult diapers is one of the few medication-free ways that incontinent people can feel comfortable going out in public. Adult diapers are exactly what they sound like—padded, disposable cotton briefs similar to those worn by infants. There are two layers to most well-made adult diapers. The inside is composed of hydrophilic material that attracts liquid, while the outside is composed of hydrophobic material, which prevents the liquid from seeping through. "You don't want that clamminess on your skin," said Gary Evans, owner of incontinence supply house XP Medical.

A couple of months ago, Slate asked me to field-test various adult diapers for its "Geezers" issue. In many ways, I was an unlikely choice—I am a 27-year-old male, and incontinence primarily afflicts women and the elderly. Then again, I am prone to back pain, influenza, sinusitis, digestive malfunctions, and swollen fingertips; I eat poorly, exercise infrequently, drink heavily, and never sit if I can slouch. If there is anybody who is due for a painful and unhappy old age, it is me.

Methodology

There are several Web sites, like the Incontinence Resource Center, that rank adult diapers from best to worst. As for my experiment, my methodology was simple. I was testing for wearability, for absorbency, for longevity, and for style. I rated the diapers in each category on a 5-point scale for a total of 20 possible points.

Wearability (5 possible points)

While you will never really feel comfortable in an adult diaper, some are more wearable than others. Several criteria are encompassed in this metric. Does the diaper fit? Does it feel like genuine cotton underwear, or does it feel like you're wearing a stack of paper towels? Does it provoke scratching and crotch-adjusting to the point at which it would be noticeable in public? Can you wear the diaper for extended periods without feeling like Baby Huey? Do you ever forget that it's there?

Absorbency (5 possible points)

This, of course, is the big one. A good diaper should be able to absorb as much liquid as a brimming bladder can expel. How much liquid can the diaper hold, and how much can it hold comfortably? How well does it absorb that liquid? Does it keep you dry? Is it prone to leaks? At what point does the diaper start feeling like a used sponge? At what point does it start feeling like a swimming pool?

Longevity (5 possible points)

"You're relying on the product to perform the process that your bladder's not—storing urine," said Gary Evans. Thus, it's important that an adult diaper be wearable even after it has been soiled. Besides, spare diapers are like spare tires: You can't really bring either to a cocktail party. How long can a used diaper be worn comfortably? At what point does a quick-change act become necessary?

Style (5 possible points)

Diaper style doesn't matter so much for babies, who don't know any better and who cry all the time, anyway. But it's important for adults. If you are a slender, incontinent man, will the diaper ruin your silhouette? Does it make it difficult to fit into pants? Can you wear an adult diaper and still feel sexy?

I chose six brands of diapers—all the "superabsorbent" kind—and put them through a rigorous, three-prong testing process. First, I subjected them to clinical and scientific wetness testing. (I poured water on them from a measuring cup and watched for sogginess.) Next, I wore them dry as I went about my daily routine—to work, on the subway, to the low joints that I frequent at night. Finally, I wore them wet. With my own urine. (Ah, the things that we do for science, and money.)

Store Brands

For the sad soul who is both incontinent and destitute, and for nobody else. Conventional wisdom says that any savings that may result from using generic personal-hygiene products are subsumed by the discomfort that users must endure. This is doubly true for generic adult diapers. Unless you are impoverished, or a masochist, there is no reason to go generic. The savings are minimal, and so is the quality.

I tested three different store brands: Target (Affirm), Walgreens (Certainty), and Kroger (Kroger), all of which were similar in price (low) and quality (low). The simple verdict: Don't use the store brand if you have any plans at all to do anything that day besides change your adult diaper.

My experience with Kroger was particularly memorable, which isn't a good thing when it comes to diapers. They were about as absorbent as a drainpipe, sagging under the weight of the water and leaking like Daniel Ellsberg. These pull-on-style diapers went on easily and didn't actually feel too bad when I wore them dry, but years of using my congenitally cheap roommate's Rite-Aid-brand toilet paper has steeled me for discomfort.

Eventually I consumed enough liquor to muster the courage to wear them wet. Unfortunately, consuming all that liquor also mustered enough urine to make the testing process one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. The diaper swelled until it could swell no more, at which point streams of urine began running down the sides of my legs. Even though I had locked myself in a bathroom to perform the test, I still feel unaccountably ashamed, as if God were laughing at me—a feeling made worse by my inability to exit the diaper. The Kroger diaper features quick-release strips on its sides so that wearers can rip the sides for a quick and easy exit. But the strips didn't immediately rip, and I just stood there stymied for a few seconds, tugging ineffectively at a wet adult diaper and feeling as if there must be easier ways to make a living.

Afterward, I headed directly to the shower.

Wearability: 2

Absorbency: 1

Longevity 1

Style: 2

Total: 6

Depend Super Plus Absorbency Adjustable Underwear

Perhaps the best-known brand of adult diaper, thanks to the long-running commercials featuring Little Women star June Allyson. Many of the adult diapers I came across boasted soothing and gentle names like Depend or Affirm. This makes sense—people want to trust their adult diapers. A product with a name like Mystique probably wouldn't sell very well.

I tested the Super Plus Absorbency Adjustable Underwear variety (now with worry-free odor control!), which looked and felt like a cut-rate codpiece. While it was comfortable and largely itch-free, the main problem was that the garment didn't fit. It is undoubtedly difficult to make a one-size-fits-all adult diaper, but I fell squarely inside the L/XL size according to the chart on the box, and I could have fit another person in these briefs. (This is speculation: I did not attempt this.)

As absorbency goes, Depend is adequate at best. While much better than the Kroger diaper, Depend still had trouble comfortably holding more than a pint's worth of liquid. When I wore it wet, the poor fit really became a problem—it felt like a damp, loose towel was wrapped around my waist. When it comes to "rewet absorbency" (how much liquid an already wet diaper will absorb), Depend does not perform well; it's necessary to change diapers if you're planning to double dip.

One final note: Depend claims that you can change these diapers without having to remove your clothes. I tried this several times, and am pretty sure that this is false. Maybe it's a practice-makes-perfect thing, but it was essentially impossible to change these diapers while still wearing my pants. Impossible and disgusting—it always felt like the urine was going to brush up against the inside of my jeans, leaving me with stink-thigh. And besides, you'll have to remove your clothes to don a new diaper, so it's not really a significant time savings.

Wearability: 2

Absorbency: 3

Longevity: 3

Style: 2

Total: 10

Attends Underwear Super Plus Absorbency With Leak Barriers

The word Attends sounds a lot like the word Depend, and, indeed, the two brands are similar—similar in their mediocrity, that is. Like Depend, Attends was functional, but its performance certainly wasn't great. None of the American diapers was that great, actually. There is an economic reason for this. The vast majority of American-made adult diapers are purchased by hospitals, Medicare, and Medicaid. These institutional purchasers are mostly interested in saving money, so diaper manufacturers tailor their products to their buyers' demands, producing diapers that are, essentially, cheap and cheaply made.

Attends fit a little bit better than Depend, although I would not recommend wearing either of them underneath tight pants. ("Relaxed fit" is the phrase to remember when it comes to buying diaper-friendly trousers.) It was the most comfortable domestic diaper when it came to long-term wear, but that's sort of like saying that first-degree burns are the best kind of burn. While, like a Depend, it held about 16 ounces of liquid before structural integrity was breached, it certainly did not live up to its expected absorbency.

A basic Attends brief promises to hold about 15 ounces of liquid; you would expect that the Super Plus Absorbency variety would exceed that capacity. It did not, which is no big surprise, according to diaper guru Gary Evans, who explained how manufacturers test their product absorbency: "They dunk the entire product, leave it there for a certain amount of time, allow the surface liquid to drain off, and weigh the product to see how much liquid it absorbs. I find that, realistically, you'd be lucky to get half of [the advertised absorbency]." I found that, realistically, American adult-diaper manufacturers are sort of bastards.

Of course, for many people, incontinence is manifested not in sudden, game-changing urinary explosions but in the small and steady drips characteristic of stress incontinence. I therefore subjected all of the diapers to the "drip test," dousing myself periodically with small amounts of liquid over the span of a few hours. (It is extremely hard for a strong-bladdered man to simulate stress incontinence, so I did this by pouring water into my crotch.) I can say that Attends is perfectly fine when it comes to catching drips. Just don't ask it to soak up a gusher.

Wearability: 3

Absorbency: 3

Longevity: 3

Style: 2

Total: 11

Molicare Super Plus Adult Diapers

Like chocolate, beer, and jewel thieves, the best adult diapers come from Europe. This is not coincidental. European manufacturers don't have to cater to institutional purchasers' demands, so they're more likely to sell on quality rather than cost.

The top-of-the-line European diapers are made by a company called Abena; their diapers boast a ridiculous 4,100-milliliter absorbency (more than a gallon). Sadly, I had trouble tracking these down stateside. European diapers typically aren't sold in drugstores and have to be purchased from specialty retailers or online merchants. I did, however, get to test-drive the awesome Molicare Super Plus. If Abena is the Mercedes of adult diapers, then Molicare is at least comparable to a Volvo. Bulkier than its domestic counterparts, the Molicare is nonetheless a more wearable product, thanks to its superior fit, which envelops your netherlands snugly and completely. It felt like I was wearing one of those portable seat cushions that people bring to high-school football games. Frankly, I felt voluptuous.

The European advantage was most evident when the Molicare got wet. Orders of magnitude more absorbent than Depends, Attends, or Kroger, the Super Plus never leaked, not even after two rewettings. My legs were never clammy while wearing it wet; indeed, I felt as comfortable as one can probably feel after having urinated in one's pants. When my bladder finally starts down the road to unreliability, I'm going European.

Wearability: 4

Absorbency: 5

Longevity: 5

Style: 4

Total: 18

If you're approaching retirement age, you might be looking forward to devoting some quality time to artisanal cheese-making or, say, perfecting your grandmother's recipe for piccalilli. After all, it's your generation's enthusiasm for fine dining that made cooking a national spectator sport. (Thank you, by the way.) But you may also be concerned that your gustatory pleasures will diminish as you get older. If you start losing teeth, will you still be able to gnaw on a hunk of rustic wood-oven-baked bread? Will you still be able to tell a New World Syrah from an Old World Côtes du Rhône with a sniff and a gargle? Here's a preview of the ways your food world may change as you get into your late 60s and beyond.

You may eat less. Because your energy requirements generally lessen as you age, your appetite is likely to shrink. In a phone interview, fabulous octogenarian and food historian Betty Fussell (who has a new book, Raising Steaks, coming out this fall) mentioned that her appetite has decreased as she has gotten older, but her desire to eat hasn't. In fact, the small-plates appetizers that have become popular in restaurants in the past decade or so are perfect for her, she says—custom tailored for someone with an adventurous palate but a bite-sized appetite. "Desire remains the same," she says, "but it focuses on intensity rather than quantity."

The problem with a smaller appetite is that the food you do eat must be, in awkward nutri-lingo, nutritionally dense. Your body's need for vitamins and minerals holds steady as its need for calories lessens, so it's best not to get calories from instant ramen. (For more information on senior-specific nutrition, check out a version of the USDA's "My Pyramid" graphic modified for older adults by Tufts University researchers.)

You may eat more. Over the years, you've probably gotten good at snacking. Just because you're getting older and your body needs fewer calories doesn't mean you're going to lose that talent. Not surprisingly, more and more seniors these days are obese, and nutritionists now find themselves issuing a double warning—eat enough to make sure you get your daily nutrients, but don't eat so much that you increase the risk of obesity-related disorders (like heart disease or diabetes).

Your Stilton may be less stinky. Most older people experience a significant deterioration in their sense of smell, which, you may remember from your wine-tasting classes, is a key component of flavor. (Flavor, technically, is a composite picture of what your taste buds taste, what your olfactory nerves smell, and other tactile factors like the chill of menthol or the irritation of a hot chili.) Without a sharp sense of smell, you might become a chronic browser, nibbling at different foods but perpetually unable to get the emotional satisfaction that you once did from any particular meal.

Corn off the cob. Old age doesn't necessarily mean a full set of dentures anymore. The percentage of people over 60 dealing with full-on tooth loss has gone down significantly, even in the past decade, to about a quarter of the population. If you do end up with dentures—particularly an ill-fitting set—toothsome textures that you once loved may prove annoying or even painful to eat. Fortunately, softer food is chic as can be, with chefs Cryovacking, braising, and slow roasting away to create tender and voluptuous food.

You'll start keeping a candy jar. The actual sense of taste—those five qualities (sweet, sour, bitter, acid, and umami) that you can perceive thanks to your mouth's taste buds—also can change with age, but usually less significantly than the sense of smell. You'll probably gravitate toward the taste that you respond to most; for a lot of people, it's sweetness, which might explain the omnipresence of Jell-O on nursing-home menus. (Although that might actually say more about the retrograde state of institutional food than it does about its consumers. For utterly depressing and typical sample menus, click here or here.)

You'll miss salt. More than half the population over 65 has hypertension, so your doctor is likely to tell you to cut back on salt (not to mention saturated fats and refined sugar). Heart-healthy-pamphlet writers insist that you'll eventually get used to, or perhaps even prefer, less salt. But don't be too surprised if you daydream about the flaky fleur de sel you once lavished on everything from salads to chocolate cake.

Slow cooking. In retirement, you'll finally have time to make the gourmet treats you never prepared when you were raising kids and working. But if you have arthritis or weakened vision, it could be harder to do prep work. Consider investing in an easy-to-read measuring cup or an extra-soft grip peeler. (Here's one source of easy-grip supplies.) Other shortcuts might come from the grocery store, not the kitchen. Jacques Pepin, the world-famous 72-year-old cooking instructor who, as a young apprentice, used to pluck his own chickens before roasting them, told me during a phone interview that he uses "the supermarket more as a prep cook. … You take a boneless and skinless breast of chicken at the supermarket in a nonstick pan, and you add some prewashed spinach and some sliced mushrooms, and within five minutes you have a dish, and that's cooking from scratch." His new book and TV series, More Fast Food My Way, is all about such little efficiencies.

Your style may change. If you've always eaten with curiosity and gusto, you will probably continue to do so. But Jacques Pepin told me that getting older has led him to a simpler path. "I look at young chefs, and [they] tend to add and add and add to make it supposedly more professional or more intricate or more esoteric or more complicated. And I suppose as you get older you take and take and take away from the plate. You tend to be left with the essentials."

Despite any adjustments that old age brings to your appetite, some things remain the same. If you have always been cautious about food, no doubt you will prefer a narrow range of meals as you get older; after all, age is a great distiller of personality. But once a foodie, always a foodie—even if you have to trade your salty soy sauce for a squeeze of lemon, your spare ribs for soup dumplings, or your chewy bistecca fiorentina for a more forgiving bollito misto.

Thanks to Dr. Beverly Cowart at the Monell Chemical Senses Center.

Since Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy first put on their tramp suits and pancake makeup back in the 1920s, Hollywood has extracted affectionate laughter from audiences according to the ever-reliable formula of the buddy movie. The key is to generate a comic spark from the friction of two dissimilar personalities: the slob and the obsessive-compulsive sharing the same apartment (Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in The Odd Couple), the gruff bounty hunter and the neurotic accountant sharing a pair of cuffs (Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run), Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson sharing a bathtub (Shanghai Noon), etc. The genre has proliferated many overlapping subcategories, which include the cop buddy movie, the on-the-lam buddy movie, and the coming-of-age buddy movie. But the most endearing variation of all, at least in its outlines, might be the old-buddy movie.

The old-buddy movie rests on a simple conjecture, one that can easily turn mushy: When you've outlived your spouse, or resent your failing body, or feel restless and marginalized in retirement, the comforts and solidarity of friendship are more important than ever—even when the friendship in question is a total pain in the ass. The geriatric wing of the buddy comedy has plenty of odd couples, epitomized by the actual Odd Couple, Lemmon and Matthau, who portrayed bickering, inseparable neighbors in the 1993 hit Grumpy Old Men. The old-buddy movie adds a second layer of incongruity by playing off pat cultural expectations of the elderly—specifically, all the things they supposedly don't do: break-dance (Don Ameche in Cocoon), sky-dive (Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman in The Bucket List), fornicate (various). The problem, though, is that refuting these assumptions for laughs can collapse into isn't-Pops-the-cutest mawkishness. Any whiff of condescension will give the humor a funny odor, which makes the old-buddy comedy a particularly tricky subgenre to pull off.

One way to succeed is to make sure your grumpy old men spend ample time and energy resisting the very premise of the movie they're in. The Sunshine Boys (1975) stars Matthau as Willy Clark, an unemployable ex-vaudeville star who's persuaded by his nephew/agent to reunite with his longtime comedy partner, Al Lewis (George Burns), for a TV special, though they haven't performed together—or spoken—in more than a decade. (Matthau was a quarter-century Burns' junior, but with his doughy, sad-Nixon features and gravel-road voice, he was practically born middle-aged.) The squabbling duo's inability to rehearse or perform a comedy routine becomes a running comedy routine unto itself, since the offstage Lewis and Clark settle instinctively into the punning, absurdist wordplay and perfectly calibrated rhythms of their mothballed stage act.

Any threat of sentimentality in their reunion is undercut by Clark's relentless surliness and Lewis' unflappable straight-man composure, and, refreshingly, neither character seems all that keenly interested in this proverbial One Last Chance at stardom. If they can spend an hour in the same room without a life-threatening incident, that's heartwarming triumph enough.

Like many old-buddy movies, The Sunshine Boys can be seen as a quasi-sequel, wherein Lewis and Clark revisit and fitfully revive their showbiz heyday. The beloved Cocoon (1985) is also a second-chance movie, in which a trio of retiree pals (Ameche, Hume Cronyn, and Wilford Brimley) find the fountain of youth in a swimming pool full of alien pods, rendering them happy, energetic, and randy in a way that only recidivist teenagers can be.

Less charmingly, in Tough Guys (1986), train robbers Kirk Douglas (hard-bodied into his 70s) and Burt Lancaster re-enter society after 30 years in prison and—after a fish-out-of-water interval spent puzzling over newfangled phenomena like yogurt shops and gay people—engineer an elaborate do-over of the crime that put them away in the first place. The film's neck veins bulge with the strain of reanimating the salad days of both its characters and stars; Douglas and Lancaster still had it, but the movie was secondhand goods. (The big in-joke comes when frustrated cop Charles Durning asks, "What is this, Gunfight at the OK Corral?"—a movie that Douglas and Lancaster starred in about the time that their characters went to jail.)

Lesser old-buddy films like Tough Guys enact a strange contradiction: By their very existence, they challenge any notion of senior citizens as cultural outsiders, yet their actual content too often reinforces the stereotype. A case in point is Grumpy Old Men, which is basically The Odd Couple retired to snowbound Minnesota: High-strung John Gustafson (Lemmon, doing Felix Ungar on Anafranil) spends his every waking hour in a snit of sniping and bitching with his neighbor Max Goldman (Matthau, his winter-weather ear flaps accentuating his basset-hound dolefulness). Despite the virility-stoking presence of a comely new arrival (Ann-Margret, who here fulfills the role of the pool in Cocoon), John and Max give the impression not of post-pubertal adult males but of tantrum-throwing, prank-pulling, petty-minded children, to the point that Gustafson's ancient and libidinous father (Burgess Meredith!) is called upon to break up one of their scuffles.

The great team of Lemmon and Matthau did their best to elevate their characters above regressive caricature, but the movie could only respond with a patronizing smile. No matter your age, it's hard to rise above a dress-up montage scored to Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy."

GOM inspired several more, increasingly feeble Lemmon-Matthau collaborations, including Grumpier Old Men, Out to Sea, and, inevitably, The Odd Couple II. (Tragically, no one ever thought to cast these legends in a live-action Statler and Waldorf.) It's also a forefather of The Bucket List (released last December), one of the most recent and most commercially successful old-buddy movies, in which a salt-of-the-earth mechanic (Freeman) and a rich son of a bitch (Nicholson) embark on a One Last Chance journey of self-discovery through the magic of blue-screen technology, unlimited liquid assets, and symptom-free terminal cancer. The movie's star wattage and holiday-season timing help to explain its box-office success, but it nonetheless marks a nadir for grizzled old couples, rife as it is with inspirational clichés and tear-jerking contrivances. (Three words: long-lost daughter.) Watching it gave me newfound insight into the helpless, spluttering infuriation of being Grandpa Simpson.

In fact, American moviegoers haven't been treated to a quality old-buddy comedy since the last time a certain hotheaded septuagenarian ran for president. Clint Eastwood's cheerfully implausible Space Cowboys (2000) wears its contrivances lightly, arranging to send a former Air Force flight team (Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner) into orbit to repair a malfunctioning satellite, one that Eastwood just happened to have designed back when the men were proto-NASA hotshots. Partly concerned with mending the broken friendship between stern codger Eastwood and merry misfit Jones, Space Cowboys invents a world where solidarity is everything, whether it's Eastwood lobbying hard to get his guys into orbit or Garner reinterpreting the role of "spotter" on Jones' behalf in the NASA weight room.

Like a lot of Eastwood's movies, this one's a little creaky and hokey, but every scene is bolstered by the actor-director's irritable, squinty integrity; in the interests of full disclosure, he even gives us a rear-view glimpse of the four wrinkly stars in the nude. A larky tribute to courage, loyalty, and sheer pig-headedness, Space Cowboys is a piece of crotchety dream-chasing that seems apt for revisitation in the autumn of candidate McCain.

Asked why so many architects lived long lives, Philip Johnson quipped, "Of course they live long—they have a chance to act out all their aggressions." Johnson must have had a lot of acting out left to do, for his well-publicized "retirement" at 85 turned out to be only the first of many, and he continued to design and build until his death 13 years later. I.M. Pei, more judicious in all things, was 72 when he announced his retirement from the firm he had founded 28 years before. Golf, fishing, mah-jongg? Hardly. "I want to spend whatever time I have left working," he said, and he has been doing just that—in France, Germany, Qatar, China. His most recent building, done in collaboration with his two sons' firm, Pei Partnership Architects, is the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Washington, D.C. At 91, Pei is the same age Frank Lloyd Wright was when he died. Wright didn't pretend to retire; he just kept drawing until the end. And what drawings! His last decade saw three great masterpieces: the Price Company Tower, the Beth Sholom Synagogue, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

What is it with architects that they don't—or can't—retire? In part, it is the nature of their profession. Architecture is a delicate balancing act between practicality and artistry, and it takes a long time to master all the necessary technical skills as well as to learn how to successfully manipulate the thousands of details that compose even a small building. Requisite skills for the successful practitioner include dealing with clients: individuals, committees, communities, boards. The architect, proposing an as-yet-unbuilt vision of the future, must be able to persuade, and it's easier to be persuasive if you have a proven track record.

For all these reasons, architectural wunderkinds are few and far between; architects have traditionally hit their stride in late middle age. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was 62 when he started designing the Lake Shore Drive apartments, which became the model for all subsequent steel-and-glass towers; Le Corbusier was 63 when he built the marvelous chapel at Ronchamp, setting the architectural world on its ear; Louis Kahn was 64 when the Salk Institute was built; and Frank Gehry was 68 when he produced the Bilbao Guggenheim. So once you finally get really good at it, why stop?

It's not so hard for an architect to keep going. Since building is a team endeavor, the old master is surrounded by scores of assistants. For any slowing down that occurs in later years, there are plenty of younger hands and minds to pick up the pace. The younger minds propose, but the master disposes, and the big decisions still benefit from years of practice and experience. From the client's point of view, since buildings represent large investments, it is safer, by far, to know that a seasoned practitioner is overseeing the process.

In old age, painters have the choice of retreating to their studios and picking the subject that interests them. Architects don't have that luxury; they depend on clients for their work. All architects have experienced periods when the clients stopped coming, for one reason or another—when there was no work in the office and staff had to be let go, oblivion beckoning. So when clients continue to knock at the door with large, interesting commissions, it's very hard to say no. After all, who knows for how long the knocking will continue? I met Gehry when he was 73. He said that he was turning down a lot of work and speculated that he probably would not do more than a handful of projects before retiring. That was six years—and many, many buildings—ago.

Everyone's always talking about how an aging population, with more retirees, is going to wreak havoc on Social Security and the federal budget. Here's my question: What impact will that have on the planet? After all, my grandparents don't seem to care much about global warming, their refrigerator is from the 1970s, and they use an awful lot of air conditioning at home. Give it to me straight: Are Grandma and Grandpa bad for the environment?

"Do it for the kids" has always been one of the most popular arguments in favor of environmentalism: Older people need to get their act together, or else it's the children who will suffer the environmental consequences. Indeed, in terms of what they buy and how they vote, younger Americans tend to be more eco-conscious than seniors, who are less likely than anyone else to believe that global warming is a man-made phenomenon. But here's the weird thing: In practice, it's the older folks who are better for the environment.

In an effort to improve models of global warming, a team of researchers led by Brian O'Neill of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated (PDF) what U.S. emissions would look like in two different cases: one in which the age structure of the population looked exactly the same as today's, and another where—as many demographers project—the percentage of Americans over 65 more than doubled.

Their conclusion: Grayer is greener, with the aging population expected to produce anywhere between 10 percent and 37 percent fewer emissions by the year 2100. At first glance, the Green Lantern assumed this must be because older Americans spend their money in a more environmentally friendly way. For one, they drive a good deal less, so they spend less money on gas and produce less air pollution. They are also less likely to buy new big-ticket items, like cars or large appliances. And they spend a huge percentage of their income on health care, which—dollar for dollar—doesn't produce that much pollution or require that much energy.

In fact, says O'Neill, the consumption mix for older people isn't significantly more carbon-efficient than the mix for younger folks. Older Americans spend a higher percentage of their incomes heating and cooling their homes—so much so that it just about cancels out whatever benefits they generate by driving less (PDF). (If you are elderly or have elderly parents, that makes it even more important to invest in insulation and other energy-saving fixes.) The elderly do spend a lot of their money on health care, but the rest of us put more resources into education, another clean way to spend.

The real reason older Americans are better for the environment is that they work less and have lower incomes. It's not so much that they spend their money in a better way—it's just that they don't spend as much in the first place. The general aging of the population will make America somewhat poorer—after all, economic growth will slow as a greater share of consumers become unable to work. A slowed economy in turn produces less pollution. All told, the aging of the population won't reduce U.S. emissions enough to halt climate change, but it might make our work a little bit easier.

What can younger folks learn from the elderly about becoming more environmentally friendly? Not much. Growing older means becoming greener only because it involves a lifestyle change that no young person wants to make—namely, becoming a good deal poorer. In that sense, the aging of America—and to an even greater extent, Western Europe and Japan—offers just about the least attractive plan there is for combating global warming. With a smaller percentage of the population working, the challenge is to find a way to keep growing in a grayer world, while making sure that growth is green, too. Modern environmentalism—and this column!—put great stake in the idea that small, individual choices, added together, can make a big difference. It turns out that who we are, demographically speaking, ends up mattering at least as much as what we do.

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.

If I'm reading the banana peels correctly, the prospects for organic agriculture have never been better. Indeed, the most recent batch of bananas I bought came adorned with a "certified organic" sticker that confirmed the virtue of my purchase. It explained, "When you purchase organic produce you are taking part in the HEALING of our land."

This makes intuitive sense. Conventional agribusiness, after all, is a chemically dependent, resource-intensive venture that contributes to global warming, aquatic "dead zones," and massive land degradation. Organic systems, by contrast, restore soil health, foster biodiversity, and recycle organic matter rather than lading the land with synthetic chemicals. Whereas conventional agriculture follows the law of supply and demand, organic agriculture follows what its founder, Sir Albert Howard, called "the law of return." Potential waste, according to this dictum, ends up enriching the soil.

The law of return, however, has a loophole. One issue frequently overlooked in the rush to embrace organic agriculture is the prevalence of excess arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, mercury, copper, and zinc in organic soil. Soil ecologists and environmentalists—and, to some extent, the concerned public—have known for more than a century that the synthetic pesticides of conventional farming leave heavy metals in the ground. But the fact that you'll find the same toxins in organic soil has been something of a dirty little secret.

The implications of this fact cannot be overlooked. The human body naturally contains trace amounts of heavy metals, but when they accumulate faster than the body can excrete them, several serious health problems can follow, including cardiovascular and neurological disorders as well as kidney and liver damage. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a division of the U.S. Public Health Service, cites fruit and grain consumption as the leading cause of lead exposure in the general population. Lead exposure has been proven to cause severe anemia and permanent brain damage. It's not yet clear whether organic (or conventional) soil contains enough of these metals to pose a genuine risk to human health. But continuing research on this topic weighs heavily on the future of what we've come to assume is a sustainable alternative to conventional agriculture.

Scientists have known since the 1920s that organic fertilizers used by farmers to supplement conventional systems—composted animal manure, rock phosphates, fish emulsions, guano, wood ashes, etc.—further contaminate topsoil with varying concentrations of heavy metals. Organic advocates, who rely exclusively on these fertilizers, remain well aware of the problem today, although they rarely publicize the point.

No one is saying that organic soil has higher heavy-metal counts than conventional soil as a rule—scientists have not conducted enough research to make such a determination. Still, some evidence indicates that organic soil can, in some cases, be more contaminated. George Kuepper, an agriculture specialist with the National Center for Appropriate Technology, observed in a 2003 report that composting manure actually concentrates the fertilizer's metal content, which could lead to greater levels of the contaminants in organic soil.

Recent studies have lent Kuepper's concern tentative support. For example, in 2007, researchers conducted an analysis of wheat grown on various farms in Belgium; based on the results, they estimate that consumers of organically grown wheat take in more than twice as much lead, slightly more cadmium, and nearly equivalent levels of mercury as consumers of wheat grown on conventional farms.

Beyond the comparative impact of organic vs. conventional systems on the soil's heavy-metal concentration, there's the question of how easily these trace elements enter crops. Although the research here is also relatively thin, what has been done suggests that the problem of plant uptake is equally serious in both organic and conventional systems. For example, 14 percent to 28 percent of New Zealand's cattle (destined to be organic beef) were found to have kidney cadmium levels exceeding limits set by the New Zealand Department of Health because of a diet of plants grown in contaminated soil. Similarly, a 2007 study of Greek produce found that organic agriculture does not necessarily reduce the cadmium and lead levels in crops. As it turned out, "certified" organic cereals, leafy greens, pulses, and alcoholic beverages had slightly less heavy-metal contamination than conventional products, but "uncertified" organic products had "far larger concentrations" than conventional ones.

These findings might be preliminary and inconsistent, but pressure is mounting on the organic community to take action. Under rules set by the USDA's National Organic Program, responsibility has been left to the individual farmer to manage plants and animals in a way that does not contaminate crops with heavy metals. The question of how to monitor that responsibility, however, is complicated by the fact that there are as yet no federal limits on heavy-metal concentrations applicable to all fertilizers.

Organic farmers thus work with broad suggestions rather than concrete federal regulations. They're routinely forewarned by organic watchdog groups such as the Organic Trade Association about dangerous levels of copper and arsenic in poultry manure. They're reminded of proper "nutrient management planning" and encouraged to experiment with the relationship between soil pH levels and rates of heavy-metal contamination. They're advised to test soil regularly for heavy metals and to adjust fertilizer combinations and relative nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium levels in the soil when metal concentrations rise. A handful of states—California, Oregon, Washington, and Texas among them—have established loose legal guidelines. But the fact remains: The decentralized sprawl of information about fertilizers and heavy metals fosters a far-flung approach to the problem.

The Organic Materials Review Institute, a nonprofit organization that provides certifiers with an independent review of products intended for organic use, is working to change this situation by framing a standard of fertilizer use. OMRI officials have evaluated models from Canada, Washington state, and the Association of American Plant Food Control Officials. Initially, the organization established regulations that, according to Patty Martin, director of Safe Food and Fertilizer, would have been like "driving a hazardous waste truck into organic agriculture." After her 2006 testimony, however, OMRI revised its recommendations to include a somewhat more stringent set of limits on heavy metals in fertilizers.

No matter how they end up, OMRI's guidelines may ultimately come to naught. Scientists are currently documenting another cause of heavy-metal pollution in global agriculture. "Atmospheric deposition"—the transfer of pollutants from the air to the earth—has nothing to do with organic practices per se but is, rather, the result of industrial processes beyond the farmer's control. Farmers already know that fertilizers are not the sole source of heavy-metal contamination. They've inherited a landscape once pummeled with arsenic and lead insecticides. Heavy metals can leach from wooden fences treated with copper chromium arsenate and from lead paint on houses. But the idea that these contaminants can come directly from the air takes all this to a more bewildering level.

Mercury from tooth fillings incinerated with humans corpses and magnesium dust blown east from the Gobi Desert can now join heavy-metal residues wafting from smelting plants and arsenic from coal mines to contaminate soil. Needless to say, airborne contaminants don't land on conventional farms alone. As atmospheric deposition grows more widespread, the difference between organic and nonorganic farming will become ever smaller.

Fortunately, complete despair may still be avoided. Consider this: Plant biologists are working to genetically modify a fern plant that, when ashed and dusted on soil, is capable of sucking up zinc. The dust can then be gathered so the recovered zinc may be recycled and put to better use. Of course, in order for bioremedial technologies such as this to move forward, the dichotomy between organic and conventional agriculture will have to be collapsed, a sober view of organic agriculture will have to be adopted, and we'll have to read the banana leaves with greater skepticism.

On Sept. 4, Earl Devaney, inspector general for the Department of Interior, submitted three related reports (PDFs here, here, and here) to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne detailing investigations of "more than a dozen current and former Minerals Management Service employees." Devaney's cover memorandum (see below and the following three pages) noted that "alcohol abuse seems to have been a problem" when Denver-based federal employees tasked with collecting royalties on oil pumped from federal land "socialized with industry." The memo describes a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" in which the "royalty in kind" staff—the government collects its royalties not in cash but in an allotment of oil or gas—accepted gifts with "prodigious frequency" from the companies they oversaw. The RIK staff reported to Washington-based Associate Director Lucy Q. Denett (misspelled "Dennet" in the report), whom Devaney criticized for "ethical failure" and for allowing a "pervasive culture of exclusivity." According to the report, Denett, who retired earlier this year, herself "manipulated the contracting process" to award "lucrative MMS contracts" to her former assistant.

Secretary Kempthorne said he was "outraged by the immoral behavior, illegal activities, and appalling misconduct" of his employees.

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This past February Daniel Mudd, the recently ousted president of the Federal National Mortgage Association ("Fannie Mae"), gave a speech to the National Association of Homebuilders in which he laid out plans to "weather the housing market crisis" (see below and the following three pages). Mudd told homebuilders that Fannie Mae's "prudent steps" to keep the mortgage market "stable, liquid and affordable" included "cutting our dividend" to investors (see Page 3). Mudd didn't mention his own sacrifices (according to the Washington Post, one month earlier the board had stopped paying his $100,000-per-year country club dues), but he predicted that the increase in defaults and foreclosures would take "at least another tough year to get through" (see Page 4).

Mudd explained that although the goal was "avoiding foreclosure at all costs," once all such efforts were exhausted, "our real estate team comes in and prepares to put the house on the market" (see Page 2). This mitigation effort, Mudd said, helped resell more than half the foreclosed properties that "came into our inventory" in 2007. The remainder "sit on the market driving down local home prices and property values" (see Page 3).

In his talk, Mudd stressed the importance of giving defaulting mortgage holders who face foreclosure "an exit with dignity" (below). On Sept. 7, the federal conservator who took over Fannie Mae foreclosed on Mudd. Mudd has hired politically powerful Washington attorney Bob Barnett to negotiate his severance, which is expected to be a very dignified $9 million.

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The investigations into the Department of Interior's cozy relationship with the oil and gas industry have spotlighted the freewheeling lifestyle of those who worked in the booming energy sector of the early 2000s.

In three reports that reached the press on Wednesday, department Inspector General Earl E. Devaney detailed all kinds of civil service malfeasance, including inappropriate consulting arrangements, drug use and sex between superior and subordinate, and flings and other forms of close contact with oil industry representatives.

The officials worked for the Department of Interior's Royalty-in-Kind program, in which the federal government receives oil and gas (rather than cash payments) in exchange for oil and gas leases on government land; the product is then put into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or resold on the market. Big Oil apparently saved at least $4.4 million through the RIK program, thanks to a multiyear practice of offering gifts, free meals, and junkets to government employees, luring staff into what one official called the "oil and gas industry marketing culture."

We pick out the juicy bits from the inspector general's report here:

Sex

"One e-mail from Shell Pipeline Company representative to [a RIK program employee], regarding attending 'tailgating festivities' at a Houston Texans game, stated, 'You're invited … have you and the girls meet at my place at 6 a.m. for bubble baths and final prep. Just kidding ... ' " (Page 9).

"[The e-mail] was laden was sexual innuendo such as, 'We've always provided the patrons with beer on demand, but the ever-depleting supplies have dwindled beer storage to dangerously low volumes on occasion. ... Although it's a given that the horsemen will indeed 'bring the meat to the table' " (Page 9).

"[A RIK employee] also admitted to having a 'one-night stand' with a Shell employee. She said she did not subsequently recuse herself from work involving Shell because she only had a 'one-night stand' with its employee and did not think this would affect RIK business" (Page 14).

"Relationship-Building"

"We determined Chevron, Shell, Gary Williams Energy Corporation, and Hess Corporation provided gifts to RIK (Royalty-in-Kind) employees. Each of the four companies maintained a business relationship with RIK and is therefore considered a 'prohibited source' " (Page 5 of "Investigation Report of MMS [Minerals Management Service] Oil Marketing Group—Lakewood").

"[Former Shell Trading Company trader Alan] Raymond said he viewed RIK as 'just another oil exploration company,' and, therefore, providing RIK employees with gifts and entertainment was 'relationship building.' He claimed that his superiors at Shell Trading Company had approved of providing gifts and entertainment to RIK employees" (Page 15).

"Industry expense reports and other documentation indicate that [a RIK program employee] accepted gifts valued at approximately $2,887 from Chevron, Shell, and GWEC on at least 74 occasions between 2002 and 2006" (Page 10).

Field Trips

"One RIK employee opined that because RIK regularly paid a major producer to transport oil, it was perfectly appropriate for him to attend a 'treasure hunt' in the desert with all expenses paid by the producer" (Page 9).

"[A Shell manager] remembered that [a RIK program employee] stayed overnight in the Shell-owned lodge, 'Dutchman Haus,' because she had too much to drink" (Page 15).

"Chevron representatives' expense reports … entries include meals and drinks, an appreciation dinner, and a paintball outing" (Page 10).

Bob Woodward's first three books on George W. Bush were national best-sellers, and it's all but certain that his newly released fourth will be the talk of your next cocktail party. The War Within details the commander in chief's backseat approach to the Iraq war. It reveals a sharp disagreement between Bush and Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq before Gen. David Petraeus, over how to assess combat progress and suggests that many key decisions regarding the troop surge were made not by Bush but by National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley. Woodward also describes three factors other than the surge that have led to a drop in violence. To help you keep up with political gossip, Slate has put together a reading guide that will fast-forward you straight to the juiciest bits.

The Real Decider

Although Bush famously described himself as "the decider," Woodward makes the case that, leading up to the surge, the real decider was National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley.

Page 8: Asked about his relationship with the president, Hadley told Woodward: "If I feel it, he feels it. If he feels it, I feel it." When Woodward read this bold statement to Bush in Hadley's presence, Bush agreed. "I'm watching him all the time," added Hadley. "I'm watching him watch me all the time," Bush responded. "Hadley didn't need permission to walk into the Oval Office. He could stop by or call anytime."

Page 102: By the summer of 2006, Bush was worried that the administration's strategy in Iraq wasn't working. He told Woodward during an interview that "the fix-it was Stephen J. Hadley. … Look, here's the thing. Hadley knows me well enough that we don't need a major seminar to figure out that we got to do something different. So he starts a very thorough process and keeps me posted."

Page 177: In October of 2006, Hadley proposed starting "an informal internal review" with a small group of NSC staff to get the war back on track. Bush gave him carte blanche. "Do it," the president said. Later, Bush tells Woodward: "Let's just cut to the chase here. Hadley drove a lot of this. Why? Because I trust he and his team a lot."

Pages 320-321: Bush told Woodward he should write a book about Hadley: "[I]t ought to be 'The Life and Times of Stephen J. Hadley, Great American Patriot.' … When you've got a complex problem to describe on major national security issues, unleash Hadley. That ought to be the book: 'Unleash Hadley.' "

Page 27: Bush trusted Hadley in part because the feeling was mutual. "The guy's a real visionary," Hadley told Woodward. "He defies the conventional wisdom by his boldness. He's unapologetic. He sits there and reaffirms it, and clearly relishes it. And, you know, it traumatizes people. And they think, 'What's he doing … this cowboy?' … [But] those of us who are here [in the White House] believe in him. Believe in him and believe he has greatness in him."

Bush and Gen. Casey

Although Bush always backed Gen. George Casey in public, Woodward argues that each man mistrusted the other.

Page 4: Casey once told a colleague in private that Bush reflected the "radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, 'Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you'll succeed.' "

Page 6: Bush infuriated Casey by suggesting he wasn't doing enough militarily. "George, we're not playing for a tie," Bush once told Casey. "I want to make sure we all understand this, don't we?" Casey later summarized Bush's approach as: "If you're not out there hooking and jabbing with American forces every day, you're not fighting the right fight."

Page 13: In interviews with Woodward, Bush lent credence to Casey's concerns: "What frustrated me is that from my perspective, it looked like we were taking casualties without fighting back because our commanders are loath to talk about our battlefield victories." He'd ask about kills and captures to "find out whether or not we're fighting back. Because the perception is that our guys are dying and [the insurgents are] not. Because we don't put out our numbers. We don't have a tally. … [I]f I'm sitting here watching the casualties come in, I'd at least like to know whether or not our soldiers are fighting."

Spying on Maliki

Page 382: U.S. intelligence agencies didn't trust Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, so they spied on him. "We know everything he says," one source told Woodward. A second source explained that Maliki suspected this surveillance and took countermeasures. Woodward writes: "In some specific cases … human sources had given senior U.S. officials a heads-up on positions, plans, maneuvers and secret actions of the prime minister, members of his staff and others in the Iraqi government."

Bush's Managerial Style

Page 5: Casey and Gen. John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, would watch Bush's body language to figure out what he was thinking. "What do you think?" Casey would ask. "Did we get through today?" "Oh, no, I don't think so. … I think the body language was bad on that one," Abizaid would reply.

Page 7: Bush kept his generals on their toes. Shortly after Katrina, Bush told Casey and his staff via video conference, "Guys, you're doing a heck of a job." He added, "But then, I said the same thing to Brownie." Then the screen went blank.

Page 407: Bush would often become impatient and bully his colleagues. Once, when Condoleezza Rice raised a State Department budget issue at a meeting, Bush snapped: "Now's not the time and place for you to be advocating the interests of your building. I told you, I don't want to hear about that." And he'd often push his advisers to cut short their presentations: "Speed it up. This isn't my first rodeo."

Page 319: Bush described himself as "a contemplative person" but "not a brooder." He also bragged that he made up his mind about the troop surge during the busy holiday meet-and-greet season. "This was a very, for me, a very all-consuming decision. Now, this is a period of time [the winter of 2006] where I've got, I don't know how many, holiday receptions. I mean, it'd be interesting for you to know. We probably shook hands with 9,000 people when they came through."

Why Violence Is Down

Pages 380-381: Woodward argues that "at least three other factors were as, or even more, important than the surge" in quelling sectarian violence. First, U.S. intelligence agencies launched a series of operations enabling them to "locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al Qaeda." Derek Harvey, an intelligence expert, said that the operations were so effective they gave him "orgasms," but Woodward can't go into detail because these missions are still top-secret. Second, the U.S. military started working with tribal leaders to build local security forces and set up armed neighborhood watch groups to patrol their communities. Third, as is well-known, Muqtada Sadr told his Mahdi Army to suspend operations.

No Love for the Maverick

Page 318: John McCain was pressing for more troops as far back as 2003, but in interviews with Woodward, Bush refused to give the senator credit for his foresight. Woodward asked, "Do you wish you'd listened to him earlier?" Bush replied: "The question really is, should you have put more troops in earlier? Whether it's listening to McCain or listening to anybody else. And history is just going to have to judge."

Page 344: After visiting Iraq in early April 2007, McCain said at a press conference that "[t]hings are getting better in Iraq, and I am pleased with the progress that has been made." Behind closed doors, however, he made clear that he wasn't optimistic. He told Condoleezza Rice, "We may be about to lose the second war in my lifetime."

Someone—lots of people, actually—have been editing Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry, but chances are, none of them is John McCain. Over the past weeks and months, some members of the mainstream media and many bloggers have grown obsessed with a single question: Does John McCain truly not know how to operate a computer? While entertaining (see "McCain makes historic first trip to Internet"), it's also a pretty silly discussion. The 1930 version of this game might have been, "Roosevelt can't drive a combine harvester—can we trust his agricultural policies?" What, exactly, does knowing how to Twitter illuminate?

Behind this superficial buzzing lies something deeper, however—an interesting split between McCain and Barack Obama on what might broadly be called their media policies. What are their positions on how Americans communicate and get information—and what role, if any, does government play in overseeing that process?

Over the course of history, media and communications policies have sometimes proven the very mark of a government: Just ask Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis, in case you've forgotten, put media "reform"—or, rather, state propaganda—at the top of their agenda, fashioning German radio into the "towering herald of National Socialism." In the United States, communications policies can shape a presidential legacy. Herbert Hoover oversaw the creation of American radio and NBC, John F. Kennedy (not Al Gore) began funding the original Internet, Lyndon Johnson begat PBS and NPR, and Richard Nixon oversaw the deregulation that led to cable television. The future of the Internet and the way Americans communicate will be shaped profoundly by the 2008 election. It will be a legacy for the victor.

Both campaigns have "tech plans" that include plenty of feel-good generalities. But behind them lie fundamental differences between the candidates and a rift between their main advisers. The essential difference lies in the view each candidate takes toward private power over the public media. McCain and his advisers put their faith in the private sector's ability to provide a full and healthy information environment, and regard most government intervention as counterproductive. Camp Obama, meanwhile, believes in the need for serious oversight over what it perceives as real potential for abuse. This philosophical divide will translate into real differences over the next four years.

The first division appears over the question of "media consolidation" or "big media." By "the media" here, I mean all the firms that create and handle information (the New York Times, Google, and that blogger next door) and those who move it around (AT&T and Comcast). Here's the thorny question: Is it a problem if a tiny handful of firms—say, News Corp., Comcast, and others—own much of the media world? It is almost certain that McCain and Obama administrations would differ on the answer.

McCain's principal adviser on such matters is Michael Powell, a formidable thinker whose ideas, influenced strongly by the Chicago antitrust school and Robert Bork, have held great currency during the Bush years, especially when he was chair of the FCC. Powell and McCain believe it's better to approach the media industries in basically the same way as any other industry, with the implication that media consolidation is a natural process best left alone. President Bush doesn't care if, say, Miller Brewing wants to buy out Pabst Blue Ribbon—so why should he care if Fox (News Corp.) wants to buy NBC? Other than in cases of blatant price-fixing, grossly anti-competitive conduct, or exposed female nipples, this media policy holds that government generally ought to let the industry do as it likes.

The Obama camp starts from the premise that the media and information industries are special—that like the transportation, energy, or financial industries, they are deeply entwined with the public interest. That means they warrant a level of scrutiny beyond that accorded the market for low-alcohol beer. Why? Control over media and communications, the argument goes, translates too readily into political power and influence over speech. If a few companies have the power to control who and what gets heard, they can suppress or amplify news and wield a private control over democracy of the kind that terrified Thomas Jefferson. The public might also want a little more from their media than what the private sector delivers without oversight. Reasoned debate or shows like Sesame Street don't always generate the ad revenues of, say, Dancing With the Stars.

It's not fair to say that McCain's camp ignores these facts altogether. Rather, it believes that trying to prevent media consolidation and attempts to favor "good" content will tend to backfire. Consider last year's takeover of the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch as a test case. Camp Obama might have tried to help the Bancroft family fend off Rupert Murdoch, while Camp McCain would be inclined to trust the market.

That's the "big media" debate, but in a sense, the whole PBS vs. Fox thing is itself growing obsolete as fewer people watch either. Instead, today's media policy is rapidly morphing into a debate over the future of the Internet—and here again the candidates offer divergent ideas of what that future should be.

Camp Obama thinks of the Internet as an incredibly successful public research project that was thrown open to the American public and entrepreneurs to dramatic effect. The open design of the network, in this view, is like a magic crystal placed at the center of the network by government scientists. As such, it is a resource that warrants special protection. The Internet has succeeded, says the Obama Web site, "because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way."

Translated into the lingo of our day, this means Obama's camp is "pro-net neutrality." In the interests of disclosure, so am I—and in 2007, when the Obama campaign ran its proposed net-neutrality language by me, I approved of it. Being pro-net neutrality means that Obama and his advisers believe basic anti-discrimination rules (a modern version of the "common carriage" rules that make phone companies and innkeepers serve all comers) will preserve the open nature of the Internet—and keep it safe for unapproved speech and surprising innovations like Wikipedia and YouTube.

Camp McCain starts from a different ideological place: one that takes the Internet as, essentially, a very cool "product." As a product, the Net is less a public resource, and more something provided by the private sector in whatever form it considers best. In this sense, Camp McCain sees the Internet as more like cable television on steroids than some imaginary commons of the ether. What channels should be on cable is mostly a question for Time-Warner and Comcast—so why shouldn't Internet providers make the same kinds of decisions?

That's the view McCain pushed in 2005, when he co-sponsored a bill that allowed Internet blocking "on notice." If McCain's bill had become law, a cable or phone company could in theory block, say, the video site Hulu.com by providing notice in the "service plan." Interestingly, in that bill at least, McCain put himself at odds with more moderate Republicans, like Kevin Martin, present chairman of the FCC, who recently punished Comcast for just such consumer blocking. McCain (though he wavers in interviews) has put himself firmly in the anti-net-neutrality camp. According to his Web site, McCain might forbid some blocking, but in general, "John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like 'net-neutrality.' "

So, which candidate is on the side of the market? Both McCain and Obama would claim that their views on the Internet and net neutrality are "pro-market." McCain calls it "prescriptive regulation" to dictate to cable or phone companies in what form they must provide the Internet. Conversely, Obama's camp says that a neutral Internet, like other public utilities, is the base line over which the free market operates.

That latter approach is better known as the "infrastructure" view of the Internet—the idea that the Internet is itself a necessity upon which the economy is built. More generally, it is the view that communications, along with energy, money, and transportation, are industries inevitability affected with a public interest, because the whole economy depends on them. Obama would probably hope to leave as a legacy, if not a chicken in every pot, a fiber-optic cable in every home.

Camp McCain is far more suspicious of such thinking and fundamentally does not see the Internet as essential infrastructure in the same way. Instead, Camp McCain dreams of a competitive market in Internet services, and so if Obama sees the Internet as a road, McCain takes it as a car: something that consumers will buy if they want it. In fact, in 2001, Michael Powell compared the Internet to a luxury car: "I think there is a Mercedes divide. I would like to have one, but I can't afford one." Any too-ambitious government project to put a fiber cable in people's homes, thinks Camp McCain, is likely doomed to failure.

Ultimately, most of the difference in Obama's and McCain's media policies boils down to questions about whether the media is special and a dispute over how much to trust the private sector. Camp McCain would tend to leave the private sector alone, with faith that it will deliver to most Americans what they want and deserve. The Obama camp would probably administer a more frequent kick in the pants, in the belief that good behavior just isn't always natural.

Tim Wu is a supporter of Barack Obama, but the views expressed here at not necessarily those of the Obama campaign.

Perhaps you've heard about the guy who is wrecking the American health care system. He is uninsured, has no major medical problems, and loves the emergency room. He is said to stroll in about once a month to various E.R.s around town for reasons as diverse as a simple cold or an STD check. He usually asks a doctor to excuse him from work and complains if he doesn't get a prescription for narcotic pain medication. The cost of his medical care is unnecessarily high because for his complaints, the E.R. is more expensive than a doctor's office would be. But our legendary visitor doesn't have a primary-care doctor: Why should he, since everything he needs is at the local E.R.?

If you believe the conventional wisdom, the E.R. abusers of our nation are especially responsible for many problems in health care. They fill up E.R. waiting rooms and because they can't (or won't) pay their medical bills, the insured patients who prudently wait for weekday appointments to see their doctors end up bearing the costs of the abusers' in the form of higher insurance premiums. The oft-repeated claim is that if we can just find a way to get the abusers out of the E.R. waiting rooms, we'd eliminate many of the high costs associated with health care in the United States.

The problem is that this story of the healthy, cavalier, uninsured E.R. abuser is largely a myth. E.R. use by the uninsured is not wrecking health care. In fact, the uninsured don't even use the E.R. any more often than those with insurance do. And now, a new study shows that the increased use of the E.R. over the past decade (119 million U.S. visits in 2006, to be precise, compared with 67 million in 1996) is actually driven by more visits from insured, middle-class patients who usually get their care from a doctor's office. So, the real question is: Why is everybody, insured and uninsured, coming to the E.R. in droves? The answer is about economics. The ways in which health information is shared and incentives aligned, for both patients and doctors, are driving the uninsured and insured alike to line up in the E.R. for medical care.

Asymmetric information is one of the reasons for excess E.R. use—information that doctors have but patients don't. The truth is, many people don't have a good way to judge whether a headache or fever is a true medical emergency. Heralded medical stories may contribute: Think about the coverage about Tim Russert's sudden death from a heart attack right after receiving a clean bill of health from his cardiologist. Now say you're the one feeling lightheaded: How do you know you're not going to just drop dead? All the health information on the Internet can serve only to feed the flames of misunderstanding and worry: Google any symptom, and you find a comprehensive list of the deadly diseases that you may have but probably don't. It's quite nerve-racking, and it drives people who may not need to be there to the E.R.

The way that care in outpatient clinics is organized and reimbursed also sends people to the E.R. when what they really need is to see or talk to their primary-care doctors. Here the problem is that primary-care providers have little reason to tell someone not to seek E.R. care, especially if the complaint is potentially serious and may take a little bit of effort to sort out. Assume a patient calls his doctor about a new symptom. Ideally, after listening on the phone and deciding that it's probably nothing serious, the doctor arranges an office visit for the next day, offers reassurance, and averts an unnecessary late-night E.R. visit. But doctors don't get reimbursed for that call. And what if they tell a patient to wait and something bad happens? Then malpractice lawyers have a field day.

Either way, this scenario assumes that a patient can get through to his doctor. Many come to the E.R. because it's always open. We thank the many doctors who do talk to their patients (even though they don't get paid) and schedule the urgent appointments that keep their patients out of our E.R.s. But they may be more the exception than the rule. The old adage "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" has been replaced by an office secretary or voice-mail message that says, "Hang up and call 911 or go to the nearest E.R."

What about those long E.R. waits when patients get there—aren't they a disincentive for going unless you're sure you're having a real emergency? Yes, E.R. crowding has been shown to lower patient care and satisfaction. And yet, patients may still rationally decide that the E.R. is more efficient than waiting for a doctor's appointment, waiting more for outpatient lab and radiology tests, and then waiting again for another appointment to review and discuss the results. In 2005, the EMPATH study, a national survey of emergency-department patients, sought to answer why patients choose the E.R. rather than other sources of care. The authors found that nearly all such patients believed they had a real emergency. They also cited an appreciation for quality and convenience. Over the past 30 years, E.R.s have insisted on the availability of rapid test results and highly trained personnel. The EMPATH study suggests that patients with nonemergency cases may also now seek the high-tech, high-quality E.R. care just because it's there. This affects how doctors use the system, too: sending patients to the E.R. when they have a new symptom, need a CT scan, or should see a specialist. E.R.s have become one-stop shops, assuming that you're willing to lie on a foam stretcher in a hallway for eight hours.

Low co-pays push patients in the same direction. The RAND Health Insurance Experiment in the 1970s showed that patients use more health care (even if it doesn't make them healthier) when they don't bear much of the cost directly. In the E.R., a single $100 co-pay may feel like a relative bargain compared with the alternative: fees for multiple trips to the doctor and testing centers, hours on the phone arranging the whole process, and days of missed work.

If you are uninsured, it's even more rational to get your care in the E.R. Federal law requires a screening exam and treatment for any patient who shows up, regardless of whether they can pay. And hospitals, after a string of negative press reports, are less likely than ever to aggressively pursue patients for delinquent medical bills. In contrast to ERs, primary-care clinics routinely fail to provide urgent appointments for patients who are uninsured, even if they have a serious condition or are willing to pay cash for their visit.

The problem, of course, is that societal health costs end up higher because of E.R. overuse. This is because many conditions can be prevented through health maintenance programs, like managing blood pressure or cholesterol, which E.R. doctors don't do. Instead of the relatively small costs of seeing the doctor and taking a generic blood pressure pill, we foot the bill for expensive, high-tech services when the uninsured with no preventive care develop strokes and heart attacks.

Ultimately, it doesn't take a genius to outline a cure for E.R. overuse. We could start by changing the incentives to line up with rapid access to urgent primary and specialist care. This could be achieved by developing reportable standards for acceptable waiting times for appointments. Next time you call the dermatologist and they say, "We'll see you next summer," you could cry foul. We also should restructure the payment system for primary-care doctors so they won't go belly up if their schedules aren't 100 percent booked, given how little they're paid per patient. They should get paid for those after-hours calls. Then there are fixes on the E.R. side: Some emergency rooms have considered taking steps to try to change the law on medical screening exams and triage, so that some E.R. patients could legally be sent away without seeing a doctor as long as they could get to see a primary-care doctor within 24 hours. Another promising idea is to send patients with nonemergency conditions directly to affiliated primary-care clinics without a complete E.R. work-up. But this would only work if clinics made room for E.R. patients, who may or may not have insurance.

For now, if you're stuck in the E.R. with a real emergency (like chest pain that you think might be a heart attack) and you sit down next to a guy with a clearly minor problem (like a sprained pinky), just remember that he may be making as rational a choice as you are. The problem is a lot bigger than his aching pinky and the pain in your chest.

"Decoupling," a promising economic idea imported from abroad, lasted a little longer than Coupling, an exciting entertainment imported from abroad. Coupling is a British sitcom that NBC adapted with much fanfare and cancelled after four episodes. "Decoupling" is the notion that the rest of the global economy could power ahead even as its biggest single motor, the United States, stalled. Decoupling was trumpeted by many of the international grandees at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last January and gained currency in certain circles (including the one surrounding my desk). But now it, too, seems to have been cancelled.

According to the original decoupling theory, globalization is moving into its next phase. The United States, which accounts for about 30 percent of the global economy, still matters, but global trade isn't simply manufacturing goods in China and sending them to the United States. With the emergence of giants like Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC), global economic growth would rise as these countries increasingly traded with each other and as they grew vast domestic markets populated by middle-class consumers. So if the United States lagged, the BRIC houses would surely slow down, but they'd still clip along at an enviable rate—say, 7 percent or 8 percent GDP growth for India, instead of 9 or 10 percent. Decoupling had strong political overtones, too. With the erstwhile hegemony struggling with self-inflicted economic (subprime) and geopolitical (Iraq, Dick Cheney) wounds, the rest of the world was busy getting on with its affairs. In a decoupled world, the United States would no longer determine the fate of the globe.

Decoupling worked well for a few minutes. In the first half of 2008, as U.S. financial institutions teetered and data on retail sales, employment, and growth disappointed, the rest of the world seemed to be humming along. But in recent weeks, there's been a shift. The data flow from the United States has remained largely negative. But the international news suggests we Americans are no longer in the soup alone.

The Eurozone and the United Kingdom now appear to be in recession—or in something very close to it. Eurostat last week reported that the economy of the 15-nation Eurozone shrank modestly in the second quarter while the EU-27 zone, which includes the United Kingdom and faster-growing Eastern European countries, eked out an extremely slim gain. The economies of both Germany and Japan contracted in the second quarter. In September, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development updated its 2008 growth projections. And, voilà, the United States was transformed from the weakling of the G-7 (the OECD's June projections had the United States growing more slowly than the other big economies) to the strongman.

In the second quarter, the G-7 economies were hampered in large part by skyrocketing prices for commodities like metals, oil, and coal. But recent data shows that even geologically blessed nations are slamming on the brakes, too. Australia's commodity-based economy, which is tightly integrated with Asia, has been growing for 17 straight years. But in the second quarter, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics recently reported, Australia grew only 0.3 percent.

Russia is being hit by a double whammy—falling prices for its biggest exports (oil, natural gas, metals) and a negative reaction to its invasion of Georgia. Russia's stock market has fallen 40 percent since May. And as the Financial Times reported this week, a Russian credit crunch is taking hold.

Even China is showing signs of faltering. The most worrisome indications aren't exports. (With the G-7 slumping, they'd be expected to fall.) Rather, China's domestic market is lagging. As the Wall Street Journal reported, August vehicle sales "fell 6.3 percent from a year earlier to 629,000 units, the first decline since February 2005." Yes, sales for the first two-thirds of 2008 are up nearly 14 percent from 2007, but that represents a sharp deceleration from 2007, when sales rose nearly 22 percent. The rate of China's growth of steel production fell in the first half of this year. And the Financial Times reported last week that "growth in Chinese steel consumption is expected to slow markedly in the second half of this year amid weakening demand from the construction, household appliance, and automobile industries."

For the first two quarters of this year, big multinational companies such as Pepsi and Caterprillar were experiencing domestic weakness and international growth. Federal Express, the delivery giant, is a pretty good barometer of how well the global trade machine is working. In its report for the quarter that ended on Feb. 28, 2008, FedEx sang from the decoupling hymnal. It complained of a weak U.S. economy but was cheered by "growth at FedEx Ground, FedEx International Priority and an increase in international domestic express shipments resulting primarily from recent international acquisitions." But now? Not so much. Yesterday, it gave an update for the quarter that ended on August 31. The takeaway: "While sustained declines in fuel prices could improve our full-year outlook, the slowing economic growth trends in the U.S. are now extending to other areas of the global economy."

On Sunday, the Treasury Department announced that it would effectively take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the critically wounded government-sponsored mortgage behemoths. (This landing page at the Treasury Department has the details.)

Generally speaking, the federal government has been content merely to watch the failures stemming from the real-estate/housing-credit bubble. If individuals default on their mortgages and get foreclosed on, that's their proper comeuppance. If subprime lenders go out of business, that's capitalism's creative destruction. If banks start to fail, as they're now doing at a rate of one per week, no big deal.

But Washington reacted with alacrity when a second-tier investment bank, Bear Stearns, threatened to take the plunge. And the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a rare example of Washington regulators being slightly ahead of the curve. Of course, Fannie and Freddie are bigger and more significant than any of the financial firms that have failed thus far. But the reason for the fevered weekend rescue activity has less to do with the companies' size than with their scope.

When U.S.-based banks fail, the outcomes are pretty unpleasant. Still, there's a tried-and-true mechanism in place to deal with them: the FDIC. The damage—closed branches; job losses; angry shareholders, lenders, and depositors—is real, but it is generally contained to the geographical areas in which the bank operates. But with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and to a lesser degree with Bear Stearns, it's more like an airborne virus than a localized explosion. They had the capacity to inflict huge damage around the globe and to cripple the international financial system. And for that reason, they couldn't be allowed to go down. In the case of Bear Stearns, the potential victims were counterparties to trades all around the world. In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the potential victims were central banks and foreign institutions that have bought their debt by the boatload. It's no accident that the takeover was announced in the middle of the day on Sunday. (Barry Ritholtz chronicles a slew of other recent Sunday credit-related announcements.) It was timed to get out before the Asian markets opened for trading on Monday.

For years, as scolds warned of the dangers of a low U.S. savings rate and a massive trade deficit, optimists pointed out the bright side. Chinese central banks and Persian Gulf petrogovernments take the dollars we send them for oil and manufactured goods and spend them on dollar-denominated assets such as Treasury bonds, thus financing our consumption and keeping interest rates low. For foreigners, Treasury bonds have long been the safest best. But as the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates a few years ago, Treasuries became less attractive. And the foreigners began to gobble up the type of debt issued by "government-sponsored enterprises" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. With their implicit guarantee, the GSEs were deemed to be just as safe as U.S. government bonds but paid a slightly higher interest rate. The Federal Reserve quarterly flow of funds accounts tells the story. As chart L107 shows, in 2003, non-U.S. investors held $654.8 billion of agency or government-sponsored enterprise debt. That was divided among official investors like central banks ($262.9 billion) and private investors ($391.8 billion). That year, official foreign authorities thus held about 8 percent of the total agency/GSE debt. With every passing year, the amount of debt held by foreigners—and especially by official foreign investors—rose dramatically. In the first quarter of 2008, foreigners held $1.54 trillion in such debt. But now, official authorities hold most of that total ($985 billion). In five years, then, official authorities more than tripled their holdings. And as of the first quarter of 2008, they held 21.4 percent of the total.

When foreigners buy bonds denominated in dollars, they assume three related risks: currency risk (if the dollar weakens, then dollar-denominated assets fall in value); interest-rate risk (if interest rates rise, the value of fixed-income investments falls); and repayment risks (the value of bonds can fall if doubts arise over whether the debt will be paid back). The foreign investors that loaded up on Fannie and Freddie debt assumed the first two risks but didn't bargain for the third. And as doubts about the viability of Fannie and Freddie grew, foreign central banks suddenly found themselves massively exposed. With the agencies needing to sell billions of dollars of debt on a weekly basis, and with the U.S. institutions lacking capital, proper deference had to be paid to the foreigners. The U.S. government had to protect their GSE investments. Paulson & Co. face an extra burden because foreign investors have been so badly burned by the U.S. financial sector. When sovereign wealth funds began buying chunks of Wall Street firms after they had imploded, Paulson repeatedly trumpeted those purchases as international votes of confidence. But those investments have been disastrous for the foreign purchases, as Asian and Persian Gulf authorities have lost billons on the Blackstone Group, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and others investments.

The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be sold and marketed as an effort to shore up the U.S. housing market. Maybe so. But it is mostly meant to shore up our damaged international financial standing, preserving leadership and making sure the U.S. Treasury Secretary doesn't get tarred and feathered at the next G-8 meeting.

As Jasira, the barely pubescent protagonist of Towelhead (Warner Independent Pictures), the 19-year-old actress Summer Bishil captures the terrifying combination of lubricity and innocence that is being 13. Her performance is the truest thing in a movie that, for all its good intentions, feels thoroughly phony and mildly embarrassing, like an extended PSA about inappropriate touching.

Towelhead marks the directorial debut of Alan Ball, screenwriter of American Beauty and creator of Six Feet Under and the just-launched HBO series True Blood. Ball's script is adapted from a 2005 novel by Alicia Erian, and it shows; the script is densely and fussily novelistic, packed with foreshadowing and metaphor and painstakingly highlighted "themes." Put it this way: When a white kitten named Snowball shows up, you just know he's going to symbolize something.

Jasira is a child of divorce whose Lebanese father and American mother seem to be competing for world's worst parent. When her bed-hopping mother Gail (Maria Bello) starts to perceive her as a sexual competitor, Jasira is sent to live with her father Rifat (Peter Macdissi) in a sterile housing development in Houston. Rifat is a bundle of contradictions: a morally rigid NASA engineer who forbids his daughter to wear shorts or even use tampons but who sees no problem in leaving her alone all night while he visits his girlfriend. The isolated, confused, and horny Jasira soon starts getting into trouble. After developing an impressive array of hands-free masturbation techniques, she enters into a sexually compliant relationship with a black schoolmate (Eugene Jones) whom her racist father has forbidden her to see. More disturbingly, she flirts with the next-door neighbor Mr. Vuoso (Aaron Eckhart), a married Army reservist who lends her porn magazines from his stash. Despite the worried interventions of another neighbor (Toni Collette), Jasira gets closer and closer to Mr. Vuoso, letting him take her out on queasy semi-dates that blur the line between fatherly affection and statutory rape.

Provocative without being thoughtful, Towelhead is an exercise in button-pushing that seems unsure of what it wants to say (except to assert, correctly, that being a sexually abused biracial teenager in suburban Houston would really, really suck). The very title, which has been the object of protest by some Arab-American groups, hints at a treatment of race relations that is largely absent from the movie, though the epithet does get hurled once or twice at Jasira by redneck kids. The story is also set during the first Gulf War for unclear reasons—maybe just to allow Peter Macdissi to growl "Fuck Saddam" at the television screen at regular intervals. Macdissi, a terrific Lebanese-American actor familiar from Six Feet Under, finds a stratum of likability in his comically awful character. The scenes in which Rifat provokes and shames his petulant daughter into confessing her transgressions have a glimmer of emotional truth. And Aaron Eckhart excels at playing nice guys with corruption at their core (witness his recent turn as Two-Face in The Dark Knight). It's too bad Eckhart, Macdissi, and Bishil are stranded in a movie that treats their characters as sociological types rather than flawed, funny, believable people.

After No Country for Old Men's rapturous (to my mind, overly so) reception at the Oscars, the Coen brothers have returned to the kind of movie that made their name: an arch black comedy about provincial losers on the make. In a weird way, the cheerfully nonsensical spy caper Burn After Reading (Focus Features) is almost like a comic version of No Country. In both movies, a small-time blunderer gets a hold of some stolen property and, in the attempt to profit from this luck, gets in way over his or her head with some seriously bad dudes. But whereas No Country was ponderous, Burn After Reading is flip. The decay of America's moral fabric, the new movie implies, is no reason for bleak despair and breakfast-table hand-wringing; it's just the brutally funny truth.

Burn After Reading's roundelay of buffoons is set in motion by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich), a CIA analyst who's fired in the opening scene because of a drinking problem. After venting his outrage at this injustice, Cox goes home to drink—and to bounce some career plans off his wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), an icy shrew who's plotting to leave him for federal marshal Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney). Meanwhile, the first draft of Cox's grandiose personal memoir somehow winds up on a disk on the floor of the Hardbodies gym, where it's intercepted by personal trainer Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Convinced that he has some "classified shit" on his hands, Chad shows the document to his co-worker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand). As it happens, Linda has been trying to raise money for the extensive cosmetic surgery that she's convinced she needs in order to catch a man. So the barely functional Linda convinces the even dumber Chad to help her shake down Cox for $50,000.

The joke is that the intel at the center of this spy story is utterly without value. Cox doesn't care about getting his disk back; he only wants to get a bead on the motives of these two clueless blackmailers. Chad and Linda carry on like characters from a Graham Greene novel, arranging drop-off points and meetings with Russian diplomats, oblivious to the fact that their faux MacGuffin is getting them in real trouble. It's a clever setup for a spoof of the espionage thriller, but despite the film's intermittent pleasures (Pitt's gum-snapping dolt chief among them), the result is oddly airless.

Part of the problem is a plot twist two-thirds of the way through that abruptly changes the tone from devil-may-care lark to nihilistic joke. I've written before on the Coens' sadism toward their audience. The brothers' penchant for pulling out the rug from beneath our feet and then snickering when we fall down was what kept me from giving myself over to the otherwise powerful No Country for Old Men. A similar tactic undercuts the momentum of Burn After Reading; when something awful happens to one of the few characters worth rooting for, the energy simply rushes out of the movie.

Still, for those who like their black comedy without a trace of cream or sugar, Burn holds up as a minor Coen brothers comedy, a Hudsucker Proxy rather than a Big Lebowski. It zips along at 95 minutes, features lots of A-listers enjoying the chance to mug broadly, and delivers at least a dozen big laughs. Several of these come from the indispensable J.K. Simmons as a pragmatic CIA head. (Is there another actor alive who can bark from behind a desk with the authority of J.K. Simmons?) "No biggie," he tells a nervous underling who's briefing him on the unfolding mayhem. "Report back to me when all this makes sense."

Country music has a Mr. Nice Guy problem: There are too many of them. Consider the country A-list: Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley. They all make fine records. (Jackson and Paisley make great ones.) But although these stars are superficially different—Jackson is a laid-back good ol' boy, Paisley a jester, Chesney a beach bum—they're all variations on a single type: the solid, earthy man's man, a bit rough around the edges, prone to moral lapses when he knocks back one too many, but ultimately genial and upstanding, dedicated to God and family and Old Glory and pickup trucks and fishing rods, not necessarily in that order. Peek under every big hat in Nashville, and you'll find a big lunk with a bigger heart.

Jamey Johnson has a 10-gallon Stetson of his own—but the similarities end there. Johnson, a 32-year-old former Marine from Alabama, is not a nice guy. He's a bit of a creep. He wears a permanent scowl and has a droopy goatee that looks like it might house a colony of fire ants. In other words, he's an heir to the outlaw country tradition of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson and, of course, Johnny Cash. Except that Johnson is bleaker and blacker than the Man in Black. On his new album, That Lonesome Song, Johnson sings in the voice of a drug addict, a depressive, and, occasionally, a sociopath. In "Mowin' Down the Roses," Johnson returns to the house he shared with his ex to set fire to her clothes and steer a power mower through her flowerbeds. "Down in Mississippi, it's getting perfectly clear/ That anything you used to love just ain't gon' grow 'round here," he sings. The archetypal country outlaw is an endearing rapscallion. Jamey Johnson is a walking, talking blight on this land.

He's also made one of the year's best albums. It begins with the sound of a clanging jailhouse doors and segues quickly to a prison of another kind. "High Cost of Living" is a bleak, almost journalistic account of a life undone by drugs. Johnson sings:

My whole life went through my head

Layin' in that motel bed

Watchin' as the cops kicked in the door

I had a job and a piece of land

My sweet wife was my best friend

But I traded that for cocaine and a whore

Johnson drawls these lines over a sturdy country-rock backing, accented by organ and a pedal steel guitar. It's a retro sound, which is the way Johnson likes it. He performs his ballads in waltz time, covers two songs popularized by Waylon Jennings, and genuflects at the altar of Jennings and George Jones in a clever tribute song.

The honky-tonk traditionalism extends to Johnson's subject matter. That Lonesome Song is a heartbreak album, written by Johnson (and some skilled collaborators) in the annus horribilis the followed the tanking of his 2006 major label debut and a nasty marriage bust-up. The tempos are slow, the sound brooding, the scenery familiar from a thousand country ballads: bedrooms, bars, desolate highway strips, divorce court. But Johnson breathes life into these clichés by relishing the gory details. "What the hell did I do last night?/ That's the story of my life," he confesses in the title track. Johnson sings in a sullen drawl, almost mumbling at times: the voice of a man too stupefied by his loss, and too numbed by his hangover, to raise his voice or to wallow. He lets the pedal steel do the weeping—he just recites the facts.

Johnson has been knocking around Nashville for several years, co-writing big hits for Strait (the chart-topper "Give It Away") and Trace Adkins (the bootylicious novelty smash "Honky-Tonk Badonkadonk"). He's a craftsman of a high order with a knack for disrupting generic chord progressions with harmonic twists and a gift for the wordplay that country fans love. ("The high cost of living/ Ain't nothing like the cost of living high.") He can do schmaltz: In 2006, he had a minor hit with a shamelessly tear-jerking "The Dollar," and the first single from That Lonesome Song, "In Color," is a weeper about leafing through old photo albums.

But in general, That Lonesome Song is fearsomely anti-sentimental, an anomaly in a genre that serves up even the grimmest tales in gauzy soft focus. In song after song, Johnson revels in gloominess, offering neither happy endings nor easy catharsis. The fine tunes, the vivid storytelling, and Johnson's rugged croak make for compelling listening, but he refuses to ingratiate—he's not trying to win a popularity contest or a headlining spot at Fan Fair. The closest he comes to cornpone is "Stars in Alabama," a lovely, old-fashioned home-and-hearth song in which a mother pleads with her troubadour son to cancel his next gig and come back to Montgomery for a visit. Country's chart-topping Mr. Nice Guys would surely have ended the song with an emotional money shot: throwing the tour bus into reverse and heading straight to sweet home Alabama, into momma's waiting arms. But Johnson keeps rolling toward Tennessee.

New Republic, Sept. 24

An article examines how the policy choices of Sarah Palin, supermom though she may be, hurt other working mothers. Palin embodies a Republican brand of feminism: If she can balance parenting five children with her gubernatorial responsibilities, other working mothers shouldn't carp about handling their less-demanding desk jobs and smaller broods. "Palin's brand of up-by-your-bootstraps feminism allows the McCain campaign to appear to support working moms—plus hockey moms, team moms, soldiers' moms—while rejecting the policies that would actually make their lives better." … Peter Bergen offers a slate of policy options to quell the rising violence in Afghanistan. Among his suggestions: sending in more U.S. Special Forces and top civilian advisers, bringing high-level Taliban leaders into the political fold, and focusing on infrastructure projects. American policy in Afghanistan needs "the kind of strategic reset that helped the U.S. military to dampen down the violence in Iraq."

Weekly Standard, Sept. 15

They might as well call it the "Sarah Palin Issue." The cover depicts John McCain as an old West sheriff and Palin as his bonnet-wearing, shotgun-toting assistant while a piece deconstructs why the left finds the pick so offensive. The "simple fact of her being a pro-life married mother of five with a thriving political career was … enough for the left and its outliers to target her for destruction," the author concludes. Palin's existence contradicts the left's central narrative that, to succeed professionally, women must not have "the temptation to be with and enjoy several children." … A "how-to guide" to punishing Russia argues that Putin should pay a price for his August military incursion into the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, Georgia. Providing aid to Georgia without censuring Moscow, the author writes, will not deter Russia from future invasions into other former Soviet states. One solution: moving the 2014 Olympics from the Black Sea resort town of Sochi would "put a big wet cloth over Putin's neofascist strongman strut."

The New Yorker, Sept. 15

A profile of Cindy McCain contrasts the wealthy, globe-trotting humanitarian with the birdlike stay-at-home mother who does not seem to be relishing her time in the campaign spotlight. While she "prides herself on being traditional," Ariel Levy writes, she has often left her husband in the dark: She surprised him by adopting a daughter from Bangladesh and did not tell him about her painkiller addiction until the DEA was investigating it. ... A piece re-examines the death of James Zadroga, the 34-year-old NYPD homicide detective who toiled for three weeks at Ground Zero and died of a mysterious lung ailment in 2006. Results of a 2003 biopsy obtained by the reporter show that his lungs did not contain the talc, cellulose, and other particles found in his autopsy. The discovery supports the theory he had a habit of injecting crushed pills. "Sometimes it's necessary to slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact," a medical examiner said.

New York, Sept. 15

A piece finds that John McCain's pick of "Saracuda" for veep has recalibrated the presidential race and left Barack Obama's campaign unsure of how to deal with her. Sarah Palin, with her "hard-right views … contained in a disarming, charismatic package," will be sent out to rev up the Republican's conservative Christian base, allowing McCain "to ignore the wingnuts and sprint hard toward the center." … A photo essay chronicles the reinvention of New York City, which has seen 76,000 new buildings spring up in the last 15 years. "The city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel," the author writes, offering side-by-side photos of the old and the new. New York is, overall, better for these changes. Attempts to preserve old buildings instead of replacing them "would have created a museum of shabbiness."

Newsweek, Sept. 15

Reporters trek up to Wasilla, Alaska, to unearth more details about Sarah Palin. While she grew up attending the Assembly of God church in town, she did not speak in tongues, according to her childhood pastor. Like George W. Bush, she "is not regarded as an introspective or intellectual type—not the sort who likes to mull the deepest nuances of every issue." Newsweek unearths a 2000 recommendation letter she wrote in support of her future brother-in-law Mike Wooten, whom she later allegedly had fired. … Dealing with rising fuel costs, school districts across the country are looking for alternatives to the school bus. Some students now walk to school in groups while schools in rural areas have cut back to a four-day week. "If every formerly bused student begins hoofing it to school, it's a environmental win—but if too many of their parents decide to drive them instead, the overall carbon footprint can grow."

Wired, September 2008

The cover story profiles Shai Agassi and his push for low-cost, rechargeable electric cars. The charging stations, still in development, "will be much more than dumb sockets; they have to carry the charge, sure, but they also must withstand being dinged by cars, vandalized by thieves, and subjected to the heat and cold." Agassi's startup, Project Better Place, has lured Israel and Denmark to try out the technology. … A dispatch from Russia's Star City follows Richard Garriott, a "very wealthy geek" who has paid $30 million to live in a Soviet-era dormitory and endure eight months of "remedial cosmonaut training" to spend a week and a half at the International Space Station this October. Garriott's poor vision prevented him from following in his astronaut father's footsteps, but his online gaming fortune reopened the door. Real cosmonauts tend to scorn the "thrillionaire wannabes." "Better to send monkey" in their places, they say.

Listen to Laura Polley read .

We brought the dog home in the trunk.

All the way from school Dad said she was

back there, feet on the same red carpet as mine.

The February sun made me feel like a thief.

You're not part of this memory. Your figure is missing

from the strange gray half-light of the closed garage

where he tried but couldn't shut her eyes, Siberian blue,

where we stood, two blunderers, not knowing what to do

with the clumps of dead fur coming off in our hands.

One week before your birthday. You must be inside

washing dishes by hand, or wringing your prayers.

You must be respecting the father's collapse, his soft

exterior caving in like cake, the daughter's undoing

in one afternoon a dozen years of ladylike calm.

You must be delegating comfort to the saints.

You must be imagining we need you this way.

Sarah Palin's ignorance about the specifics of "the Bush Doctrine" in her first big network interview does not worry me. What's worrisome is her familiarity—and comfort—with Bush's general worldview.

In the pop-quiz question about the Bush Doctrine even Charlie Gibson—who knew, presumably, what was coming—didn't define it correctly. The Bush Doctrine is about preventative military action (Gibson mistakenly used the word pre-emptive), but in its first iteration, it defined those who harbor terrorists as no different from the terrorists themselves. Later, it came to include the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Given the president's selective application of his doctrine and its subsequent revisions, it's quite possible that not even Bush knows what the Bush Doctrine is.

So it's a little murky. But while Palin may not know what the Bush Doctrine is, she seemed, in her answers, to have adopted his approach to world affairs.

As Bush did, Palin comes to national office with little knowledge about foreign affairs. She hasn't traveled much, and the claims the campaign have made for her foreign-policy experience are evaporating. For example, aides have asserted that because Alaska neighbors Russia, Palin understands Russia. Yet the campaign has never been able to back up this assertion. When Palin was asked about Russia, her strongest response seemed to be that she can see Russia. "They're our next-door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska," she told Gibson.

This is a travel tip, not an argument for foreign-policy expertise. Because a person can see the moon does not make them qualified to be an astronaut.

Palin also seems to share Bush's lack of curiosity. Much of the interview felt like the forceful recitation of talking points she'd only just learned. There was very little evidence of original thought. (Obama has the opposite problem: He has thoughts, but is too calculating to share them.) Some Republicans have compared Palin's directness to Reagan, but that analogy doesn't hold—he'd been working over his ideas for decades before he was on the national ticket.

Finally, like Bush, Palin does not appear to let her unfamiliarity with the material hold her back. She was at pains throughout the interview to demonstrate her decisiveness. This makes political sense: What better way to reassure people about her ability as a leader than to look decisive?

But by repeatedly asserting that she will "not blink," Palin was eerily Bush-like. She offered a black-and-white worldview of bold decisions made quickly and changed reluctantly for fear of showing weakness. Sound familiar?

As a political matter, Republicans will think the Bush Doctrine question was unfair. Since doctrine is like paradigm—a word not often used in daily life—those who make issue of this will be mocked as pasty elites. Democrats, meanwhile, will see Palin's fumble of the question as the perfect encapsulation of their every worry about her.

I'm not sure much changed politically after the first round of the three-part interview. But if the new message of the McCain campaign is that his ticket is a change from George W. Bush, Palin didn't make the case.

This week, we asked Slate readers to e-mail us with their Sarah Palin dreams. So far, you've sent us nearly 500 of them. Many of you were appalled that Slate would undertake such a frivolous (according to liberals) or insulting (according to conservatives) project (click here to read some of those furious responses), but even more readers were relieved to know that they weren't the only ones who went to sleep every night and discovered the newly crowned conservative queen in their dreams.

It's hard to generalize about such a large group of dreams, but there were a few persistent themes: Palin as a gun-toting animal killer, pregnancies and denied abortions, baby Trig, and the landscape of Alaska. Many of you reported dreaming about John McCain dying and Palin taking over the Oval Office. Both men and straight women reported sexual fantasies involving the Alaska governor.

Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and Independents all wrote to us, though judging by the content of the dreams, we heard disproportionately from Palin foes. This may indicate that Slate's readership skews Democratic, or it may signify something else: According to Kelly Bulkeley, author of American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us About the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else, "conservatives tend to recall fewer dreams, and they take less interest in the subject than do liberals." Even so, not everyone is partisan in their dreams. Democrats had dreams in which Palin helped them with a personal problem or gave them money, and Republicans had nightmares in which Palin brought about World War III. The dreams weren't all about politics, either. Palin appeared sticking her finger in Indian pudding, washing dishes at a Jewish summer camp, and making a hotel bed in Las Vegas.

We've compiled 20 of most compelling dreams below. What do they mean? We don't pretend to know.

"All the animals from the local zoo had been transferred to my house for some reason. Sarah Palin gave me a handgun and told me I had to kill them all. I love animals, and I didn't want to do it, but I was afraid she'd kill me if I didn't comply. I started with lions and bears, but my gun ran out of bullets. I tried to free the owls since they could probably make it to safety before Sarah returned to see if all the animals were dead. She returned, and I just had my empty gun, so I was afraid of what she might do to me, but then fortunately I woke up."—Nadine Farouq

"I'm on a small town main street. There is no one there. I start walking, and then suddenly Sarah Palin starts walking toward me. She comes up to me and says, 'It's okay. Ignorance is a pretty good excuse.' Then she hands me a twenty."—Josh Cole

"I dreamt that two of my girlfriends from work had a combo wedding to save on costs, and I decided to crash, wearing my old wedding dress as well. The more brides, the better. So as the other two brides took me out in the parking lot to scold me for taking away from their special day, Sarah Palin screeched up next to us in a black BMW X5, the luxury SUV for mommies. She and I are apparently good pals because she leaned out the window and told me to cut the drama with my friends and she'd take me out for some fast food. A sucker for fast food and high-profile friends (both of which I dream a lot about), I hopped in the car with Sarah and took off."—Kimberly Holland

"In the dream I am in the television series Sex and the City. I am there, but not really present, more of an onlooker of the scene. Carrie and Miranda are chatting on a random sidewalk, I think in D.C., when down the street Sarah Palin is seen walking toward them with some sort of entourage, one of them holding an umbrella over her head. She is wearing a red wraparound skirt and everyone else around her is wearing dark suits. As she comes nearer, it appears the group is part of some kind of tour. The group pauses, at which point Carrie and Miranda look on, confused as to what the group is doing. All of the sudden, Sarah Palin lifts her skirt to blow her nose on it, revealing red bloomers. No one in the group seems to notice, or care, but Carrie and Miranda proceed to shriek in horror and disbelief ... and then I woke up."—Tiffany Urban

"Sarah Palin's standing over me (I'm naked, she's not) and shouting, podium style, through a pair of great, floating glasses, 'And you know what? I'm going to cut it off. I'm gonna CUT IT OFF.' I hear cheers. Are we onstage? I don't see it, but I feel the presence of TV camera everywhere. She continues, 'And you know why? Because, well why shouldn't I? If you're good, I know God will put it back.' I look down and realize I have the biggest pot plant ever growing up between my legs. I mean, the thing is beautiful. I think something happens next, but I can't remember what. All I know is we are in a field, and Sarah Palin is kneeling over me decked out in hunter gear. She cradles her rifle pragmatically and smiles pathetically as if to say, 'You silly bear,' and ruffles my stomach. The plant is gone, but I am now covered in fur. And blood. And bits of grass. And as much as I want to bite her face off, I can't be angry at her. Or rather, I can't argue it. I've got nothing. And she knows it too. Her triumphalism is effortless."—Joshua Mensch

"I dreamt last night that I went to a local political event, and Sarah Palin was being introduced as Pennsylvania's new governor. I got really upset, and I asked, 'But what happened to Ed Rendell?!' And then she stopped her speech, stared me down, and told me, 'Ed Rendell is gone now.' "—Teresa Reilly

"I had this horrible dream about Sarah Palin on Monday, the day of the release of the Bristol Palin pregnancy news. I dreamed that I was walking down a dark, grimy street and felt a strange feeling on the right side of my abdomen. I looked down and there was a little bump there, a bulge, and it was moving. Suddenly, a huge, oily, millipede-esque parasite started crawling out of the bump. I was horrified and disgusted as I began to pull on it to get it out, and when I pulled the whole thing out (it was about 6 inches long), I saw that it had a head on each side of its body. I looked up and Sarah Palin was there, smiling her huge smile, looking like an evil librarian, and she said to me, very sweetly 'Oh, there it is! How wonderful! Now I'd like to talk to you about an amazing opportunity to host another one in your body ...' She smiled the entire time she was talking to me, and it was almost a Joker-like smile."—Anna Tarleton Potter

"(To start with, you need to know that I have a 17-year-old daughter with Down syndrome.) In my dream, my daughter is pregnant and gives birth to an almost fully grown African-American baby boy who looks a lot like Barack Obama!"—Ellen Jennings

"I dreamt her hubby was killed in an strange accident, and we somehow met in Germany. My wife was also gone, not sure how. McCain became ill, and Sarah and I were married. My son and I moved into the White House, and I gave a speech about Americans not using common sense, etc. Of course there are some romantic portions of the dream I will not go into detail about. She is very attractive—as you know. My speech was powerful, as Sarah and I both scolded the media for not holding the right folks accountable for certain accounting scandals, etc. I also tried very hard to give America a wakeup call on issues like common sense parenting, buying more house and car than we need, being very wasteful, etc. The dream was a bit foggy, but in the end, I wrote several books, and Mrs. Palin-Kaiser ran the country for a year, doing a very good job. I also see her shaking her finger at the media over and over in the dream. But she always gave me a kiss afterward, so I only got on her case a little about the finger-wagging. Much of the dream is foggy, as I did not even know she existed until six weeks ago. Now I think about her a lot."—Michael A. Kaiser

"Last night I dreamed I was the 'superhero' version of Sarah Palin (certainly a force to be reckoned with). While singing a solo in a church choir, a crazed woman from the congregation came at me with a knife. I responded by skillfully evading the attack and disarming the woman with a karate chop to her knife-wielding hand. I then adjusted my hair, smiled at my family, and jumped right back into the song without skipping a beat! I should mention that I am a Christian, an adamant Palin supporter, and hold a minor in vocal performance."—Kelli Willard

"My parents and I were in our driveway, rearranging our golf bags, when I saw Sarah Palin walking down my street. She was alone with no Secret Service, no press, just her, with her purse, walking around my neighborhood. I was kind of weirded out; then Palin approached us. She reached into her purse and pulled out this small bag with a golf thing inside. It held a ball, recorded strokes, and was a practice putting cup. She said, 'I don't know if this will work for you, it's a half-gallon cup.' My mother shot back, 'Great. That's great.' I reassured Palin that I could still use it, and I was genuinely excited about it. My dad just remained silent.

"My mother angrily said to Palin, 'Is this part of your campaign, walking up to people in random neighborhoods?' Palin smiled and said, 'It's a really great campaign. I'd love for you to be a part of it.' It was strange for my mother to be doubting Palin in this dream, as she's a Palin supporter in the real world. The conversation suddenly shifted to Palin's face. She hadn't been out in public for a while because she had pimples, and my mother remarked, 'I really hate when that happens! Sometimes the pimples turn into acne!' The dream then abruptly ended."—Emma Johannes

"I had a dream last night where there was a problem with boulders coming down hills and crushing cars. Sarah Palin made the police put up machine guns to disintegrate the boulders as they passed by. Unfortunately the guns were triggered by movement, so animals were getting killed by mistake. She and I were in a screaming match about the poor animals. She kept calling them collateral damage, and we used them to feed the homeless."—Asylynne Wright

"The night of Sarah's speech I fell asleep and dreamt of saving her young daughter from getting hit with a hockey puck at a Philadelphia Flyers game. With a quick peck on the cheek and a photographer close by, the kiss became the picture of the year on all the tabloids. She was so thankful for what I had done in saving her child, I was invited to the inauguration and personally escorted her to the ball afterward. Her husband having somehow died, everyone raved about how she found her new dude."—Joe Waetjen

"Last night I dreamt that I was being sent to jail for four months, for an unknown reason. I kept telling everyone around me that I had a new baby, she was only five months old, and I couldn't leave her for so long. Then Palin appears and starts telling me that I've breastfed her for long enough, that she doesn't need me anymore, and she and my husband will be fine without me. 'Just wean her already so you can go to jail!' I kept arguing that I was her mother and she needs me, plus I've done nothing wrong, and Palin keeps brushing me off as overly sentimental and clingy to my child!"—Katherine Meyers

"I was at a coffee shop much like Starbucks, but it was called Snyder's (not a real place, as far as I know). I stepped up to the counter to get my coffee, and the barista was Sarah Palin, who used one finger to push the cup toward me, while silently giving me a frank stare. The cup had a red, felt-tip marker taped to the side. I understood all of this to mean that my boss was angry that I was late turning in an assignment, and that I was to write the assignment in red ink, which would indicate to my boss that Sarah Palin was responsible for my getting it done.

"Incidentally, even though the coffee shop was called Snyder's, Ms. Palin was wearing a green apron with the Starbucks logo, which I understood to be the Snyder's employees' way of protesting a takeover attempt by Starbucks."—Chris Stvartak

"I had stomach cancer, and my parents were preparing me to die, nurturing me. Sarah Palin was a doctor who delivered the bad news I would die. She was calm and stern. She put her hand on my stomach. She and my parents exchanged a look as if they knew something that I didn't."—Jake Breeden

"In my dream she is seated in the Oval Office busily using her crayons and a coloring book. I am standing in front of the desk where she sits, at attention, with my hands behind my back. In my dream, I am a man, looking like the stereotypical Secret Service agent (sans sunglasses and earpiece). I keep trying to get her attention for some urgent matter, but she is feverishly coloring. I want to grab her and slap her, and I strain to keep my composure. Her tongue is sticking out of her mouth as she concentrates on her masterpiece, and her hair is disheveled, although she is impeccably dressed. There are many other people milling around behind me in the room, and the atmosphere is tense, but no one approaches her, no one can figure out how to get her attention. I have this feeling of impending doom. I am frantic. Then I wake up."—Marta Nelson

"Last night I dreamt I was at a strip club, and Sarah Palin was dancing on stage in a G-string and being periodically groped by three professional baseball players dressed in uniform. I looked next to me, and Bill Richardson was sitting there smiling and giggling at me, gesturing towards the stage with a big cigar. I attribute this dream to watching a little bit of CNN, The Colbert Report, and Baseball Tonight before bed."—T.D. Botkin

"In my dream, I was with a group of people watching the election results on television. However, pundits weren't announcing the results. Both candidates and their VP picks were sitting on two couches in a room full of journalists/pundits. McCain and Palin were on one couch, and Obama was on his couch with his VP pick, but it wasn't Joe Biden, it was a woman in an emerald-green ball gown. In a way she resembled Doris Kearns Goodwin. What stood out to me is how insignificant McCain appeared. All attention, a spotlight even, was on Palin. It was like McCain was a sad old man on a park bench, and Palin was just soaking up all of the energy in the room. She seemed to be a magnet for all of the energy in the room—a bit like a Dementor from Harry Potter. Obama and his Doris Kearns Goodwin look-alike VP were also relatively insignificant, but not as much as McCain. Obama smiled graciously the entire time. At some point, Tim Russert's disembodied head appeared through a doorway in the room where I was, and I started to cry. Tim didn't say anything, he just floated there observing the group. One of the journalists/pundits in the room was overheard whispering, 'It's McCain!' It wasn't an official announcement, but he let it slip, and it was true—McCain won the election.

"But McCain just sat there not moving. Palin stood up and started queen-waving. Obama got up to shake her hand—graciously—and Doris Kearns Goodwin sat on her couch, as I was sitting on my dream-couch, crying."—Amy Howland

"I dreamed I was in the audience of the RNC. I looked down, and I was breastfeeding Trig Palin. After he finished, Piper Palin put a piece of gum in Trig's mouth, which he chewed casually as he turned his head to watch the end of the speech."—Jenny Jemison

Return to article

"This is ridiculous, and I cannot believe you have put this in the updates and news sections. I am extremely irked by this extreme silliness. Sarah Palin has captivated the hearts of the American people. I am amazed at her accomplishments, her grace, her intelligence, and her fashion sense—especially her smile—in a time when politicians seem to lack an understanding of the American people and a commitment to moral ethics. Palin's family and husband should also be complimented for supporting her exceptional success. The nightly dreams sound like an admission of personal insights to personal character flaws to me."—JoAnn Burtness

"Come on. Are you guys serious?!?! We are perhaps making the most important decision for our future and you guys are dreaming about this woman who no one knew about a few weeks ago? I am not dreaming, but losing sleep thinking about the country my son will inherit if we don't make some important changes soon. Your dreams are bigger than this."—Doug Herlocker

"Dreams like described in this article usually come when someone has either very high expectations or very high fears. Don't you think it is time for the media, including Slate, to ask the question if they, in the interest of entertaining and informing their customers, are becoming a larger polarizing factor in our nation than even the political parties they report on?

"I work in both Seattle and Dallas—two cultural and political opposites. I find people in Dallas who are afraid of Obama, because they feel people have projected upon him all their wishes like a blank canvas. Many of them actually hated Hillary Clinton for reasons that seem mostly personal and misinformed. Likewise, I find people in Seattle who hate George Bush so much they actually seethe about him daily! Many are deeply bitter and dangerously condescending toward red states and their people as a whole. What happened to the attempt to address medieval prejudice? Rather than a sane debate in the media, I see the much of the hatred, condescension, fear-mongering, sarcasm, and wildly bizarre projection of motives starting there. When did the line between entertainment and news get crossed so much that even Slate acts like Jerry Springer?

"BTW, I have had no dreams whatsoever of any of the candidates, although I dream often. You guys need to get a life, or at least a good psychologist."—Brad Smith

"I dream of Sarah Palin walking a sidewalk in Washington and coming across all those who worked at the now defunct Slate, standing there selling pencils. She tosses a penny in each journalist's cup and moves on. After she leaves, they turn on each other in animalistic fervor trying to get each other's penny."—Ronald Hamric

I was a little shocked to see Sarah Palin motor across the hot stage Wednesday morning in Fairfax, Va. Given the outrage and upset displayed on her behalf over Barack Obama's recent remarks, I expected her to arrive on a stretcher.

Palin arrived without the aid of a walker, and the crowd loved every minute of her 15-minute speech. People had waited on the hillside of a local park in the baking sunshine after a long wait in a line that seemed to stretch to Washington. Palin was thoroughly at ease as she toured through the greatest hits of her convention speech. McCain aides call her a natural, and she certainly has the politician's talent for delivering stock lines as if they've just occurred to her. Whether or not the audience had heard the lines, it approved.

The main target of her attack was Obama's record of asking for earmarks, the funding requests lawmakers make for their state or district. Obama requested $311 million in such funding last year (he's asked for nothing this year). The evil of earmarks, which John McCain has railed against for years, was the central theme of the day and is his campaign's new central theme. After a long assault on earmarks, McCain said: "That's what this campaign is all about. … Change and reform, change and reform."

A key part of the earmark story, of course, is Palin's opposition to the now-infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." And on Wednesday Palin repeated her line about telling Congress "Thanks, but no thanks" as easily as she did the day McCain introduced her as his running mate. She did so despite numerous and regular reports pointing out that her version of the story is, to put it mildly, bunk. But the point of the story is not, as the McCain campaign would have it, that she ultimately opposed the bridge. That part is true enough. The point is that her handling of this bridge does not show her to be any kind of warrior against federal pork.

The dramatic version makes it sound like Palin objected to the bridge project on principle the minute she heard about it. But she didn't. She advocated for the bridge and said no to it only after it was already dead. Ultimately, she used the money for other projects. She has other weaknesses on earmarks that don't square with the story line. As mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, she hired a lobbyist to seek federal money for special projects. This year, Palin has requested $200 million in earmarks. Ben Smith of Politico reports that she wanted a lot more of the kind McCain makes the most fun of. Perhaps this is a last-minute binge now that Palin proclaims, as she did in Fairfax, that she and McCain are going to "end the corrupt practices of earmarks once and for all."

The larger problem with this anti-earmarks strategy is that they don't amount to much. Earmarks represent just $16 billion of the 2008 budget. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it's not everything. McCain makes it seem like earmarks are central to the federal government. In Fairfax, he blamed earmarks for high food and gasoline prices and the trouble that many homeowners face in making mortgage payments.

McCain also vowed, as he always does, to make the authors of earmark legislation famous by embarrassing them as a way to cut down on the practice. I wonder. Most earmarks are not ridiculous boondoggle programs. They fund things like schools and hospitals, which are not the kinds of things that their supporters feel embarrassed about. They also fund things like abstinence-education programs (in swing states like Pennsylvania), which many of McCain's voters favor.

Is Sarah Palin, who promised to be an advocate for special-needs families when she's in the White House, really going to slash earmarks for special-needs schools? Will McCain really "make the authors famous" when they're Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Republican allies who support an earmark for services aimed at families with autistic children? If they're so evil, why not do it in this election year, when Collins is a vulnerable incumbent? Earmarks get really tricky really fast.

The Obama campaign has been working hard to make an issue of the Bridge to Nowhere, and the McCain campaign doesn't mind. Aides believe any discussion about earmarks is one McCain is winning. Instead of talking about taxes or the larger economy and whether McCain's policies will be a change from Bush's, Obama is arguing over a $16 billion portion of the budget where McCain has actually been a force for change. Arguing over earmarks shrinks the field of debate into one where he has a long track record. Obama has waged no significant battles with Democrats. Palin's record may not be as fabulous as she claims, but she's got a record of cutting government and fighting her party. The McCain team bets that those larger points overcome the smaller inaccuracies.

At any rate, the crowd in Fairfax was certainly not worried about such technicalities brought up by the good-for-nothing press. When Palin arrived, the enormous crowd erupted into chants of "Sarah, Sarah." It had been energized by Fred Thompson, the opening act, who really does seem energized by Palin. Thompson dinged the "brie and chablis"-swilling press that had gone to Alaska to look into her life. He heralded her performance at the Republican Convention. He mocked Obama as "the only person who thought running for president was qualification for being president."

Thompson was so fired up for Palin he called her "the most remarkable success story in American politics." Republicans used to call themselves the party of Lincoln. He had a pretty good success story, too. But for the moment, Republicans appear ready to cast even old Abe aside to embrace their new favorite politician. It is now the party of Palin.

All campaigns must change in order to handle the arrival of a vice-presidential candidate. To accommodate Sarah Palin, John McCain's Straight Talk Express has now installed a fainting couch. It's not for the vice-presidential candidate—she's plenty tough—but for McCain aides who are rapidly perfecting the act of expiring on the cushions on her behalf at every sign of perceived sexism.

Click on the player below for Obama's response to the McCain campaign:

Tuesday night they turned in a spectacular performance. Barack Obama used the expression "lipstick on a pig" to refer to McCain's new pitch as a change agent in Washington. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said as the crowd cheered. "It's still a pig. You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It's still gonna stink. We've had enough of the same old thing."

The McCain campaign reacted to the remarks with emergency umbrage. A conference call was ordered for 7 p.m. Former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, the newly minted chair of the "Palin Truth Squad," told reporters she was offended at Obama's attack on Palin. She couldn't explain how Obama's general attack was a personal one aimed at Palin but asserted it was just obvious. She also took offense on behalf of her children. She may have even put her hand to her brow, but it was a phone call, so I couldn't tell. (Note: If it had been a man on the call, I also would have used this expression because of the silent-movielike theatricality. I believe that this gesture is gender neutral, but if you have another one, drop us a line and we'll fix it.)

The McCain team's hypersensitive and highly managed approach to the new vice president offers up yet more signs of just how far the Republican nominee has come from his freewheeling days. McCain, once one of the most accessible politicians in modern times, has essentially hidden his vice-presidential pick from the press since her selection. Palin's performances are highly scripted, and the campaign that once rightly criticized bloggers for taking McCain's every utterance out of context has now perfected the blogger's quick trigger of outrage.

If McCain is going to get tagged for his every slip of the tongue, his aides have determined, he might as well do the same and get some political benefit. Earlier Tuesday, when Obama had referred to Palin as a "governor, mother, and moose shooter," the McCain campaign instructed its Iowa Sportsmen for McCain co-chairman to proclaim the remarks an outrage to hunters. The strategy seems to be working. Whenever the press tries to question Palin, it's used as a foil to stir the Republican base; charges of sexism keep team Obama off-balance.

It was obvious that Obama wasn't talking about his opponent's running mate, as Gov. Mike Huckabee pointed out on Fox News: "I'm going to have to cut Obama some slack on that one. I do not think he was referring to Sarah Palin." It also turns out McCain himself is a fan of the "lipstick on a pig" expression. He even used it last fall to describe Hillary Clinton's health care plan—a nearly parallel construction. (Watch McCain use the phrase on Slate V.) But these two pieces of information don't obscure the fact that Obama is in a bit of a fix. His campaign will now spend a day adjudicating this pig business, which is another day he's not talking about something else. (In an effort to keep the ball bouncing, the McCain campaign produced a video called "Lipstick," further bending Obama's meaning.)

This matters politically for Obama because the Palin pick appears to have helped McCain for the moment with women voters. In last month's NBC/WSJ poll, Obama was leading McCain by 14 points among female voters. In the most recent poll, he's up by just four points. Among younger women (ages 18-49) Obama was up by 20 points; now McCain is ahead by three. And last month, Obama held a one-point lead among white women; now McCain is up among them by 10.

Obama should have known better than to use the pig line. Clinton loyalists staged a nearly identical public chest-clutching when his adviser Samantha Power was caught calling Clinton a "monster." Plus, Obama, like McCain, has perfected the art of taking quick and flamboyant umbrage on the least little evidence. A month ago he proclaimed the McCain campaign had attempted to use his race against him when there was less evidence this was the case than McCain has now.

It's not clear what Palin thinks of the lipstick remark or the campaign's nine-alarm ire. She's spoken only to People magazine since she was selected. She'll sit down with ABC's Charlie Gibson later this week for a set of interviews designed around her son's deployment ceremony, and perhaps he'll ask her. She once spoke at length about the ways in which Hillary Clinton's whining about sexism had hurt all women everywhere, so perhaps it rankles that it's being claimed so frequently on her behalf. She seems like the kind of woman who can defend herself. She might even think making such a fuss to protect her is sexist.

In 2004, the "youth vote" was supposed to break all records. It did and it didn't—but either way, it didn't make a difference for John Kerry, even though he won 54 percent of voters under 29. So it is with this year's youth vote: Even if it exceeds that of four years ago—Barack Obama currently commands about 60 percent of the under-29 cohort—it will be nearly impossible to say whether it made a difference.

On Election Day 2004, kids turned out in record numbers: About 4.6 million more people under the age of 29 voted in 2004 than in 2000. Yet 18- to 29-year-olds accounted for only 17 percent of voters—roughly the same as in 2000—because the geezer vote also grew. As a result, youth mobilization was declared a myth, perhaps unjustifiably. "We rocked the vote all right," Hunter S. Thompson said at the time. "Those little bastards betrayed us again."

Of course, organizers are saying this year could be different. And not just because of will.i.am. Here are a few indicators that in 2008 young people might actually turn off the Family Guy marathon and show up on voting day.

Primary bump: Youth turnout in the primaries saw a huge jump over previous years. In 2000, it was roughly 9 percent of the total vote. This year, it was 17 percent. In the Iowa Democratic primary, youth turnout more than tripled over 2004, a bump that contributed to Obama's margin of victory there. (Obama beat John Edwards and Hillary Clinton by 20,000 votes. About 17,000 of them were under 30.) Think caucuses are the exception? Youth turnout tripled in Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas compared with 2000. And since 2000, increased youth participation in the primaries has led to more votes in the general election.

The '06 wave: Speculators wouldn't be so optimistic if it weren't for the Phish-like levels of participation in the midterm elections. Participation jumped 4 percent from 2002 to 2006, to the mid-20 percent range—pretty high for a midterm, especially when most young people don't know their congressman from Ernest Borgnine. They can even claim they made the difference in Montana, where youth turnout rose from 26 percent in 2002 to 39 percent in 2006. Democrat Jon Tester won by about 3,000 votes. Same in Virginia, where the youth vote increase was 14 points (from 18 percent to 32 percent), or 128,000 votes. Sen. Jim Webb won his race by about 8,000 votes. If the whippersnappers can swing a midterm, the thinking goes, why not a presidential election?

Registration nation: In 2004, 60 percent of eligible 18- to 29-year-olds were registered to vote, and 52 percent of them actually voted. Of those not registered, one-fifth said they'd missed the registration deadline. To avoid repeating history, Students for Obama has organized more than 700 chapters, the campaign says. Groups like Rock the Vote and Campus Progress are also registering voters on campuses. They could stay home on Election Day, of course. But bumps in voter registration correlate with surges in turnout.

Geekocracy: Whereas voters in 2004 could get campaign updates via e-mail, now it's a combination of e-mail, text messages, RSS feeds, tweets, and social networking. Just as online fundraising has boosted donations, the campaign expects online GOTV efforts to bolster turnout. If Obama merely pokes all his Facebook friends on Election Day, for example—well, that's 1.2 million pokes right there.

Take their word for it: Just because a young person says she's going to do something, doesn't mean she will. But in a poll conducted in February by Rock the Vote and the Tarrance Group, 82 percent of voters under 29 said they were likely to vote in November, including 62 percent who called it "extremely likely." Of course, they probably also said they were going to clean their rooms and do their own taxes.

But all of this isn't just mere speculation—it may be pointless speculation. That's because, regardless of whether Obama wins or loses, it will be hard to say that the youth vote—or any other segment of the population—"made the difference." For one thing, the phrase is meaningless: If an election is close, any group on the winning side can say its votes were decisive. It's like hogging all the credit for yourself if your candidate wins by one vote.

In addition, 18- to 29-year-olds are a fairly narrow demographic. "To change the entire election, they'd have to be double their size," says Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's campaign manager in 2004. And thanks to the Electoral College, the growth needs to happen in swing states. Another few hundred thousand young voters in California won't change much. But if Obama wins Ohio by 5,000 votes, says Trippi, "I can bet it was his lead among young people that put him over."

So maybe all this hype about the importance of the youth vote is just that. Still, if there's anything that can stop young voters from sleeping through their 5 p.m. alarm, maybe it's the knowledge that, if they get out and vote, their curmudgeonly elders will finally shut up about it.

I rarely remember my dreams, but for the past week, GOP vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin has been haunting me. Night after night, she appears in my dreams, always as a scolding, ominous figure.

When I mentioned my Palin dreams to Slate colleagues, they volunteered their own. One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips. A third says, "In the Sarah Palin dream I keep having, she has superhuman powers but is not really a person at all. In fact, she is more like the weather with glasses and an up-do, pushing clouds around and pitching lightning bolts."

I suspect we are not unusual. Palin has gripped the American imagination in a way that seems designed to burrow into our dream lives. Palin's supermom abilities provoke envy and anxiety in women, especially other working mothers. Her instant celebrity and dazzling speech have panicked Obama supporters who thought they had the election in the bag. And then there's her sex appeal. A couple of conservative men I know have mentioned that they've been having sexual fantasies about the Alaska governor. I'm sure they're not alone.

Palin wouldn't be the first politician to preoccupy American dreamers. A 1994 book collected dreams about President Bill Clinton. Several Web sites, including I Dream of Barack, aggregated dreams about Obama, John McCain, and Hillary Clinton.

In this spirit, we invite Slate readers to send us their dreams about Palin. E-mail them to IdreamofSarah@gmail.com. We will publish the most interesting. (We obviously can't stop you from submitting invented dreams, but we'd encourage you not to. There are enough weird, true dreams out there: Why bother to make something up?)

This presidential election—like the ones in 2000 and 2004—will be won on the ground in a few swing states. So forget the movements in the Gallup daily tracking poll or the Intrade political market. You don't even need to focus on the electoral-college maps at Pollster.com or Electoral-Vote.com. The 2008 election may well be determined by some of the legal and election administration skirmishes going on now in several key states. Here's a quick rundown.

Pennsylvania: In 2004, Democrats successfully kept Ralph Nader off the presidential ballot, fearing he would draw votes away from John Kerry. Kerry beat Bush in Pennsylvania by only two percentage points; Nader's presence on the ballot could well have cost Kerry the state. Nader will be on the ballot again this time in Pennsylvania, but Republicans are now fighting to keep former Republican and current Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr off the ballot. There hasn't been any polling of Pennsylvania since late August, and the polling then showed an Obama lead among registered voters and little support for Barr. But the race could have tightened up since then, and the presence of Barr (and Nader) on the ballot could make a difference.

Virginia: Virginia is neck and neck this year, to the surprise of Democrats and Republicans alike. At this point, Democrats appear to have an advantage, thanks to an aggressive voter registration effort by the Obama campaign, which has been especially successful in registering young voters. Republicans have responded to the surge in voter registration by raising the tried-and-true boogeyman of voter fraud. In addition, some local registrars in Virginia have been incorrectly—though perhaps innocently—telling college students who legally register to vote in their college towns that by doing so they "could no longer be claimed as dependents on their parents' tax return … and could lose scholarships or coverage under their parents' car and health insurance." Which candidate wins Virginia could well depend on which campaign is able to turn out its voters.

Ohio: Ohio, too, is very close. Democrats hope to take advantage of a new Ohio law that provides a five-day window in late September and early October for residents to register to vote and to vote absentee at the same time. Republicans say the practice encourages voter fraud. Democrats, meanwhile, are complaining about a new "vote caging" effort and worrying about whether residents who are forced to move because of foreclosure won't be able to cast valid ballots. Remember that a small shift in Ohio votes in 2004 would have handed the presidency to John Kerry.

Colorado: The 2006 midterms in Denver were a true election meltdown. Officials promise that things will be better this time around, but there's been a major battle over the secretary of state's decision to decertify, then recertify, some touch-screen and optical-scan voting machines. The Internet publication Election Law @ Moritz, which tracks election litigation the way a weatherman tracks an approaching hurricane, concludes that because of issues related to voting machines and other factors, if "election integrity groups or political parties see their fortunes resting with Colorado's 9 electoral votes, litigation there will be likely."

New Mexico: New Mexico makes me nervous. A battleground state, New Mexico was the site of allegations of voter fraud and election administration incompetence in 2004. God help us all if the presidential election comes down to the counting of provisional ballots here. An astonishing 12 percent of all votes cast in the primary between Obama and Clinton were provisional ballots, and it took a long time to get them counted. And election-law experts Ned Foley and Tova Wang have warned that "state laws are incredibly vague and incomplete with regard to casting and counting provisional ballots." No doubt armies of lawyers are standing by for deployment in New Mexico if the election is as close this year as it was in 2004, when Bush won by 5,988 votes.

Florida: Any list of battleground states and potential problems would be incomplete without a discussion of Florida. After the 2000 election, political battles in the state have turned to voter registration. Left-leaning voting rights groups have threatened to sue Florida for failing to make enough efforts to register low-income voters. Meanwhile, the state has issued new rules that may be deterring independent groups like the League of Women Voters from registering voters. Once the registration period is over, we can go back to worrying about whether Florida (with many counties having moved to their second or third voting system since 2000) can actually count the votes fairly and accurately—especially with 13 candidates to appear on the Florida presidential ballot and thousands of new voters. I don't take much solace in a headline from the Sun-Sentinel last Friday: "Hunt for Missing Ballots Widens in Palm Beach County."

It all adds up to … a lot of uncertainty. The Obama campaign viewed the primary season as a "game of inches." (Press reports that Clinton beat Obama in Texas and Nevada were incorrect: Obama ended up with more delegates from those states.) Obama won his party's nomination by focusing on the ground war. That and the tremendous voter registration advantage bode well for Democrats.

But McCain's candidacy, remember, was all but dead in the summer of 2007, yet he is now the nominee. And he has responded to Obama's game of inches with his "Hail Mary" pass, Sarah Palin. Whether that's enough to win the game for McCain depends on how well the players perform on the field.

Dear Sen. Biden:

You have a problem. In less than a month, you will face off against Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin in a vice-presidential debate in St. Louis, and were you anyone but Joe Biden, it would likely be a rout. Last week, Palin proved herself a charming, confident, and gifted reader of speeches. But that doesn't change the fact that two years ago she was the mayor of a town of 6,000, crusading against dirty books at the local library. You are a six-term senator and chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee. World leaders routinely friend you, unbidden, on Facebook ("Wait … Is this the Angela Merkel?"). World leaders had never heard of Gov. Palin until last Friday.

That's your problem, Joe. Everyone expects you to win the debate, and to trounce her on the substance. But the rules for debating Gov. Palin are different. If you lecture her, you'll be seen as a sexist bully. If you act too smart, you'll be seen as a sexist bully. If you condescend to her, you'll be seen as a sexist bully. So this longtime parliamentary debater (and longer-time female) is going to humbly offer you a few tips on how to debate a girl.

Sen. Biden, let's be clear. Great Supreme Court oral advocates will tell you that a flawless oral argument will never win a case, but a bad argument can lose one. You have a similar problem. If you engage, fight, bicker, or bluster, you can lose this debate. Think Rick Lazio. So my advice, in a nutshell: Don't lose it.

Your real problem with Palin is not actually going to be her gender. Assuming you don't gaze fixedly at her breasts or ask her to fetch you a coffee, you probably won't do anything truly career wrecking on the sexism front. Your real problem is that Palin is not a serious candidate. I don't mean to suggest that she is not a serious person or even a seriously impressive first-term governor with real potential to shake up national politics. Nor do I want to imply for an instant that Palin is not a serious competitor. I just want to state here what you will be unable to say out loud at the debate: That by every obvious metric—experience, knowledge base, decades of public service, policy experience, understanding of the world—Palin is an unserious candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. And as any college debater will tell you, it's far harder to beat a clumsy opponent than a good one. (That's why you do better in your judiciary committee hearings with John Roberts than with Alberto Gonzales.) But if you even hint that Sarah Palin may be opining on the Israel-Palestinian peace process with something Piper pulled off Wikipedia that morning, you will look like a snotty professor lecturing an undergrad. And if you look like a snotty professor, you will come across as a sexist bully.

There is no easy way to tell you this, Joe Biden, but the surest way for Joe Biden to lose a debate against Sarah Palin is by being Joe Biden. If you are windy, pompous, unctuous, or pushy, you will come across as patronizing and condescending—the guy who puts the "boy" into "old boys' network." If you flirt and smirk and flatter (Did you truly tell an Ohio crowd you thought Palin was "good-looking"? Did you really introduce us to your wife, Jill, by leering that she is "drop-dead gorgeous"?), you're going to sound like the creepy guy in the trench coat at the back of the porn theater. If you can manage to be your warm, amiable self, even if you're going batshit on the inside, you will do fine.

And that's why the best way for you to approach Sarah Palin will be to forget that she is a woman. Tell yourself that she is a machine in 3-inch heels that has been programmed to make you look brutish and aggressive. She will attack, and you will smile. She will make jokes, and you will laugh. Do whatever you need to do—take four Percocet, deploy Zen breathing techniques—to prevent yourself from attacking this woman. And do just as much not to pay attention to her. Even if she pulls out her breast pump during commercials, keep your eyes glazed over on the middle distance. No compliments. Don't say you like her shoes. Just the facts, Joe.

You will need to match Palin point for point in the blue-collar-off. If she invokes her sister's gas station, bring up your cousin's Laundromat. (Try to locate one in the coming days, if you aren't in possession of one already.) If she mentions the threshers, you need to see her the threshers and raise her the balers. If she mentions the Washington media elite that hate her, you can truthfully tell her they've been calling you a blowhard for decades.

Caution: Sarah Palin is funny. And it's the kind of jeering Ann Coulter-funny that's assuredly going to irritate the heck out of you. She'll suggest you are a coward and unpatriotic and also (heh heh) that you are corrupt and dishonest. Keep your poker face. Poker face when she says you plan to raise taxes on the middle class. Poker face when she says she has plans to sell Barack Obama's next celebrity memoir on eBay and give all the money to special-needs children. Don't lunge (a la Lazio). Don't sigh (a la Gore). Don't roll your eyes (a la Where the Wild Things Are) or look longingly into the camera as if to plead "This is the best they could find for me?" Just nod sagely and refute logically. Get off a zinger if you can. ("You're nice enough Sarah" does not constitute a zinger.) But you are not going to beat her at the victim game, or the regular-folks game, or the humor game. You have to beat her on the fact that you are qualified to be a heartbeat from the presidency and that in 10 years she may be, as well.

Take a page from Campbell Brown's book and ask politely (and like you really want to know the answer and not just hear yourself say the question) what she learned while leading the Alaska National Guard into that war against Saskatchewan. But play to your strengths. Know stuff. Say it briefly. Don't accuse her of not knowing things. Just know more. An insanely successful college debate friend told me recently that the way he won against women was by always behaving like they were men.

My senior year in college, I debated in Glasgow, Scotland, against men who all stood up when I entered the room. One guy called me a "little flower" in the quarterfinals. Welshmen asked me to fetch coffee. What I learned from that experience was how deeply glad I was to live in a country where, for the most part, a woman can argue, tell jokes, kick ass, or get her ass kicked, just like a man. In 2008, in St. Louis, against a charming, cocky Alaska governor, that will only be truer. Thank goodness we live in a time and place in which nobody expects you to pull the chair out for your opponent or compliment her brooch, and nobody will be offended if you shake her hand firmly and pound her on national security. My best advice to you for dealing with Gov. Palin? Fight like a man. She will.

Sincerely,

Dahlia Lithwick

Without being smarmy about it or unfurling gotcha questions, ABC News anchor Charles Gibson demonstrated that he knows volumes more about national security and foreign policy than does Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

In an on-location-in-Alaska interview that consumed 11 or 12 minutes (video) of the Thursday edition of World News Tonight and continues later tonight on Nightline and again tomorrow on World News Tonight and 20/20, Palin recited her answers as if reading from a Teleprompter inside her head. The extensive coaching she has received could not save her from embarrassment in this exchange.

Gibson: Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?

Palin: In what respect, Charlie?

Gibson (refusing to give her a hint): What do you interpret it to be?

Palin: His worldview?

Gibson: No, the Bush Doctrine, enunciated in September 2002, before the Iraq War.

Palin attempts to fake it for 25 seconds with a swirl of generalities before Gibson, showing all the gentleness of a remedial social studies teacher, interjects.

Gibson: The Bush Doctrine as I understand it is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense. That we have the right of a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that?

Of course Palin agrees with the Bush Doctrine, but she can't come out and say so, having just admitted that she doesn't know it by name. At every point in the Q&A, Gibson had the right follow-up questions to elicit more from Palin, including after he asked the Bush Doctrine cringe-maker. He asks her to give thumbs up or down to the U.S. military's recent forays into Pakistan from Afghanistan. He asks her several ways. But she can't answer the question, and she won't dismiss it. Instead she slows the interview to a crawl again, dribbling and dribbling the ball but refusing to take the shot.

"I get lost in a blizzard of words there," Gibson says, his glasses riding the end of his nose, asking for a "yes" or a "no" again. Palin finally expresses her view that the United States "has to exercise all options" to stop terrorists, making her reluctance to endorse a li'l cross-border thrust into Pakistan made by the commander-in-chief difficult to understand.

In asking about 30 questions, including follow-ups, he gets Palin to call for the inclusion of Georgia in NATO and commits the United States to waging war with Russia if Russia reinvades a NATOed Georgia. (I'm guessing Gibson's hypothetical assumed an invasion into parts of Georgia that Russia doesn't already occupy.)

Palin can't blame her muddled responses on Gibson, who treats her fairly and conducts himself professionally. Never mind about her not being ready to be president. She wasn't even ready for this interview.

******

I'll return later to assess the other Palin-Gibson interview segments. Taunt me with trick questions via e-mail: 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 Doctrine in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

Twice a year, the Washington Post Style section drops all journalistic self-respect to hype a pathetic awards ceremony called "The Kennedy Center Honors."

Style's first genuflection to the event, produced by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, comes each September when the center announces the five or six artists to be "honored" for their "lifetime contributions to American culture through the performing arts." This year, as in years past, Style puffed the KenCen press release into a section-topping story: "Streisand, Freeman, Tharp Among Kennedy Center Fab Six" (Sept. 10). The article doesn't have to explain how special this event is because the honorees do it for them. Morgan Freeman calls the awards ceremony "very special." Twyla Tharp agrees that "it is special." Barbra Streisand: "This is special recognition."

The Style section's second genuflection to the affair comes in December, as the Kennedy Center stages a black-tie whoop-de-do for the honorees in its Potomac-hugging pillbox. The section gives each honoree a tongue bath—I mean a profile—and reports breathlessly on such exciting events as the State Department dinner and White House reception for the honorees.

As with many awards programs, you've got to read into the fine print to discover that its primary function is not to honor great artists. Folks like Streisand, Freeman, Tharp, and this year's other honorees—Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and George Jones—need to rent aircraft hangars to store their Emmys, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, Golden Globes, MTV and CMT awards, and various lifetime-achievement trophies. Rather, the event exists primarily to raise money, as this Kennedy Center Web page confesses: "The Honors gala is the Kennedy Center's most important annual fundraising event, supporting its performing arts, education, and outreach programs."

It's a racket, and the Style section is an accomplice.

Although Style considers the honors a big deal, the only other U.S. dailies to cover the announcement this week were the New York Times and the Washington Times. Our friend Nexis informs us that the only other coverage earned by the affair was tiny squibs in the Akron Beacon Journal, the Courier-Journal in Louisville, the Boulder Daily Camera, the Orlando Sentinel, the Seattle Times, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The mighty Los Angeles Times, which obsesses about arts and entertainment news, wasted not a column inch on the topic. CBS tapes the event but airs it in late December, historically the lowest rating period in the year.

As I plowed through the acres of toadying Style copy and set my word processor to full-bile, I was pleased to discover a piece that delivers more damage to the Kennedy Center Honors than I ever could. The second surprise was that the piece appeared in the Washington Post itself, in its "Sunday Show" section the week of the 1991 Kennedy Center awards.

Titled "Honors? Who Cares Except D.C.?" and written by Paula Span, it put the honors in their proper scale. To a former Kennedy Center chairman's testimonial that the award is internationally recognized as "the most significant award given to any performing artist in the United States," Span responded that "the Kennedy Center Honors are deeply irrelevant, an apparently pleasant event that simply doesn't count for much."

Span beat me to the punch on every count, noting that the show almost never wins its time slot when broadcast; that the rest of the press largely ignores the show; that it's a crass attempt to raise money for the Kennedy Center, not to honor artists; and that it honors "the kind of art Washington can get behind, the sort that doesn't offend William Dannemeyer or Tipper Gore." The complete list of past honorees screams safe as mother's milk, the sort of artists that Boeing, this year's "Exclusive Underwriter of the Kennedy Center Honors Gala Luncheon and Supper," loves to fly with.

Span doesn't excoriate her newspaper for its hard-sell coverage, but she does the next best thing, ridiculing the Washingtonians who attend. She writes:

You can see why Washingtonians, at least the ones who travel in black-tie circles, consider it such a hot ticket. Power and glamour ordinarily are little intertwined in Washington, where a treasured dinner guest might be Richard Cheney and Henry Kissinger was actually considered a sexy guy. Any three movie stars testifying before a House subcommittee can stop traffic on Capitol Hill. But the KenCens mean that at least once a year, Washington gets to be every bit as twinkly as some of those other cities. Look, there's Anjelica! Yes, Kate's wearing pants! Isn't that Marvin Hamlisch?

******

Span's piece isn't on the Post Web site, an oversight I'll see if I can correct. For a brief but withering assessment of the Kennedy Center Honors by Trey Graham in Washington City Paper, scroll to the bottom of this page. What's my grudge against the Kennedy Center? It occupies the former home of Christian Heurich Brewing Co. What transgressive artist deserves a lifetime-achievement award but will never get his due from the KenCen? Send nominations 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 KenCen in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

ABC News anchor Charles Gibson's forthcoming interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin—her first since being hoisted onto the ticket by John McCain—will give a national audience an unvarnished look at the candidate. Because Palin is telegenic and the interview will be shot against scenic Alaskan backdrops, the only thing to prevent the interview from turning into sweet Republican syrup will be tough questions from Gibson.

Gibson and his team got knocked by Washington Post columnist Tom Shales as "shoddy," "despicable," and "prosecutorial" after they hosted the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although I think the transcript tells a different story, Gibson will surely approach this interview on tip-toe lest he become the story again.

Gibson enters this Q&A at a disadvantage: Palin and her associates know volumes more about Gibson and his interviewing techniques and the questions that he's likely to ask than he knows about her and her positions. She'll have crammed like a Ph.D. candidate preparing for an oral examination, and her expert coaches will have prepared her on how to slip out of questions for which she doesn't have answers.

Gibson will wisely avoid the "gotcha" questions designed to prove that she's an ignoramus because she can't name all the capitals of the now-independent Soviet republics. Likewise, he'll skip the complicated hypotheticals ("If the president of North Korea has a stroke and nobody seems to be in charge and the country appears to have restarted its nuclear program, as president, what do you do?").

Because this is Palin's first interview, her coming-out if you will, Gibson has an obligation to ask questions about the issues thrust into the news by her words and actions. After covering that area, he needs to ask the sort of open-ended questions that will dislodge her from the script the McCainites have prepared. We need to hear her genuine views—which are largely unknown—on a range of issues.

Because the first instincts of a politician are to evade a tough question by dismissing it, filibustering, or answering a question that wasn't asked, Gibson's toughest job will be formulating the follow-up question to block her retreat.

Because the McCain campaign is running against Washington, they've got to run against George W. Bush and the Republican majority that not so long ago held Congress. Gibson needs a question that defines this separation. So he should start by asking:

1) What Bush administration policy do you disagree with most, and what would you have done differently?

She'll praise the president before damning his increased spending. To that answer Gibson should volley:

Then how much smaller would the McCain budget be and where precisely should he cut?

If she tries to vague Gibson out, which she will, he need only restate his request for specifics. It will be like pouring sand into her gears. No Republican president has ever delivered on the promise to shrink the federal government, and no Republican president ever will.

Next question:

2) How are you like Hillary Clinton?

Palin will flash that million-dollar, time-buying smile. It's a trick question, but it's an honest trick question because it forces her to acknowledge the obvious similarities. Both women are ambitious, underrated, glass-ceiling crackers and family-career jugglers, but Palin will do her best to distance herself from the comparison because it violates her sense of self. In Palin's mind, Clinton is a baby-killer, a socialist, a Washington insider, and a vain pig. She'll evade with gracious words about how she differs from Clinton, but Gibson can guide her toward self-reflection by noting the similarities (ambitious, underrated, cracker, juggler) and daring her to deny them.

Some questions work because they contain a preface that prevents the questioned from escaping. Here's the earmark-pork question Gibson should ask:

3) You're running as a reformer, a crusader against the special interests and politics as usual. Setting aside for a moment Sen. Ted Stevens' legal problems, should Alaska return to the Senate this Republican who has delivered more pork to his state than virtually any other elected official? Yes or no?

Like a good, loyal Republican, she'll resist condemning Stevens and will extol his virtues, perhaps by perhaps by talking about his struggle to make government smaller. After she runs the line out 100 feet or so, Gibson should give it this yank:

But in the past you had no problem with asking Alaskans to vote out a standing Republican. You challenged the incumbent Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, on a pork-slaying, reformist platform and beat him in the primary. Isn't Stevens as antithetical to your views on good government as Murkowski?

The McCain campaign believes that Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia has given Palin standing as a foreign policy maven, or something akin. For the purposes of his interview, Gibson could accept this as a given in his preface and ask:

4) Unique among all U.S. governors, you lead a state that shares a border with Russia, a sometimes hostile nation with a nuclear arsenal and new geopolitical ambitions. Given that, how do you evaluate Vladimir Putin?

This untethered question evaporates upon being asked: Palin will respond with generalities from the "trust but verify" stockpile. Gibson's duty will be to wrap her answer in barbed wire and toss it back to her:

That's not very specific, governor. It's the sort of response I might get from the governor of Iowa. Can you share any special insight about Russia and Putin that you've gleaned from your years in office?

The vice president can't be the voice of loyal opposition to the president. She is always his slave, so on the campaign trail Palin will have to recant her previously stated view that global warming is not caused by man and accept McCain's view that it is. Politicians should feel free to change their views, if only because the process by which they change their views informs how they will govern. (Tim Russert used to cruise these waters every Sunday.) Gibson should force her to expand on how her mind was changed by asking:

5) Do you still disagree with John McCain's position that global warming is caused by man? If you've changed your mind in the last couple of weeks, please tell me why you changed your mind and when that happened.

She'll try to filibuster about the need for a vigorous debate on the issue, but Gibson is enough of a pro to make her fold and admit that she has surrendered to McCain's position. This follow-up will expose her as a socialist greenie:

Do you favor McCain's advocacy of a carbon-emission cap-and-trade system to stem climate change? If you've changed your mind in the last couple of weeks, please tell me why you changed your mind and when that happened.

Here's another issue that will require genuflection on Palin's part and force her to show how and why she changes her mind. She supports drilling in ANWR. McCain does not. Gibson should ask:

6) On the campaign trail or as vice president, will you try to persuade Mr. McCain to adopt your position on drilling in ANWR? Or have you adopted his?

Some questions must be asked simply because they're on everybody's mind. Just because the candidate will have a well-rehearsed answer shouldn't disqualify it. So, let's hear Gibson ask:

7) Were you for the bridge to nowhere before you were against it?

She can't shrug off the question or joke her way out of this one. If she's smart—and I think she is—she'll call it the biggest mistake of her political career and one from which she's learned many valuable lessons. Gibson's follow-up should explore the libertarian socialist paradise that Alaska has become and ask her if she intends to block it from the federal trough. Make her give a number for Alaska's fair take, Charlie.

Every candidate hates the press, but no smart candidate vents on the topic without thinking through the consequences. Palin scalded the press in her acceptance speech, saying she wasn't seeking the "good opinion" of Washington "reporters and commentators." The comment may presage a campaign against the press, or it could have been just a populist wisecrack. Gibson could open the topic with this softball:

8) For most in the nation, you're an unknown quantity. What questions should the press be asking you?

She'll probably throw down platitudes about the glories of the First Amendment and salute the newspaper reporters in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau who have kept government accountable. Blah, blah, blah. If she doesn't become unhinged, Gibson should invite her to with this follow-up:

What questions are out of bounds?

Will she protest the coverage of Bristol Palin's pregnancy, the nature of Trig Palin's birth, the investigation of her role in the firing of her state trooper brother-in-law? Will she draw a circle around her nuclear family that she forbids the press to enter, or will she acknowledge that she has already made every member of her clan a McCain-Palin campaign appendage and that it's too late to complain? If she's smart—and I think she is—she'll laugh and say that the testing only made her family stronger and better prepared for the future. As cheerful as can be, she'll say, I wish that the news about Bristol's pregnancy could have been released on our family's time table, not that of the press that was asking whether Trig was my baby. But that's all passed. I'm as used to sharp-elbow politics as I am to sharp-elbow basketball, so I hold no grudge against anybody, not even the nasty anonymous bloggers.

If she goes this direction, you can be sure that the McCain campaign will urge the press to consider no question out of bounds for the Obama-Biden ticket.

As a foreign policy novice, Palin deserves an open-ended question like this about what she knew before McCain picked her and what she's learned since:

9) What have you learned about foreign policy from John McCain since joining the ticket?

She'll ably recite chapter and verse from the McCain manual. Gibson's goal here shouldn't be to force a fumble but to see how far she'll carry the ball when given a field that stretches a thousand yards before her. Will she have a beginning, a middle, and an end questioning her answer? Will it reveal her a foreign policy prodigy or a dope whose understanding is miles wide and nano-inches deep. Gibson should resist asking a follow-up and just smile and nod his lunkhead nod that says, Tell me more. Can she fill dead air? Can she resist it?

Finally, Palin is the sort of politician for whom the personal is the political. She's already reaped political rewards from the deployment of her son, a soldier, to Iraq, so Gibson has every right to personalize her views by asking:

10) Your son is being sent to Iraq. What is he fighting for?

Follow-ups:

John McCain says we're on the road to victory in Iraq. How do you define victory? What exactly have we won?

******

Bonus questions for Gibson: What rights do suspected terrorists have? And if Gibson is up to it, this one: On Sept. 2, you and your husband issued a statement about Bristol Palin's pregnancy stating that you were "proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents." Was it Bristol's independent decision to have her baby? Would you have blocked her from getting an abortion if that had been her decision?

Send additional Palin questions 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 Gibson in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

Of the many stories of personal heroics that emerged from the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, perhaps none is as compelling as that of the former Marine who suited up and went searching for survivors—and found two. A year after the attacks, Rebecca Liss told the story of Dave Karnes, who rescued two Port Authority police officers from the rubble. The original article is reprinted below.

Only 12 survivors were pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center after the towers fell on Sept. 11, despite intense rescue efforts. Two of the last three to be located and saved were Port Authority police officers. They were not discovered by a heroic firefighter, or a rescue worker, or a cop. They were discovered by Dave Karnes.

Karnes hadn't been near the World Trade Center. He wasn't even in New York when the planes hit the towers. He was in Wilton, Conn., working in his job as a senior accountant with Deloitte Touche. When the second plane hit, Karnes told his colleagues, "We're at war." He had spent 23 years in the Marine Corps infantry and felt it was his duty to help. Karnes told his boss he might not see him for a while.

Then he went to get a haircut.

The small barbershop in Stamford, Conn., near his home, was deserted. "Give me a good Marine Corps squared-off haircut," he told the barber. When it was done, he drove home to put on his uniform. Karnes always kept two sets of Marine fatigues hanging in his closet, pressed and starched. "It's kind of weird to do, but it comes in handy," he says. Next Karnes stopped by the storage facility where he kept his equipment—he'd need rappelling gear, ropes, canteens of water, his Marine Corps K-Bar knife, and a flashlight, at least. Then he drove to church. He asked the pastor and parishioners to say a prayer that God would lead him to survivors. A devout Christian, Karnes often turned to God when faced with decisions.

Finally, Karnes lowered the convertible top on his Porsche. This would make it easier for the authorities to look in and see a Marine, he reasoned. If they could see who he was, he'd be able to zip past checkpoints and more easily gain access to the site. For Karnes, it was a "God thing" that he was in the Porsche—a Porsche 911—that day. He'd only purchased it a month earlier—it had been a stretch, financially. But he decided to buy it after his pastor suggested that he "pray on it." He had no choice but to take it that day because his Mercury was in the shop. Driving the Porsche at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, he reached Manhattan—after stopping at McDonald's for a hamburger—in the late afternoon.

His plan worked. With the top off, the cops could see his pressed fatigues, his neatly cropped hair, and his gear up front. They waved him past the barricades. He arrived at the site—"the pile"—at about 5:30. Building 7 of the World Trade Center, a 47-story office structure adjacent to the fallen twin towers, had just dramatically collapsed. Rescue workers had been ordered off the pile—it was too unsafe to let them continue. Flames were bursting from a number of buildings, and the whole site was considered unstable. Standing on the edge of the burning pile, Karnes spotted … another Marine dressed in camouflage. His name was Sgt. Thomas. Karnes never learned his first name, and he's never come forward in the time since.

Together Karnes and Thomas walked around the pile looking for a point of entry farther from the burning buildings. They also wanted to move away from officials trying to keep rescue workers off the pile. Thick, black smoke blanketed the site. The two Marines couldn't see where to enter. But then "the smoke just opened up." The sun was setting and, through the opening, Karnes, for the first time, saw clearly the massive destruction. "I just said 'Oh, my God, it's totally gone.' " With the sudden parting of the smoke, Karnes and Thomas entered the pile. "We just disappeared into the smoke—and we ran."

They climbed over the tangled steel and began looking into voids. They saw no one else searching the pile—the rescue workers having obeyed the order to leave the area. "United States Marines," Karnes began shouting. "If you can hear us, yell or tap!"

Over and over, Karnes shouted the words. Then he would pause and listen. Debris was shifting and parts of the building were collapsing further. Fires burned all around. "I just had a sense, an overwhelming sense come over me that we were walking on hallowed ground, that tens of thousands of people could be trapped and dead beneath us," he said.

After about an hour of searching and yelling, Karnes stopped.

"Be quiet," he told Thomas, "I think I can hear something."

He yelled again. "We can hear you. Yell louder." He heard a faint muffled sound in the distance.

"Keep yelling. We can hear you." Karnes and Thomas zeroed in on the sound.

"We're over here," they heard.

Two Port Authority police officers, Will Jimeno and Sgt. John McLoughlin, were buried in the center of the World Trade Center ruins, 20 feet below the surface. They could be heard but not seen. By jumping into a larger opening, Karnes could hear Jimeno better. But he still couldn't see him. Karnes sent Thomas to look for help. Then he used his cell phone to call his wife, Rosemary, in Stamford and his sister Joy in Pittsburgh. (He thought they could work the phones and get through to New York police headquarters.)

"Don't leave us," Officer Jimeno pleaded. He later said he feared Karnes' voice would trail away, as had that of another potential rescuer hours earlier. It was now about 7 p.m. and Jimeno and McLoughlin had been trapped for roughly nine hours. Karnes stayed with them, talking to them until help arrived in the form of Chuck Sereika, a former paramedic with an expired license who pulled his old uniform out of his closet and came to the site. Ten minutes later, Scott Strauss and Paddy McGee, officers with the elite Emergency Service Unit of the NYPD, also arrived.

The story of how Strauss and Sereika spent three hours digging Jimeno out of the debris, which constantly threatened to collapse, has been well-told in the New York Times and elsewhere. At one point, all they had with which to dig out Jimeno were a pair of handcuffs. Karnes stood by, helping pass tools to Strauss, offering his Marine K-Bar knife when it looked as if they might have to amputate Jimeno's leg to free him. (After Jimeno was finally pulled out, another team of cops worked for six more hours to free McLoughlin, who was buried deeper in the pile.)

Karnes left the site that night when Jimeno was rescued and went with him to the hospital. While doctors treated the injured cop, Karnes grabbed a few hours sleep on an empty bed in the hospital psychiatric ward. While he slept, the hospital cleaned and pressed his uniform.

******

Today, on the anniversary of the attack and the rescue, officers Jimeno and Strauss will be part of the formal "Top Cop" ceremony at the New York City Center Theater. Earlier the two appeared on a nationally televised episode of America's Most Wanted. Jimeno and McLoughlin appeared this week on the Today show. They are heroes.

Today, Dave Karnes will be speaking at the Maranatha Bible Baptist Church in Wilkinsburg, Penn., near where he grew up. He sounds excited, over the phone, talking about the upcoming ceremony. Karnes is a hero, too.

But it's also clear Karnes is a hero in a smaller, less national, less public, less publicized way than the cops and firefighters are heroes. He's hardly been overlooked—the program I work for, 60 Minutes II, interviewed him as part of a piece on Jimeno's rescue—but the great televised glory machine has so far not picked him. Why? One reason seems obvious—the cops and firefighters are part of big, respected, institutional support networks. Americans are grateful for the sacrifices their entire organizations made a year ago. Plus, the police and firefighting institutions are tribal brotherhoods. The firefighters help and support and console each other; the cops do the same. They find it harder to make room for outsiders like Karnes (or Chuck Sereika). And, it must be said, at some macho level it's vaguely embarrassing that the professional rescuers weren't the ones who found the two survivors. While the pros were pulled back out of legitimate caution, the job fell to an outsider, who drove down from Connecticut and just walked onto the burning pile.

Columnist Stewart Alsop once famously identified two rare types of soldiers: the "crazy brave" and the "phony tough." The professionals at Ground Zero—I interviewed dozens in my work as a producer for CBS—were in no way phony toughs. But Karnes does seem a bit "crazy brave." You'd have to be slightly abnormal—abnormally selfless, abnormally patriotic—to do what he did. And some of the same qualities that led Karnes to make himself a hero when it counted may make him less perfect as the image of a hero today.

Officer Strauss tells a story that gets at this. When he was out on the pile a year ago, trying to pull Officer Jimeno free, Strauss shouted orders to his volunteer helpers—"Medic, I need air," or "Marine, get me some water." At one point, in the middle of this exhausting work, Strauss asked if he could call them by their names to facilitate the process. The medic said he was "Chuck."

Karnes said, "You can call me 'staff sergeant.' "

"That's three syllables!" said Strauss, who needed every bit of energy and every second of time. "Isn't there something shorter?"

Karnes replied, "You can call me 'staff sergeant.' "

Sexual desire may wane with age, but it doesn't disappear. For Slate's 2007 "Sex issue," Daniel Engber reported on sexual expression in nursing homes—a thorny issue for doctors worried about whether their senile patients are capable of informed consent. His original article is reprinted below.

When 15 elderly residents at a rundown and understaffed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., died over a three-year span that recently ended, their families filed suit in state court. According to Charles Duhigg's damning report in last Sunday's New York Times, these claims of negligence don't have much of a chance. Throughout the industry, financial backers have begun to hide their profits behind elaborate corporate façades, making litigation against nursing homes almost impossible. Not surprisingly, the quality of care is already in decline.

But there is one way in which these venal, cost-cutting schemes might actually improve conditions in the nursing home. As lawsuits become harder to win, families will have less of a say in how their relatives are treated—and that could give administrators the freedom to reverse overcautious policies on intimate contact between residents. If that happens, elderly patients could reap the rewards of more sex.

Old people have plenty of intercourse when they're not in an institutional setting. A survey published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that a quarter of those between the ages of 75 and 85 were having sex, and many were doing it at least once every couple of weeks. A third of these sexually active respondents said they had either given or received oral sex in the past year.

There's no reason to think that nursing-home residents would be any less frisky, if left to their own devices. After all, we're talking about a mixed-sex population living in close quarters with almost endless amounts of free time. Already, staffers routinely field patient requests for personal lubricants, pornographic magazines, larger-size beds, and prescriptions for Viagra. And that's with the 1.6 million elderly residents who came of age before the sexual revolution. Within a few decades, nursing homes will be replete with the desires and expectations of almost 7 million liberated baby boomers.

For now, though, never mind what they want: We seem content to let our elders lie in celibate repose as they wait for Oscar, the death-sniffing cat. In most nursing homes, residents are relegated to narrow mattresses with very little privacy. Nurses enter rooms without knocking, and express disgust at masturbation or coupling, and in some cases, residents are even deprived of conjugal visits from their long-term partners. (This 2004 case study [PDF] from Clinical Geriatrics describes a 77-year-old resident who is instructed by his doctor to "take cold showers" when he complains of sexual issues.) Overseas, elderly patients seem to enjoy a bit more open-mindedness; at one home in Denmark, you can even call out for hookers and X-rated movies. But most nursing-home residents in the United States suffer under a regime of tyrannical chastity.

Why are nursing-home administrators so queasy about sexual expression? They're afraid of getting sued. An estimated 50 percent of elderly residents suffer from some degree of Alzheimer's disease or dementia, which, depending on its severity, can make them confused, forgetful, or unaware of their own behavior. Even in the best cases, many of these patients may not be able to provide clear consent to a sexual advance.

At the same time, certain kinds of cognitive impairment can actually enhance a patient's sex drive. Almost a quarter of dementia sufferers lose interest in sex, but about 14 percent experience a heightened libido—and up to 8 percent become unable to control their sexual behavior. This can manifest as incessant masturbation and repetitive sexual advances. (A patient with memory loss might forget that he's just had sex with his wife or girlfriend, or mistake a stranger for an intimate partner.) Certain psychoactive drugs—especially those prescribed for Parkinson's disease—can also serve as nursing-home love potions.

So what happens when one of these patients with dementia starts sleeping around? According to federal law, nursing-home residents are guaranteed some small degree of privacy, as well as the right to "psychosocial well-being"—which can be taken to include free sexual expression. The administrator must balance these rights with the possibility that the patient isn't able to consent to sex at all, and that his every encounter amounts to an elder version of gray rape.

It's easier to determine if a senior citizen is the victim of outright sexual assault. Even an Alzheimer's patient who has lost the ability to talk can express desire or dismay through sounds, facial expressions, and hand gestures. But caregivers face a dilemma when they find a patient with dementia enjoying a bout of raunchy, goatish sex. Break it up, and they may be depriving a dying man or woman of physical pleasure and companionship. Leave them be, and the nursing home may be exposed to negligence claims from dismayed relatives or a forgotten spouse.

In practice, nursing homes tend to err on the side of prudish caution. After all, most of us aren't expecting our elderly mothers or grandmothers to be having sex in the first place—so we're far more likely to complain if she's getting too much action rather than too little. So, administrators crack down with de facto statutory rape rules that treat elderly patients as if they were teenagers: If they can't be trusted to provide consent, they're automatically treated as the victims of any sexual encounter. The most liberal institutional policies on sexual contact [PDF] call for psychiatrists or social workers to review each situation and decide whether the participants are capable of saying no. Another approach uses a standardized test of mental state, with a minimum score required for consensual sexual activity. As a result, a patient with advanced dementia can summarily lose her right to have any sex whatsoever—even with her own spouse. (In 1996, an Ohio court ruled against a man who sued for the right to spend nights with his mentally incompetent wife. The nursing home had declined his request due to "the complex legal environment in which we exist.")

But rules designed to protect teenagers from sexual exploitation don't make sense when they're applied in a nursing home. For starters, elderly patients have more to gain from sex than their teenage counterparts. A 14-year-old girl kept (or protected) from the arms of an older man can still look forward to a lifetime of fulfilling, consensual relations. An 84-year-old woman who is denied sex has been consigned to lonely chastity for the rest of her days.

Likewise, an Alzheimer's patient has much less to lose from quasi-consensual sex. Statutory rape laws are designed to protect teenagers from a host of problems that aren't relevant to the elderly population. A teenager's coerced or unfortunate dalliance might produce decades of distress as she grows into an adult. But someone with dementia has no dawning awareness after the fact; there's no way for a psychic wound to mangle her developing brain. Nor are unwanted pregnancy and the financial risk it carries at issue. It's not too strong to say that when doctors are too quick to enforce celibacy as a way of protecting their patients from exploitative sex, they replace one form of elder abuse with another.

How can doctors make it easier for their patients to have safe, fulfilling sex in their twilight years? To begin with, they might allow sex between two seemingly willing residents with dementia, in the same way that "age gap" laws allow for consensual sex between age-matched teenagers. Nursing homes might also consider formal exceptions to the consent rules for spouses or long-term partners. Perhaps the safest solution would be to encourage residents to designate a "sexual guardian" in advance of their cognitive decline. That person—whether a spouse, a friend, or a close relative—could serve as the elder-sex cop, or elder-sex partner, for their loved one.

As it stands, nursing-home residents are going to have more sex only when their doctors can stop worrying about legal liability. We shouldn't have to rely on a bunch of sleazy Wall Street investors to give them the opportunity.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il was absent Tuesday from a parade celebrating the 60^th anniversary of the founding of North Korea. Kim has not made a public appearance in more than a month, and a U.S. intelligence report said he might have suffered a stroke. In 2002, Chris Suellentrop analyzed the notoriously militant ruler. The article is reprinted below.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyangology has replaced Kremlinology as the favored sport of Communist-watchers. It's a tricky exercise: Few know what really goes on inside North Korea, much less what motivates the nation's perplexing leader, Kim Jong-il. As a result, most North Korean analysts have a predictive record that rivals tech-stock analyst Henry Blodget's.

A quick scorecard: In 1994, when Kim Jong-il formally took power after the death of his father, Kim Il Sung, most experts foresaw the almost immediate collapse of the son's regime. Kim Jr. was thought to be a drunken lech, too busy partying and chasing tail to survive long. But he kept a firm grip on power despite ruinous floods and a famine that killed upwards of 2 million of his subjects. Then, when Kim met with South Korea's Kim Dae-jung for a historic summit in June 2000, his image underwent a revision. The new Kim was rumored to be the totalitarian version of George W. Bush, a pampered political son who, after a misspent youth, developed into a capable leader. But last week, after North Korea acknowledged that it's been developing nuclear weapons despite promises not to do so, Kim's reputation was revised once again: North Korea's international man of mystery is more Dr. Evil than Austin Powers.

Which isn't to say that he doesn't have a little Austin in him. After all, the 60-year-old Kim is a short, anachronistic party animal who boasts a silly haircut, elevated shoes, and goofy glasses, and who almost always wears the same outfit. Although Kim's dissolute exploits have likely been exaggerated by South Korean intelligence, he's still thought to be a heavy drinker with a fondness for blondes. (Perhaps he was actually referring to his taste in women when he told Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000 that, economically, he was intrigued by "the Swedish model.")

But Kim is a more serious leader than many first thought. He's been running much of the North Korean government for decades. According to Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig's North Korea: Through the Looking Glass, Kim's father picked Kim Jong-il to succeed him in the early '70s, after which the son slowly took control of the levers of power. He preferred to work behind the scenes, and in a sense he still does: Even in death, dear old Dad holds the titular position of "eternal president." (Think of Kim Il Sung as the dictator-for-afterlife.)

Like many sons, Kim didn't always want to follow in his father's footsteps. What he really wants to do is direct. Kim's video library reputedly contains between 15,000 and 20,000 films, and in 1973 he wrote a 300-page book on film, titled On the Subject of the Cinema. In a less academic vein, he authorized the separate kidnappings of a South Korean movie director and his wife in 1978. After keeping them apart for five years (with neither knowing of the other's whereabouts), Kim reunited them and explained that he hoped to turn North Korea into some kind of East Asian Hollywood with their help. The three made six movies together before the two captives escaped, including one that won a best-director award at a Czechoslovakian film festival. In a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times, the liberated actress-wife said Kim could have been a top-notch movie producer had fate not led him down the path of totalitarian dictatorship. "We nicknamed him 'micro-manager,' " she said. "He pays attention to everything. He keeps track of everything. He is simply amazing."

When Mr. Micromanager isn't on the set, however, his temper can get the best of him. His fingerprints are thought to be on a 1983 bombing that offed most of the South Korean Cabinet. He's also thought to have given the order to blow up a South Korean passenger plane in 1987, killing 115 passengers. The motive? Kim wanted to keep people away from Seoul's 1988 Olympics. The evils Kim has visited on his own country are even more horrifying—Stalinist gulags, secret police, and a populace that starves while Kim spends $900 million on dad's mausoleum. According to Anne Applebaum, visitors to Pyongyang report that starving women can be seen "surreptitiously eating grass in the city parks."

It would be easy to dismiss Kim as a madman, but his behavior is too consistent for that. The trick North Korea just pulled on the United States over the two countries' nuclear weapons agreement is a familiar one. As Asia analyst Chuck Downs has outlined, North Korea's negotiating behavior is predictable. First, North Korea "agrees in principle" to a deal; later, the North "reinterprets" the agreement; and finally, it blames its negotiating partner for "the failure of talks."

Kim has used these tactics in almost every one of his recent diplomatic efforts. The Korean peace process hasn't gone anywhere for more than a year: Since the historic Kim-Kim summit, Kim Jong-il has reneged on a number of agreements, particularly embarrassing Kim Dae-jung by not setting a date for a promised trip to Seoul. Kim turned to the same page of his negotiating handbook when dealing with Russia: Vladimir Putin thought he reached a deal with Kim to stop North Korea's development of missiles, but Kim later said that his remarks to Putin were a "passing, laughing matter" that the Russian president had taken too seriously. And now, North Korea attributes its failure to comply with its nuclear agreements to Washington's "hostile policy" toward it.

So, perhaps Dr. Evil isn't the right Mike Myers character to describe Kim Jong-il after all. He isn't a lunatic supervillain. He's just a fat bastard.

In her "Human Guinea Pig" column, Emily Yoffe does things that readers are too shy—or too well-adjusted—to try themselves. She's been a street musician, a beauty pageant contestant, and a children's party entertainer. During the summer of 2006, she tried to preview what old age would be like by checking herself into Leisure World, a retirement community. Her original article is reprinted below.

Adelaide "Addie" Finneran, 83, is my escort to the future. Or one possible future—a future in which I am an "active adult" (which, given Addie's level of activity, would mean being a lot more active than I am now) and living in a community like Leisure World, where Addie has been a resident since 1988.

I am a baby boomer, which makes me one of those sickening, self-obsessed, rapidly aging people you nonboomers wish would just shut up and shuffle off already. Although at age 50 I still have a margin of five years of "youth" before I can become a resident of Leisure World, the frequent entreaties I receive from AARP remind me how long ago my youth really was. (And if you think the Bush administration is monitoring you, try keeping your 50^th birthday a secret from AARP.) For this Human Guinea Pig, I wanted to preview what old age would be like. Usually this column is about exploring odd corners of life so you don't have to. But this time, I'm just getting there ahead of you, because if you're lucky, you'll get there, too.

Addie, who was a housewife, makes a good case for getting old. Her mind is agile and her body obeys her wishes. Her most noticeable sign of age is that she bends forward slightly at the waist, so when she walks, which she does vigorously, it is as if she is heading into a strong wind. She was widowed young, twice. Once in 1950, when her husband died in a car accident, leaving her with a 2-year-old; the second time in 1981, when her husband—with whom she had two more children—died of complications of multiple sclerosis. After his death, Addie's daughter, who lives in Maryland, convinced her to abandon Florida and come to Leisure World in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.

She says it is one of the best decisions she ever made, ticking off some of the scores of activities available to the 8,500 residents: everything from aerobics, to ceramics, to golf, to theatricals, to woodworking. Include archery and it would sound very much like my daughter's summer camp.

Leisure World, which celebrates its 40^th anniversary next month, was one of the earliest retirement communities on the East Coast—the country's most celebrated was Sun City in Arizona, which opened in 1960. There are no official numbers on how many places like Leisure World exist—in Florida and Arizona many such communities come together ad hoc without an age restriction because the developments look so much like Leisure Worlds that no one but older people buy in. (For ones that do require residents to be 55 or older, an exemption of the Fair Housing Act makes it legal to discriminate against the unwrinkled.) These communities are not assisted living, in which somewhat frail people get on-site help. The average Leisure World resident is in her late 70s—although they don't have statistics on sex ratios, the females appear to outnumber the males about 3-to-1.

As I walk the lovely landscaped grounds, I try to imagine my husband and myself living there. Given that my father died at 72 and my husband's parents are still going strong at 87 and 94, all I can envision is my quick demise, followed by my husband being inundated with fluffy-haired women bearing casseroles. (Ladies, go light on the cream sauce!)

This night Addie lets me sit at her table for the weekly on-site bingo game; Addie and her friends frequent a regular bingo circuit around town. Although the game starts at 7 p.m., by 6:15 the place is quickly filling. In my brief sojourn into old age, I realize that before I actually get there I better develop two qualities I now lack: being early, and a belief that I will win games of chance. Addie has already staked out her table on the side of the room and saved seats for two friends: Ann Simpson, 77, and Charlotte (who wants to keep her last name out of it), 62. Ann, who did drafting for the phone company, was also widowed young—her husband died of a heart attack in 1980. I ask Addie and Ann if they are searching for romance, and they both adamantly shake their heads no.

"Do you know what a man our age is looking for?" Ann asks me. "A nurse with a purse."

Addie says that for the last two years of her husband's life she kept him out of a nursing home by caring for him round-the-clock. Since men have a propensity to fall ill and die, she never wants to be in that situation again.

About 150 people have shown up for bingo, and everyone is engaged in lively chatter. There is none of the silent, disinfectant gloom of the nursing home. Addie introduces me to some of her friends. I talk to Anita Robinson and Bill Brasile, who are both in their 80s. For the last two years, Anita, a widow, and Bill, a widower, have been dance and life partners. Like many couples who meet at Leisure World, they have no desire to marry. "His apartment is not big enough for me, and mine's not big enough for him," Anita says. (Addie explains that when people each have property, grown children, and grandchildren, marriage can just result in an estate-planning mess.)

Next I meet a woman universally known as Big Red. She is Gwen Leannarda, 83, tall and slender with orange-sherbet hair. She moved to Leisure World 16 years ago because of increasing crime in her old neighborhood; crime is one of the best friends of developers of active-adult communities. Big Red spent the afternoon rehearsing for the Leisure World production of Guys and Dolls, and now her knees are paying her back, she says.

She says she's got a pair of redheads I should meet, the twins, Doris and Dorothy Bell, 82. The Bells spent their careers working together as secretaries at the phone company and now share an apartment at Leisure World. "We're two old maids," Dorothy says. They've been here for three years, and their favorite event is the sing-along at the bar on Friday nights. Dorothy says the pianist plays "Me and My Shadow" and she and Doris act it out.

"You two keep the place open until 9!" says a friend sitting nearby.

In his delightful book, Early Bird, Rodney Rothman tries retirement in a Florida active-adult community while still in his 20s, and he describes his difficulties mastering the hard-core bingo played with multiple cards and different patterns. When the Leisure World game starts, everyone falls silent and concentrates on their boards—you play a minimum of three at a time, although some players have nine going at once. It starts off easy, with a bingo requiring a straight line of winning numbers, but then the caller announces a "specialty" game. Addie explains that it's an "inside picture frame with four corners." She advises me to fill in my card only when the number matches the pattern, but I quickly lose track of the design, to my elders' delight.

"Emily, don't get mixed up," Ann advises after seeing my mess. "They tax our brains here!"

Bingo lasts for two hours, and, as with any sporting event, it's both relaxing and stressful. But there's no grasping the Leisure World experience without taking a road trip with the ladies.

Traveling is as much a part of the active-adult lifestyle as having the podiatrist on speed dial. In her 18 years at Leisure World, Addie has been on 18 cruises. She has taken bus trips to Chicago and Las Vegas. And, of course, she makes regular trips to East Coast casinos. Almost every Friday morning, she, Ann, and Charlotte take a $29, 8-hour round-trip bus to Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, N.J. They are such regulars that the Eyre bus company makes a special Leisure World stop just to pick up the three of them.

They agree to let me join them on their Trump run. The bus picks us up just before 9 a.m. outside Leisure World. Everyone packs a lunch to eat on the bus, because when we arrive at 1:00 p.m. we only have six hours to gamble—interrupted by a 3 p.m. dinner at the buffet—before boarding the bus back home at 7:15 p.m.

As the bus approaches Trump Plaza, Addie starts opening various pockets and zippers in her purse. Each is stuffed with coupons for free play and free food. I follow Addie to a machine where she turns in her coupons for vouchers—the casino has given her $45! I was given a coupon on the bus that I trade in for a $20 voucher. Then Addie tells me we have to stop at a computer kiosk and enter a sweepstakes that promises everyone wins something. I know I will never win the sweepstakes, and I have no desire to drag home whatever dreck The Donald is giving away, so I decline to press the button, much to her astonishment. A few minutes later Ann comes up holding a large, stuffed bear.

"Did you get your bear yet?" she asks me.

Addie explains I have refused to enter the sweepstakes.

"It's free!" Ann almost shrieks at me, holding out the bear. "Look, it's adorable. It's musical. I've got great-grandchildren but I might keep it for myself." I give in, enter the sweepstakes, then follow Addie to the end of the casino to retrieve our bears. Finally, it's time to play, and that means slots. Or rather, penny slots—the cheapest games in the house. Addie explains that to get some bang for my pennies, I should play two lines at a time, meaning 18 cents per spin. I follow her advice and in a matter of minutes my $20 has turned into $14.89. While Addie goes off to cash in some more coupons she has found, I hop to the dollar slots, where I instantly lose $5. I rush back to the penny slots before she can see me. I finish dumping what's left of my $20 into the slots and put in $10 more. Fortunately, it is now 3 p.m. and we all meet and head for the buffet. We have to get there before 3:30, when the price jumps from $15.95 plus tax to $18.95 plus tax.

It is no surprise that Addie has coupons for this, too—a "buy one get one free" and a voucher. She tries to parlay this into a meal for herself and Charlotte, but the cashier demands that Addie pay full price for one, much to her confusion. But when we get into the buffet and show our tickets, the server says we've been overcharged. Just as Addie thought, and she goes back to the cashier to straighten it out. Addie comes back in and says a supervisor is looking into it, and she finally gets to eat. But when we get back outside, the supervisor insists that Addie has been charged correctly. This makes no sense given all her coupons and the observation of the server. Forty minutes and three supervisors later, Addie gets $8.60 back but is warned that she can't again combine a "buy one get one free" coupon and a voucher for the same meal.

With time running out, it's back to the penny slots. Addie and I bounce around several machines unluckily, until I sit down at one and stick in yet another $20 bill. This machine is hot. I follow Addie's advice, playing my 18 cents, and while I frequently lose, I also regularly hit enough to win $1.70, even $3.60 at a time. I sit fixed at this machine for more than an hour. I can barely pull myself away—I'm up $1.92!—but it's bus departure time.

At first I thought playing penny slots was faintly ridiculous—who cares about winning or losing when you're talking about pennies? But now I understand. When you're deep into the active-adult part of your life, after your children are raised, your career is over, and your spouse is buried, the purpose of the slot machine is not to take your money, but your time.

Addie and I meet up and head to the bus. She's given back the $45 to the casino, plus $10 of her own money. But, as she points out, it's less than she would spend at a dinner theater and she's had more fun. On the bus ride home I ask Addie if she ever worries about her future. She doesn't. "This is a happy time of my life. If I can't take care of myself anymore, my daughter says I can move in with her." And when it's all over, she's donating her body to science.

At 11 p.m., right around their usual bedtime, we're back at Leisure World. The three women pile into Addie's Chevy Blazer for the short ride to their condos. As they pull off, Ann calls out the window at me, "Bye, kiddo!" I have never felt so young.

The first particle beams will race through Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider, the biggest particle accelerator ever built, this Wednesday. After 15 years—and something like $8 billion in construction costs—the machine should start producing early results by midfall. According to the usual story, particle physicists everywhere are anxiously awaiting evidence of an as-yet-unseen elementary particle called the Higgs boson.

Last summer, I argued that the discovery of the Higgs could spell disaster for the field. If we find the Higgs, the Standard Model of high-energy physics would provide a theoretical account of all known particles and their interactions. Physicists could use it to predict the results of every particle accelerator experiment ever performed with near-perfect accuracy, given a big enough computer. But the Standard Model isn't intuitive enough to provide insight into why the world happens to be the way it is. Most physicists hope that there's a deeper, more revealing theory waiting to be discovered; if all the LHC finds is the Higgs, they will be sorely disappointed. Fortunately—and this I didn't mention last year—there's no particular reason to expect that the Higgs will show up.

That the Higgs boson appears in the Standard Model at all is more a matter of historical and sociological coincidence than a prediction based upon firm scientific data. Indeed, there is no direct (or indirect) proof that the Higgs boson is real. The hodge-podge of theories that are rolled up in the Standard Model are such that everything we think we know about particle physics may be exactly right—and yet the "God particle" could be a fiction.

The story of the Higgs boson goes back almost 50 years, to when the theories that would ultimately be combined into the Standard Model were first developed. At that time, physicists were aware of three apparently distinct forces that could influence the motion of particles: the electromagnetic force, responsible for familiar phenomena like thunderstorms and televisions, and two other forces that were important in nuclear processes, known as the strong and weak forces. They knew of a fourth force, too—gravity—but it was far too weak to be important in these experiments.

The Higgs saga begins in 1960 with a physicist named Sheldon Glashow, who had just wrapped up his Ph.D. at Harvard and was working in Copenhagen, waiting for a visa to come through so he could begin his postdoctoral work in Russia. Glashow had a hunch that two of the three forces—electromagnetism and the weak force—were actually manifestations of the same thing, an "electroweak" force. In 1961, he published a paper that tried to describe both forces with a single mathematical framework.

But there were problems with Glashow's theory. When two electrons exert a force on each other, that force is "carried" by a different kind of particle that travels between them. Electromagnetism, for instance, is carried by photons, the same stuff that makes up light; when two electrons repel each other, they exchange photons. To make the connection with the weak force, Glashow needed to suppose that there was a kind of analog to the photon that would carry the weak force. But no one had ever seen a particle like this, and if they were really anything like photons, they should have been very easy to observe.

One way around this problem was to suppose that the weak-force carriers were very heavy. The heavier a particle is, the bigger the accelerator you need to produce it; by theorizing large masses for these force carriers, it was possible to put them outside the range of 1960s technology. This would have explained why no one had seen them, but it also threatened to make Glashow's theory untenable: The only mathematically consistent way that anyone knew of to make these new force-carrying particles so heavy involved adding a new, very light particle to the theory called a Goldstone boson. (A boson is one of two types of particle—the others are called "fermions"—distinguished by differences in their internal rotation. Photons are bosons; electrons are fermions.) These Goldstone bosons would have been easy to detect if they were real, again because they're so light. Yet they were conspicuously absent in experiments.

Meanwhile, a young Scottish physicist named Peter Higgs was interested in an entirely different area of particle physics: the strong force. Here, too, no one knew how to create a consistent theory without also predicting pesky, nonexistent Goldstone bosons. At least until 1964, when Higgs proposed a solution.

Higgs' idea, now called the Higgs mechanism, was to expand the playing field: He studied what happens mathematically if you suppose that force carriers all act the same within the scope of the theory you're trying to build but behave differently when they meet something outside the theory. (This outside influence could be one or several new particles, or it could be something you already knew about but which you wouldn't expect to be relevant to your theory.) He found that it's possible for some force-carrying particles to interact so strongly with an outside particle that they become inextricably entwined, such that what experimenters saw in the lab were really mixtures of the two. Other force-carrying particles don't interact with the outside particle at all. If Higgs was right, all of the force-carrying particles would be very light, but some would appear heavy because they mix with this massive particle. And that means there wouldn't be any Goldstone bosons to worry about.

The original work on the Higgs mechanism didn't worry about the details of the outside particle; to make his point, he just made the simplest possible choice mathematically. The important thing was that, whatever was at the heart of the Higgs mechanism, it could be massive enough to explain why no one had seen it at work.

It wasn't until 1967 that Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam tried using the Higgs mechanism to save Glashow's electroweak theory. But to get the Higgs mechanism to work, they needed to pick a specific particle from outside the theory—a consideration that Higgs didn't have to worry about when he developed his mechanism abstractly. We now know that there were several things that Weinberg and Salam could have proposed that would have fit snugly into their big theory. One set of possibilities, now known as Technicolor models, would have posited a whole bunch of new fermions, rather than a new boson. (Weinberg worked out the specifics of Technicolor models in 1980.) A related set of theories might have accounted for the mass of the force-carrying particles with an exotic interaction—called a condensate—between the top quark (which has since been observed) and its anti-particle.

The ideas behind these alternatives were already well-established in 1967, but there was no evidence to lead Weinberg and Salam toward any one of them. So they chose the most parsimonious possibility as a placeholder until experiments could catch up with a more complete picture of the electroweak force: They published their theory with the single new elementary particle that Higgs originally used as an example and that we now call the Higgs boson. Nothing in the rest of the theory compelled this decision, and though we now have considerable evidence for the Higgs mechanism, we don't have any for the eponymous boson.

Why, then, does the Higgs boson get so much attention, among physicists and in the popular press? Weinberg and Salam's papers, though ignored until the early 1970s, are now immensely influential because of the theory's other predictions. Indeed, Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for their electroweak theory. In 1974, John Iliopoulos cobbled together the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam electroweak theory—Higgs boson and all—with a theory of the strong force to write down the Standard Model as we now understand it. Over the last 35 years, as the Standard Model recorded success after success, it became easy to forget that the Higgs boson is—and has always been—independent of the rest of the theory.

When Tom Brady left Sunday's season opener with an injured knee, his New England teammates didn't want to believe what they'd just seen. "I was like a little kid at the candy store just hoping you would see that No. 12 come out those doors and up the steps," said wide receiver Randy Moss. Patriots fans, too, were incredulous that the season might've been lost in the first quarter of the first game. The poor schlubs who took Brady in the first round of their fantasy drafts felt just as terrible. Meanwhile, NFL followers who hate the Patriots—at this point, that includes most of America beyond the Connecticut River—cheered as the heartthrob QB went down.

The only person in America, it seemed, who felt no emotion was Patriots head coach/automaton Bill Belichick. "As a team we all just have to do our jobs. That really doesn't change," droned the coach as he explained that the best quarterback in the league was lost for the season. "He played one position; he played it very well. We have somebody else playing that position now." Also, the team photo is Wednesday, and players can pick up their dental insurance plans from the traveling secretary.

OK, OK, Belichick did say: "Of course, we feel badly for Tom. It's a tough setback for him." Still, the gears appear to be turning in the taciturn coach's head. The Patriots have won three of the last seven Super Bowls thanks to a detached, what-have-you-done-for-me-lately personnel strategy. Belichick and Scott Pioli, the team's vice president of player personnel, plug in new players the instant the old models cease to be effective, demand a raise, or suffer a long-term injury. Admittedly, this is the strategy of every NFL team—the Patriots just do it better and with less mercy than the other guys. Thus far, Brady has been the only Patriot who has seemed irreplaceable. His injury should destroy the team's chances. But if Belichick does somehow lead New England to the playoffs, it will be the ultimate validation of his genius, as well as a signal that in today's NFL the coach and the GM are more important than any single player. That will be great for Bill Belichick's legacy, but it'll be a sad lesson for NFL fans.

You might recall that Belichick dealt with a similar scenario in the recent past. The New England dynasty started when Belichick plugged in Brady—a lightly regarded sixth-round draft pick—after the team's star player, Drew Bledsoe, was pancaked by New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis. With a callow quarterback at the helm, the team won with defense, smarts, and clutch plays in the fourth quarter. Or did it? In football, it's impossible to separate the accomplishments of the individual from those of the team. Was it a coincidence that the Patriots started winning as soon as Brady stepped under center, or was he—at least in those early years—simply an adequate caretaker of a team that was ready to win?

We'll probably never know if the Pats carried Brady or Brady carried the Pats in those early years. There won't be much question who's carrying whom this season. The guy who's replacing Brady—the player Belichick lovingly described as "somebody else playing that position now"—is longtime backup Matt Cassel. He is the perfect test subject for this experiment. Cassel hasn't started a game since taking the field for the Chatsworth High Chancellors in 1999. In college, he was buried on USC's depth chart behind Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart; in the pros, he's held a clipboard while Brady has started 128 consecutive games. Cassel has been iffy in his rare opportunities. Last season, he replaced Brady with New England winning 42-7 against Miami. After the Dolphins scored twice in the fourth quarter, once on a return of a Cassel interception, Brady was reinserted and threw a pile-on touchdown pass. Cassel was also awful enough this preseason that Brady came to his defense after announcers slammed his performance.

On Sunday, the new quarterback played creditably in getting the win against a Chiefs team that also saw its starting QB go down to injury (to somewhat less fanfare). Nevertheless, the Patriots won't rely on Cassel's individual brilliance to keep winning. Brady's injury is a reminder of the critical importance of the offensive line to a quarterback's success, or lack thereof. Early in his career, Tom Terrific benefited from the strength of the linemen in front of him; last year's Super Bowl, by contrast, was the ultimate example of how even a historically potent offense doesn't work without pass protection. Elsewhere in the NFL on Sunday, Cassel's former teammate Carson Palmer had an awful day in Baltimore, thanks mainly to the fact that the Cincinnati line has the consistency of polenta. Or witness the tribulations of Marc Bulger in St. Louis, who was downgraded from a top-five quarterback to a mediocrity right around the time his linemen began dropping around him.

Compared with the team Brady inherited and led to the 2001 championship, this Patriots squad has both better line play and better playmakers. The 2008 Pats still have Randy Moss, Wes Welker, Richard Seymour, Vince Wilfork, and Rodney Harrison; Antowain Smith and David Patten were among the key starters in Brady's first year as the starter. According to David Halberstam's The Education of a Coach, Belichick reacted to the 2001 upset of the Rams by crowing, "Can you believe we won the Super Bowl with this?!" The 2008 Patriots expect to win and won't exult about it afterward.

While it's difficult to conjure a scenario where New England earns a playoff bye, eight to 10 wins still seem reasonable. But the difference between a solid playoff team and a Super Bowl champion is often the quarterback, and the difference between Brady and Cassel is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. That 20-game regular-season winning streak may not last past this weekend, and players like Moss won't be kids in a candy store this season. That's a lot of pressure on Matt Cassel—from the fans, from his teammates, and from Belichick, who has to know that if New England tanks this season, it will be said that the coach owes all of his success to Brady. If it's any consolation to the new man in Foxborough, he's at least likely to go further than either Carson Palmer or Matt Leinart this season.

Perhaps, dear reader, you are just an innocent consumer of cable news, and it's your fortune to enjoy a mind uncluttered by the chatter of Romenesko, the whammo yammer of Variety, and the sweet smell of Page Six dung-slinging. In which case, God bless you and skip to the fourth paragraph.

Others, having stared more intently into the spectacle MSNBC has made of itself this election season, might be wondering when the on-and-off-screen drama will reach its inevitable peak. But Hardball host Chris Matthews, his self-regard untouched by self-consciousness, has been blustering forward at an even higher rate of wind speed since April, when Mark Leibovich in the New York Times Magazine convincingly pegged him as a total hustler. And Countdown host Keith Olbermann—a superstar now for reading the left's outrage at the Bush White House right back to the left in radio-days cadences—spent his summer escalating a feud with Fox News that seems best settled in a sandbox. And the past fortnight of convention coverage saw the egos of these personalities and others playing bumper cars live on air, sniping and sideswiping. This week, Matthews and Olbermann were separated from their shared duty of anchoring upcoming debate and election nights; they were de-elevated to analysts after leaving the pretense of objective journalism to die peacefully in its sleep.

Trade papers and media blogs seemed to consider these events to be a meltdown indicative of inner turmoil and bad management. Maybe so, but it only looks like riveting television to me. The channel is 12 years old now, and—restless and growing-pained and insatiably attention-hungry, trying on new identities every hour of the day—it behaves as if in early puberty.

The Rachel Maddow Show (weeknights at 9 p.m. ET) gives some indication of what MSNBC might want to be when it grows up. Its Monday debut was altogether sane—the first and toughest hurdle for a cable-news show to meet—and its atmosphere no more than 50 percent hot air. Further, it had moments of sass, flow, spirit, and a modicum (pardon my jargon) of gravitas. And the host is not afraid to punctuate her clear paragraphs of liberal-to-progressive thought with a well-timed bat of her eyelashes.

Maddow first gained prominence as a host on Air America Radio—in my experience, a channel that encourages knee-jerk liberals to sound at least mildly coherent when talking too loud in coffee shops. She has been a fixture on MSNBC since playing an arch-liberal panelist on The Situation with Tucker Carlson, earning much adoration as a leftie pundit more committed to policy than politics. Lately, sounding smooth as butter, she has been as hot as sliced bread. She's confident enough in the intelligence of her arguments not to attempt bludgeoning anyone with them.

The new show seems built on her promise to come on not like a media hack such as Matthews—and not at all a Howard Beale-style mad prophet like Olbermann—but, rather, like a concerned citizen, a Democrat unconnected to the System. Her job is prying insights out of the hack and the madman and their ilk, and her aim is to offer her audience reassurance. Olbermann aided her in this quest last night. As her first guest, he hashed over an interview with Obama that he had aired in the previous hour; reasoned that the candidate's confidence in the face of the day's poll figures was not undue; and, just for kicks, likened Sarah Palin, in her ingenue quality, to the Lana Turner of legend.

By the time Olbermann left, Maddow was reassured enough about the Democrats' "capacity for attack" that she could wag her head and move on to other matters. These include the achievements of Sarah Palin (in a recap of lukewarm Palin-supporting sound bites from Bush officials), the religious views of Sarah Palin (during a chat with a clergyman about church and state—Maddow's introductory "Talk Me Down" segment"), and the media's treatment of Sarah Palin (opposite Pat Buchanan, "my fake uncle," as she twice called the conservative). She left her constituents with some relatively subtle arguments to recycle at their next Chardonnay-soaked orgy.

I do hope that the McCain campaign sees fit to book its spokesbots and surrogates onto the show. There would be sizzle in seeing this woman joust with genuine opposition—to watch her play get-the-guests with those who aren't just spinning for sport—and there can be no doubt that this year's bewildering gender politics will give The Rachel Maddow Show a further charge. Cf. Campbell Brown—host of CNN's Election Center—who last week instigated a bunch of moaning when dogging a McCain representative to give her a straight answer to a simple question. Even if you agree that Brown's queries were fair, you must have seen that her face was a farce. While spokesman Tucker Bounds dodged and BS'd, she winced theatrically, arched her excellent eyebrows, and pulled a frowny face at his hopeless thrashing. A man could not have gotten away with that mugging or, especially, with Brown's parting line: "Tucker, I'm going to give it to you, baby. We'll end it there." Baby? Wow. We've come a long way.

To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, click the arrow on the player below.

You can also download the audio file here, or click here to subscribe to the Slate Audio Book Club feed in iTunes.

The Audio Book Club kicks off the fall books season with a discussion of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, a sprawling novel based largely on Laura Bush's life. The story of a shy, book-loving girl from Wisconsin who winds up as the president's spouse, American Wife asks what it might be like to have married a man who doesn't share your political values. Slate culture critic Meghan O'Rourke, Slate contributor and NYU professor Katie Roiphe, and Slate Deputy Editor Julia Turner debate the merits of Sittenfeld's novel. Does Sittenfeld, author of best-seller Prep, illuminate anything about Laura Bush's life? Does the novel have any power as fiction, or is it interesting only insofar as it has factual relevance? The 45-minute conversation explores these and many other questions.

If you'd like to get an early start on the next book-club selection, we've chosen David Carr's The Night of the Gun, a reported memoir about being an addict. Watch for—and listen to—our Audio Book Club about The Night of the Gun in early October.

You can also listen to any of our previous club meetings by clicking on the links below*:

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh

Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock

All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren

Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton

Independence Day, by Richard Ford

The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Beloved, by Toni Morrison

Everyman, by Philip Roth

Saturday, by Ian McEwan

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion

Questions? Comments? Write to us at podcasts@slate.com. (E-mailers may be quoted by name unless they request otherwise.)

* To download the MP3 file, right-click (Windows) or hold down the Control key while you click (Mac), and then use the "save" or "download" command to save the audio file to your hard drive.

In the 1980s, the rising conservative movement tried to frame the pro-life cause as part of a broader family-values agenda that included reducing rates of illegitimate childbirth, welfare dependency, and divorce. To Ronald Reagan and many of his most ardent supporters, abortion-on-demand was the pre-eminent example of the breakdown of traditional morality brought about the sexual revolution. Few remember it this way, but Reagan's "evil empire" speech, delivered to the National Association of Evangelicals in 1983, had more to say about the right of parents to prevent their daughters from receiving contraceptives without their consent than it did than about the Soviets.

In fact, these two conservative social goals—ending abortion and upholding the model of the nuclear family—were always in tension. The reason is that, like it or not, the availability of legal abortion supports the kind of family structure that conservatives once felt so strongly about: two parents raising children in a stable relationship, without government assistance. By 12^th grade, 60 percent of high school girls are sexually active or, as Reagan put it, "promiscuous." Teen-pregnancy rates have been trending downward in recent years, but even so, 7 percent of high-school girls become pregnant every year. And the unfortunate reality is that teenagers who carry their pregnancies to term drastically diminish their chances of living out the conservative, or the American, dream.

Forget the Juno scenario—in the real world, only a tiny fraction of unwed mothers give their babies up for adoption. If you do not allow teenage girls who accidentally become pregnant to have abortions, you are demanding either that they raise their children as single mothers or that they marry in shotgun weddings. By the numbers, neither choice is promising. Unmarried teenage moms seldom get much financial or emotional support from the fathers of their babies. They tend to drop out of high school and go on the dole, and they are prone to lives of poverty, frustration, and disorder. Only 2 percent of them make it through college by the age of 30. The Bristol Palin option doesn't promote family happiness, stability, or traditional structure, either. Of women under 18 who marry, whether because of pregnancy or not, nearly half divorce within 10 years—double the rate for those who wait until they're 25.

I've long expected the Republican Party to resolve this conflict in its social vision by moderating its stance on abortion. Politically, pro-life absolutism has never made much sense. A significant element within the GOP—libertarians, economic conservatives, Barbara Bush—favors leaving Roe v. Wade alone. A majority of the country agrees. Meanwhile, the percentage of people on either side of the debate who say they'll vote only for a candidate who shares their views has been steadily shrinking. Since Lee Atwater's heyday, pragmatic Republicans have been trying to figure out how the party can become a "big tent," making room for a pro-choice as well as a pro-life faction. Until recently, the modernizers included John McCain himself, who in 1999 said, "Certainly in the short term, or even the long term, I would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." That was only one of several attempts on McCain's part to evolve his position. If Roe ever were repealed, there would follow a fight in every state about whether to ban abortion by statute. Politically, this could be the best thing to happen to liberals since the New Deal. We got a taste of this dynamic after the Supreme Court's 1989 Webster decision, which allowed states to restrict abortion in certain ways. As my colleague William Saletan has argued, fear of Roe being overturned contributed to Democratic electoral gains in 1989 and 1990 and to a wave of more conciliatory rhetoric from the GOP.

But renewed evangelical dominance of the GOP in the Bush years has pushed McCain in the opposite direction—to the point of letting Phyllis Schlafly revise the abortion plank in the party's 2008 platform. The new version actually eliminates language from the 2004 edition rejecting "punitive action against women who have an abortion." This "base" bias explains how McCain ended up with a wildly underqualified running mate, instead of his preferred pro-choice veep picks, Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. It's the reason social conservatives have wholeheartedly embraced Sarah Palin, who chose to raise a child with Down syndrome rather than terminate a pregnancy. And it's why a pregnant, unmarried 17-year-old and her boyfriend appeared onstage in St. Paul with the Republican presidential nominee last week. A pregnant teenager as role model, Mary Cheney's gay parenting, the primary caregiver to a special-needs infant working a second, 24/7 job—the Republican right is prepared to overcome its objection to all of this and more as the price of an uncompromising pro-life agenda.

Give the anti-abortion extremists credit for living their principles. If they weren't deadly serious, they wouldn't sabotage their party's political prospects or sacrifice so many other values they hold dear for the sake of denying exceptions in cases of rape and incest. But Sarah Palin's pro-life extremism is as ethically flawed as it is politically damaging to the GOP. By vaunting their pro-life agenda over everything else, conservatives are abandoning one of their most valuable insights: that intact, two-parent families are best for children and for the foundation of a healthy society. The evidence here is overwhelming. Children with two parents, whether of the same sex or the opposite sex, are vastly better off. By every measure social scientists have devised, those raised by two parents grow up healthier (physically and psychologically), wealthier, and wiser, on average, than those raised by a single parent, divorced parents, or even a parent and a stepparent.

About this, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bill Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and, yes, Dan Quayle were entirely correct. Remember Murphy Brown? I always thought the former vice president was on solid ground when he called it morally irresponsible to encourage women without the TV character's resources to embark on child-rearing on their own. In today's GOP, Quayle wouldn't condemn Murphy Brown. He'd call her up to the stage and salute her for choosing life.

Slate advice columnist Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, was online at Washingtonpost.com to take readers' questions about weddings and the etiquette for planning, attending, or buying gifts for the big day. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.

Emily Yoffe: Let the drama begin!

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Aurora, Colo.: Dear Prudence,

Recently, two dear friends of mine were married. Included in the invitation was card that stated the couple was registered at Retail Place A and to visit the retailer's web site to select, buy, and ship a gift. How convenient! Except the registry for the couple was an "account" at the retailer that wedding guests were to donate money to so the couple could presumably buy something large(r). Upon further research, I discovered that the newlyweds had the option to completely cash out their account, in the event that they were unable to decide on what to spend their gift. Please comment.

Signed,

One More Way to Ask for Money

Emily Yoffe: First, wedding invitations are supposed to be invitations to a wedding. The instructions included should be when the event is and how to get there, not what to buy.

Is this retailer Fannie Mae? I'm astounded there isn't even a pretense of registering for specific gifts. You can feel free to ignore the deposit instructions and purchase an actual gift if you are so moved.

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Miami: Dear Prudence,

When I got engaged, my parents gave me $25,000 with the unspoken agreement that this would help pay for a lavish wedding. Weddings are a BIG deal in their culture. I already got mom and dad to accept that the wedding will be at city hall, not a church, so now, mom expects the $25K to finance the reception. The proposed guest list has almost 200 people and is still growing. Her wedding dream requires a hall, catered food, $4,500 for an open bar and even a babysitter in case people bring rowdy kids.

Meanwhile, my guest list is closed at 22 people and the total price tag is $1,600 including the dress, food, rings, a champagne toast and 20% gratuity for the waiters at the restaurant hosting the wedding party. How do I convince my mother that she's not the one getting married? My older brother did the same thing I'm planning without a single question or fake anxiety attack. I have another six months of my mother breathing into a paper bag before I'm married and this ridiculous issue can be buried forever. Part of me knows the simple way to solve this is to give back the money and have my small, affordable wedding, but it irks me that my brother got to use his wedding money for a luxury honeymoon and to pay down student loans while I'm like the family leper for wanting to use the $25K for the down payment on our apartment.

Thrifty Bride

Emily Yoffe: You need to have a serious talk with your mother about her gift and about your plans. You need to clarify if this is a very generous nest egg for your new life, or an account with strings—the strings being you can only use the money to pay for the kind of celebration your mother wants. In either case it's your wedding (and your new life) so you have to be respectful but firm and not be guilt-tripped into a hosting an event you have no desire to have. But I am always astounded that parents would rather see their hard-earned money go to roast beef for 300 than to a down payment on a home.

_______________________

St. Louis, Mo.: My best friend was recently incredibly hurt by what she perceived as a bride's rudeness and selfishness during the wedding weekend's activities. My friend felt close to the bride, "like a sister" and had picked up the slack when the maid of honor (and only attendant) dropped the ball for the shower and the bachelorette party. My friend was invited to some but not all of the weekend's events for out-of-town guests (she lives in-town), so she felt hurt when the bride said she wasn't invited to the Sunday brunch, but several people expected that they would see her there. (The bride's excuse was that she didn't have control over the guest list, but my best friend was there as she gave the list to the host over the phone, so she knew that was not really true.)

My question is: what are some etiquette guidelines for out-of-town guest events? Is there a way to include in-town people to show appreciation? Also, what you do when you feel like you have gone out of your way and you are not appreciated?

P.S.: My friend's solution to the last question was to get violently angry and swear to never speak to the bride again—I don't recommend that...

Emily Yoffe: Usually I hear from people who complain about the forced march of events they are required to attend, not that they didn't get invited to twelfth celebration. Your best friend sounds a little martyrish here. Yes the bride should express her profound appreciation, but it sounds as if your friend wanted more attention than she was ever going to get. She should be glad she got to sleep late and skip the brunch.

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Anonymous: My fiance's father constantly makes negative comments about how much we are spending on vendors despite all the research I do and truly great deals I am getting. His family is paying for photography and video and his father just does not understand how much these services cost and compares the prices to his wedding 26 years ago. Is there a polite way to tell him to keep his opinions to himself?

Emily Yoffe: Imagine that you hadn't bought a car in 26 years—you, too, would be shocked at the outrageous inflation. If everything goes right, this man will be your father-in-law for many years to come. Do not tell him off just because he's sounding off over wedding prices. Just smile and explain you're searching for the best bargains, but you agree all this stuff is really expensive.

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Philadelphia, Pa.: Dear Prudie:

Lucky me, I'm engaged! Not so lucky us, we're paying for the wedding ourselves. We're both older (mid-30s), so we have a clear idea of what we want: classy, individual, and not over-the-top. Unfortunately, my husband-to-be has a large extended family that will probably be hurt if they're not all invited. My list is modest, and I've never dreamed about a big wedding, but if cost wasn't an issue, I wouldn't be opposed to it.

We're thus presented with the classic dilemma: How do we not offend, do what we'd like to do, but yet not severely compromise our financial situation in the future? The destination wedding probably won't work because of my immediate family, and my husband to be isn't excited with the idea of a casual affair—with less cost—that we can invite more people to.

Any ideas on how to have it all would be appreciated.

Full of Class, Not Cash

Emily Yoffe: You need surrogates to spread the word around that you two are having a very small wedding—that you wish you could invite everyone, but you can't. I know the small wedding is becoming a quaint concept, but surely people can still grasp it. Then, later, you might want to have a picnic or some kind of more informal gathering (again get the word spread you're not expecting gifts) that's for you as a couple to get to spend time with his extended family.

_______________________

Brooklyn, N.Y.: Is it really the world's worst sin to invite friends to an engagement party and not the wedding? I've actually been invited to many in the past, but I recently read how rude it is to do so and I am feeling sheepish about having invited a small group to an engagement party and not the wedding... How bad is this?

Emily Yoffe: The world's worst sin? Yes, yes it is—that's why Leviticus goes on at such length about engagement party invitations. Yes, it is considered rude to invite people to pre-wedding events who aren't invited to the wedding. An exception is if the people in your office decide to throw you a celebration/shower with no expectation that they will be on the invite list. But why would you invite a select group of people to bring you engagement gifts whom you didn't intend to invite to the wedding? Nonetheless, it's done, so as long as you've written gracious thank you notes, don't dwell on it.

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San Francisco, Calif.: Dear Prudence, I am a bridesmaid in a wedding and am looking forward to spending time with the couple and their family and friends, and celebrating the start of their new life together. The families of the couple seem eager to show off, and I have been invited to multiple showers, in addition to a lavish bachelorette weekend, which involves another shower-type party. How many times am I expected to give a gift? I have already given one gift I am comfortable with, and of course, bought a dress and the additional accessories necessary for the wedding. How do I attend another shower, and not feel awkward showing up empty handed?

Emily Yoffe: I have heard from so many couples who said they simply could not refuse their many loving friends and relatives the opportunity to throw them a dozen showers. I hope down the line they are able to tell their children, "You get one birthday party a year." There should be a lid on the number of showers, and the guest list should be distinct so people aren't invited to serial gift-giving events. Show up empty-handed and with a smile (or decline). One engagement gift is enough.

_______________________

New York, N.Y.: It seems like every engaged person I know is having engagement parties, then bridal showers, plus bachelorette parties, and then the actual wedding. Plus, with coworkers, I am usually asked to attend the wedding and also chip in for a joint gift from the office. Obviously, all of this, at least 3 times a year, is financially draining. I have a set amount of how much of a gift I feel is appropriate for a wedding, and I usually spend that much total on gifts. I thought weddings were for the couple to celebrate their new life together, not an excuse to get as many gifts as possible. But lately I've noticed that people seem to give very lavish gifts for each occasion, and I wonder if I am being cheap. Should I consider the cost of shower and engagement gifts independently of the wedding gift?

Emily Yoffe: Yeah to cheapness! It says something about how out of control this has all gotten that guests need to think about taking out a second mortgage to pay for all the gifts. Set a budget and stick to it.

_______________________

Help!: I need a definitive answer, please: Are registries tacky? Yes or no?

If you can't tell people about the registry, and you can't list the registry in the invites, is it better not to have the registry in the first place?

Thank you!

Emily Yoffe: Etiquette opinions vary. The Emily Post franchise says they're fine, Miss Manners says no. I find them helpful, so I don't have a problem with them. But to reiterate—the registry information DOES NOT GO IN THE WEDDING INVITATION. If guests inquire about a registry you or a family member can point them to it. And people are not obligated to give gifts just from the registry either. Actually, they're not obligated to give gifts—but people usually want to if they don't feel they are being held up at gunpoint by the couple.

_______________________

Glover Park, D.C.: I'm recently engaged, and have started the process of making a list of wedding invitees. There are obvious inclusions, but what do I do about people whose weddings I went to within the last 2-4 years who I am no longer close with (as a result of just drifting apart, as opposed to a falling out)? Is there a rule of reciprocity that states that I have to invite them?

Emily Yoffe: If the first communication between you in four years would be your wedding invitation, no you are not obligated to them. This is a judgment call and it might help you to think if the situation were reversed. Would you be offended at not being invited to X's wedding or would you think, "How nice for her. I should drop her a note to catch up and to congratulate her."

_______________________

Miss Manners Fan Club: I'm sure you're getting inundated with this same comment right now, but Miss Manners has never said that registries weren't okay! In fact, she has lots of suggestions about selecting appropriate items and patterns for them. What she is indeed very strict about is the promulgation of the registry information—NEVER in an invitation or similar, but only as a word-of-mouth response to a specific inquiry by a guest.

Emily Yoffe: Thanks for the clarification. I was just reading her on asking for money and I think I think I was confusing her view of asking for that with her view of asking for china. (Although she doesn't seem crazy about registries in general.) I worship Miss Manners and would not want to distort her advice!

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Rockville, Md.: Hello! Why is it so terrible to have a destination wedding?

Emily Yoffe: I know many people who have been guests at destination weddings and have had a great time, so I don't make a blanket statement about beach blanket weddings. And yes, every wedding ultimately has a destination. What I object to is forcing people to give up their vacation time and spend thousands and thousands of dollars to schlep to the couples' idea of a vacation. If the couple wants to go for an extended trip to an exotic destination, why don't they just go by themselves and call it a honeymoon.

_______________________

Ann Arbor, Mich.: Is it okay to register for more things than you have people invited? I wanted to give people a great selection so they can pick something they would like, but my cousin recently said I must have invited 500 people to my wedding if I'm expecting to get all those gifts. Should I cut back on my registry? I wasn't expecting all the gifts, I just want to give people options... but the absolute last thing I was is to appear greedy.

Emily Yoffe: Yes, you appear greedy if you look like you think of your registry as a version of Supermarket Sweep. The registry should have a reasonable choice of things within various price ranges, but not look as if you are saying, "What I really want is the whole store!"

_______________________

DC: I recently got married and a number of my guests have yet to give us a wedding gift. While I know etiquette states that guests have up to 1 year to give a gift, does that really hold true? Is it wrong of me to expect a wedding gift of any value from those who attended the wedding? Is it wrong of me to be personally offended if a guest did not give a gift at the end of the one year period?

Emily Yoffe: I don't know where this "You have one year to give us a gift or else" idea comes from. Probably the same place that the "I have one year to write you a thank you note" idea comes from (that is false, by the way—write the note asap). Repeat three times: "No one is obligated to buy me a gift." You presumably married the guy of your dreams and have started a happy life. Why not dwell on your good fortune rather than the seething about lack of loot from your guests?

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Troy, Mich: What if anything should be included on the wedding invite regarding gifts? The bride and groom have lived on their own for 20 years and have everything necessary to set up their home. They are not registering, but would like cash donations to help with the wedding expenses. Is the best way to just let family know so they can spread the word if guests should inquire?

Emily Yoffe: I'm always curious about how excited friends are family are supposed to be that a couple who have lived together for TWENTY YEARS, are getting married. If in that time you haven't saved enough cash to put on a wedding, you have bigger problems then how to hit up people for gifts. You say you have all the household goods you need, so why not spread the word that you since you've been a couple since before people had heard of the Internet, you don't actually expect any gifts.

_______________________

Dover, Del.: My sister is getting married and would like both of my parents to walk her down the aisle. The only problem is...they're divorced and don't get along. My sister feels that the father of the bride gets a lot of special treatment at weddings. He gets to walk her down the aisle and give her away and he gets the father/daughter dance. Our mother played a very large role in our lives and my sister wants to celebrate that. Now, my father is pitching a fit and says that he doesn't want to walk her down the aisle at all and doesn't want to wear a tuxedo. My sister is obviously upset. Prudie, how do I get my family to enjoy this great occasion and get my father to grow up?

Emily Yoffe: You can't get your father to grow up, sadly. But you can be the grown ups. I think it's lovely when both parents walk the bride down the aisle. If your father says he won't if your mother does it, so be it—Mom walks the bride. Your sister should try to be as gracious as possible to your father and say, "Then, Dad, I look forward to having the first dance with you."

_______________________

Lewes, Del.: My 20-year-old granddaughter is being married on the beach in Florida in October. I will not be attending a shower being held in Maryland, but have sent a set of dishes from her registry. I am flying to Florida and my son has made accommodations for housing for me. There is another "gift card shower" being held in Florida the day before the wedding that I am obligated to attend. The wedding in Florida is just for parents and grandparents with a dinner afterwards. One week later the groom's family is hosting a "reception" in Maryland that I will be attending as well. I am retired on a fixed income and want to do the right thing. My daughters are telling me that I am only obligated to give one wedding gift (probably cash) for the two events. What is the right thing to do? Is the second shower gift expected as well? What is the appropriate amount for a gift given my other expenses? Thank you in advance!

Emily Yoffe: The appropriate amount is the amount you feel comfortable with. Period. I hope your granddaughter has been raised to simply be happy that she has a grandmother around able to witness this wonderful event.

_______________________

Waldorf, Md.: Hope I'm not submitting this too late...

This year will be my 5 year anniversary. My mother died shortly before my wedding, at the time, I relied on her for etiquette knowledge. When I did my invitations, I didn't realize how cheesy it was to include the registry information. (I certainly do now!) I included it discreetly on the back of the directions insert. Here I am, 5 years later, still bothered by my lack of etiquette. Is there anything that I can do short of individually apologizing to 150+ guests?

Thank you.

Emily Yoffe: Forget it! Everyone else has. Be glad you're the kind of person who can recognize she makes mistakes. Everyone does, and this one is a minor one.

_______________________

Minneapolis: I am a teetotaler for non-religious reasons, my fiance rarely drinks, and most of my family and friends drink. Am I expected to serve alcohol at my reception, or would I be able to have a dry reception (which I would prefer for many reasons)? Any light you can shed on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Emily Yoffe: You obviously get to choose the kind of reception you want. But in the absence of a religious restriction, etc. a dry reception will have the air of a temperance meeting, which perhaps you would rather avoid.

_______________________

Small town, Mich.: Hello,

I received an invitation to a wedding that had no RSVP card. Should I let the couple/the bride's parents/anyone know that I will attend? And what is the best way to do so.

Emily Yoffe: An rsvp card is a courtesy to nudge people into fulfilling their obligation to rsvp. Get a piece of paper, write that either you look forward to attending, or will be unable to, put it in an envelope, stick a stamp on it and mail it.

_______________________

Emily Yoffe: Thanks everyone—and best wishes for long and happy marriages.

Dear readers, ask not what Slate can do for you but what you can do for Slate. Last week, we sent out a call for your best antimetabole—the rhetorical device in which words are repeated in transposed order, as with this Sarah Palin zinger at the Republican National Convention: "In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change." So far, you've sent in more than 100 examples, suggesting that you've always dreamed of moonlighting as political hacks—and that you're very bored at work.

Some of you concocted nonpartisan antimetaboles that would work equally well in a Republican or a Democratic stump speech. Peter Morreale led the pack in this category with "A great president must not only answer the question, he or she must also question the answer." Look out for that one at the first debate.

Far more of you, however, dreamed up nasty attack lines—a reflection, perhaps, of the WWE turn the presidential race has taken in recent months. On the Republican side, we have James Cornell Behrens, who wants to hear McCain or Palin say: "Obama will not shut up about his record of change; I wish someone would change the record." But James is outnumbered by Slate readers from the angry left living out some kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Obama mans up and gets angry. Russell S. Braman came up with "The Republicans have turned the fear of terrorism into the terrorism of fear." Bruce MacIntosh wants the Democrats to take on the religious right: "The GOP preach the power of religion but practice the religion of power." And Joan Hancock must have watched An Inconvenient Truth before submitting her entry: "Republicans attack those who want to protect the planet, and protect those who want to attack it." Last but not least, an attack-metabole from Alan Dybner: "Sen. Obama will use all his energy to pursue those who killed over 3,000 Americans, not get over 3,000 Americans killed to pursue energy."

Other Slate readers fancy themselves would-be saboteurs, hoping to sneak a Kinsley gaffe onto the enemy camp's teleprompter. The best one, from Michael Milligan: "We're not going to raise corporate taxes, we're just going to tax corporate raises."

A fourth category is perhaps best labeled "not in a million years" or, maybe, "I wish"—the antimetaboles a politician might believe but wouldn't dare say. Joe Hood will never hear McCain say, "Torture qualifies me to be president, but a president should never qualify torture." Carlyn Meyer won't live long enough to hear Palin unleash this imperfect antimetabole: "Ask not what you can do to prevent teen pregnancy, ask what teen pregnancy can do for you." And no one on either side will ever use Jim Stahl's submission: "Expect to get what you pay for, and expect to pay for what you get."

Finally, there are the antimetaboles you hope to hear from media commentators. Some of these struck a PBS-type tone, like Mike Caverhill's "Democrats try to make the intellectual argument feel emotional. Republicans try to make the emotional argument feel intellectual." Others were more reminiscent of The Daily Show, like Allison B.'s: "It's not which Levi's jeans your daughter is in, but which Levi is in your daughter's jeans." This inversion, from John O'Connor, might show up in the Newseum one day:

2004 Headline, day after Kerry loss in November: "The most liberal senator is defeated by successful Bush surge."

2008 Headline, day after Obama loss in November: "Successful Bush surge defeats most liberal senator."

Congratulations to all of our budding rhetoricians. And remember: You must never invert out of fear, or fear to invert.

Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008

NASCAR on Ice: Every election, pollsters and pundits introduce another voter group whose views are certain to decide the outcome: soccer moms, NASCAR dads, security moms, office park dads, and (three times in the past week) Wal-Mart moms. These categories, while sometimes useful, share an important methodological flaw: On Election Day, when undecided voters finally make up their minds, exit pollsters don't ask them where they work or where they shop, what sports they watch or what games their children play. Exit polls eschew these trendy questions in favor of boring demographic perennials like age, race, gender, education, and income level.

Precisely because exit poll questions don't change much from one cycle to the next, however, they provide an interesting portrait of how the electorate evolves—or doesn't. Some segments of the electorate are fiercely loyal to one party; others lean toward one party but more dramatically in some years than others.

According to exit polls, the most volatile swing voter group over the last 20 years hasn't been hockey moms like Sarah Palin, commuter dads like Joe Biden, or soccer parents like Barack and Michelle Obama. Over the last two decades, the swing voters most prone to moving away from Republicans in elections Democrats won and toward Republicans in elections Republicans won have been white men with a degree from high school but not college. In other words, forget Sarah Palin: In recent elections, the biggest swingers looked more like her husband, Todd.

Democrats don't need to win a majority among white men without bachelors' degrees, but it's crucial to cut our losses. In 2000 and 2004, Democrats lost that group by about 30 percent. In the 2006 midterms, Democrats cut our losses in half. In 1992, with some help from Ross Perot, we managed to eke out a slim plurality. Because this voting bloc still makes up nearly one-fifth of the electorate, losing them by 30 points instead of 15 means a shift the size of George W. Bush's margin over John Kerry. The only group with a swing that comes close is white women with the same educational profile, who turn out in greater numbers but are less likely to switch sides.

Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, especially in a path-breaking year like this one. The Obama campaign has invested heavily in registering and turning out new voters, while the McCain campaign carries the albatross of an old, unpopular GOP brand. In an economy this troubled, and after an administration this bad, all kinds of voters who went Republican in the past should be up for grabs. Then again, that might be yet another reason men with no college degree should be among the most up-for-grabs of all.

So far, Todd Palin has attracted as much attention for his looks and his nickname as for his politics. No one knows whether he joined the Alaskan Independence Party because he wanted a vote on statehood, was a Perot supporter fed up with the two parties, or just liked this one's quirky platform: "The AIP supports fishing!" Sarah Palin called her husband "a story all by himself"—fisherman, oil worker, snowmobiler, part Eskimo, and perhaps the first person ever to be cheered by a Republican Convention for belonging to the United Steelworkers Union.

The current vice-presidential spouse, Lynne Cheney, grew up in a small Western town, got a Ph.D., and used it to write racy novels. Todd's passion is the 2,000-mile, NASCAR-on-ice Tesoro Iron Dog. Last year, he told the AP that his principal cause as First Dude of Alaska was expanding training for noncollege workers: "For those of us who learn by touching and tearing stuff apart and for those who don't have the financial background to go to college, just being a product of that on-the-job training is really important."

Noncollege men aren't going to vote Republican just because they identify with Todd Palin—and in any case, he's hardly the stereotypical working-class swing voter. He's now a registered Republican, married to a passionately conservative one. Before he left his job as a production operator for BP, he was earning between $100,000 and $120,000 a year—about three times the Census Bureau average for men who haven't finished college. In contrast to the Lower 48, Alaska remains a land of opportunity where it is still possible to succeed beyond one's wildest dreams through what the AP called "a lifetime of manual labor." Many of my high-school classmates in Idaho headed north for the same reason.

The trouble with the GOP argument is that so far, their only plan to boost the incomes of non-college-graduates is the one Todd Palin came up with on his own 20 years ago: work in Alaska!

So in the rush to court more familiar voters, Democrats shouldn't concede Dude Dads to the Republicans. Democrats may not have a First Dude on the ticket, but we have a good plan to help the forgotten middle class do better again. The next president needs to help the United States build the job-rich industries of the future, such as new energy-efficient technologies, and give Americans what Rep. Rahm Emanuel calls "a new deal for the new economy": health care they can afford, a 401(k) pension they can keep, a tax cut they've earned, and the chance to get more training and send their kids to college.

In this campaign, Americans have heard more than enough about the Bridge to Nowhere. What millions of voters want out of this election is a bridge to somewhere. A bridge to the 21^st century would be a good place to start. ... 5:19 p.m. (link)

Saturday, August 30, 2008

The New Frontier: Flush from a pitch-perfect convention week and a crescendo of can-you-top-this speeches by Bidens, Clintons, and Obamas, Democrats in Denver had no trouble bounding out of bed Friday morning. After running up the score at Invesco Field on Thursday night, our biggest worry was getting penalized for excessive celebration. Then, just when the party thought its luck couldn't get any better, John McCain's choice of an obscure rookie governor sent Democrats popping champagne corks all over again. Giddy partisans rushed to the phones and microphones to trash Palin as "Geraldine Quayle."

I wasn't so quick to jump for joy. For one thing, I would have rather spent the fall poking fun at Mitt Romney, and got my hopes up when his stock soared to 80% in the political futures market shortly before the Palin announcement. Alas, passing up Romney deprives us of the perfect slogan: "Four More Houses!" While we weren't able to elect the first presidential android, his supporters and I can take heart that thanks to his campaign, there are now 4.7 million cracks in that plastic ceiling.

For me, the choice of Sarah Palin cuts a little too close to home. She was born a few miles from where I grew up, went to junior college in my hometown, and has now eclipsed Deep Throat and Larry Craig as the most famous graduate in University of Idaho history. It's as if the McCain campaign were micro-targeting my wife's demographic: exercise-crazed hockey moms from Idaho who married their high school sweethearts. The Obama campaign can rest assured – universes don't get much smaller than that.

As governor, Sarah Palin helped stop the Bridge to Nowhere. Now she's the Candidate from Nowhere. That's a steep climb for any candidate, even one who shoots moose and runs marathons. Before every VP selection, the only people willing to talk about the choice don't know anything. With Palin, that was still pretty much the case even after her announcement. Republican congressman Mike Simpson doesn't know her, but told the Idaho Statesman, "She's got Idaho roots, and an Idaho woman is tough."

If national security experience is the measure of a potential Commander-in-Chief, Palin has an extraordinarily high burden to prove. To paraphrase the words Lloyd Bentsen used to destroy the last surprise vice-presidential choice, she's no Joe Biden.

But for a host of reasons, Democrats needn't rush to run down Sarah Palin. Obama seemed to come to that conclusion Friday afternoon, striking the right tone after Democrats had gone after her with a few early hip checks. Both Obama and Biden called Palin to wish her good luck, but not too much. Hillary Clinton echoed that Palin's "historic nomination" would nevertheless take the country in the wrong direction.

Why hold back? First, as Obama himself demonstrated in winning the Democratic nomination, 2008 is a tough year to handicap the relative virtues of being a fresh face and having experience. The natural reflex is to brand Palin as too great a risk. But McCain is practically begging our side to throw him into that briar patch. Convinced he can't win as a candidate of the status quo, he wants everyone to know he's willing to take a risk.

Second, anyone going after Palin for the important experience she lacks had better be careful not to dismiss the value of the experiences she does have. Raising a large family and running a small state may not be sufficient qualifications to assume the Presidency. But we're not going to get far by minimizing those jobs, either. Here again, the McCain campaign may be hoping that Democrats – or the press – will come down too hard on Palin, and spark a backlash that turns her into a working mom's hero.

Third, and most important, voters don't need our help to figure this out. In the end, they'll be the best and toughest judge of whether or not Sarah Palin is ready. Back in 1988, the Dukakis campaign actually ran an ad against Dan Quayle. It didn't work, and wasn't necessary. In any case, Quayle had only himself to blame for falling flat on the national stage. By straining so hard to compare himself to JFK on the campaign trail, he practically wrote Bentsen's famous line for him.

In fact, Quayle never recovered from his debut at the '88 convention, when voters witnessed his deer-in-the-headlights moment. Over the next few days and in the vice-presidential debate, Palin's reputation will be shaped in much the same way – by whether she can take the heat, or looks like a moose hunter in the headlights. … 1:38 A.M. (link)

Friday, August 22, 2008

Spoiler Alert: When the McCain campaign floated the idea of a pro-choice running mate, social conservatives reacted with the same outrage they've been rehearsing for 40 years: Some threatened to bolt at the convention; others said they'd rather lose the election than expand the Republican tent. "If he picks a pro-choice running mate, it's not going to be pretty," Rush Limbaugh warned.

But the most explosive threat comes from former right-hand-of-God Ralph Reed, in his new novel, Dark Horse, a "political thriller" that imagines this very scenario. Spoiler alert! Just hours after forcing his party to swallow a pro-choice VP, the Republican presidential nominee in Reed's pot-boiler is brutally murdered by radical Islamic terrorists at the GOP Convention. Reed's implicit threat to Republican candidates: The Christian right has so much power, they can even get someone else's God to strike you down.

Reed doesn't just kill off the character who named a pro-choice running mate—he has the running mate go on to destroy the Republican Party. For the Republicans (and the reader), the plot goes from bad to worse. With the pro-choice figure—an African-American war hero named David Petty—now at the top of the Republican ticket, evangelical leaders throw their support behind Calif. Gov. Bob Long, who just lost the Democratic nomination at a brokered convention and decided to run as an independent after going through a religious conversion in the chapel of the hospital where his daughter nearly lost her baby. Petty offends evangelicals, while Long—obviously a quick study—wows them with the depth of his knowledge of the Bible.

Petty's candidacy implodes when a YouTube clip shows him telling Iowans that his support for the GOP abortion plank is only symbolic. Days before the election, voters also learn that as defense secretary, Petty convinced a no-bid contractor to hire a lobbyist who moonlights as his mistress and madam of an exclusive Washington brothel.

Reed's clear warning: If you put a pro-choice Republican on the ticket, don't be surprised when he turns out to be a lying, cheating, no-bid-earmarking john.

By contrast, Reed's evangelicals love Long, who woos them with parables and waffles on abortion. "I've heard through the grapevine that he's become a Christian," says televangelist Andy Stanton, a composite of Limbaugh and Pat Robertson. "He may be someone we can do business with." With Stanton's enthusiastic blessing, Long sweeps the South and beats Petty 2-to-1 among evangelicals.

All three candidates come up short of 270 electoral votes, so the election goes to the House of Representatives. Even though Republicans control the House, Petty loses when Republican members of the evangelical caucus support Long instead. The message to McCain: Social conservatives will gladly support a maverick, as long as he says what they want to hear on their issues.

Of course, John McCain doesn't need to curl up with a Ralph Reed roman à clef to know that social conservatives won't budge on abortion. The more interesting question is why my evil twin decided to write the Great Republican Novel in the first place. True to his own life story, the book suffers from too much plot and not enough character. But it's not nearly as bad as I'd hoped, and it's chock-full of accidental revelations:

• Ralph expects the Republicans to lose the White House in 2008 but win it back in 2012 and 2016. By the time the book takes place, Democrats haven't carried a single Southern state in five straight elections (2000 through 2016), and a Republican president who is retiring after two terms reminisces fondly about how "I did what I had to do" to win the 2012 election. Alas, his "botched effort to overthrow the Iranian government" inspires the terrorist attack on the 2020 GOP convention.
• Much as social conservatives and neocons can't stand liberals and the media, most of all they hate each other. Reed's hapless Republican nominee insists that "this election is about terrorism, not social issues" and doesn't hide his contempt for social conservative leaders and "their self-importance, single-issue litmus tests, and insufferable sense of entitlement." Meanwhile, social conservatives view themselves as "abused spouses" trapped in a "self-destructive codependence" with "the spineless wonders" who run the Republican Party. Reed says the Reagan formula can't save the GOP anymore: "A pro-business party with the religious right grafted in like a wild olive plant, it no longer appeals to the center of the country."
• Money-grubbing consultants are obsessed with alcohol, drugs, and sex. Long's adman is arrested for snorting cocaine, and his top strategist nearly costs his candidate the election by shacking up with a spy from a rival campaign.
• Novel-writing operatives, by contrast, are obsessed only with sex. Reed tries his best to turn social conservative politics into steamy beach reading. In Dark Horse, the operative always gets the girl, and she is invariably "bronzed," with swaying hips and tight designer clothes. One femme fatale is "a brunette lollipop" who captures her prey with lines like, "I thought I was dessert."
• Apparently, Reed does not have much experience courting the women's vote. Long's wife is an alcoholic who's upset that he found God. The Democratic VP candidate is a lightweight who can't remember her party's position on Iran. Two campaign operatives refuse to discuss their grand jury testimony but stop to answer press questions about the designer outfits they're wearing.
• Reed enjoyed running the Christian Coalition more than humping corporate accounts for Jack Abramoff. He writes himself into the book as a minor character named Ross Lombardy, "a veritable computer hard drive of political trivia" and "strategist-cum-organizer with a killer instinct who could quote 200 Bible verses from memory" and "had an uncanny ability to cite the precise vote percentages in every key U.S. House and Senate race in the previous three election cycles." The Abramoff character, G.G. Hoterman, is a corrupt, ruthless multimillionaire lobbyist who crushes anyone who gets in his way. "Politics has a way of criminalizing the normative," Hoterman complains.
• Reed writes knowingly of the "time-honored Washington tradition" of "expressing false regret at the misfortune of someone caught in a scandal, when the truth was everyone enjoyed it." With a twinge of bitterness, he adds that "Washington scandals burn like funeral pyres, and only go out after the angry mob has tossed someone to the flames to pacify the gods.

That pyre suggests Ralph's next move. It's time to gin up the social conservative movement to forget about McCain's running mate and wake up to the GOP-bashing, sex-peddling novelist in their midst. Nothing could do more for slumping sales than an urgent edict from the religious right: Burn this book! ... 3:58 P.M. (link)

Monday, August 11, 2008

It's Your Money: Over the next two weeks, the Obama and McCain campaigns will spend an impressive $11 million to advertise during the Olympics. Obama's first ad, "Hands," outlines his plan for a green economy. McCain's attacks Obama on taxes. Both ads reflect the campaigns' respective game plans, although Obama's fits in much better with the upbeat not-the-triumph-but-the-struggle spirit of the games that surround it.

If I had a few million to help NBC fill the time between tape delays, I might go after a topic that is on most American viewers' minds during these games and that seems destined to weigh heavily on the next president: China.

When the 2008 campaign started a few lifetimes ago, this election appeared to be all about China—or, at least, about the long-term competitive challenge that the emerging economic superpowers of China and India pose to the American way of life. But a host of urgent short-term economic problems have pushed our long-term economic challenges aside. For the moment, falling housing prices, rising gas prices, and soaring credit-card debts have made us more concerned about the threat the American way of life poses to the American way of life.

But if our next president ever gets done cleaning up after our current one, he'll confront China's growing shadow on issue after issue. While the United States can make an enormous difference by finally doing its part on climate change, the Chinese have already passed us as the largest producer of greenhouse gases, and our ability and willingness to make progress will depend in part on theirs. Meanwhile, China's rising demand for oil to fuel its relentless economic growth will continue to cost us at the pump.

When the next president decides what to do about education reform in the United States, China should be on his mind. The Chinese education system churns out 5 million college graduates a year, while we still paper over our high-school dropout rate and look away as half a million of the young people we send to college every year never finish.

Perhaps most urgently, the next president will have to admit what George W. Bush would not—that if we don't put our fiscal house in order, China will foreclose on it. As Obama has pointed out, "It's very hard to tell your banker that he's wrong." This year's federal budget deficit will be a record $500 billion, not counting wars and economic bailouts. One of history's headlines on this administration will be, "Bush Owes to China."

The rise of China is the story of this Olympics and threatens to be the story of the next presidency. So it's only fitting to give viewers a sense of what's at stake.

My dream ad would show the robot Wall-E methodically stacking pressed blocks of discarded dollar bills to form giant structures, which turn out to be the Bird's Nest stadium, the Water Cube aquatic center, and the CCTV tower. The script would go something like this:

"Sponsor" (60 seconds)

Voiceover: "Ever wonder what Washington has done with your tax dollars? This Olympics is your chance to find out. For the last 8 years, the Bush administration has been paying China billions of dollars in interest on the trillions it borrowed for tax breaks, pork, and special privileges you never got. That money helped create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs—in China. So as you enjoy the games, keep an eye on your tax dollars at work. The way our economy's going, it's tough to pay your bills. But take heart: You already paid China's."

Tagline: "America's Taxpayers. Proud Sponsors of the Beijing Olympics."

What's an Olympics without a little national pride? And with any luck, NBC might refuse to run it. … 10:30 A.M. (link)

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Trader Mitt: As if John McCain didn't have enough reason to keep quoting JFK's line that life isn't fair, consider this: According to the political futures markets, Mitt Romney now has a better chance of being McCain's running mate than McCain has of winning.

Since the primaries, Romney has steadily gained ground in the VP sweepstakes through hard work and a disciplined message: He'll help on the economy, he grew up in the swing state of Michigan, and he makes his current home in the right wing of the Republican Party. He seems at ease with the unattractive chores of being the vice-presidential nominee: raising money, playing the attack dog, telling the base what it wants to hear.

On paper, Romney's VP bid looks as picture perfect as his presidential campaign once did. Yet even as Mitt watchers revel in the current boomlet, we can't help wondering whether this Romneymania will last.

With that in mind, Romneystas everywhere need to start making new and urgent arguments on his behalf:

• The French Are Coming!: Romney was widely mocked last fall when he warned that France posed a clear and present danger to the American way of life. But after watching French President Nicolas Sarkozy embrace Barack Obama in Paris last week, conservatives may finally warm to Mitt's "First, Not France" slogan after all. Romney has impeccable credentials as a Francophobe; Sarkozy would never dream of saying of him, "If he is chosen, then France will be delighted." In a few short hours in Paris, Obama claimed the president as a convert. Romney spent two whole years in France and converted no one whatsoever.
• Leave 'Em Laughing as You Go: One of McCain's heroes, Mo Udall, loved to tell the story of primary voters who heard him say, "I'm Mo Udall and I'm running for president," and responded, "We were just laughing about that this morning." Poor Mo wouldn't know what to make of this campaign. Two months into the general election, nobody's laughing about anything. No one much wants to joke about Obama or McCain. If Romney were the VP, pundits across the spectrum would exult that at last they had someone fun to mess with. He's a good sport and a happy square, with a track record of supplying ample new material.
• WALL-E's World: Mitt Romney's Web site is a shadow of its former self—no Five Brothers blog, no ad contests, no animatronic Mitt messages for your voicemail. Yet like WALL-E's stash of charming knickknacks, the few surviving objects on Planet Romney carry greater meaning. For example, a striking photo highlights a strength few politicians reveal: Unlike McCain, Mitt Romney was born to read a teleprompter. In the official campaign photo of him rehearsing his concession speech, Mitt is barely visible. All the focus is on the words in big type to be loaded on the prompter.

McCain doesn't much like giving speeches and treats teleprompters accordingly. But you can see how a campaign that has struggled to follow a script might be tempted by the first completely programmable running mate. In 2000, McCain often joked that he was Luke Skywalker. This time, Romney could be his C3PO. ... 12:47 p.m. (link)

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Make My Day: What a difference a month makes. At its June meeting, the D.C. City Council debated Mayor Adrian Fenty's emergency legislation to ban sparklers. After the Supreme Court struck down the city's gun ban, the Council spent last week's July meeting debating emergency legislation to let residents own handguns. Here in the District, we couldn't shoot off firecrackers over the Fourth because they're too dangerous, but we can now keep a loaded pistol by our bedside, ready to shoot down prowlers in self-defense.

Like most D.C. residents, I have no plans to stockpile guns in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. But if the city wants to take away my sparklers, they'll have to pry them from my cold, dead, slightly charred hands.

When I was growing up, the rights to keep and bear firearms and fireworks went hand in hand. My grandmother used a revolver to shoot garter snakes in her garden. Well into her eighties, however, her greatest pleasure in life was to spend the Fourth setting off massive strings of firecrackers, 200 at a time. When she came to visit, she'd step off the airplane with a suitcase full of firecrackers purchased on an Indian reservation. As soon as we got home, she'd light the fuse with her cigarette, then squeal with delight as serial explosions made the gravel in our driveway dance.

In recent years, firearm regulation and firework regulation have gone their separate ways. The National Rifle Association has successfully opposed most gun laws, even ones aimed primarily at criminals. Armed with Justice Scalia's maddeningly unhelpful ruling on the D.C. ban, the NRA already has begun to target the rest.

By contrast, although fireworks aren't nearly as deadly as guns, the government treats them like what they are – a widely popular, sometimes dangerous American tradition. The federal government long ago banned once-commonplace explosives like cherry bombs. Most states – even the libertarian bastion of Idaho – have banned or restricted the use of firecrackers. According to the website AmericanPyro, five states, including Iowa and Illinois, permit only sparklers and snakes. Five others, including New York and Massachusetts, allow no consumer fireworks whatsoever. In general, states insist that fireworks must be "safe and sane" – a balance that has been all but impossible to strike with firearms.

Thanks to the enduring power of pyromania, sales haven't suffered. Since 1976, fireworks consumption has increased ten-fold, while fireworks-related injuries have dropped. Fireworks manufacturers can take heart in knowing that this year's survivors are next year's customers.

Because there is no Second Amendment right to keep and bear sparklers, fireworks law is a straightforward balancing test – between the individual right to burn a hole in the back porch and the mutual responsibility not to burn entire communities to the ground, the personal freedom to pyromaniacal self-expression and the personal responsibility not to harm oneself and others. These days, the fireworks industry has more to fear from climate change than from the authorities. This summer, the threat of wildfires led Arnold Schwarzenegger to ask Californians to boycott fireworks. Drought forced John McCain to forego fireworks at his annual Independence Day barbecue in Arizona.

The trouble with the Supreme Court ruling in the Heller case is not that it interprets the Second Amendment as an individual right. The Second Amendment is the constitutional equivalent of the grammatical paradox Eats Shoots & Leaves, but whatever the Founders meant by its muddy wording and punctuation, most Americans now take it for granted. The real problem with the Court's decision is that the balancing test for gun rights and responsibilities is even less clear than before. Scalia's opinion devotes 30 pages to a grammatical history of the Second Amendment and a single sentence to how the courts should apply it to most other gun laws already on the books.

Alongside such vast imprecision, the Court went out of its way to strike down the requirement for trigger locks – an extraordinarily modest attempt to balance freedom and safety. Trigger locks can help prevent gun accidents and keep guns out of the hands of children. Far from impeding self-defense, new trigger locks can be unlocked with a fingerprint or a special ring on the gun owner's finger. That means today's gun owner can arm himself to shoot an intruder in an instant – compared to the 30 seconds or more it took to load a pistol or musket in the 18^th Century.

Over the long term, it's not clear how much of a boon the Heller decision will be for gun rights advocates. In winning the case, the gun lobby lost its most potent argument – the threat that at any moment, the government will knock on the door and take your guns away. With that bogeyman out of the way, the case for common-sense gun safety measures is stronger than ever. Perhaps now the gun debate will revolve around more practical and less incendiary issues, like what can be done to reduce illegal gun trafficking and trace guns used in crimes.

If it's any small consolation, the real winners in Heller may turn out to be the sparkler lobby. If cities have trouble banning handguns, they will be hard-pressed to take away sparklers. Of course, as with guns, the threat to sparklers may well have been exaggerated. The D.C. Council rejected Mayor Fenty's sparkler ban by a vote of 11-2, as members nostalgically recalled playing with them in their youth. Councilman and former mayor Marion Barry voted no "with a bang." As Barry knows, there are worse things in life to light than a sparkler. ... 9:51 A.M. (link)

Friday, June 6, 2008

The Fight of Her Life: Ten years ago, at a White House farewell for a favorite staff member, Hillary Clinton described the two kinds of people in the world: born optimists like her husband who see the glass as half-full, and born realists like herself who can see the glass is half-empty.

As she ends her campaign and throws her support behind Barack Obama's remarkable quest, Hillary could be forgiven for seeing her glass as, quite literally, half-empty. The two candidates traded primary after primary down the stretch, two titans matching each other vote for vote. In the closest race in the modern era, she and Obama split the Democratic wishbone nearly right down the middle, but she's not the one who got her wish.

Yet for Hillary and the 18 million of us who supported her, there is no shame in one historic campaign coming up just short against another. History is a great deal wiser than Chris Matthews, and will be kinder, too. The 2008 contest has been one for the ages, and the annals will show that Hillary Clinton has gained far more than she lost.

The Obama-Clinton match will go down as the longest, closest, most exciting, most exhausting ever. Obama ran an inspired campaign and seized the moment. Clinton came close, and by putting up a tough fight now, helped fortify him for the fight ahead.

Our campaign made plenty of mistakes, none of which has gone unreported. But Hillary is right not to dwell on "woulda, coulda, shoulda." From New Hampshire to South Dakota, the race she ran earned its own place in the history books.

While the way we elect presidents leaves a lot to be desired, it has one redeeming virtue, as the greatest means ever invented to test what those who seek the job are made of. In our lifetimes, we'll be hard-pressed to find a candidate made of tougher stuff than Hillary Clinton. Most candidates leave a race diminished by it. Hillary is like tempered steel: the more intense the heat, the tougher she gets.

And has any candidate had to face fiercer, more sustained heat? As a frontrunner, she expected a tough ride, and as Hillary Clinton, she was accustomed to it. But if she was used to the scrutiny, she could not have anticipated – and did not deserve – the transparent hostility behind it. In much the same way the right wing came unglued when her husband refused to die in the '90s, the media lost its bearings when she defied and survived them. Slate at least held off on its noxious Hillary Deathwatch until March; most of the press corps began a breathless Clinton Deathwatch last Thanksgiving. The question that turned her campaign around in New Hampshire – "How do you do it?" – brought Hillary to tears out of sheer gratitude that someone out there had noticed.

For a few searing days in New Hampshire, we watched her stare into the abyss. Any other candidate forced to read her own obituary so often would have come to believe it. But as she went on to demonstrate throughout this campaign, Hillary had faith that there is life after political death, and the wherewithal to prove it.

In New Hampshire, she discarded the frontrunner mantle and found her voice. For a race that was largely won or lost in Iowa, the discovery came a few days too late. But the grit Clinton showed with her back to the wall all those months will make her a force with a following for years to come.

The chief hurdle for Clinton's presidential bid wasn't whether she could do the job; Democrats never doubted she would make a good president. Ironically, the biggest question she faced for much of the race is one she answered clearly by the time she left it: whether America was ready for a woman president. No one asks that question any longer. For all the sexism she encountered as the first woman with a serious shot at the White House, voters themselves made clear they were ready. The longer the race went on, the more formidable she looked in the general election. In this week's CBS News poll, she was beating John McCain by nine points, even as she was losing the Democratic nomination.

Last year, the press and other campaigns insisted that Clinton was too polarizing and that half the country was united against her. Now, a woman who was supposed to be one of the most polarizing figures in America leaves the race with handsome leads over McCain in places like North Carolina, a state her husband never carried.

When her campaign started, aides often described Hillary as the least known, least understood famous person in America. During this campaign, it became clear that in certain quarters she's the most deliberately misunderstood person as well. The recent RFK flap was yet another attempt to suggest that her every miscue was part of some diabolical master plan.

Yet while talking heads imagined the evils of Hillary Clinton, voters finally came to know and understand her. They saw someone who knew what they were going through, who would stick with them, fight for them, and get back up when she got knocked down. The phony, consultant-driven shadow boxing of the last few years has dulled Democrats to the party's historic mission – to defend the values and stand up for the interests of ordinary people who are doing all they can just to get ahead. For those voters, Hillary Clinton was the champion they've been looking for, a fighter they can count on, win or lose, not to let them down.

That's a fight she'll never quit. Like the woman in New Hampshire, we still wonder how Hillary does it, but this time, the tears are on us. As we wish her well, our hopes are high, our hearts are full – and if our glass is empty, it was worth every drop. ... 11:58 P.M. (link)

Friday, May 30, 2008

The Adventures of Bobble-Foot: For enough money, any McClellan or Stephanopoulos in Washington will write a kiss-and-tell book these days. But the memoir Larry Craig just announced he's writing could launch a whole new genre: don't-kiss, don't-tell.

Craig revealed his plans on Boise television during Tuesday's coverage of the Senate primary to choose his potential successors. For the senator, if not his viewers, it was a poignant moment, one last point of no return in a three-decade-long political career.

With a touch of empathy, the local reporter told Craig, "You're looking forward now to a much different life for yourself." Alas, the life Craig described isn't much different from any other retiring pol's, nor does he sound like he's looking forward to it. He hinted that he is entertaining a number of lobbying offers. Because of ethics rules, he explains, "There are some one-way conversations going on, 'cause I've said I can't talk, but I certainly can listen." Perhaps they can figure out some kind of code.

These are heady times for the Idaho senator. Last Sunday, on National Tap Dance Day, the first-place St. Paul Saints, a minor league baseball team, drew their biggest crowd of the year with a special promotion in Craig's honor: a bobble-foot doll commemorating the bathroom stall at Minneapolis-St.Paul airport. The team website reported, "Saints Have Toe-Tapping Good Time, Win 9-3."

The bobble-foot promotion gave Craig a way to test his market value even beyond the lobbying and book worlds. Scores of Craig bobble-feet are now available on eBay, selling for upwards of $75 apiece. You'd better hurry: Like successful appeals of uncoerced confessions, supplies are limited.

The upcoming memoir may be the last we ever hear from the man, so it's worth asking: What kind of book will Larry Craig write? Consider the possibilities:

• The Broken Branch: Left to his own devices (never a good idea), Craig seems likely to write an insiders' version of the woe-is-gridlock lament popularized most recently by political scientists Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann. "The thing that's important for someone with my experience to talk about is the state of politics in Washington," Craig said Tuesday. "It's created what I call a extremely dysfunctional, hyperpartisan Senate. We're getting little to nothing done." Craig cites immigration and energy policy. As his agent and editor will surely tell him, this sober approach is not the way for Craig to put his best foot forward. No one wants to read the case for decisive action written by a man who claimed his innocence after pleading guilty and remained in office after promising to quit. Then again, Craig might not be a household word if he had listened to the advice of Ornstein and Mann, who urged members to bring their families to live with them in Washington.
• The Packwood Diaries: With slight modifications, Craig has modeled his entire Senate career after his friend, former Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood. Craig sobbed on the Senate floor the day Packwood resigned. Packwood dug in his heels and remained in office for three years after his sex scandal became public. Craig has done the same, and is only leaving because his term is up. Considering how much Packwood served as his role model, it's possible that Craig tried to emulate another part of the Oregonian's legacy: the Packwood diaries. Packwood kept a meticulous journal of all his exploits, with an eye to history and none on the lookout for satire or federal prosecution. We can only hope Craig has done the same.
• What Happened: Every publisher is looking for the next Scott McClellan, who told lies for a living but was scared straight after his escape. Craig could play this role with gusto. The pitch: It wasn't his idea to stand up in front of the press time after time and insist he wasn't gay. Karl Rove made him do it, in a deliberate cover-up to protect the Republican brand – and he'll never forgive Rove for it.
• If I Did It: O.J. Simpson never got to keep a dime of his controversial book, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. Craig, on the other hand, could hypothesize all the way to the bank. Senators love to write loosely autobiographical fiction. Gary Hart and Bill Cohen wrote The Double Man about a politician who wanted to be president. Barbara Boxer wrote A Time to Run about a woman who becomes a liberal senator from California. Craig could write a great book about an imaginary conservative senator who happens to be gay. His hypothetical musings would wow the critics and sell like crazy. Besides, what does Craig have to lose? Hinting he did it would be no more an admission of guilt than the misdemeanor plea he was just kidding us about last June. ... 8:48 P.M. (link)

It's still a miserable year to be selling a house. In May, for example, U.S. house prices fell by 0.4 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Index. (The raw data are here.)

Except: They didn't. House prices actually rose in May, albeit very slightly, according to exactly the same source.

Why the difference? The first number is the result of "seasonal adjustment," an attempt to strip out predictable calendar patterns and report just the underlying trend. House prices usually surge in May, and this May the surge was so limp that after seasonal adjustment, it was a fall.

House-price indices are presented in seasonally adjusted form by researchers and reported that way by the media. That makes some sense. For anyone trying to understand the big picture, predictable seasonal gyrations just get in the way.

But for anyone trying to buy or sell a house, predictable seasonal gyrations can't be ignored. Nobody pays a seasonally adjusted price. If you spend $500,000 on a house in a typical February, you might expect to have paid $515,000 had you waited until August. That $15,000 is money in your pocket, seasons or no seasons.

That raises a fairly big question. If house prices systematically surge in summer and stagnate in winter—and they do, in Belgium, France, the United States, and especially the United Kingdom—then why do so many people buy in summer? Why don't we make more of an effort to buy earlier or to wait a few months until the market cools again?

It's true that summer is a convenient time to buy a house. It is the season of weddings and the time when families prepare to send their children to new schools. These are two popular reasons for moving home. House-hunting is nicer in the sunshine, too. But surely these conveniences aren't worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Another possibility is that summer house buyers save on expensive summer rents or that mortgage finance is cheaper. But no: Neither rents nor mortgages fluctuate with the seasons.

A new research paper—still at a preliminary stage—by L. Rachel Ngai and Silvana Tenreyro of the London School of Economics, offers a solution to the puzzle.

Start with the observation that, unlike a car or a laptop or a share in Coca-Cola, every house is a little different. Any particular house may match a family's needs awkwardly or perfectly. Finding out just how well a given house suits you is also a costly and time-consuming business.

That means that buyers like to house-hunt in "thick" markets, when lots of houses are for sale, and a very good fit is likely to come up quickly. It is no fun to house-hunt in a "thin" market, where the meager crop of houses is unlikely to offer up the dream home.

If Ngai and Tenreyro are right, then the housing-market dynamic is something like this: Buyers slightly prefer to purchase houses in the summer, so house prices are slightly higher in the summer, so sellers prefer to put their houses on the market in the summer—and with more houses on the market, the market is thicker. That means that buyers are more likely to find the exact house they want and so are willing to pay more. With prices higher, more sellers are attracted into the summer market, and fewer will contemplate selling in the winter. And so on. The self-reinforcing process can produce a large gap between summer and winter prices. In the United Kingdom, regulations mean that few new houses are built, and so the existing stock is particularly idiosyncratic—a possible reason why seasonality is stronger in the United Kingdom than anywhere else.

So by all means, wait until winter in the hope of getting a cheaper house. But remember, a cheaper house is not necessarily a better deal—unless you are not very fussy about how well the house suits you.

The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Fortune all lead with Lehman Brothers' plight this morning. "Lehman races to find a buyer," screams the WSJ headline after a disastrous day during which the once high-flying investment bank's "self-made survival strategy—ranging from spinning off commercial real-estate to selling a stake in Lehman's lucrative investment-management division—failed to halt a slide in Lehman's stock price." By the end of yesterday, Lehman's shares had slid 41 percent as investors voted with their feet. Lehman's best hope now is an outside buyer: Bank of America and Barclays are interested but only if the U.S. government offers assurances to help shield them from further losses. The Washington Post says that the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are "actively helping" Lehman put itself up for sale, but time is running out; long-time Lehman customers tell Fortune that "they have sharply curtailed their trading with the firm." It all seemed so different just one year ago. Back then CEO Dick Fuld (who recently received a $40 million compensation package) said, "Do we have some stuff on the books that would be tough to get rid of? Yes. Is it going to kill us? Of course not." Those words could yet come back to haunt him.

Other banks are scrambling to reassure investors, none more so than Washington Mutual, which, coming off the back of its own 40-plus percent share drop this week, issued a statement assuring all and sundry that it "continues to be confident that it has sufficient liquidity and capital to support its operations while it returns to profitability," CNN Money reports. WaMu says it has $50 billion in liquidity, but that didn't stop both Fitch Ratings and Moody's Investors Service from downgrading their assessments of the company.

Next into the lion's den are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which report their third-quarter earnings next week. While no one on Wall Street is expecting a shock to rival Lehman Brothers (both Goldman and MS are expected to turn a profit, says CNN Money), the expected tepid performance of both institutions further reinforces the fragility of the U.S. banking sector. "The [question] will be, 'Can they muddle through?' rather than, 'Can they surprise with robust business?' " one analyst tells CNN Money. Life could be much tougher for insurance giant AIG. Investors are skittish that the company that has already lost $13.1 billion this financial year "will face billions in additional losses because it has effectively guaranteed complex financial instruments tied to home loans whose values have plummeted," writes the NYT.

There's no joy on the other side of the world either. Japan's economy recorded its "sharpest quarterly fall in almost seven years as the country appears to be falling into recession," the BBC reports. The world's second-largest economy shrank at an annualized rate of 3 percent from April to June. Meanwhile China's economy is feeling the pinch from the all-out Olympic push that brought about the temporary closure of hundreds of factories. Industrial output growth slowed to 12.8 percent last month compared with August 2007—a six-month low. New Zealand's Labour government can't blame the Olympics for its country's recession; what's worse, it has to fight a general election two months from now. Prime Minister Helen Clark hopes the recession-hit country will be enjoying a "much needed boost from recently granted tax cuts and lower interest rates," writes the Financial Times.

The imminent arrival of Hurricane Ike on Texas shores has shored up crude prices even as they flirted with dropping into double digits for the first time since March. U.S. gasoline prices are expected to rise after the Gulf of Mexico's refining hub shut down to brace for yet another major storm, reports the NYT. And biofuels, too, are taking a hit. Yesterday the European Union announced that its "ambitious targets for using crop-based biofuels should be pared back dramatically" over fears that corn-based ethanol is driving up food prices and that grain-based biofuels could create more CO₂ pollution than they curtail.



At least some sectors are smiling, however. With the pro football season just one week old, NBC reports that it has already sold about 85 percent of the available Superbowl TV ads, and that's after it hiked its rate by 10 percent, the WSJ reports. Budweiser and Pepsi will be looking for a big game, but GM is sitting it out this year.

Wall Street's biggest banks cooked up elaborate "derivatives gimmicks" over the past decade to help their best foreign clients dodge the tax man, U.S. Senate investigators allege, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning. The racket cost the country $100 billion a year in unpaid taxes, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations charges. The yearlong investigation, the newspaper says, "concludes that Wall Street firms actively competed with one another in dreaming up complex transactions that allowed hedge funds to avoid withholding taxes imposed on dividends paid by U.S. companies." The Financial Times says the biggest banks on the Street have been named in the tax-dodge probe, including Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Merrill Lynch. They will testify today, along with a variety of hedge funds, the newspaper adds.

Citing the report, FT says Lehman alone succeeded in helping clients avoid paying $115 million in tax and that Citigroup voluntarily paid the IRS $24 million in what it believed to be withheld tax between 2003 and 2005. The IRS is also not getting off lightly. The Associated Press reports that Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, the ranking Republican on the committee, took the agency to task for allowing the practice to go on for as long as it did. Coleman said it was "especially troubling that the IRS has failed to address many of these problems for so long," AP reported.

Sex, drugs, and lavish gifts: just another day at the office for the U.S. Interior Department employees tasked with collecting about $4 billion per year in oil and gas royalties who now find themselves "caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal," the New York Times reports. Congress is investigating a dozen current and former employees of the department's Minerals Management Service who, the reports say, allegedly are guilty of a range of abuses including steering lucrative energy contracts to a trusted aide, accepting gifts from the companies they were supposed to collect from, and cultivating a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity" while on the job. "The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration's watch," the newspaper says. The NYT adds this isn't the first time the department has come under congressional scrutiny. "Previous reports have focused on problems the agency had in collecting millions of dollars owed to the Treasury," the newspaper says. As the Guardian points out, "the accounts of the partying atmosphere under the Bush administration's oversight of the MMS ... could prove politically sensitive, given the prominent role of energy as an issue in this election year."

On Wednesday, Lehman Brothers unveiled what may be its last best hope of survival by "selling most of its prized asset management unit and spinning-off $30 billion-worth of troubled property assets," the FT reports. Lehman's plan to shrink the 158-year-old firm may already be too late, the WSJ writes in a detailed profile of the bank's problems. Nonetheless, CEO Richard Fuld Jr. vowed that by selling off real-estate assets and its investment-management division and by slashing the dividend 93 percent, Lehman would "emerge clean." Investors weren't buying the message. They sent shares in Lehman down a further 7 percent Wednesday as the bank faces a "race against time," the NYT reports, leading off its business coverage.

Lehman critics appear to have lost faith in Fuld. The WSJ lists the grievances from anonymous critics who claim Fuld waited too long to sell off the real-estate assets and that he mistakenly believed the "Federal Reserve bank-lending facilities would buffer the firm from continuing pain." Fuld's biggest problems may be internal. Details of the firm's closed-door dealings, including failed negotiations for a capital injection by the Korean Development Bank, have been leaking onto the Street regularly. Rumors bedeviled Fuld, too, leading him to grouse to his associates, "I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole every day."

A contentious $35 billion contract for new aerial refueling tankers was put on hold by the Defense Department on Wednesday and will not be granted now until a new administration enters the White House next year, Business Week reports. The delay, WSJ says, is being scored as a victory for Boeing, which lobbied hard this summer—employing, in the process, "political allies who decried awarding the deal to a team that included a foreign company"—to have the original contract overturned; initially, the DoD awarded the deal to rivals Northrop Grumman and European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co.

The FT calls the about-face "a fresh blow to EADS." The Franco-German group has become a victim of "highly charged" U.S. political environment, the newspaper says. Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged a "cooling off" period was required before a winner could be named. That won't happen until after November, he adds.

What good is a cartel if the biggest member defies its peers? OPEC will soon find out. Saudi Arabia, the cartel's most influential member, on Wednesday said it would not go along with agreed upon oil-production cuts struck at its latest meeting this week, the NYT reports. The dissention sent crude prices down, unheard of following an OPEC cut in output.

After its stock tanked 45 percent on Tuesday, dragging down the markets with it, Lehman Bros. will today come clean—a week ahead of schedule—about the state of its finances, the New York Times says, leading off its business coverage. "Lehman's future as an independent firm now seems more uncertain than ever, and many analysts fear that the bank is running out of time and options," the newspaper adds, summing up investor sentiment that saw Lehman lose nearly half its value on Tuesday and stoked fears the financial sector is still in trouble. Bloomberg says Lehman shares have fallen 88 percent this year and that on Wednesday morning, before the market opens, "the firm will report more writedowns and losses."

The historic Lehman sell-off on Tuesday, according to the Wall Street Journal, followed the news that a last-ditch deal with Korea Development Bank had fallen through. That set off a chain reaction of selling across all indices, wiping out Monday's gains inspired by "the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac," the newspaper noted.

After falling to a five-month low on Tuesday, oil bounced back Wednesday morning in early-trading in Asia as OPEC announced a surprise cut in production on Tuesday night, Reuters reports. U.S. crude rose on Wednesday morning more than $1 to $103.72 a barrel, the newswire adds. Analysts had been predicting the oil cartel would leave quotas unchanged, but it instead decided to slash production by roughly one-half million barrels per day, the NYT says, in "a bid to stem a rapid decline in oil prices in recent weeks." The move may have exposed a rift, as Saudi Arabia lobbied hard to keep production at full tilt. "The decision represents a rare case of OPEC's going against the position of its biggest member," the newspaper said.

Marketwatch reports the OPEC decision could set a floor on plummeting oil prices. "The market is short oil, and this piece of fundamental news would unnerve the market," Jonathan Barratt, managing director of Commodity Broking Service in Sydney, told Marketwatch. "It could arrest the fall in oil prices for an intermediate time."

"Wars and a weak economy" will mean the U.S. federal deficit balloons to $407 billion this year, more than double that of 2007, WSJ reports. For fiscal hawks, the news only gets worse—fiscal 2009 is expected to be even worse, the newspaper adds. How bad? Just $438 billion in the red next year. Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag, understandably, did not try to sugarcoat the outlook. "The figures make it challenging to avoid playing the dismal economist," Orszag said in a statement.

A fall in revenues from corporate tax receipts plus the government's tax rebate stimulus plan for individuals, CNN Money calculates, resulted in "a budget deficit [that] shot up 153% from last year's shortfall of $161 billion." The CBO is not only forecasting more revenue shortfalls but several more months of "very slow" economic growth, CNN Money adds. And further out? Whoever inherits the White House will be looking at a cumulative deficit over the next 10 years that now stands at $2.3 trillion.

The fallout from Sunday's Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac seizure continues to dominate the business pages today. First, the winners. Investor Bill Gross' Pimco Total Return fund, the world's largest bond fund, netted a cool $1.7 billion "payday" thanks to a shrewd bet Gross made months ago that the government would step in and bail out the troubled lenders, the Financial Times reports. NYT reports the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, or Farmer Mac, has seen a run-up in shares and profits thanks to the soaring price of farmland and farm commodities. And the Government National Mortgage Association, or Ginnie Mae, has had one of its best years selling government-guaranteed debt.

And the not so shrewd? The WSJ reports Baltimore-based Legg Mason Capital Management Inc. had raised its holdings in Freddie shares from 50 million earlier this year to nearly 80 million shares as of July 31. Fidelity's Fidelity Select Home Finance, meanwhile, invested 17 percent of its assets in Fannie and Freddie, WSJ reports.



Maybe it was the unfortunate name—"Let's Rock"—of its annual showcase event that disappointed investors on Tuesday. Apple shares fell 4 percent, BusinessWeek reports, despite the company's announcement of new iPods and an iTunes upgrade in time for Christmas, news that ordinarily triggers a buying spree—in shares and gadgets. But there was reassuring news for jittery investors. When Steve Jobs took the stage Tuesday, the NYT writes, "a message that appeared on the large screen behind him read, 'Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.' "

One day after the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac bailout, it's time for some second-guessing. The Wall Street Journal points out that while short-term financial indicators around the world—ranging from mortgage rates to stock prices—surged on the Treasury's nationalization of the two mortgage giants, "[m]any in the market warned that it will do little to salve the deeper wounds in the American economy and financial markets." Simply put, the Journal worries that although the government has plugged a hole in the dike, there is no guarantee that its radical emergency actions will turn the tide of housing woe. The New York Times looks at the role of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in driving the biggest government intervention since the Great Depression (at the prodding of foreign governments, notably the Chinese, says the WSJ). "The sentiment was, "You're in charge, and I hope it works' " is how President Bush's deputy press secretary Tony Fratto characterized the president's attitude toward Paulson.

The NYT observes that Paulson has led Bush "where he instinctively would not ordinarily go: into the realm of government intervention in the markets." The NYT's "Dealbook" column gives Paulson little credit, writing that the moment he floated the idea of government intervention, "he virtually guaranteed that that was exactly what would happen," as other potential saviors saw an easy way to wash their hands of the problem. Whether that's true or not, Paulson's actions have presented Congress with a major policy headache and, just as soon as the pols stop squabbling over who created the Fannie/Freddie mess, lawmakers will have to begin reinventing the two companies. Some see the chance to rein in their market exposure by turning them into public utilities or pure government agencies. Others want to use them as a tool to provide more affordable housing, writes the NYT.



There haven't been too many bumper trading sessions recently, so you can imagine how London brokers felt when a computer glitch took down the London Stock Exchange for seven hours on the day the Fannie/Freddie news sent world markets surging. United Airlines must have wished the blackout had affected the entire financial world after Miami investment advisory firm Income Securities Advisors wrote that the Florida Sun-Sentinel was reporting that United's parent company, UAL, would be filing bankruptcy. The story was true, if six years too late, having been originally published in 2002. By the time UAL could address the problem, its shares had plummeted to about $3 from more than $12, wiping out more than $1 billion in value.



Even as Google announced plans to partner with NBC Universal to sell advertisements on some of NBC's cable channels, the WSJ reports that the Justice Department is eyeing a "possible antitrust challenge" to the company's growing power in advertising. The government has retained the services of renowned litigator Sanford Litvack, an indication that the "U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo," writes the paper. But why worry about federal investigations when there is the rest of the world to conquer? The FT reports Google will join forces with HSBC and Cablevision honcho John Malone in a $750 million project to bring satellite Internet access to 3 billion people in Africa and other emerging markets. First step is an order for 16 satellites from a French aerospace group to "connect mobile masts in a swath of countries within five degrees of the equator to fast broadband networks."



Shell is set to become the first western oil company to sign a deal with the Iraqi government since the 2003 invasion, the FT reports. The Anglo-Dutch oil giant will undertake a joint venture valued at $4 billion with the Iraqi government to tap gas reserves in the Basra region. The news is a lone success for Big Oil in Iraq, given that the Iraqi oil ministry has abandoned a controversial plan to award short-term no-bid technical support contracts to companies like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell. Baghdad will now look to forge longer-term contracts that could bring other international oil companies into the bidding.



Finally, with just four months to go until Christmas, Apple is set to unveil a new line of iPods. Steve Jobs must be worried that Microsoft's new software update for the Zune digital music player is going cut into market share, no?

The Wall Street Journal is calling it the "most dramatic market intervention in years." After weeks of speculation, the U.S. government is now in control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In a deal structured by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the Feds seized the troubled lenders over the weekend, pledging up to $200 billion to cover a feared deluge of mortgage defaults. The Financial Times says the Fannie-Freddie seizure amounts to the "world's biggest financial bailout." It saves, for now, the two chief backers of up to $5.4 trillion in U.S. home mortgages. "While the Bush administration stopped short of using the word 'nationalization,' analysts said the moves amounted to a de facto government control," the FT reports. The New York Times, in its six-story package on the historic deal, reports that Daniel H. Mudd, departing CEO of Fannie Mae, is guaranteed a severance package of $9.3 million, while Freddie Mac chief Richard F. Syron will walk away with at least $14.1 million. And who is on the losing end of this historic bailout? They include: "shareholders, rank-and-file employees and, in the worst case, American taxpayers," the NYT says.

The news was greeted with cheers Monday morning in Asia. Japan's Nikkei index and Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surged more than 3 percent in early trading on hopes the Fannie-Freddie "conservatorship" would stabilize the U.S. housing market, the BBC reports. For China, owners of $376 billion in U.S. debt (the majority is Fannie-Freddie debt), the seizure confirms what many have long known: "Beijing's huge U.S. exposure still poses a serious risk," Reuters reports.

Kerry Killinger, CEO of Washington Mutual, is the latest scalp claimed by the mortgage crisis, the WSJ reports in a Page One scoop. WaMu's once fiercely loyal board pushed out Killinger after the lender disclosed $19 billion in losses and the share price plummeted 85 percent. According to the WSJ, "succeeding Mr. Killinger will be Alan Fishman, currently chairman of New York commercial mortgage broker Meridian Capital Group." Prior to that, Fishman was head of Philadelphia-based Sovereign Bank, the nation's second-largest thrift. The NYT, citing people briefed on the Killinger ouster, confirmed that WaMu's new chairman, Stephen Frank, told Killinger on Thursday he ought to retire. According to the NYT, thus "ends an 18-year run in which he built the bank into one of the nation's biggest financial institutions through a series of acquisitions. But his failure to properly integrate those deals and manage the growing losses from subprime mortgages and credit card loans proved to be his undoing."

And the revolving door didn't shut there. Wachovia's new CEO, Robert K. Steel, just weeks into the new job, will be appointing Carlyle Group's David Zwiener as the troubled lender's new CFO, the WSJ reports. He will replace Thomas J. Wurtz. Zwiener will likely have to oversee Wachovia's plan to eliminate 10,750 jobs.

More than 27,000 machinists for Boeing will take to the picket line today after contract talks between the aircraft manufacturer and one of its largest unions broke down over the weekend. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports today there is no sign that contract negotiations will resume anytime soon. The strike is expected to cost Boeing about $100 million to $120 million a day in revenue, the newspaper says, citing analysts. The work stoppage could also delay the inaugural flight of the 787 wide-body Dreamliner, which had been anticipated for November. If the strike lengthens, it would affect much of the aviation industry, Reuters reports. "Japan's heavy engineering firms Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Fuji Heavy Industries are taking part of the project risk in developing new carbon-fiber fuselage and wing structures for the 787, and stand to lose if the project is further derailed," a Reuters report says.

Oil bounced back from a five-month low in early trading Monday on fears that Hurricane Ike will barrel into Gulf waters in the coming days and once again disrupt oil and gas production, the Associated Press reports. The price of light, sweet crude rose more than $2 to $108.80 in midday trading in Singapore on Monday, the AP says. The region survived the worst of Hurricane Gustav last week, but not all the rigs are up and operating again; Ike's possible arrival later this week complicates matters further as personnel continue to evacuate at-risk rigs, the Houston Chronicle reports. "Offshore oil and gas operators in the Gulf of Mexico who are reboarding platforms and rigs and restoring production following Hurricane Gustav are now starting to take precautions for Hurricane Ike," the U.S. Minerals Management Service told the Chronicle.

Forget India, Taiwan, or China. For many of Europe's largest companies, it's cheaper to outsource manufacturing to the United States, the FT reports. "It may sound like a joke but it can be cheaper than you imagine to manufacture there," the chairman of one of Germany's largest automobile groups tells the newspaper. The lure of a cheap dollar and, more importantly, fiscal perks thrown in by enterprising communities has sent firms like Volkswagen and ThyssenKrupp to open plants recently. The Italians, too, say America is a bargain. "It is one of the low-cost locations to be in at the moment," a Fiat official told the FT.

The Los Angeles Times leads with word that the Bush administration is sending Predator aircraft "equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems" to target militants inside Pakistan. This new technology was apparently a key weapon in the fight against Iraqi insurgents, and now drones with this special equipment are being pulled from other areas and sent to help out in Pakistan. This is yet another example of how the Bush administration has decided to pursue more unilateral attacks in Pakistan instead of trying to cooperate with the Pakistani government.

The Washington Post and New York Times lead with news that Lehman Brothers has put up a for-sale sign, only a day after the investment bank was busy insisting that it could continue to operate by itself. The WP emphasizes that the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department are helping Lehman deal with its problems and are actively talking to potential buyers. Government officials are hoping that a sale can be completed before Asian markets open Monday. USA Today and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with Hurricane Ike, which is expected to hit just south of Houston sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. Forecasters predict the storm will get stronger before hitting Texas' Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane and government officials have ordered the evacuation of many low-lying areas along the coast.

So what's this new technology the LAT is referring to that has apparently been an important piece of equipment in the fight against insurgents in Iraq? Well, officials asked that details not be released because it could help militants evade detection. But "the previously unacknowledged devices" permit human targets to be tracked "when they are inside buildings or otherwise hidden from Predator surveillance cameras." Also, with this new system, remote pilots have a way to confirm where the target is located beyond just looking through the Predator's lens, which means decisions about when to strike can be made much more quickly. "A military official familiar with the systems said they had a profound effect, both militarily and psychologically, on the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq," reports the LAT. One official said that with the new technology, insurgents often feel "like they are living with a red dot on their head" and are constantly afraid that a missile might strike.

The paper doesn't mention it (and TP, of course, has no way to know for certain), but it sure sounds like this technology the LAT is describing is at least part of the program Bob Woodward credited as the main reason behind the decrease in violence in Iraq. In The War Within, one of the few new pieces of information that Woodward put forward had to do with a secret program that apparently gave the military greater capabilities to track and kill insurgents in Iraq.

The new system described by the LAT today apparently allows suspects to be identified quickly. "All I have to do is point the sensor at him," said a military officer, "and a missile can be off the rail in seconds." But Predators have also been known to miss their targets, and increasing their use would likely lead to even more civilian casualties, which has already fueled resentment among many Pakistanis in the area who, often as a result of these attacks, see the United States as the enemy.

While the Federal Reserve wants to keep public money as far away as possible from a deal to buy Lehman, potential buyers are looking to the U.S. government to protect them from future losses. Lehman's stock plunged 42 percent yesterday, which, as the LAT points out, means that its purchase is "feasible for a range of potential suitors." The leading contenders now appear to be Bank of America and Barclays, a British bank. But it seems unlikely either of them would want to take on the company without any help from the federal government. "The test will come if potential buyers balk at a purchase without the Fed's backing," notes the NYT.

Some think the federal government will jump in eventually to prevent the rest of the financial system from being hurt by Lehman's woes. For their part, Fed officials are adamant that after the rescue of Bear Stearns and the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they don't want Wall Street to assume the government will always put taxpayer money on the line to help rescue companies that are in trouble.

But it may be a little too late to be worrying about that now. The WP's Steven Pearlstein notes that the government is now "hip-deep in the direct management of the financial system," which is particularly interesting considering that this "unprecedented intrusion of government" is coming in the final days of a president who has always touted deregulation and prayed at the altar of the free market. But just like during the Great Depression, "it has taken a full-blown financial crisis to shake the faith that free markets will always deliver better outcomes than politicians and bureaucrats."

The LAT, NYT, and WP all front Sarah Palin's first extensive interview with a hard-news outlet since becoming John McCain's running mate. The WP, however, doesn't actually lead its story with the interview but rather mentions that Palin appeared to link Sept. 11 to the war in Iraq. While talking to a group of soldiers that included her son, she said they would "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans." It certainly sounds like she was making an oft-repeated claim from before the war that linked Saddam Hussein with the Sept. 11 attacks. But the truth is that everyone agrees al-Qaida militants have taken root in Iraq since the invasion. Regardless, the NYT talks to the campaign and says aides emphasized she doesn't think Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11.

As for the interview itself, the NYT says that "perhaps the most confident answer" Palin supplied in "a sometimes tense and generally probing interview" was her assurance that she felt ready to be president. For the most part, Palin successfully uttered talking points from the campaign in a calm manner that mostly didn't veer far from message. The most uncomfortable moment for Palin must have been when Charles Gibson asked her about the Bush doctrine and she didn't seem to know that he was referring to the view that the United States can engage in a pre-emptive war. She also switched her position on global warming a bit to put it more in line with McCain's and said that she was "thankful that, under Reagan, we won the Cold War." In foreign policy, she very much sounded like McCain and said that if Georgia joins NATO, the United States might have to fight Russia if Moscow decides to invade again. To its credit, the LAT not only goes through Palin's misstatements but also says that Gibson quoted some of her words "out of context" and also "mischaracterized her" view at one point.

The NYT's Alessandra Stanley writes that Gibson "had the skeptical, annoyed tone of a university president who agrees to interview the daughter of a trustee but doesn't believe she merits admission."

The NYT fronts a look at how Barack Obama will begin to attack McCain more forcefully today with new ads and a general "new tone." Democrats have been criticizing Obama's campaign for failing to hit back hard enough at Republican attacks that have been coming quickly since the convention. As much as the Obama campaign insists it is not worried and this is just a phase, many are ready to push the panic button because the Democratic nominee is allowing McCain and Palin to control the message of the campaign and forcing him to respond to accusations rather than push his own ideas.

In the Post's op-ed page, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes that the campaign is now "a blur of flying pieces of junk, lipstick and gutter-style attacks." McCain's lies about Obama and Palin's distortions on her own record "suggest an unedifying scuffle over a city council seat." Dionne blames the media for frequently failing to call a lie a lie, and McCain for "running a disgraceful, dishonorable campaign." But he also blames Obama because he isn't doing a good job reminding Americans this is an important election that can't come down to trivial issues. Obama desperately needs to take control of his campaign and remind voters what he stands for, because most voters simply don't know. "McCain has shown he wants the presidency so badly that he's willing to say anything, true or false, to win power," writes Dionne. "Obama can win by fighting for what he believes."

Palin's popularity is helping not just Republicans, as her personal style has also "sparked a buying frenzy," notes the WSJ. Hairstylists and wig sellers say more people are asking to look like Palin, and if she wears a distinctive piece of clothing, chances are that sales will increase. The shoes she wears have been selling quickly, and her eyeglasses are on back order. Most of the companies are happy for the attention, even if Palin wasn't exactly the demographic they had in mind for their product. "The age bracket we target is a little younger," one executive says of the shoes Palin wore when McCain introduced her as his running mate. "It's a very edgy, very hip, very street brand."

The New York Times leads with word that President Bush signed classified orders in July giving U.S. Special Operations forces permission to carry out ground operations inside Pakistan's border without approval from the Pakistani government. This marks an important shift for an administration that has repeatedly tried to work with the Pakistani government to target militants in its tribal regions and came about only after months of discussions between U.S. officials.

The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with an Interior Department investigation that found "a culture of ethical failure" at the agency that is in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies. USA Today leads with news that all air cargo will now be scanned for radiation at airports across the country. The 9/11 Commission had identified the lack of scanning as a clear vulnerability, even though no one knows of any information that would lead officials to think that terrorists are planning to smuggle radioactive material using planes. Some complained the program is nothing but a huge waste of money that could easily slow down commerce.

American officials who talked to the NYT emphasized that they will still inform Pakistan when ground attacks are carried out on its soil, but its permission will not be sought. The classified orders are described as a result of the exasperation felt by the Bush administration from the lack of action on the part of the Pakistani government at a time when all reports point to a growth of al-Qaida and Taliban operations within its borders. The move also reflects the fact that U.S. officials don't fully trust Pakistan's military and intelligence services, who are often accused of cooperating with the militants. The NYT deftly notes that it's not exactly clear "what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country."

Meanwhile, the NYT reports on new details of last week's Special Operations raid in a village near the Afghanistan border and reveals that it "was more intrusive than had previously been known." The operation involved more than two dozen Navy Seals who were inside Pakistan for several hours and killed more than 20 suspected militants. Although one U.S. official says that the Pakistani government had hinted that it wouldn't oppose limited ground operations, Pakistan's top army officer was singing a different tune yesterday and said his country's sovereignty would be defended "at all costs." The paper notes that if a U.S. servicemember is killed or captured inside Pakistan, it would not only further strain diplomatic ties, but would also be celebrated as a huge victory by al-Qaida.

The Interior Department's inspector general described a free-for-all atmosphere in which more than a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service repeatedly accepted gifts and trips from industry representatives and directed contracts to favored clients. And that's just the G-rated part of the reports, which also detailed the party atmosphere at the Denver office of the royalty-in-kind program, where employees "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relations with oil and gas company representatives," thus creating a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity."

These reports were hardly the first time that the Minerals Management Service has come under fire for mismanagement and oversight failures. But, as the NYT notes, "the new reports go far beyond any previous study in revealing serious concerns with the integrity and behavior of the agency's officials." Even though the agency may have an obscure name that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily, it's important to remember that it not only issues drilling leases but also handles lots of money. In fact, it collects royalties that in some years amount to the largest source of revenue for the U.S. government besides taxes.

The reports' most lurid details are concentrated on the agency's royalty-in-kind program, which allows energy companies to pay the government in oil and gas instead of cash for drilling in taxpayer-owned land. The misconduct allegations that center around the program's former director, Gregory Smith, seem to be the most all-encompassing. Not only did he use his position to get lucrative outside work but also had sex with subordinates and purchased cocaine from an employee, which he frequently got delivered to his office. That's not to say he was the only one making questionable decisions. A couple of employees also had sex with industry representatives but continued to handle work involving those companies. When asked why she never told anyone that her objectivity might be compromised, one employee said that she "did not consider a 'one-night-stand' to be a personal relationship."

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that having these types of relationships with clients may have cost taxpayers money. Employees at the royalty-in-kind program repeatedly allowed energy companies to revise their bids after they had already been awarded and the vast majority of them favored the industry rather than the government.

"The activities at the [royalty-in-kind] office are so outlandish that this whole IG report reads like a script from a television miniseries—and one that cannot air during family viewing time," House natural resources committee Chairman Nick Rahall said.

Lawmakers who have been opposing calls to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling immediately seized on the reports to highlight one of the reasons why they think it would be a bad idea. "I warned publicly that we could not trust the oil companies … nor the federal watchdogs charged with keeping a watchful eye over them," Sen. Bill Nelson said. "Now, we have proof."

The WP fronts, and everyone covers, the pessimistic assessment of the situation in Afghanistan that top Pentagon leaders gave Congress yesterday. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, went as far as to tell lawmakers, "I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan." Along with Gates, Mullen heaped much of the blame on the current situation on Pakistan and emphasized that more time and resources will be given to Afghanistan in the near future. "Frankly, we are running out of time," Mullen said.

The presidential candidates are calling a truce today and will stop running ads while they join together in New York to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. But looking at the policy proposals of how each candidate would tackle the war on terrorism and prevent another attack on the homeland, it looks like they could come together every day. The candidates would vociferously disagree as they spend much time on the stump criticizing each other's policies. But the truth is that, in what the LAT calls an "unexpected development," John McCain and Barack Obama "seem to be moving toward consensus on their broad-brush strategies." There's clearly a difference in personality and approach, but in general terms they're both speaking the same language. But how about the details? Well, neither one of the candidates is really talking about those pesky details at the moment. "There is not a big incentive to articulate the details," one Obama adviser said. "These are complex questions that don't lend themselves to short answers during presidential debates."

On the NYT's op-ed page, two pieces pick up on this theme and say that it's about time the candidates start to seriously address these issues. In one piece, Philip Bobbitt and John Danforth say that "with respect to national security, neither campaign has articulated the fundamental points of view that will allow people to make an informed choice in November." This is an unacceptable development, and the two authors pose 12 questions for each candidate with the "hope that these answers will be published on this page." In the other piece, Clark Kent Ervin also poses some questions for the candidates, noting that they have been pretty much silent on homeland security. That's a problem because "another major attack is likely to be attempted sooner rather than later," and, if history is any guide, it could come soon after the next president moves into the White House. "The government's approach to homeland security needs to be changed drastically if we are to close the gap between how secure we need to be and how secure we really are."

And while some are worried about national security, over in the WSJ, the editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer is eager to welcome voters "to the greatest tabloid presidential election in modern times." Who's to blame? Why, John Edwards, of course. After ignoring the rumors of an Edwards affair for so long, the media were eager to pounce when some started whispering that Sarah Palin was not actually the mother of her youngest child. As much as it likes to think that it is above tabloid fodder, "when a Republican VP nominee showed up with a pregnant teenage daughter, the mainstream media's superego disappeared faster than Dan Quayle at a spelling bee."

The Washington Post leads with word that U.S. and Pakistani officials are switching gears in their hunt for Osama Bin Laden to focus more on the use of Predator drone spy planes in western Pakistan. No one has received reliable information on Bin Laden's whereabouts since December 2001. Hobbled by the continued lack of informants in Pakistan's tribal regions, officials are now concentrating on tracking down other al-Qaida leaders that could lead them back to the ultimate prize. The New York Times leads with, and the Wall Street Journal fronts, the increasing fears that Lehman Brothers might be on its last legs. Sparked by concern that a planned investment by a Korean bank would fall through, investors dumped Lehman's stock and erased almost half of the firm's value in one day. The WSJ leads its world-wide newsbox, and the WP and LAT front, word that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il may be seriously ill. No one is quite sure, but he didn't attend a parade to commemorate the country's 60^th anniversary yesterday, a date that is particularly important in North Korean society. His absence lent credence to reports that the reclusive leader is having health problems and may have suffered a stroke.

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how many top Democrats are doing what Democrats do best: worrying. There's a general concern that John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which many expected to drag the Republican down, has effectively stolen Barack Obama's thunder. And now that Obama has started to aggressively criticize the Alaska governor, there are worries he could be helping the Republican ticket by increasing Palin's appeal among white, blue-collar voters, particularly women. USA Today leads with word that foreign investment could begin flooding to Iraq as the government has received requests for more than $74 billion in projects over the past five months. Only one project has actually broken ground, as government approval has been difficult to obtain, and there are skeptics who say the final amount that will be spent will actually be much smaller. Still, investors, particularly from oil-rich monarchies in the region, insist they're ready to plow money into Iraq.

Besides the lack of on-the-ground informants, officials attribute their failure to find Bin Laden "to an overreliance on military force, disruptions posed by the war in Iraq and a pattern of underestimating the enemy," reports the Post. But even as many say that the American effort has been hurt by an aggressive approach that claims civilian casualties and fails to foster good will among those in the border region, the number of missile attacks in Pakistan has more than tripled this year. Officials are also quick to blame their failure to catch al-Qaida's leader on the switching of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 as well as less-than-stellar relations with the Pakistani government.

The fears surrounding Lehman had a reverberating effect on the rest of the stock market and more than wiped out gains made in Monday's rally after the government announced the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The uncertainties are compounded by the fact that many don't think the government will come to Lehman's rescue. "Some may worry that Treasury has taken on so much taxpayer burden they don't have any remaining capacity more to take on the burdens of Lehman," one analyst said. Now the 157-year-old institution continues on what the NYT calls "a fight for its life" as executives desperately seek investors who could save it from extinction.

The WP quotes an Asia expert saying that the man who is considered to be the No. 2 leader in North Korea gave a speech on Monday "that referred to Kim Jong Il mainly in the past tense," which is highly unusual. Others warned that rumors of this kind have swirled around in the past and cautioned against reading too much into them. Still, everyone notes that if Kim Jong-il dies or is incapacitated, a power struggle is likely to ensue, and it might make it more difficult to continue nuclear disarmament negotiations since the country's generals oppose giving up its nuclear weapons. North Korea announced it would rebuild its Yongbyon nuclear reactor shortly after Kim Jong-il was last seen in public, which some think could be evidence that a power struggle is already underway.

Over the last few days, Obama has been aggressively responding to Palin's claim of being a reformer who stood up to Washington while also making fun of the Republican ticket's claim that it is the true choice for those who want change. Yesterday, Obama said Republicans are trying to put "lipstick on a pig," which immediately raised cries from the GOP that the Democrat was making a sexist allusion to Palin. Obama's campaign dismissed the complaint as a "pathetic attempt to play the gender card," but it's exactly these types of distractions that Democrats say Obama could avoid by effectively ignoring Palin and focusing on McCain. That's not to say all Democrats agree. In fact, some think Obama should be more aggressive in order to let independent voters know about Palin's conservative record.

A new WSJ poll, which the paper fronts, gives some hints at where all these concerns are coming from as it echoes the other surveys released this week and notes that McCain has received a sizable post-convention bump. The race is pretty much a dead heat nationally among registered voters. But while enthusiasm among McCain supporters has increased sharply, Obama voters are still more enthusiastic about their candidate. The poll also suggests that the Palin pick may have been exactly what McCain needed to tip the scales his way in Southern states. "Nearly six in 10 Southern voters now favor the McCain ticket, up from fewer than half in August," reports the WSJ.

Remember how the LAT said yesterday that Obama was pursuing a more ambitious strategy than McCain and devoting lots of resources to traditionally Republican states? Well, today the WSJ suggests that's not quite true. The increasingly competitive contest is leading Obama's campaign to focus almost exclusively on traditional swing states. So far this month, the Democratic nominee has spent the bulk of his time in three states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.

The NYT also says that Obama's initial plan of competing in at least 18 states "may soon get whittled down" because, quite simply, there isn't much time left. Although Election Day is on Nov. 4, more than 30 states allow voters to cast their ballots early, so someone in Iowa, for example, could be making his or her final choice in less than two weeks. This not only means candidates have to be selective about where they appear, but also that they can't afford to wait to release their most hard-hitting advertisements and arguments. "I think it's unprecedented, a whole new way of looking at elections," a Democratic strategist said. "A combination of the late conventions and the way early voting is becoming even earlier around the country is going to have a big, big impact."

While the candidates are scrambling to reach the finish line, they're not as concerned about telling the truth, notes a front-page piece in the WP. There's probably no better example of this than Palin's claim that she opposed the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska. We've already known for more than a week that's not true (she defended the project while campaigning in 2006 and turned against it only after Congress made it clear that it would not pay for it), but that doesn't mean Palin has stopped repeating the applause line. Another example is McCain's oft-repeated claim that Obama would increase everyone's taxes. As the campaign enters its final weeks, "untrue accusations and rumors have started to swirl at a pace so quick that they become regarded as fact before they can be disproved," notes the Post.

Although the WP does note that the Republican ticket has "been more aggressive in recent days in repeating what their opponents say are outright lies," it tries to make it seem as though this is the way both campaigns are operating by noting that there have been untrue rumors swirling around the Internet about Palin. But isn't there a fundamental distinction between e-mail rumors and what is said by candidates on the stump? TP sure wishes the WP—and all the other papers—would be less reluctant to explicitly qualify these lies and call them as such instead of saying that "their opponents say" they're lying. It would also be nice if there was recognition that not all "untruths" are created equal. For example, Obama's campaign has repeatedly quoted McCain saying that the economy is fundamentally sound. Is it disingenuous? Sure. That quote is months old, and now McCain can't stop repeating that the economy is in trouble. But he did actually say it, which is quite different from making something up. Not that it would matter. "We have created a system where there is not a lot of shame in stretching the truth," one analyst said. And once these lies seep into the public consciousness, it's difficult to change them.

The NYT's Thomas Friedman says that in the last few weeks Obama has lost his "gut connection" with voters. "Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama's coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats because Obama has gone from cool to cold." But unlike many commentators, Friedman doesn't equate being more aggressive with attacking his opponent. "Forget trashing McCain's ideas," Friedman writes. "If Obama wants to rally his base, he has to be more passionate about his own ideas."

The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how the two presidential campaigns are approaching the final stretch of the contest in markedly different ways. While Barack Obama is devoting lots of time and resources to traditionally Republican states, John McCain is sticking to the more obvious battlegrounds from past elections. The Washington Post leads with a new national poll that shows Americans are pretty much evenly split on who they want sitting in the Oval Office next year. As yesterday's USAT poll noted, McCain seems to have gained a sizable post-convention bump not only in the number of people who are excited about his candidacy but also in the percentage of voters who think he's better suited to handle economic issues. The WP points out that much of McCain's gains come from white women, who tilted slightly toward Obama before the Republican Convention but now favor McCain by 12 points.

The New York Times leads news that a British jury convicted three men of conspiracy to commit murder but couldn't decide whether any of the defendants were guilty of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic flights with liquid explosives in 2006. The failure to convict was an embarrassing blow to counterterrorism officials on both sides of the Atlantic, who had used plenty of superlatives to describe the plot as potentially the deadliest act of terrorism since Sept. 11. Prosecutors said they might call for a retrial. USA Today leads with a look at how many states' unemployment insurance trust funds are running low at a time of rising joblessness. Several states will probably need federal help in the near future to cover weekly unemployment payments, which would likely lead to higher unemployment insurance taxes for businesses. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with news that President Bush will announce the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will increase by approximately 4,500 troops while about 8,000 military personnel will be withdrawn from Iraq by February. The move amounts to an endorsement of a compromise plan that was presented by top Pentagon leaders last week.

The LAT rightly points out national polls are basically meaningless at this stage of the presidential race since the candidates need to worry about getting enough states in their column to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes in order to win the White House. On that end, the Obama campaign clearly has a more ambitious strategy as the Democratic nominee is devoting significant resources to 18 states, 14 of which voted for President Bush in 2004. The Democrat is so ambitious that his campaign insists it's still holding hope for Alaska (though it has pointedly stopped running ads there), saying that it just wants to maximize Obama's chances as much as possible. The McCain camp basically scoffs at this plan. "Eighteen states is 10 states too many," one McCain strategist said. Some Democrats are getting worried that Obama is devoting too much money to pie-in-the-sky dreams, instead of just focusing on places where he has a better chance of actually winning, particularly since some states—Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and Michigan—that voted Democratic four years ago are far from a sure thing.

Although it doesn't say it outright, a Page One NYT story suggests the Obama campaign might not keep up this ambitious strategy for much longer. Fundraisers for Obama are getting nervous that the gamble to refuse public money for the general election campaign might not actually pay off. This concern is hardly new as many have written about how Hillary Clinton's fundraisers have so far failed to come through as much as was initially predicted. Of course, all the handwringing could be for nothing if Obama reports surprising August fundraising numbers, but it's not looking good for the Democrat. In what could very well be an attempt to play the expectations game, a fundraiser estimates the Obama campaign raised $17 million last month, and has a mere $13 million in the bank. For its part, the McCain campaign had its best month ever in August as it raised $47 million for itself and $22 million for the party.

The WP's new poll makes clear that both candidates were able to solidify their party's base at the convention, although nearly one-quarter of voters who backed Clinton still say they plan to vote for McCain. Inevitably this means the real fight is now for the independents, who, for the first time, prefer McCain by a narrow margin. Whatever happens in the next few weeks, it seems the voters will notice. Approximately nine of every 10 voters said they're following the race, and a slight majority say they are following it "very closely."

The WP took a look at Gov. Sarah Palin's travel documents and reports that Alaska taxpayers paid for 312 nights that she spent in her own home. The "per diem" charge that's supposed to cover expenses while traveling on state businesses is apparently permitted because she is officially based in Juneau but spends most of her time in her home town of Wasilla. The state has also paid for trips that she took with her children, and her husband also charged taxpayers for trips that he took on official business. In total, Palin received almost $17,000 as her allowance, while her husband and children charged almost $45,000 for travel expenses. Regardless, the $93,000 Palin spent on airfare in 2007 pales in comparison to the $463,000 that her predecessor spent the previous year.

The NYT takes an amusing look at how McCain has taken to hugging Palin when they appear together on stage. This might seem unremarkable, but the paper notes that when Walter Mondale ran with Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the two almost never touched each other. If he had gotten closer, "people were afraid that it would look like, 'Oh, my God, they're dating," Ferraro said. Etiquette experts mostly say the hugs are perfectly appropriate, particularly since they're more stiff than loving, and Palin seems to keep a distance. "As the nuns used to say before school dance, 'Leave room for the Holy Ghost,' " quips Washington satirist Christopher Buckley.

The WP fronts, and everyone carries, a look at how a six-year-old news story that reported the bankruptcy filing of United Airlines was posted as new information over Bloomberg News. The story "triggered a massive sell-off that nearly obliterated the company's stock in a matter of minutes," says the WP. The drama began when a reporter for Income Securities Advisors, a research firm, was doing an online search and came across the newspaper article, which apparently looked like it had been posted over the weekend. Everyone was busy pointing fingers yesterday (the paper blamed Google, and vice-versa) except for the president of Income Securities Advisors, who wasn't eager to really blame his reporter's actions. "It would have been nice if the reporter had been more grounded in what's going on out there in the world."

In an amazing feat, the NYT fronts a story about Salvia divinorum that is short on hysteria and even seems to chastise those who make too much of the hallucinogenic herb. TP even dares say that Slate's Jack Shafer would approve (earlier this year, Shafer documented how the press has been covering the herb). Today the NYT notes that state lawmakers are using some of the thousands of videos posted on YouTube of people trying salvia as evidence that it should be regulated. But the paper goes on to note there's no evidence it's addictive or that people abuse the herb and points out that "even devotees use it sparingly." The paper's reporters apparently were present when someone smoked a bit of salvia and the description hardly makes it sound like something to fear—"a beatific smile spread lightly across his face." Finally, even though the NYT does say there have been "rare claims" of deaths related to salvia, "the links are speculative." Impressive!

In the NYT's op-ed page, Mark Everson says there's a simple way to deal with all the promises from the presidential candidates that they'll change Washington: "Decentralize the executive branch of the government." Although it might make sense for certain Cabinet departments to be close to the White House, many more offices and federal employees could move out of Washington and scatter across different areas of the country. "Running government operations outside the Beltway would more equitably distribute government jobs and at the same time help limit the undue influence of Washington."

The WP's Eugene Robinson notes that while McCain is busy making fun of Obama for being a celebrity, the Republican "is campaigning on a platform that can be summed up in three words: me, me, me." Even though McCain has eagerly pointed out the GOP's shortcomings over the past few years, he "is arguing that he should be elected in spite of his party's many failures because, well, he's John McCain," Robinson writes. "He's special."

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times lead with the news the papers have been previewing all weekend: The U.S. government officially took control of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac yesterday. In basic terms, this means that the government now has control over the companies that fund around two-thirds of all new home mortgages. Or, as the LAT succinctly summarizes: "Washington's move means the federal government will directly back the great majority of the nation's home mortgages." And if the magnitude of that fact is still not clear, the papers all make sure to emphasize that this is A Big Deal. The NYT calls it "a seismic event" and the Wall Street Journal characterizes it as the "most dramatic market intervention in years."

USA Today fronts the Fannie and Freddie news but leads with a new poll taken over the weekend that shows John McCain got a big bounce from the Republican Convention. He now leads Barack Obama by 50 percent to 46 percent, a marked turnaround. Among likely voters, McCain leads 54 percent to 44 percent. The huge 19-point advantage that Obama had on handling the economy has virtually disappeared, and Republicans are also much more enthusiastic about voting than before the convention. Experts are quick to warn that post-convention bounces are often fleeting. "It is really surprising how quickly convention memories fade," one political scientist said. The WSJ leads its world-wide newsbox with Hurricane Ike killing dozens in Haiti as Cuba rushed to evacuate those in the path of the Category 3 storm. The hurricane is expected to reach the Gulf Coast this week.

When Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the government's takeover of Fannie and Freddie yesterday, he described it as the only viable option to deal with the current crisis. "Failure of either of them would cause great turmoil in our financial markets here at home and around the globe," Paulson said. The plan put the two companies under the management control of their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and their chief executives were summarily fired. The government will receive $1 billion of preferred shares in each company and the Treasury is committed to providing as much as $100 billion to each company to cope with any shortage of capital. In exchange for its help, the government would also get the right to buy up to 80 percent of the companies for a nominal fee.

In what the LAT calls "perhaps the most unexpected aspect of its rescue effort," the government also announced that the Treasury would buy at least $5 billion of new mortgage-backed securities issued by the two companies. This could help restore confidence and even bring down the interest rates for some home mortgages. The companies could then expand to ease the pain of the credit crunch until the end of 2009, at which point Paulson said he wants the companies to shrink dramatically by reducing their mortgage holdings by 10 percent a year. Of course, that's all likely to change, depending on the makeup of the next administration and Congress, and some were already speaking up against plans to shrink the mortgage giants dramatically.

"There is no guarantee that the takeover will work," declares the WP, "and it comes at a potentially massive cost to taxpayers."

So how much will all this cost? No one knows, and estimates are hard to come by (yesterday, the NYT explained that it's unlikely the Treasury will release an estimate on such a huge bailout before the presidential elections). If, as many predict, problems in the mortgage market continue and foreclosures rise, it could add up to "an expensive tab," notes USAT. The NYT points out that the Congressional Budget Office said two months ago it might cost $25 billion, but many think the final figure will be significantly higher. And the Post says the $29-billion rescue of Bear Stearns could seem like chump change once this is all over. But, on the upside, if the companies return to profitability, the government would be first in line to get its money back.

Existing shareholders are likely to incur huge losses, while the plan protects holders of the companies' debt. These bondholders, which include mutual funds, foreign central banks, and government investment funds, are "the biggest winners" (WP) since their investment has the explicit backing of the U.S. government. Asian investors cheered the news, and markets rallied at the opening bell today. Most politicians, including the two running for president, expressed their support for the plan.

The NYT and WSJ both front deeply reported blow-by-blow accounts of how the decision to take over Fannie and Freddie was made in marathon 18-hour days that led officials to realize they really had no other choice. The NYT emphasizes that when Congress awarded Paulson the power to bail out the mortgage giants if necessary, he never intended to use it. "But he quickly learned that getting those powers made their execution inevitable," says the NYT. Paulson began telling his friends that he "felt like a dog who'd caught a bus and didn't know what to do with it." Investors became nervous about putting money in the company without knowing the Treasury's plans, and fears that foreign governments would stop buying the companies' debt began to grow.

The WSJ highlights that until last month, Treasury officials thought that if they had to intervene, it would be through an equity investment. It was only in the middle of August that officials began to realize that wouldn't be enough and, on Friday, Paulson told the companies they either agreed to a takeover or one would be forced on them. The NYT says that Fannie's chief executive pleaded with Paulson to save the company since it was in better shape than Freddie, but Paulson refused. He shouldn't feel too bad, though. The NYT reports that the head of Fannie Mae could collect a $9.3 million exit package, while the chief executive of Freddie Mac could get at least $14.1 million. That is, of course, on top of the millions they've already earned while running the companies so spectacularly for a few years.

How did we get here? The NYT says that the "downfall of Fannie and Freddie stems from a series of miscalculations and deferred decisions, both by their executives and government officials." First, the companies expanded rapidly and ignored risks and then they failed to raise enough rainy-day capital while lawmakers just stood by and watched.

In a Page One column, the WP's Steven Pearlstein also looks into the events that led to yesterday's takeovers and says that while executives at Fannie and Freddie, along with their regulators, share some of the blame, "a good chunk of the responsibility should be assigned to elected politicians." Lawmakers were so busy arguing about the ideological basis for Fannie and Freddie that they neglected to increase oversight.

Several are quick to note that as much as the takeover plan might help reassure investors that the mortgage market isn't going under, it's hardly a panacea. The WSJ points out that "it won't cure the housing market's biggest ailments: falling home prices and rising foreclosures." And investors are also likely to conclude the takeover is a sign that the country's economic problems are far from over. Meanwhile, the NYT notes that the dramatic announcement also highlighted how reliant the U.S. economy is on Asian investors.

In other news, the NYT's Carlotta Gall goes to the village in Afghanistan where U.S. forces carried out an airstrike on Aug. 22. The strike has become a source of controversy because a U.N. investigation said that more than 90 civilians were killed while the U.S. military has insisted that the real number is between five and seven civilians. But the senior American commander in Afghanistan has requested further investigation, due to what he called "emerging evidence." Gall talks to villagers, including a doctor, and counts the graves, all of which appear to support the account from the Afghans. The U.S. military says militants encouraged the villagers to exaggerate their stories, but many of those who spoke to the NYT have ties to the government and insist they wouldn't take orders from the Taliban.

The LAT fronts a look at a debate currently going on in the Pentagon about whether the military should develop its capacity for cyber attacks. Until now, the focus has always been on defending U.S. networks and intelligence gathering, but some senior officials think the Pentagon needs to take a more proactive approach in developing its capabilities to carry out electronic attacks. Those pushing for these new programs have been citing Russia's use of cyberspace to try to convince Pentagon leaders that the United States can't stand back and needs to develop more advanced cyberwarfare methods.

Now that we know former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales repeatedly mishandled highly classified information while on the job, the WP's editorial board has a few basic questions: "Was Alberto R. Gonzales the least intellectually gifted attorney general in history? Did he possess the worst memory? Was he incapable of telling the truth? All of the above?"

For the second day running, everyone focuses on the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is expected to be announced later today. The New York Times pokes through the two mortgage-finance giants' entrails, revealing that the multibillion-dollar bailout was prompted in part by the discovery that Freddie Mac had overstated its capital cushion, presenting itself as more stable than it in fact was. Fannie Mae was in slightly better shape but would have struggled to remain afloat once the government took action against Freddie Mac.

The Washington Post leads local but off-leads with a report noting that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has rejected the idea of trying to stabilize Freddie and Fannie with a huge one-off injection of cash and will instead make quarterly investments in a bid to provide security while minimizing the cost to taxpayers. The Los Angeles Times casts Paulson's strategy as an attempt to find a middle ground between Republican free-marketeers who believe the companies should be allowed to go into receivership and congressional Democrats who believe that government intervention is necessary to save the companies and put the American economy back on an even keel.

Despite the ideological divide, the NYT notes, the rescue package is merely the latest in a succession of recent government bailouts, from the $15 billion set aside for airlines in the aftermath of 9/11 to the Federal Reserve's recent rescue of Bear Stearns. "If anybody thought we had a pure free-market financial system, they should think again," says one analyst. The exact price tag for saving Freddie and Fannie is likely to remain unclear; it's difficult to project, and naming an exact figure could prove politically uncomfortable in the run-up to the presidential election.

John McCain and Barack Obama were broadly supportive of the rescue deal, reports the NYT. Obama said he was withholding final judgment until the Treasury Department released a detailed outline of the plan and called for officials to put the strength of the economy ahead of the demands of lobbyists. McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, applauded the bailout but said a McCain administration would push for the companies to be made "smaller and smarter."

The NYT looks at the battleground states in the presidential race. Despite early suggestions that the candidates' crossover appeal would bring traditionally blue and red states into play, this year's swing states look remarkably similar to those of 2000 and 2004. Meanwhile, both candidates continued to tout their ability to bring change to Washington. McCain called his ticket "a team of mavericks" and declared: "Change is coming! Change is coming!" Obama responded with an unusually robust attack: "This is coming from a party that's been in charge for eight years," he said. "What they're saying is, 'Watch out, George Bush. Except for economic policies, and tax policies, and energy policies, and healthcare policies, and education policies, and Karl Rove-style politics, except for all that, we're really going to bring change to Washington.' "

All the papers continued to pore over Sarah Palin's CV. The LAT reports that the vice-presidential hopeful's appeal to working-class women may be limited; many say that economic concerns trump the Alaskan governor's "maternal grit." The Post fronts a report on the degree to which Palin has mingled family and politics. Her working-mom persona is a central part of her appeal but thrusts her family's problems into the public eye. The NYT considers Palin's declaration that she would be an advocate for children with special needs. The state of Alaska is currently the subject of two lawsuits alleging inadequate services for special-needs children.

The NYT runs several pieces pondering claims that the media has been unduly tough on Palin. The paper's public editor says that intense scrutiny was inevitable and right given McCain's decision to choose a largely unknown running mate. "The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin's partisans," he writes. "But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job." Mark Leibovich suggests that the GOP is merely rehashing time-worn claims of liberal-media bias: "The bashers and bashees have been through this and know the drill," he says. "It was hard to find a journalist last week who felt any unusual sense of siege or discomfort." Frank Rich is more cynical: "By hurling charges of sexism and elitism at any easily cowed journalist who raises a question about Palin, McCain operatives are hoping to ensure that whatever happened in Alaska with Sarah Palin stays in Alaska," he writes. "They just might pull it off."

The Post gives half its front page to a splashy piece puffing Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush administration's management of the war in Iraq. In today's installment, Woodward looks at the bloody summer of 2006, tracing the conflicting reports that ultimately led Bush to overhaul his administration's strategy for the war.

Pakistani lawmakers have elected Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, as the country's next president. Zardari, known locally as "Mr. Ten Percent" for allegedly taking millions of dollars in kickbacks during his wife's two terms as prime minister, won by a wide margin; he pledged to usher in a new era of democratic stability and to strengthen Pakistan's national parliament.

India would be allowed to engage in nuclear trade, reports the Post, under a landmark deal approved yesterday by the global body that regulates the sale of nuclear fuel. The NYT notes that the move followed intensive lobbying by the Bush administration but may have a rough passage through Congress amid scheduling problems and concerns that the move could spark an Asian arms race.

The LAT fronts a report raising concerns about the increasing use of CT scans. The technology provides doctors with a vital diagnostic tool but also boosts exposure to radiation. One controversial study estimates that scans being administered today could be responsible for up to 2 percent of cancer deaths in two or three decades. "In 20 or 30 years, the radiation debate will be like the smoking debate today," says one researcher. "People will say, 'Why did I get this imaging in the first place?' "

The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times all lead with news that government officials are poised to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by placing the flailing mortgage-finance giants under federal control. The plan would see the troubled companies lose their chief executives but would allow them to continue functioning with the government guaranteeing their debts. It's unclear how much the bailout will cost taxpayers, but it's thought the final bill could run into tens of billions of dollars, making the deal one of the biggest corporate-rescue operations in America's history.

There were bleak tidings, meanwhile, from the government's latest national unemployment report: the Los Angeles Times leads with, and everyone fronts, news that joblessness hit a five-year high in August, shedding 84,000 jobs to reach 6.1 percent. The new figures, which brought total job losses for the year to more than 600,000, were markedly worse than had been anticipated, dashing hopes that the economy would recover in the second half of 2008 and confirming that the country's economic jitters have spread beyond the housing and financial sectors. "These are really ugly numbers," said one economist. "Things are going to get worse before they get better."

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson met with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac officials late yesterday to hash out the details of a bailout; the LAT reports that Paulson and Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke were due to continue meeting with Fannie and Freddie executives through the weekend, in the hopes of unveiling a finalized rescue plan before financial markets open Monday morning. It's thought the deal would see the companies put under conservatorship, leaving them at least temporarily under government control; common stock would likely be heavily devalued if not entirely wiped out. With new figures showing foreclosures on the rise, the WSJ notes that the plan could help homeowners by reducing the impetus for interest-rate increases on mortgages.

And they're off! John McCain and Barack Obama's presidential campaigns have begun in earnest, declares the LAT, with the candidates heading to battleground states and trying to turn their respective post-convention bounces into a lasting electoral edge. The Post fronts a look at both candidates' efforts to eke political mileage out of America's economic woes; in stump speeches, McCain sought to cast his rival as a tax-and-spend liberal, while Obama mocked McCain's recent claim that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong". "What's more fundamental than having a job?" Obama scoffed. "What's more fundamental than that?"

The NYT argues that the race has been transformed by McCain's decision to jettison his former message of experience and try to co-opt his rival's theme of change. In an editorial, the Post lambasts both candidates for empty posturing and calls for them to run more substantive campaigns in the race's remaining weeks; the paper also runs a column by Michael Gerson, in which the former Bush speechwriter laments McCain's failure to deliver "actual and unexpected reform."

McCain was in Michigan yesterday; the WSJ fronts a look at his chances of wooing the state's Reagan Democrats. Central to the campaign's strategy: an attempt to sell McCain as a bipartisan capable of working with a Democratic Congress to get things done; and an increasing reliance on Sarah Palin, whose stump speeches are expected to go over well with blue-collar workers. It's unclear, though, how much crossover appeal Palin will have; the Post fronts a poll suggesting that McCain's running mate won't significantly increase the ticket's pulling power with independent voters.

The NYT notes that Palin—dubbed "Baberaham Lincoln" by a hyperventilating Peggy Noonan on the WSJ's op-ed page—has been ducking reporters' questions in recent days. Still, she comes under continued scrutiny in all the papers. The WSJ eyes the largest project Palin undertook as mayor of Wasilla: the construction of a hockey rink, which led to years of litigation, major budget overruns, and continuing financial headaches. The Post interviews the state trooper at the center of the Troopergate scandal; he says he wishes Palin luck but denies threatening to kill her father. The LAT considers Palin's role as commander of Alaska's National Guard; military officials say it was mostly managerial and conferred little or no foreign-policy experience. The LAT also ponders Palin's support for contraceptive education, which clashes with McCain's preference for abstinence-only education and might alarm some social conservatives.

In a new book, Bob Woodward suggests that the United States spied on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; that's drawn a dismayed response from the Iraqi government and could jeopardize negotiations over the continuing U.S. presence in the country. The White House, meanwhile, issued a terse statement contesting Woodward's claim that Bush had grown detached from the handling of the war, saying that the Post reporter's account was "at best incomplete."

With Tropical Storm Hannah working her way up the eastern seaboard, aid agencies continue to struggle with the aftermath of recent storms. In Haiti, U.N. peacekeepers handed out food and water as receding floodwaters revealed many bodies, adding to a death toll that already stood at 163. Back home, the Post reports, the American Red Cross is taking on massive debt to finance post-Gustav aid efforts; a softening economy and a sense of anticlimax meant the organization received relatively few donations as the storm swept across the Gulf Coast.

King Mswati III of Swaziland has angered his impoverished subjects by insisting on a lavish celebration for his 40th birthday and building a 15,000-seat stadium to house the festivities. It's not the first time Mswati's expensive tastes have gotten him into trouble, notes the NYT; the ruler had previously raised eyebrows by buying new BMWs for his 13 wives, in a break from his father's more austere habit of shipping his 70 brides around by bus.

Judging from the excerpts shown Thursday on ABC's World News and Nightline, there are several appropriate responses to watching Sarah Palin answer Charlie Gibson's questions on foreign policy and national security—sorrow, pity, incredulity, fear.

Gov. Palin was obviously briefed by Sen. John McCain's advisers, and briefed fairly well. She recited what were plainly the main points of these tutorials with an assertive confidence familiar to those who engaged in high-school debate competitions.

But it was painfully obvious—from the rote nature of her responses, the repetitions of hammered-home phrases, and the non sequiturs that leapt up when she found herself led around an unfamiliar bend—that there is not a millimeter of depth undergirding those recitations, that she had never given a moment's thought to these matters before two weeks ago.

And why should she have? As governor of Alaska, nothing in her line of duties has compelled her to pay attention to such matters—and that is precisely the point.

It is stunning that Palin, McCain, and their spin masters persist in claiming that she has experience in foreign affairs by dint of governing a state that borders Russia.

Let's be clear about the nature of this border. Alaska's farthest-flung islands, along the Bering Straits, come close to the Chukchi Peninsula of Chukotka, an autonomous region of Russia on the country's northeastern tip—as far from Moscow as New York is—whose 50,000 residents are best known to most Russians as the subject of off-color jokes involving cannibals.

There are no issues between the United States and Russia in this region, except for the occasional tussle over fishing rights (in which, even so, Gov. Palin has never involved herself). No one entertains the remotest fantasy of, say, Russia invading North America through the Bering Straits.

When Palin brought up her proximity to Russia ("They're our next-door neighbor," she proclaimed), Gibson asked what insights she derived from this fact. She replied:

Well, I'm giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relations with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relations with our allies, pressuring also, helping us to remind Russia that it is their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.

What does this mean? I have no idea, and I doubt that she does, either. It doesn't help her argument of wisdom-through-osmosis that she has never been to Russia—or, shockingly really, any country outside North America, until last year, when she visited the troops in Kuwait and West Germany. (Her P.S. after admitting she's never met a foreign head of state—that probably a lot of other vice presidents hadn't, either, before taking office—turns out to be untrue. ABC reported Friday morning that every VP since Spiro Agnew had taken such a meeting before getting tapped to be a running mate.)

Gibson asked her if Georgia should be admitted to NATO? She replied, "Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia." He then asked if this would require us to go to war in response to Russia's invasion. "Perhaps so," she replied, correctly noting that this is what NATO membership entails.

Left unasked was whether, say, if Georgia were admitted right now, NATO would be obliged to go kick the Russians out of those areas that they currently occupy. In fact, it would. Is Palin saying she would go to war, under current conditions, if only there were a legal framework to allow it? It seems so.

Fortunately, the whole issue is a nonstarter because, under NATO's charter, a nation must have firm and recognized borders in order for membership to be so much as considered. Georgia does not have such borders. (The status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has long been in dispute.)

Palin also, in passing, described Russia's invasion of Georgia as "unprovoked." Gibson interrupted her: "You believe unprovoked?" She affirmed, "I do believe unprovoked." This was an eyebrow-raiser. Almost everyone, even Russia's harshest critics, acknowledge that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili did, in fact, provoke Putin—even if Putin might have been hoping for a provocation—by attacking South Ossetia first.

Then there was the moment that has caused many jaws to gape—when Gibson asked what she thought of "the Bush doctrine" and she clearly didn't know what he was talking about. I must confess, this didn't bother me much. Her initial response—"In what respect, Charlie?"—was a fair point. So many Bush doctrines have been promulgated, proved wrong, and abandoned without comment.

What did bother me was that, after Gibson outlined the doctrine's meaning (the right to attack a nation in anticipation of a threat), she didn't answer the question. She said, "If there is legitimate and enough intelligence that tells us that a strike is imminent against American people, we have every right to defend the country." This is true to the point of banality; no one would dispute it. The question is whether it's proper to take armed action not if a strike seems imminent but if preparations seem to be in the works for a possible strike sometime in the future.

The two most shuddering moments, however, came when Palin revealed her character. In a sense, character is more important than a specific bit of knowledge. A person can acquire knowledge. Character defines how much that person values knowledge, how curious she is, how keenly she wants to understand a subject deeply, and what she is likely to do once she achieves this understanding.

Thursday night's interview suggests that Palin doesn't value knowledge much at all, that she puts faith above facts and instincts above thinking.

The first hint of this came at the start of the interview, when Gibson asked if she'd ever doubted her readiness to be vice president. In a way, it was a silly question. She wasn't going to say, "Yes, Charlie, I had many doubts." Still, I'm glad he asked it, because her answer disclosed volumes:

I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can't blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we're on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can't blink.

Congratulations to Malcolm Gladwell for contributing another phrase to the popular lexicon, but the thesis of his best-selling book Blink was not that snap decisions are superior to decisions based on careful deliberation. It was that people who have a deep understanding of what they do—for instance, really good surgeons, military commanders, air-traffic controllers, and so forth—often make their best decisions quickly and instinctively.

But if you don't know what you're dealing with, snap decisions can be fatal. And it's very clear, on foreign policy and national security (in addition to much else), Sarah Palin doesn't know what she's dealing with. Worse, she doesn't know how much she doesn't know. She thinks that being "committed to the mission" exempts her from the need to think and that, therefore, firmness alone will yield righteous policy. In the wrong hands, this is a very dangerous trait.

The other spine-chilling moment came when Gibson asked about her recent comment, in a speech at her church, that the war in Iraq is "a task that is from God." (ABC then showed a YouTube clip of the speech.) Palin tried to finesse the question, saying that her remarks were only "a repeat of Abraham Lincoln's words" that we should pray not that God is on our side but that we are on God's side. Gibson didn't back down, noting that she had in fact gone on to say, "There is a plan, and it is God's plan." To this, Palin replied:

I believe that there is a plan for this world and that plan for this world is for good. I believe that there is great hope and great potential for every country to be able to live and be protected with inalienable rights that I believe are God-given, Charlie, and I believe that these are the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That in my worldview is a grand—the grand plan.

Two things came to mind upon hearing her say these words. First, they sound like the earnest answer given by a contestant in a beauty pageant when the M.C. asks her about world peace. (Sorry to seem sexist, but it's true; read it again.)

Second, and more to the point, do we want someone a heartbeat away from the presidency—and a 72-year-old cancer survivor's heartbeat, at that—to possess both impetuousness ("you can't blink") and holy certitude? Isn't that what we've had, actually in the Oval Office, the past eight years?

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, the book Sean Wilsey and I have edited that features original writing on all 50 states by 50 writers, started with a hunch and a conviction. The conviction was the easy part: that despite drive-time radio and the nightly news and the Sunday paper, despite all the books and blog posts, the documentaries and songs, America and the lives lived here remain strangely and surprisingly underdescribed. So many mirrors and yet we know ourselves so poorly! Often it takes a tragedy to remind us so: when residents of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans stand dazed on their rooftops wondering why the flood water came so fast and the drinking water so slow; when coal miners are rescued in West Virginia or entombed in Utah; when the lives of cleaners and brokers, accountants and firemen are memorialized after September 11—who hasn't marvelled at the richness of lives we don't know?

The same is true of the landscape and the past we've lived across it. The topography and climate of America may be the richest in the world, yet what ends up on the page so rarely seems to capture its dynamism, its variety, its intensity. Sure, the deepest canyons and the wettest waterfalls and the curviest roads make cameos in ads for automobiles and soda pop and life insurance; and plenty of stories, fictional and true, are set in the streets and skylines of our principal cities. But what about everywhere else: the half-dead towns too alive to be ghosts, the rusting historical markers buried in the weeds, the anonymous bits of land with their own hidden histories and surprising beauties and grace? There is poetry in the Rand McNally Atlas and wonder in the back rooms and basements of a thousand local archives and historical societies, but all too often it seems trapped there. Somehow we've come to take for granted what our country looks like, what happened here, and what it feels like to live here. Shouldn't we know it all in finer detail?

The hunch was less obvious, but the more we thought about it the more convinced we became of its truth. It was this: that America, for all its bland interstate highways and big-box superstores, retains an essential, deep-grained variety. No one doubts that America is growing more homogeneous with each passing year. Go from one time zone to another and the increasing sameness of everywhere is plain: one city blurs into another; the same architects build the same buildings, the same stores line the same streets, the same songs play on the radio; regional accents fade and everyone seems to be from somewhere else. And yet the fifty states—united by rhetoric and musket nearly 250 years ago, reaffirmed in their unity by rhetoric and rifle a century later, and bound together today as tightly as any confederation on earth—somehow stubbornly resist blending into a single undifferentiated whole.

The fifty states differ in landscape, topography, and weather; in political outlook, cultural preference, and social ideals; in accent, temperament, and sense of humor. It's not just that the West Coast is a world away from the East, that Yankees stick out in the South, or that Blue States and Red States don't see eye to eye. It's deeper than that: The fifty states themselves have individual places in our collective imagination, and they offer their natives a mind-set, even a world-view. For all the talk of identity in American life, the personal fact that defines American lives as much as gender, ethnicity, or class is where you're from, which more than anything means your home state.

Inspired by the 1930s WPA American Guide series, for which the federal government sent out thousands of American writers to "describe America to Americans," Wilsey and I envisioned a single book that would capture some of this great variety. But, lacking the $27 million that the WPA spent on the state guides, this one would feature a single writer for each of the 50 states.

So one spring day in Manhattan Sean and I huddled in a booth at the Old Town Bar to sort out a plan. First we agreed that we didn't want the pieces to be victory laps for writers known for writing about a particular state. We wanted some pieces by writers native to a particular state, of course, but we also wanted some by newcomers, and others by writers we'd send to states they'd never been to, to get a sense of the place as only a writer with a map and fresh eyes and a deadline can get. Second, we agreed that we didn't want the book to become a kind of beauty contest full of partisan arguments for the superiority of one's own state: We wanted the good, the bad, the ugly. Third, we wanted the book to go beyond personal history—so we sought out and commissioned travel accounts, historical essays, contemporary reportage, and works of oral history.

To every writer we said: Tell us a story about your state, the more personal the better, something that captures the essence of the place. Not the kind of story one hears in a musty lecture hall or one reads in the dusty pages of an encyclopedia. The kind of story the enlisted soldier tells his boot-camp bunkmate about back home. The kind of story, wistful and wise, that begins, "Well, I don't know about you, but where I come from ..."

This week Slate will feature exclusive extracts from five of the pieces in the book. They range in locale from the lobster shacks of Maine to the snowy northern reaches of Michigan and the blazing summer cornfields of Iowa to a commemoration of westward expansion in Utah and a declining pawn shop in Nevada. The five writers—Heidi Julavits, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Dagoberto Gilb, David Rakoff, and Charles Bock—have much to tell us about the ways America has changed since the WPA Guides 70 years ago—and the many ways it hasn't.

In October of 1988, my parents—as if to punish me for some egregious offense deserving of banishment—took me, their first son, to the airport in Accra, Ghana's capital city, and put me on a Boeing 747 bound for America. The departure hall, with its malfunctioning cooling system and creaky ceiling fans that only recycled trapped heat, was just as hot and humid as outside. When my flight was announced for boarding, the horde of family members who came to bid me good-bye huddled in a corner, and with hands and heads facing the heavens, prayed for my protection and well-being in America. My destination was Interlochen, a small northern Michigan town of 3,500 people. Six hundred of them were temporary residents of the Interlochen Arts Academy, where I was enrolled to begin my sophomore year of high school.

It was the first time I had left Ghana and the comfort of Hausa-Islamic culture, which, as a way of strengthening kinship and religious cohesion, emphasized doing everything—from praying and eating to traveling—in the company of other Muslims. I made my way alone across the ocean, first to New York, then to Detroit, and finally to Traverse City, at the northern tip of Michigan. As I headed west, everything got whiter: Of the four hundred or so passengers on the flight from Ghana, more than three-quarters were black. By the time we had crossed the Atlantic and I had switched to a smaller plane to Detroit, the percentage of black and white was roughly fifty-fifty. On the final leg of the trip, I was the only black person on the plane.

Most Michiganders I came in contact with were unconditionally generous, always willing to give a helping hand to someone in need; and they did so with patience and an amazing grace that was reminiscent of the traditions of my Hausa culture, which placed the generous treatment of sojourners very high on its list of morals and ethics. Examples of such generosity from Michiganders were evident to me in the first days of my arrival. From the airline lady who kept the airport open for a school official to show up, to the Academy's van driver who, knowing that the cafeteria would be closed by the time we arrived on campus, stopped at a gas station and bought me a slice of pizza and a can of "pop" (Michiganese for soda), to my residence hall's housemother, who knocked on my door early in the morning carrying blankets and warm sheets for me. Overnight the housemaster had phoned to tell her that the "African student had arrived, but he didn't bring any blankets or sheets."

Soon after my arrival in Michigan, it became apparent that I would need somewhere to go to during the many short, interspersed holidays in the school's academic year. My Ghanaian school was only a forty-five-minute drive from my home. Moreover, the educational system in Ghana tolerated very little holiday making, considering it a distraction. I spent my first Thanksgiving at the house of a fellow student from Cleveland, Ohio, and I lived with my campus housemother's family during the Christmas holidays. Not long after that, a woman who worked in the admissions office all but adopted me into her family. She and her husband and two daughters offered me the spare room in their house and told me I was welcome to stay with them during school breaks, weekends, or whenever I simply needed a break from campus life.

The family lived in Kingsley, a village of less than one thousand people south of Traverse City. Until my arrival, no black person had ever lived there. My host father was a hulk of a man, standing well over six feet and weighing a hefty 280 pounds; and yet he was as nimble and graceful as a gazelle on the improvised basketball court in front of our car garage, where we often played our lopsided one-on-one games. His demeanor and personality could be summed up in two words: gentle giant. He could be very funny, but he said little most of the time. He was a Republican who owned several guns, and he spoke often about racial injustice and inequality in America, especially about the plight of American Indians.

As a way of telling the direction of the East, my father had instructed me before I left Africa that I look for the direction of my shadow at midday, and that wherever it pointed was East, where Muslims face to pray. The problem with this unscientific yet time-tested and effective method of navigation in Michigan is that I didn't see any sun for the first three or four days after my arrival. By mid-October fall weather in northern Michigan is usually well under way, which means it could be cloudy, dreary, and sunless for days. Luckily, Islamic teaching allows one, when in doubt or in a foreign land, to face anywhere to pray until he or she is able to determine the actual direction of Kaaba, the holy black mosque in Mecca.

In general, Michiganders have a live-and-let-live attitude about life, with a deep sense of religiosity and a strong kinship to family and friends. Open-minded and curious about other people's beliefs and cultures, the Michiganders I know are more listeners than preachers. In my three years of living in the midst of a Christian family, no one ever talked to me about Christianity or tried to impress upon me its virtues. Instead, they respected my beliefs and religious practices, and were awed by my determination to pray five times daily despite the geographical and climatic challenges I faced. Muslims are instructed to rid their minds, hearts, and environments of any distraction when they stand to pray before Allah. And even though I never mentioned this to my host family, they somehow figured it out on their own. Anytime I went up to my room to pray, my host mother would turn down the volume of the television set and my younger sister would shut the door to her room, from where rock or country music always blasted.

My three-year stay in northern Michigan changed my life and made me what I am. For one thing, I came to the conclusion that I wanted to continue living in areas that have lots of snow, hence my decision to attend Bennington College …. in Vermont. And the quiet solace of pristine snowfall during the winter months and the long, bright, and cheerful summer days played a big role in making a dedicated writer out of me. No environment could have been more fertile for my imagination and ideas than the natural wonderland that is northern Michigan.

The connection between my host family and my African family has taken genuine and strong root over the years. My two daughters call my host mother "Grandma Michigan" and their biological grandmother "Grandma Ghana." Their "Grandpa Michigan," I am sad to say, lost a battle with cancer a few years ago, but he lives on in our memory, and I will always be grateful for all that he gave me.

I now live far from Michigan, in New York City, where snowfalls are scant and dirty, and certainly not the kind that inspires a writer to type away. And I have lost whatever little of that distinctive Michigan accent—what one website devoted to Michigan lore described as "a little bit Fargo, a little bit nasal Chicago, and a little bit Canada"—that I picked up during my years in the state. But I still see myself as a Michigander. When anyone asks me where I'm from, I say: Michigan. My questioner typically does a double take and asks, "But where are you really from?" To which I say again: Michigan. I am a Michigander now, or perhaps better yet, an Afrigander.

This is about the tortilla. This is about corn grown in Iowa. This is about the people who are in the campos of Iowa picking the vegetables and walking the cornfields. Those people are Mexican people. They are of the culture where hand-ground masa was first patted into tortillas and, because of that, it is said that the physical body of any Mexicano is at least half-corn. They are from the civilization that worshipped the corn plant as a god—in some regions, such as what became known as Guatemala, the God, the image of God—and they are from the soil and nation where this corn we all have learned to eat and to feed as grain for healthy livestock was first developed and harvested five thousand years ago. They are the people who now are driven here, because even corn, and the tortilla, is going up in price even more since the '90s NAFTA treaty, and subsidized corn in the United States is cheaper to import, while its demand increases its value to the corporate farmers in Mexico. Because corn has become an ethanol fuel industry, its hybrid grain is even more highly sought.

But in Mexico, the ordinary milpas—cornfields—are shrinking in size, and those people who traditionally worked them can't make enough to survive in their villages. So they are leaving, like animals in a drought, going to the big cities to find jobs, and they are crossing the border into the U.S. because that is where most jobs are. They come to Iowa because they will be hired and work in meat-packing plants cheaply, hard, and they work in the fields cheaply, and hard. And as they walk las milpas in Iowa to do as their culture has done for thousands of years, anti-immigration ideologues bash them for spoiling what they see as a field of dreams as clean and pure as Iowa butter, as nostalgic as baseball, as all-American as Kevin Costner.

The men—H2A workers, meaning they have papers and are hired temporarily—arrived on buses from Monterrey, Mexico, last night, and this is their first full day here. Tom Bell is all movement, and even as he's on the phone he hands me the same cream gorra, hat, that he gives these men—it reads SYNGENTA across it, the international seed corporation—and a red bandanna with his own business name and its logo, a basket with three ears of shucked ripe corn standing tall. On the way to the fields in his red Chevy 4x4, he tells me he pays $500 for their round-trip, and he's hired around 450 workers from early July to early August. He pays $9.95 an hour, charges $11.20 a day for food. They work the cornfields, and also pick beans, cucumbers, watermelon—to name a few. Why not illegals? It's not worth the risk. Why not Americans? He can't find them.

We drive on a paved road behind and parallel to the highway, a neighborhood of what once were one- or two-bedrooom workers' homes, now squeezed in by two or three trailer homes mounted on cement foundations. We stop at what is like a compound, outside the kitchen-slash-mess hall add-on to a brick schoolhouse—a banner over the stoves and grills reads SUPER COCINA LOS AMIGOS. People are packing ice chests of lunches and counting how many meals go in each, getting the numbers right. As Tom sorts out a problem with the ice machine's outdoor run-off hose, I head over to a picnic bench where a group of men, young and older, are sitting. Beyond them, on an open field, a few men kick around a soccer ball. They all go eyes up and quiet once I'm close, like I bear bad news. Instead, I find out that they are all from Durango. Have they done this work before? Half of them say no. The one who seems the eldest, a straw hat, dark skin weathered, says he's done it most of his life. How did he find out about this, in Iowa? Just heard. But how, exactly? They look around at one another, nobody sure what to say. Do you hear about it ... like, maybe you would gossip? They laugh at that. One heard it from this one next to him, he's the one who told that one, thus. Isn't Durango a long trip from Monterrey? They all shrug, the questions making them self-conscious. You just took a bus there? They say yes and nod, are now smiling at me. They took a bus to Monterrey, they signed some papers, and a bus brought them here.

The school building is where Tom Bell went to elementary school. Now it's been converted into a bunkhouse for his workers—all men, only men. At the top of the first stairs in, there are old couches and a TV setup in the corner—a novela is playing—and then we pass through a small room, maybe fifteen or twenty bunk beds, all just built of fresh cut 2x4 and 2x6. Like a dad pleased by his son's expensive college graduation, Tom shows me how much he's transformed the school: Where we stand used to be above the gym floor, where you could watch a game, and down below was where the courts were. Down below now are maybe 100 more bunk beds, all occupied. Clothes are already hanging off them, a few have already washed underwear and socks and laid them out to dry on the head and footboards. In a far corner, another lounge area of old couches, a TV up high, that same novela. The showers are gym-like, the sink for hands and face and teeth and probably rinsing underwear is a room-length trough with a dozen or so faucets. The walls and ceilings show the new remodel, all the new studs exposed, sheathed by pressed-wood, low-grade ply. Windows are open. A fan is mounted up high to blow in more air. Iowa? Right now it looks and sounds and—the kitchen is right next to this big space—smells like it's Mexico.

Tom doesn't speak a word of Spanish. What does he think about all these people here? He loves these people and he's proud to do them right, he says. He owns a condo in Manzanillo. When all this gets done, in the winter, he and his wife relax there for a month. He loves it.

Becky is my ride to a cornfield being walked—it's known by a field number, the digits as natural and recognizable to them as a pet's name. Her blue pickup is loaded with iced sodas and a chest of lonches, and she wants to know why it has to be her who takes me and she isn't entirely joking. She's a big Iowa woman, a '60s grown-up, born and raised not far away, rooted to the driver's seat. Her tattoos barely visible under the browned sunburn of her fleshy upper arms, she also works biker gatherings and just retired from the clerical staff at the university. It's a few ranch roads to where we go, a route that crosses the rich Iowa River and leads to Muscatine. Talking about the men bunking in the school, she says she cannot imagine the raunch of it—sweat and dirty socks, snores, farts from those beans. Who'd be able to stand all of these men? she asks. Then again she might, she tells me after a pause, smiling dirty-minded.

We pull onto a dirt farm road where dust rises from behind like bad smoke rings and stop alongside the cornfield, near the rented yellow school bus that transports the workers. Tom's son is there to wave at us from his pickup—he's on the phone, as busy as his dad. It is lunch time, and men too short to be seen inside the tall corn jungle begin to emerge. No factory whistle, and it's not like a construction site either, where it's a certain hour and everyone stops everything. Mostly in pairs, the campesinos exit slowly, unrushed, from the world of zurcos, rows, bandannas under their hats to wrap their necks, bandannas and dark glasses masking their faces—a few have mosquito netting too—and long sleeved shirts and gloves covering their arms an hands. Each has a mochilla—a daybag or a plastic store bag to carry an extra shirt or rain poncho or some rubber boots and their own personal valuables—slung over their back or in hand. On their belts is a rubber clip for a soda bottle full of water. The gloves and bottle clip are gifts from Bell's Detasseling. They get their lonches from the ice chests—a caldo of pork, pineapple, and bell pepper, a fresh jalapeño, tortillas still warm in foil. A few men go inside to sit on the soft seats there. A few sit against a side of the bus, in a slant of shade. I go over to three who rest at the back, to the water igloo, taking their time before they eat.

I tell them how they all look like Sub-Comandante Marcos coming out from the jungle. After a moment to absorb my joke, they look at each other until they finally grin. They are from Monterrey, young, though one must be closer to thirty than the other two. None of them have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border before now. Only one of them has worked in agriculture previously, but this isn't hard work except for the hours—though it isn't so hot yet, even with the long-sleeved shirts that they have to wear, the fields aren't too muddy, the mosquitos aren't too bad. Jobs are hard to find in Mexico. The youngest one talks about working in garages and restaurants. There is a lot of danger to do other things. The older one says how running movidas might seem good for a little bit, but it's not worth the trouble. This work is good for them, even if it's only a month. We are looking at the sky, more Hollywood than Iowa, the clouds too white, too flawlessly shaded gray to be believed, too beautiful. The older one asks about me and I tell them how I was born in Los Angeles and worked construction and now live in Texas. Even through their mirror glasses, I see their eyes go starry. I mention El Paso and the capital, Austin, and how in Dallas ... and how in Houston ... and it's as though I am speaking of mythical lands. I gesture to the east and tell them over there is where Chicago is, very close. The youngest one jokes how fast they could get there. The other two aren't even considering it, though the third, a quiet one, takes a couple of steps in that direction to see that much closer. This is good for now, the older says. It's what they have. After a pause, the younger one returns, sincerely, asi es la vida.

We drive to another field, more masked campesinos breaking through the corn jungle rows unexcitedly, unhurried, to take lunch. The conversations are muted. Music they like and don't, other places they've been. Muted, like they are far away. On this field the crew chief has them leave their mochilla at the beginning of each row until they come in for lunch, and all but three have been picked up. When most have finished eating, two of the stragglers appear and nod, pleased, about where to find the lunches. Twenty minutes later, the last one, Oscar, unmasked, finally comes out just as these other two go back to work. He's eighteen, maybe twenty-one, and unlike all the others I've seen so far he is overweight in that soft manner of a good boy from El Paso or San Antonio, playing too many video games, sitting in front of a TV with sodas, candies, Doritos. He is tired but also much more—lost, miserable, mom-sick—and he can barely speak, though he does: a thank you when he is told where he will find his lonche. When he is done eating—maybe he does take an entire half hour, but certainly no more than that—he ends his lunchbreak in the same self-absorbed, unself-conscious way he began, stepping back, like his feet hurt, to a line of zurcos where the others have been out of sight for some time already.

The rows of these milpas have been mowed earlier so that they are all of an even height. They are arranged so that one male plant from one seed will pollinate at least the two females, grown from a different seed, on either side of it, so that the layout is four rows of females, a male row, four female, a male, and so on. The leaves of the first male stalk are sprayed a Day-Glo orange—the men must know which it is because its aspigas, its tassles, are the only ones that must be left untouched: It is their pollen that will reach the female silks below that will grow the kernels on the cob, a new, third seed that will be harvested. Though corn carries with it both male and female parts, what the campesinos are doing is castrating the ones in the rows of four, yanking off their male parts. On a first pass, men pull this shaft out of its stalk, the one blooming an unpollinating tassle, from its node, effectively castrating the plant, leaving the cañajote beneath. The tassle pops out easily, a juiced, fleshy pop that sounds like cracking a knuckle, and is dropped onto the dirt of the zurco. After a second pass through, there is yet another pass, this one crosswise, made by a more seasoned chequeador, a checker, who looks for misses. Wrapped in the same leaf husk as the ripen female corn on the cob we know, peeled away it looks much like young rye or wheat, only deep green, and huskier. When left to bloom, the sun on it, the green becomes more golden, the yellowish pollen sticky, though not as sticky as the white female silks waiting beneath. The field has to be a 99.7 to 99.8 percent detasseled for the crop to germinate the exact corn seed that is hoped for.

Five thousand years of walking las milpas in Mexico, the descendents of those people are now in Iowa, walking the cornfields, attending to this cross-fertilization work considered spiritual way back then. Iowa's Mexicans are only a little more aware of corn's history than those in Iowa are. It's as though the migration of the Mexican deity itself has finally summoned its native worshippers to tend to it, populating the soil it grows in. I ask Becky: Ten, fifteen years ago it would have been high-school and college boys and girls from towns here. It was not only a summer ritual, but a good income for the summer. Now you have to hire as many as you can because only half stay with it. They are too hot. They are too sunburned. One doesn't want to work past 2 p.m., another says she can't. One wants to rest a day because he got too tired the day before. Or it's the weekend. Or it was just the weekend and now he wants to sleep in. One has to babysit on certain days, and then maybe the next just doesn't feel like showing up at all. And then there's the other, smaller issues. If someone's litter from lunch gets left behind, for instance, you ask one to pick it up. It's not mine, is the answer. Pick it up anyway. It's not mine. OK, but pick it up anyway. I didn't leave that. Just pick it up! There is no litter in these campos, and these mexicanos are always polite and they work until they are told it is time to stop. There are a lot more cornfields than there used to be, and there wouldn't be enough Iowa people around who could work the fields even if.

In Around the World in Eighty Days, when Phileas Fogg and Passepartout venture out into the City of the Saints, they find that they cannot "escape from the taste for symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons." The grid might have been noteworthy for a Frenchman like Jules Verne, but it's a wonder that he makes no mention of the width of the streets of Salt Lake City, which are a steppe-like 132 feet across. This breadth was decreed by Brigham Young so that a team of oxen and a covered wagon might be able to turn around in a full circle unimpeded. (A similar pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Buluwayo in Rhodesia. Perhaps this bit of hypertrophic urban planning was one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nineteenth-Century Men with Big Ideas). The avenues yawn open, human proximity is vanquished, and the nearest people seem alienatingly distant. Perhaps such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky, imbues a populace with a sense of possibility; in its most literal sense, "room to grow."

Landscape shapes character, after all. This is never more clear than when I encounter the closest thing resembling a crowd at the Gateway Mall, a bi-level outdoor shopping center constructed to look like an Umbrian hill town (if Umbrian hill towns had California Pizza Kitchens). People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of Young's mythic team of oxen, never moving faster than the speed of cold honey. I have never been in a public space in America where a sense of how to walk among others was so completely and confoundingly absent. People stop abruptly, cut across lanes, and generally meander as blissfully unaware as cows in Delhi.

Perhaps it's not just space that informs this entitlement, but the idea behind it. Human history has always been subject to the random and anarchic interactions of rock and water. Settlement succeeds or fails according to an unwritten checklist: Is there a felicitous dearth of malaria-bearing insects and wild animals? A convenient absence of marauding locals? Does that vengeful and quick-to-ire volcano god routinely incinerate our children and bury our homes beneath an infernal slurry of lava? No? Let's stay a while.

What makes Utah unique is not just that those who settled it felt they could live here, but that they should live here. It was upon receiving the reports from his advance men of this paradoxical region of arable land hard by an inhospitable desert and a crop-killing inland sea that Brigham Young then received the divine revelation that this was the true land of the Saints. Topography as God-given destiny.

And what topography! My friend Wyatt Seipp drives down from Idaho, and we head out of the city. Barely an hour out of town, all is harsh and huge. We drive past the flaming smoke stacks of oil refineries, past small towns in the foothills. For the nonalpine dweller, "foothills" seems an oddly reductive term for such incline and sky-blocking mass. The tiny houses nestle toy-like against the slopes, and highest of all, by design, the local LDS Temple, the golden pin dot of its Moroni statue gleaming.

We're heading for Promontory Point, home of the Golden Spike historical site, about a hundred miles northwest of the city. It was there, on May 10, 1869, that the tracks of the Central Pacific met those of the Union Pacific and were joined to form the first transcontinental rail system. The landscape is as large and unprepossessing as the museum/restroom/gift shop is small and inconspicuous. It can be hard to fathom that we are at one of the most important places in the United States, but it was here at the Golden Spike that the country turned into, well, a country. The first transnational telegraph had been completed eight years earlier (in Salt Lake City, in fact) in October of 1861. The effect was felt immediately. This is not metaphoric. The Pony Express ceased operations literally two days later. You can still tap-tap-tap "Mother ill. Come soonest. Stop" all you like, but if you're relying on the stage coach to get you to the deathbed in question, I'm afraid I have some bad news. With the railroads, the trickle of settlers coming by wagon trains was suddenly upgraded to a flood of terrifyingly efficient westward expansion. Manifest destiny was transformed from the merely notional into reality at a speed never known theretofore. Just ask the Indians.

Scrub plain stretches in all directions to the suede brown hills in the distance. Even seen from above, the satellite images on Google Earth reveal an expanse as beige and unvaried as a slice of bologna. One has a sense of how delayed the gratification of congress must have been for the Central and Union Pacific teams. No doubt, they must have had one another in their sights for weeks before they could consider the job done. Then again, the sight of anyone new, even if only in the distance, must have been a welcome tonic after months of laying track out in the middle of nowhere. F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped too soon when he wrote about the fresh green breast of the New World (affectionately known as Long Island) that bloomed before Dutch sailors' eyes as being the last time mankind came face to face with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. There was a whole continent beyond the eastern seaboard to slake the thirst of those seeking such adventure.

Standing at the squat commemorative obelisk, I try to conjure the mind-set that beheld this vast, sere pan of brown dirt—with the bare foothills rising in the distance, and the far more forbidding gray, snow-capped mountains rising farther beyond, all under a sky whose unbounded immensity proclaims one's insignificance with an irrefutable and terrifying truth—but I cannot do it. How does one take all this in and still think, Yes, I will go ever gaily forward. I will endure a preindustrialized trek over hundreds of miles on a rocking, hard-slatted wagon bench or in a saddle, or on foot. I will leave my children behind, or watch them succumb to scarlet fever, rickets, or infection. On those special occasions when I do wipe my ass, it will be with leaves. I will have an abscessed molar extracted by some half-blind chuck-wagon drunkard wielding a pair of rusty pliers, and I will employ my own just-past-neolithic tools to make this railroad, this house, this town. And one fine day, with my remaining teeth, I will bite down on a leather strap while they amputate my leg without benefit of anesthetic and then I will hobble twenty-two miles on foot—one foot!—so that I might then climb a scaffold in order to carve a tribute to His glory into the unyielding granite escutcheon of a cathedral. How did they do it? The monks and abbots who hauled the rocks to build their monasteries on craggy Himalayan peaks and kept at it until the job was done? Ditto the conquistadors who, even fueled with the promise of gold, saw those jagged, stratospheric peaks of the Andes and didn't just say Oh fuck this, I'm going back to Spain. It seems frankly remarkable that anyone anywhere ever attempted anything.

There's a picture of me in the back of my parents' pawnshop. It must have been taken during the seventies, because I'm not ten years old. Wearing a black knockoff Adidas sweatsuit, I'm surrounded by racks of record players, eight tracks, golf clubs, and typewriters. I'm half turned, looking toward my father, who is holding the camera. In front of me, a long flat cardboard box is jammed with rows of booklets, which are stuffed with pawn tickets. I spent untold afternoons in the back of that store, numerically organizing the tickets and stapling them into the correct books. Sometimes, when I finished with one book, I'd count and roll quarters. It's a Polaroid photo, most likely taken from a hocked camera whose owner had never come back to redeem his ticket.

My parents were far from any clichéd image of pawnbrokers. As soon as you walked into the shop, my dad—a lanky guy with a thickening middle, bright brown eyes, and black hair receding at his temples—greeted you with a kind smile. I see him making small talk while writing up a loan, bringing up the previous night's ballgame, or rolling out one of his favorite groan-worthy jokes, Hey, do you know who likes cats? No? Mrs. Katz. In the mid-sixties, he and Mom left the East Coast, following her parents who'd moved to the warmer climate of Vegas from New York City after Mom's mom got cancer. Dad then spent ten years trying to write plays and short stories while dealing craps at different casinos. He once had a screenplay that supposedly was going to be developed into a movie starring Burgess Meredith. Mom taught grade school and tried to sell Tupperware over the phone. They got into pawnbroking because my grandfather—a dice-throw-ing, trifecta-betting, mathematical genius—had his own pawnshop on Fremont Street, the gambling and tourist mecca of downtown Las Vegas. The struggle of being pawnbrokers became more appealing to my folks than the struggle of trying to make ends meet on their crappy salaries while raising four children. When I was eight or so, Gramps guaranteed the loan that allowed Mom and Dad to take over a struggling downtown pawnshop of their own.

Fremont Street was the heart of the city. Originally a Mormon missionary outpost, Las Vegas was essentially born as a town in 1905, when the completion of the train station prompted the building of shops and the sale of 1,200 lots to private citizens—all downtown. The city, which was officially recognized by the state legislature in 1911, was built from Fremont Street outward. Even in the late nineteen seventies, downtown Las Vegas was just as much a destination as the Strip. Sure, the Strip had huge hotels like Caesar's Palace, The Riviera, The Dunes, and The Sands. Some were clustered together, but for the most part, each resort was an island unto itself, a quarter mile from anything, with long swaths of hard desert between hotels. By contrast, downtown was like the French Quarter: a small and defined area, every place within walking distance. And just as Bourbon Street was lined with one bar after another for partiers to stumble between, Fremont Street was similarly packed with casinos. You couldn't come up with five locations on the planet more ideal for a pawnshop.

Here's how the biz works. You bring in your watch—say it's eighteen-carat gold, and you need a loan on it. You'd like to get five hundred for it. My dad weighs it and discovers the weight is a little light. It's not the greatest make or brand. When you bought that watch three years ago, you paid five hundred. You tell my dad you should get five hundred. Maybe you get pissed. You have all sorts of financial pressures on you and you need that money, so maybe you shout and call my dad a dirty Jew. Maybe not. I don't know you. But let's say you hold back the epithets, and are smooth in your negotiations, and have some luck to boot. Let's also say your watch is actually worth a damn: you get a loan for two, maybe two-fifty. You sign a ticket agreeing to a monthly compounded interest rate of eight percent. Your $250 loan would cost you $270, if you wanted to get the watch out during that first month. Your watch would cost you $291.60 the second month; $314.93 the third. Pawnshops make most of their money on the interest which has accrued when people redeem tickets for their goods. Your ticket says you have six months to redeem your watch. After six months, if you haven't come back, the shop owns the watch—that is, unless you call and explain your difficulties and ask them to hold on for another month. Most will then hold the watch. My parents do that, most likely, my dad wishing you well and sounding positive and trying to make you feel good (It'll be here waiting for you, don't worry). This having been said, at a certain point—figure the end of that seventh month—time's up; that watch is going out in a display window.

Making a living this way is methodical, tooth-pulling work; at John's Loan and Jewelry, my parents—neither of whom is named John—toiled for ten hours a day, three hundred and sixty days a year, my mother haggling with locals who needed to hock their goods to help pay their electric bill, my dad dealing with the couple who brought in the family television in order to get baby formula. Here's a former UNLV basketball star turned casino security guard, bringing back in, for the ninth time, the watch he got when the team made it to the regional finals of the NCAA tournament. Here are young lovers looking for wedding bands on the cheap. Thais and Filipinos on international gaming junkets. Drunks on the tail end of holiday benders. Tourists wandering down the showcases, bleary and angry and worn out, busting my parents' chops about how much some item is worth. Or ripened gamblers, who've suffered hard dry runs and are still in the grip of gambling fever, maybe they live in the grip, and need to exchange this diamond bracelet for cash, no, not to fill the tank with gas, not to drive back home to California—these are the ones who sign their pawn ticket and receive their bread and go right back in for another run at the craps table.

By the time this essay is published I will already be in hiding, probably in a midsized Sunbelt city, living under a pseudonym, and receiving no packages. Maine, a Libertarian-minded, keep-to-your-own-business kind of state, does not take kindly to written assessments, possibly because to write about the place is to say "I am an authority," and nobody, by Maine standards, is more deserving of a beat-down—or of persecution, or expulsion—than an authority. When my husband and I ask our neighbor, a professional boat-builder and former electrician, if he can lend some advice about boat-building and wiring, he'll first demur that he knows nothing in the slightest about boat-building and wiring. Of boat-building—like three-million-dollar, ninety-foot yachts he says, "Anybody can do it." Because authority holds such little weight, there is no zoning in our town, which means there are no building permits, which means you could, as my husband often jokingly threatened to do, erect a brownstone in your back field. Civilians rule in rural Maine, thus it's best not to incite the civilians by writing about them.

But here I am, writing about them, an act of inexcusable treason since I am, if you subscribe to the legal definition, a "Mainer," with a folder of convincing documentation that includes a birth certificate and a failed driving test from the Portland DMV. I'll admit that my authority, already questionable, suffers innate limitations because I'm a certain kind of Mainer—Averagely Seaworthy First-Generation Over-Educated Urban Coastal pretty much describes my brand of nativeness. I can tie a bowline, I know a nun from a bell from a can, and a harbor seal from a lobster pot, but I know squat about the daily life trials facing the lake-and-mountain set. I didn't portage a canoe until I was eighteen (and living in New Hampshire); I didn't sight my first official moose until I was in my thirties. But because my Maine is the basis of the Maine cued in the minds of the non-Maine public when they hear the word "Maine," I'm inclined to issue a cultural correction, even a doomed one. I've spent a lifetime bristling at the Murder She Wrote doddery quaint clapboard nonsense that passes as Maine in the cultural vernacular. Maine, according to this vernacular, is a state filled with people possessed of great, garbled wisdom who eat lobster like it's bologna and die in ironic drowning accidents.

But non-natives—"From Aways" in native parlance—aren't the only ones indulging in gross acts of distortion. Maine's state slogan, recently changed from "Vacationland" to "The Way Life Should Be," represents one of the boldest moves in the annals of intentional misrepresentation, depending on your notion of ideal living conditions. There are more obese people in Maine than in any other New England state. In Maine, it's illegal to bait bears with donuts and then shoot them (presumably, people, and bears, should be less fat because of this law). Maine has more cat owners than any other state. Maine's drug of choice is coffee brandy. If you want to grow your own food, which an astonishing number of people in Maine feel compelled to do, you have 122 days to accomplish this between frosts. The annual mean temperature on the coast, where I live four months per year, is 46 degrees (40 degrees up north). If you spend a year in Maine, you'll enjoy 128 days of rain, 48 days of fog, and 17 days of snow. The only state poorer than Maine in 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina, was Louisiana. Meaning, the only state worse off financially was a state that suffered the most crippling natural disaster in the history of this country. In Maine, meanwhile, 2005 was business as usual—just a lot of fat people hanging out in the rain with their cats, drinking coffee brandy and trying, without cheating, to kill a bear.

It should come as no surprise that such an elite group would be extremely cautious, if not downright parsimonious, when extending membership privileges to others. And once they've hopped the cement walls that encircle the Maine border, people discover the state's population divided into two categories—Natives and From Aways. Easy stuff on first inspection. Either you were born here or you were not. But From Away is a highly relative term, applicable to anyone who didn't grow up in the place where you are standing at that very moment. Taken to its logical extreme, everyone is a From Away—i.e., everyone who isn't You is a From Away—but Mainers don't tend to get so Hegelian about it. Instead, they invoke the town line or the water boundary that separates you from the people who graciously took you in, like a family that loves to flash before you on a nightly basis your adoption papers. Take, for example, an obituary oft-cited by a friend when trying to convey, to the average tourist, just how far away they are from the place they're currently visiting. According to this obituary, a woman had lived her entire ninety-plus years, save the first three weeks she was alive, on a remote island. She was known in her tiny community, in which she had clocked nearly a century marked primarily by winter, as the Woman From Away. I suffer similarly. I was born in Portland, Maine. I left the state when I was eighteen and returned at the age of thirty-three. My husband and I bought a house in a town three hours northeast of Portland. Thus I am a From Away in my home state.

The easy thing about being a From Away, however, is that your community has extremely low expectations for you. You're meant to screw up regularly at great cost to your homeowner's insurance, because such screw-ups are entertaining and an excellent way to warm the hearts of even the most indifferent natives. We proved highly entertaining. We showed up and promptly burst our pipes, ruining a room that had, based on the plaster and lathe we had to chunk into garbage bags, not been touched in nearly 200 years. In other words, we were the stupidest people in almost 200 years to live in this house. We were welcomed throughout the land. Months later I went into the bookstore twelve miles away, and the clerk said to me, "Aren't you the person with the burst pipe?" Our tale of successful integration assumed some chilling misshapes in the coming year; a woman whose mother lives in D.C. said she'd heard from another woman in D.C. who was friends with the woman who used to own our house that our house had burned down. I panicked before realizing this was just another variation on the Welcome You Delightful Idiot story.

I'm glad I didn't have to burn my house down to be embraced as the know-nothing I was, but some people have gone to nearly that extreme. Take, for example, Auslander. Auslander showed up from a city and knew too much. He had big plans for the town, including a low-income housing project, a ferry, maybe even a university. Then he put the ashes from his woodstove in a plastic bag and left them on his barn floor. The barn caught fire, the volunteers were called. We weren't in Maine at the time; two weeks later we drove up for a visit. A neighbor came by to say hello. "Did you hear about Auslander's barn?" he asked. We decided to take a walk, get some brisk Maine air. Halfway to town a friend stopped in his truck. "Did you hear about Auslander's barn?" he asked. Later another friend called. "Did you hear about Auslander's barn?" she asked. There was a Schadenfreude-y undertone to this news, but it also had the sweet enthusiasm of a birth announcement. Auslander had finally arrived.