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Now that the election is over, it's time to break some campaign promises! Because of the Web's constant hunger for new information, President-elect Barack Obama is in a uniquely difficult spot. He's issued and revised so many white papers and policy proposals that if he so much as sneezes the wrong way, he risks reversing something published on his campaign Web site.



His transition site, change.gov, isn't helping matters.



Over the weekend, all of the policy pages on the site were removed. Their caterpillar-short life certainly suggests that change is coming. Fortunately for Obama, most people don't take ephemera published on the Web as seriously as, say, "Read my lips" statements caught on tape. So it's perhaps not surprising that the changes attracted widespread notice but not very much controversy.

There are a few smaller but puzzling changes. Like this: Obama still believes in community service, apparently, but not enough to require students to do it. Nor is he much interested in your "vision" for America if you are not American. For a while, he was seeking comments from folks in other countries on what he should do as president. Now there's no field for your country—the form assumes you're American. "President of the world"? Maybe not.

Finally, Obama's astonishing gain of more than 700,000 new Facebook friends in 10 days has got to be a record. (During the same period, McCain lost 1,000 friends.) Maybe Obama could be president of Facebook, if not the world.

Click here to read a slide-show essay on Renzo Piano's California Academy of Sciences building. Click here to read Part I, in which Witold Rybczynski reviewed Piano's recent addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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Andrew Jackson, the warrior president who simultaneously denounced big government and expanded executive power, has been riding high recently, a bipartisan hero in polarized times. Historian Sean Wilentz and others, following lines first laid down in Arthur Schlesinger's classic The Age of Jackson (1945), have heralded Jackson for his assault on privilege and aristocracy. In this telling, Jackson served as a powerful executive who used the authority of his office to save the Union, defeat the moneyed interests, and, less happily, remove the Cherokees from their ancestral lands.

In a very different spirit, Karl Rove has compared George Bush to Andrew Jackson: a man of the people who believed in providence and opposed big government. In American Lion, his new biography of the seventh president, Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, dutifully wrings his hands at all the right places—at Jackson the slaveholder, Jackson the killer, Jackson the hothead—but adds his voice to the admiring chorus. Jackson was "a great general and a transformative president," he concludes, a leader "genuinely committed to the ideal of democracy," who was "strong and shrewd, patriotic and manipulative, clear-eyed and determined." He was the president who, of all the early presidents, "is in many ways the most like us."

There certainly are parallels to be drawn between the incumbent and Jackson, an imperious man who stretched the power of the presidency, flouted international law, ignored the Supreme Court, filled government positions with partisan supporters, relied on an elaborate campaign apparatus, and espoused small government while proceeding to expand its size. But that is only to say that Jackson was modern less by virtue of his principles than in his willingness to bend them when it suited his purposes. If he is a model for our times, it is not a very heroic one. Nor was Jackson in fact the decisively formative force in his own era that the hagiography suggests. As David Reynolds, who teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, demonstrates in his astute and concise history of the period, Waking Giant, the times defined Jackson as much as he defined the times.

If anything, Jackson belonged to the past, not the future. Barely in his teens, he fought in the Revolutionary War, and he held dearly to dreams of land and community at a moment when capitalism and individualism felt liberating. He was the first president born (in 1767) in a log cabin, the first not from Massachusetts or Virginia, the first not to attend college. He was an orphan. He made something of himself, and the American people loved that, but he was also a Mason at a time when an anti-Masonic movement suspicious of the secretive society gathered support across the nation. He also lived in the Southern world of honor, rooted in loyalty to kin relations and vigilance in defending the virtue of women: It was a world crumbling around him. Jackson, the president whom people proclaimed as one of their own, was very much up to date in one regard: He liked his comforts and introduced a novelty to the White House enjoyed only by aristocrats and guests at swank hotels—running water.

Jackson's election in 1828 did not single-handedly usher in a democratic revolution; as Reynolds points out, he benefitted from an expansion in voting rights for white males that occurred during Monroe's presidency. Suffrage expansion came for different reasons in different places: competition between Federalists and Republicans before the Democrats existed, economic interests, even the need for bodies to serve in local militias. Many new voters in 1828 flocked to Jackson, mobilized by a new political style and culture. But it wasn't because of him that they were able to vote.

Nor was his party the catalyst of a national transformation; what is arguably more notable is how little the Democratic Party figured in the seismic shifts under way. It is telling that for all but two terms between 1828 and 1860, the Democrats controlled the presidency, but the Whigs shaped the overall direction of society. Sen. Henry Clay's American system of banking and investment, protective tariffs, and internal improvements refashioned the nation. To be sure, the Democrats also had an impact, advancing the dogma of Manifest Destiny and encouraging Westward expansion. But it was the Whigs who rewrote American law and in the process transformed the nation's infrastructure, making expansion possible. Jackson's name has attached to the age, but there are many other candidates, including Clay, after whom the era might just as aptly be labeled if labels are required.

As Reynolds shows, this was the period of the Second Great Awakening, when evangelical enthusiasm burned across the nation and Americans experienced religious conversions in record numbers: It was the age of the Rev. Charles Grandison Finney, whose flock consisted of Protestant Whigs, not Catholic Democrats. This was also a time of expanding market relations, nascent industrialization, and triumphant capitalism: It was the age of John Jacob Astor, who made one fortune in fur and another in real estate and who supported the arts, something Jackson had little interest in. This was an era of social reform when moralists urged the abolition of social evils such as alcohol and began an aggressive assault on the institution of slavery: It was the age of William Lloyd Garrison, whose incendiary writings, along with those of other abolitionists, Jackson argued should be barred from circulation in the South. Emerson called it the "age of the first-person singular." Clearly, Jackson fit the mode of self-reliant American individualist, but so, too, did many others.

A recent poll on the presidency ranks Andrew Jackson 10^th, primarily, I suspect, on the strength of his defense of the Union against extreme states rights. Jackson's Nullification Proclamation, however, played a small part in resolving the crisis of 1832 (reduced tariff rates mattered more) and did nothing to strengthen the Union in the long run, though it did provide a useful precedent for Lincoln. What Jackson did as a military hero in the War of 1812, winning the Battle of New Orleans, certainly helped propel the United States into a new era of confidence and nation-building, and his military record might also account for the high esteem with which he is held. Fighting was what Jackson knew (he carried a bullet near his heart from a duel in 1806), and it was a style that also contributed to turning his presidency into a battleground against imagined monsters, as even admirers like Meacham acknowledge. Jackson's presidential combat—pressing for passage of the Indian Removal Act (1830), having his Cabinet resign over an affair of honor (1831), and destroying the Bank of the United States (1832)—hardly makes him worthy of our admiration. Assessing Jackson's character in 1860, James Parton, one of his first biographers, said he was "a democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint."

Jackson's career should caution us about the fallacy of drawing simplistic lessons from the past. Meacham sees in Jackson "a turning point in the making of the modern presidency." It is an empty exercise, however, to argue that because he seemed to have expanded the power of the executive, he therefore set a precedent for the attempts of other presidents to arrogate power. Both Meacham and Reynolds point out how often Jackson used the veto. But subsequent presidents who also availed themselves of vetoes did not need to rely on Jackson as a model for doing so. It is equally misleading to get too swept up in rhetoric that suggests an individual, even the president, makes the times. Jackson was obviously very much embroiled in the age in which he lived. But there were many other players, and the show closed long ago.

The reductio ad absurdum of Vice President Dick Cheney's penchant for secrecy has always been his office's refusal to reveal publicly the names of people who work in his office or even their number. When the government recently published its "Plum Book," a quadrennial listing of jobs opening up in the federal government, it omitted any reference to jobs in the vice-presidential office, in deference to Cheney's extreme sensitivity to sunlight. Instead, it repeated as fact a legal doctrine developed by Cheney's zealous consigliere, David Addington, to resist any scrutiny of his actions, or those of his staff, by the public. This doctrine is at best controversial and at worst utter nonsense. "The Vice Presidency," it states, "is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch." Translation: "What happens in the vice-presidential office is none of your goddamned business." The same language appeared in the previous Plum Book, published in 2004. (No such language appeared in earlier directories produced by the Clinton administration in 1996 and 2000.)

Cheney found the fish-nor-fowl doctrine a convenient justification to refuse routine oversight of classified documents by the National Archives. When the office responsible for this oversight pressed the matter, Cheney retaliated by moving to eliminate that office. Eventually, a federal judge had to issue a preliminary injunction ordering Cheney not to destroy the classified documents in his office's possession. The new vice president-elect, Joe Biden, stated in his Oct. 2 debate with Sarah Palin his view of Addington's constitutional scholarship:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution [sic. Biden meant Article II] defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the executive branch. He works in the executive branch. He should understand that. Everyone should understand that. And the primary role of the vice president of the United States of America is to support the president of the United States of America, give that president his or her best judgment when sought, and as vice president, to preside over the Senate, [and vote] only in a time when in fact there's a tie vote. The Constitution is explicit.

Imagine, then, my distress when I read the following paragraph in a Page One feature about the new Plum Book in the Nov. 13 Washington Post (" 'Plum Book' Is Obama's Big Help-Wanted Ad"):

Many of the positions are highly specific, such as assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the Treasury department. Some, like the jobs that will turn over in the vice president's office, are not included because the office technically is not part of either the executive branch or the legislative branch. [Italics mine.]

Is Addington now moonlighting as a Post copy editor? It isn't remotely established that the vice president's office "technically is not part of either the executive branch of the legislative branch." All we know is that the outgoing vice president believes it, for transparently self-serving reasons; that the incoming vice president does not believe it; and that to the limited extent the matter has been examined in court, a federal judge isn't buying it. The Post usually does a pretty good job distinguishing propaganda from fact, but this time it got played for a sucker.

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Earlier this week, I wrote a column about Barack Obama's failure to win the single biggest voting bloc in the United States: white people. No Democrat has won the white vote since Lyndon Johnson. Obama lost the white vote by 12 percentage points. That's a much narrower margin than John Kerry's 17 points in 2004 and a slightly narrower margin than Al Gore's 13 points in 2000. But Obama's white-vote deficit is significantly larger than that of the last two Democrats who actually got themselves elected president. Clinton got it down to two percentage points in both 1992 and 1996, and Jimmy Carter got it down to four percentage points in 1976. (To see all this data in a chart, click here.) Being white Southerners probably helped Clinton and Carter shrink the white-vote deficit because the South is where, since Johnson, Democrats have had the hardest time winning white votes. (On the other hand, being a white Southerner didn't help Carter's re-election bid. In 1980 he lost the white vote by 20 points. Nor did it help Gore in 2000. Maybe white Southerners were simply tired of them by then.)

White resistance to supporting Democratic presidential candidates is troubling partly because much of that resistance is a lingering reaction to Johnson's passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. After I wrote this in my earlier column, some readers asked whether white resistance to voting Democratic was an entirely Southern phenomenon that, simply because white Southerners vote so disproportionately Republican—in Mississippi and Alabama, 88 percent voted for McCain—skewed the numbers for white voters nationwide. Should whites outside the South be held harmless? Answer: No, not entirely. I refer you to a second data chart here that shows the percentages by state. Obama won the white vote in 18 states and in Washington, D.C. All 18 states lie outside the South, and most are predictably liberal. (New York, Vermont, etc.). But Obama lost the white vote in eight of the states where he won the overall popular vote. That's no great surprise in North Carolina or Virginia, the two Southern states Obama carried, or even in Pennsylvania or Ohio, where white working-class voters were known to be resistant. It's a little surprising in Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico. All three states have Democratic governors and Democratically controlled state legislatures. (The eighth state, Nevada, has a Republican governor, a divided state legislature, and a political culture I know nothing about.) David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonprofit think tank focused on issues relating to African-Americans, tells me that Obama improved on Kerry's showing among white voters almost everywhere outside the South. The exceptions were Arizona and Alaska, where the McCain-Palin ticket enjoyed a home-field advantage; Massachusetts, where Kerry enjoyed a home-field advantage; and Rhode Island and Connecticut, in Kerry's backyard. So yes, there's been progress since 2004. But things were pretty bleak in 2004. Among the states where Kerry failed to win a majority of white voters were New York, California, Delaware, Michigan, and Illinois—all states where Obama won the white vote this time out.

Many readers asked why I cared so much about racial polarization along party lines among whites but not among blacks. It's certainly true that African-Americans were virtually monolithic in their support for Obama—95 percent of the black vote went to Obama—and vote overwhelmingly Democratic in general. Why don't I lose sleep over that? Three reasons:

1) Whites constitute 74 percent of the vote. Blacks constitute 13 percent of the vote. Persistent voting patterns are more worrying among big groups than among small groups because big groups wield more power. Case in point: Only three Democrats have been elected president over the past 44 years.

2) The Republican Party doesn't offer much to African-Americans. Apart from its resistance to supporting civil rights protections since the mid-1960s, the GOP has been generally hostile to government programs that help low-income people. That matters to African-Americans because a disproportionate number of them are poor.

3) With respect to Obama, one can hardly accuse African-Americans of swarming to his candidacy just because he's black. As late as October 2007, a CNN poll showed Hillary Clinton leading Obama among black registered Democrats 57-33 percent.

Let me repeat what I wrote in the earlier column: I don't consider any given white person's vote against Obama, or against Democrats in general, to be racially motivated. Within any individual state, all sorts of political and sociological factors may influence a white person's vote apart from race. But when the Democrats go nearly a half-century without winning a majority of white votes in any presidential election, it's necessary to ask why, even after we've passed the remarkable milestone of electing our first black president.

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Electing Barack Obama president was a glorious Jackie Robinson moment for the United States of America. Obama didn't just win; he became the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a popular-vote majority. He won a larger proportion of white votes than any previous nonincumbent Democratic presidential candidate since Carter. Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in the Washington Post's Outlook section, was moved to conclude that Obama's victory vindicated Martin Luther King's "belief in white people," a belief Coates once scoffed at as a sign of "weakness and cowardice, a lack of faith in his own."

As a white person, I accept with gratitude Coates' warm feelings. But I fear they may be a tad premature. While it's certainly true that enough white people voted for Obama to put him in the Oval Office, the blunt fact remains that a majority of white people did not. Although Obama beat John McCain in the popular vote by an impressive seven-point margin, McCain beat Obama among white voters by an even more impressive 12-point margin. Obama got 53 percent of the broad electorate to vote for him but only 43 percent of the white electorate. When I say "white electorate," I don't mean the white working class, or white Southerners, or any other subgroup whose capacity for racial tolerance has long been held suspect. I mean all white voters.

That strikes me as a hidden-in-plain-sight phenomenon that warrants greater attention. Yet surprisingly little coverage has bothered to note Obama's white-vote deficit. A rare exception was a Nov. 2 New York Times article by John Harwood ("Level of White Support for Obama a Surprise"), which quite appropriately predicted that Obama would fail to win a majority of white votes before moving on to the more hopeful news that Obama had made greater inroads among whites than most recent Democratic predecessors. The sad reality is that no Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon Johnson has won a majority of white votes (and even he lost 1964's white Southern vote to Barry Goldwater).

Am I saying that any white vote against Obama must be counted as racist? Of course not. White people have all sorts of reasons for deciding who they vote for, and most (though not all) white conservatives would have a hard time justifying a vote for any Democratic presidential candidate. Nor am I saying that all or even most Republican voters harbor racial prejudice against African-Americans. Although a majority of whites was never going to vote for a black Democrat in 2008, it's entirely possible that a majority of whites might have voted for a black Republican. (Remember the brief GOP frenzy to draft Colin Powell to run against Bill Clinton in 1996?) More whites voted for Obama than for the very white John Kerry or Al Gore. That doesn't sound like racist behavior. It's Democrats who most whites dislike, not black people.

But in a more complex and indirect way, the stubborn refusal of a majority of whites to vote Democratic is all about race. Take a look at this chart. The alignment of whites with the Republican Party hasn't made it impossible for Democrats to win presidential elections, but it has made it fairly difficult. For the past 40 years, whites have made up 74 percent to somewhere north of 90 percent of all voters. Jimmy Carter got elected president by narrowing to four percentage points the gap between whites voting Republican and whites voting Democratic. Bill Clinton did it by narrowing the gap to a remarkable 2 percent. I don't think it's a coincidence that both men drew some appeal simply from being white Southerners. The South is where the GOP holds its tightest grip on the white vote.

It's no puzzler why Johnson was the last Democrat to win a majority of the white vote. He signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, observing as he signed the former that "we have lost the South for a generation." (Actually, it's been two generations, and nobody would be surprised to see three.) What Johnson didn't allow himself to think was, "We have lost the white vote for a generation." (Again, it's been more like two.) Were LBJ transported to the year 2008, he would be deeply moved to discover that the United States had elected a black man president. But he would find it very depressing to learn that none of his Democratic successors ever won a white majority. Surely, he'd think, it's harder for Democrats to elect a black man president than to win forgiveness from the white majority for abolishing Jim Crow.

The good news is that my fellow Caucasians are aging out of their lock-step Republicanism. Obama failed to win a majority of whites (43 percent); or white men (41 percent); or even white women (46 percent), who are more open to voting Democratic. But he won 54 percent of all white voters age 18 to 29, to McCain's 44 percent. You'll note from the chart that the white majority among voters has been shrinking during the past 40 years, just as the white majority has shrunk in the general population. The three-point drop since 2004, though, is so dramatic that a likely explanation isn't demographics at all but rather a greater disinclination than usual among white folks this year to vote. Turnout in 2008 was about what it was in 2004, and, according to the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, the reason it wasn't higher—as widely expected, given the keen interest in this election—was that fewer Republicans went to the polls. The percentage of Democrats who went to the polls increased 2.6 percentage points while the percentage of Republicans went down 1.3 percentage points. The greatest favor the white race did Obama this year may have been to stay home. That's a far cry from Martin Luther King's dream, but it's a start.

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In the Nov. 13 "Human Nature," William Saletan originally wrote that blacks "made the difference" in passing California's Proposition 8. This erroneous calculation was based on a margin of passage of 4 percent. The final margin was 4.6 percent. To prevent Prop 8's passage, blacks would have had to vote against it by a margin of something like 53 percent to 47 percent.

In the Nov. 12 "Number 1" column, Josh Levin originally and incorrectly stated that R5 is the name of a group that uploads pirated movies. It is a format for DVD releases.

In the Nov. 11 "Spectator," Ron Rosenbaum wrote that Jeff Jarvis had heard a speech by Paulo Coelho at the Frankfurt Book Fair that he later wrote about on his blog. He read about the speech before posting on it. It also stated that Jarvis was living hear Ground Zero on 9/11. He was on a PATH train near Ground Zero that morning.

If you believe you have found an inaccuracy in a Slate story, please send an e-mail to corrections@slate.com, and we will investigate. General comments should be posted in "The Fray," our reader discussion forum.

A question for New York Times headline writers: Are you not yourselves? You're no doubt a witty bunch, and yet house style requires you to resist any temptation toward flavorsome puns or tabloidy provocation in favor of the blandly informative. Your mission is to distill a piece to its essence in a few words without sacrificing nuance, and usually, you are more than up to the task. Once in a while, though, you respond to the challenge not with straight-up-the-middle declaratives but with enigmatic paradox and riddle-me-this contradiction.

Consider: "Bigger Is Better, Except When It's Not"—a 2007 article looking at body size in sports. "Smaller Can Be Better (Except When It's Not)"—a tech piece from 2004. "A Marriage Penalty, Except When It Isn't"—on couples and the tax code, 2003. This is the Times headline as koan, inviting readers to suspend in-the-box thinking and seek enlightenment below the fold. The style presents thesis and antithesis; it embraces binary thinking yet disavows it; it builds dichotomies and collapses them. There are good uses of this technique, except when there aren't, as a sampling from the last three months attests.

Headline: "Honesty Is the Sole Policy, Except When It's Not" (Aug. 2)

The gist: Despite tough official policy, New York City police officers who make false statements go mostly unpunished.

Worth a koan? Definitely—this piece is an epistemological gold mine. (Ancient-Greek tabloid version: NYPD SEZ "THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE.")

Headline: "NBC Is Broadcasting Live, Except When It Isn't" (Aug. 10)

The gist: The network didn't always offer full disclosure about which of its Olympic broadcasts were truly "live."

Worth a koan? Yes. A koan is "the place and the time and the event where truth reveals itself." The article ponders: If the synchronized swimming quarterfinals are tape-delayed, are they still the truth?

Headline: "The English Actress (Except in France)" (Sept. 24)

The gist: Kristin Scott Thomas is typecast as a chilly aristocrat in English-language movies but enjoys a more versatile career in French films.

Worth a koan? Nah. Ms. Scott Thomas isn't a Möbius strip. She's just bilingual.

Headline: "Job Hunting Is, and Isn't, What It Used to Be" (Sept. 26)

The gist: The Internet can help you find a job, but you still have to get out and pound that pavement.

Worth a koan? Oh, yeah! And your CompuServe account is and isn't what it used to be, either!

Headline: "Waiting to Lead (or Not)" (Sept. 27)

The gist: Presidents-elect tend to distance themselves from their lame-duck predecessors in the days between the election and inauguration.

Worth a koan? Not really—the article mulls not a paradox so much as an either-or.

Headline: "Grieving, and Not, in the Condiments Aisle" (Oct. 5)

The gist: The late Paul Newman's face still smiles out from grocery store rows of Newman's Own products.

Worth a koan? No. The article has no grieving or not-grieving, just shopping.

Headline: "Dead Language That's Very Much Alive" (Oct. 6)

The gist: Latin is making a comeback in schools.

Worth a koan? Yes, because sic transit gloria, e.g.

Headline: "Shining a Light on a Movement That Maybe Isn't" (Oct. 26)

The gist: The Guggenheim mounts "theanyspacewhatever," a group show of loosely linked installation artists.

Worth a koan? Whatever.

Headline: "Doing Things You're Not" (Nov. 9)

The gist: A night out with singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, and a quote from David Letterman on Arthur's band: "I would like to be with those people. I think they're probably doing things I'm not."

Worth a koan? It is and it isn't. Stripped of a subject noun, the headline floats in space, achieving action and not-action, being and not-being.

Nov. 13, 2008

XX Factor: What Clinton, Palin Did for Glass Ceiling

In the recent elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton and Gov. Sarah Palin were running for some of the highest political positions in the United States. But where does the so-called glass ceiling for women stand? Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon discuss the cracks in the glass and the benefits of having two distinct female politicians. Listen to the segment.

Nov. 11, 2008

War Stories: How Bush Can Ease Foreign-Policy Transition

The Bush administration is paving the way for a smooth transition of power in January. President George W. Bush is reviving relations with Russia and Iran, among others. Madeleine Brand talks with Fred Kaplan about the foreign-policy silver linings for Barack Obama. Listen to the segment.

Technology: Obama's Plans for a High-Tech White House

President-elect Barack Obama made use of text messages, e-mails, and social-networking sites to get elected. What role will these technologies play once he takes office? Alex Cohen talks to Farhad Manjoo about Obama's plans for a digital White House. Listen to the segment.

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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,

My parents' lives began when they had babies and ended when those babies reached about 6. From then on, they've lived in this semi-delusional world, refusing to acknowledge that their "wittle durl" has grown up. I'm now 40 years old, and they still "tawk to me wike dis," making it pretty much impossible to have a real conversation with them. When they do slip and speak to me adult-to-adult, they actually correct themselves to baby talk. For example, "You looked nice" is quickly repeated as, "Her wookied sooo PURRRRTY." Every single thing that happens reminds them of "when ooo was wittle." Now, I could somewhat handle this when we lived across the country from each other and contact was limited to phone calls and a visit every few years, but now my job has brought me within easy driving distance, and I'm finding that I just can't take it. I've tried to gently correct them when they do this, but they don't hear me. I don't want to be irritable every time I'm around them, and I don't want to cut them off. They are my parents, after all. My husband says I can't outright say anything to them about it because it would hurt their feelings and, at their age, wouldn't change anything, anyway. What do you think?

—Not a "Wittle Durl" Anymore

Dear Wittle,

I'm not suggesting you do this, but I do wonder whether a kind of shock therapy could work with them. That is, next time you're visiting, during dinner turn your plate of spaghetti over on your head, then grab your bottom and say, "I make a pee-pee in my pants!" Your parents have been talking to you this way for the past 40 years, which makes this one long-running folie à deux. I agree with your husband's assessment that the likelihood of convincing them that Goodnight Moon is no longer your favorite book is small. Nonetheless, I think he's wrong to say you have to participate in their delusion. Stop being so gentle and explicitly tell them that now that you're 40 years old, you need them to speak to you as an adult. Explain that, from now on, when you're visiting and they slip into baby talk, you're going to slip out the door. Then do it. Either they will reform, or you won't have to take it. You mention that they had "babies," so I'm assuming you have siblings. Unless they are all so damaged from their upbringing that they are in cribs somewhere sucking their thumbs and waiting for the tooth fairy, perhaps they can join you in presenting a united front to your parents. All of you could say you want an end to the baby talk and perhaps suggest that your parents seek counseling to figure out a new way of relating to their children. If all this fails, then when they call wondering where their "widdle, biddle baby-boo" is, you can say you'd love to see them just as soon as you become old enough to learn how to drive.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: Hermit Husband

Dear Prudence,

I recently married a wonderful man with two children. We met via an online dating service and were married within months. He's a great husband and father to his children as well as my child. Our sex life is pretty good, however I'm not sure how to tell him I need a lot more "warming up" in bed before we get down to business. I don't want to hurt his feelings, but I don't feel like a kiss or two is sufficient enough to get me hot, bothered, and ready to go. I enjoy making love with him, and I don't want this to become a bigger problem down the road. Any suggestions?

—Not So Hot

Dear Not So Hot,

The good news is that when he does get down to business, you enjoy it. You'd be in a much worse situation if the hors d'oeuvres were superb, but the main course was always undercooked. Clearly, during his previous marriage, this was how conjugal relations were conducted. But you're his wife now, and you have to make your needs clear—surely he will be delighted to please you and expand his own pleasure and repertoire. You need to talk to him, but do it at the right moment. That means not just before or after you've made love, because it would be a mood killer. Pick a time when you two have plenty of privacy and are feeling cozy, and tell him that your lovemaking is wonderful, but you're someone who needs a lot more foreplay. If you're uncomfortable describing what you want, look at the books on the Web site of the American Association of Sexuality Educators Counselors and Therapists, and see if anyone could help you give some guidance to your husband. You could also order some of the Better Sex videos—you two might get so hot and bothered during movie night that you won't even need hot, buttered popcorn.

—Prudie

Dear Prudie,

I was recently at a party with my girlfriend and some of her friends. Most of the people in attendance were female. One girl called a male friend to get him to come over and bring some other guys. To entice him, she said, "There are four beautiful girls over here. One has a boyfriend, though." To which my girlfriend replied, as she pretended to push me away, "What? You mean, 'Mike,' my brother?" I felt belittled. Is this a harmless joke? Am I being oversensitive? My girlfriend says it was just a joke and that I shouldn't take it seriously. I love her, and I love her sense of humor 99 percent of the time. I have talked to her about these kinds of jokes before; she said she would try to think about me before making jokes that might offend me, but I feel like a prop in her stand-up routine from time to time. Do I have a right to be offended by this "harmless" joke?

—Belittled

Dear Belittled,

Are you sure we're not dating, Mike? Because, like your girlfriend, I've gone through life having to explain, "It's just a joke!" If your girlfriend is only offensive 1 percent of the time, then she's got an outstanding ratio of laughs to pain. But it's that 1 percent that can really sting. Humor requires risk. When it works, as when Barack Obama referred to himself as "a mutt" during his first press conference as president-elect, it's a delight. When it doesn't, as when he said he wasn't going to try to contact any dead presidents in the manner of Nancy Reagan, it calls for an apology (which he gave to Mrs. Reagan). Since you say you enjoy dating your jokester, she should appreciate that most of the time you can take it, and when you can't, she needs to back off and say she's sorry. But I doubt there was any deeper meaning to her ill-conceived party gibe other than the irresistible opportunity for a laugh.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

About a year ago, my first love contacted me after a 20 year silence. We had dated in high school for three years and had our first sexual experience with each other. I was so in love with him, but he split up with me and broke my heart. He found a new girlfriend and married her after we graduated. They had a child and moved out of state. At first, he contacted me through a classmate-finder Web site, and we chatted online several times. Eventually, he said he would be in my area and would love to see me. When we met and hugged, the emotions came flooding back. He felt so good in my arms, and his smell was the same as I remembered. We talked for hours. Since then, we have been e-mailing, texting, and talking on the phone. We are both still married, but I can't stop thinking about him. We want to get together so badly. I love my husband very much, but I can't let go of what I feel for my first love. I think maybe I never really let go of him; I'd just locked all of those emotions inside, thinking that's all I would ever have left of him. But seeing him was the key that let them loose, and now I am very confused and want him back!

—Torn Between Two Loves

Dear Torn,

When he took you in his arms, suddenly you both transported to the back seat of his Mustang. You were young again! You'd never heard of a 401(k)! You didn't have a spouse who yelled just yesterday, "Is it too much to ask you to replace the toilet paper when you finish the roll!" You must feel as Proust did upon experiencing the memories evoked by eating a madeleine: "And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence. …" However, unless you are hoping to wreck two families, I strongly urge you to forget about being filled with your former boyfriend's precious essence. You seem to be trying to make the case that your life for the past 20 years has just been an attempt to hide from what has now been revealed: You and he belong together, and you can no longer resist your fate. However, I'll bet his truth is pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago: He'd like to sleep with you, but he plans to live with her. Have you told your husband about seeing your old flame? No? I didn't think so. So before you lead yourself into one disastrous vicissitude, tell your high-school Romeo that the reunion is over.

—Prudie

Quick: Name the highest-grossing film of 1952. Good guesses would include Singin' in the Rain, The Quiet Man, and High Noon. But they all fell well short of the $15.4 million earned by a movie you couldn't watch today even if you wanted to: This Is Cinerama.

What is Cinerama? It was the first of a wave of widescreen processes that debuted in the early '50s. Cinerama used three projectors to fill a giant screen curved to the contours of the human retina. Using films shot by a three-lens camera—in essence, three cameras in one—it created panoramic imagery that filled even the viewer's peripheral vision. This Is Cinerama showcased the format's capabilities, giving the Cinerama treatment to a water-skiing show, Niagara Falls, and the canals of Venice. (Less thrilling: a demonstration of the system's then-new stereo sound via a static shot of a church choir.)

Cinerama arrived at a moment when movies needed to stir interest. The 11 million televisions then in American homes had begun to eat into theatrical profits. In his introduction to This Is Cinerama, impresario Lowell Thomas promised an "entirely new form of entertainment" with "no plot" and "no stars." In the coming decade, Cinerama movies showed viewers the wonders of the world, from a roller coaster at Rockaway Beach to the white-water rapids of Pakistan—travelogues not unlike the glam documentaries that until recently defined the IMAX experience. It wasn't until 10 years later that the first, and ultimately only, two narrative features shot in three-strip Cinerama made their debut: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won, recently released in a new special-edition DVD and Blu-Ray. The latter is worth revisiting—as a cinematic curio but also as a clue to what the future might hold for IMAX.

Cinerama faded before I was born, but my hometown of Dayton, Ohio, became the unlikely site of a Cinerama revival in the '90s, thanks to the efforts of Dayton projectionist John Harvey. Harvey had previously set up a Cinerama screening room in his ranch home—eliminating two bedrooms in the process—and helped the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, set up Cinerama projection in 1993. In 1996, Harvey moved his home equipment to the Neon Movies, a downtown theater that had served as a pilgrimage site for Daytonians seeking art house fare since the mid-'80s. Harvey's Cinerama setup was supposed to have a one-month stay. Instead, it stuck around for more than three years, attracting widescreen enthusiasts like Quentin Tarantino and Joe Dante.

On trips home to visit my parents, I was able to see both This Is Cinerama and How the West Was Won, and the experience has stayed with me. Cinerama does only one type of shot better than other formats—long shots in which the camera proceeds into or retreats from an environment—but it does it spectacularly well. Early in How the West Was Won, there's an uninterrupted shot, slightly more than a minute long, that proceeds through the dirt-road center of a young Albany, N.Y., past carts, tradesmen, crude streetlamps, a hotel, and a ticket office, finally arriving at the banks of the Erie Canal, where laborers are unloading a boat. It's a Hollywood vision of the past, to be sure, but seen in Cinerama it feels vivid and dramatic, immersive in a way it could not have been in a traditional format. Later sequences, in particular a buffalo stampede and a shootout aboard a train, achieve a similarly enthralling effect.

Can such spectacles add up to a movie? In the case of How the West Was Won, they mostly do. The film's interlocked stories are designed to depict the heroic conquest of the American West, "won from nature and primitive Man." It's essentially the story of manifest destiny played without irony—unless a final sequence presenting the Los Angeles freeway system as a symbol of humanity's triumph over adversity counts—by an all-star cast that included James Stewart, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and George Peppard, among others. Three directors divvied up the film's five segments: John Ford, George Marshall (best known for directing Destry Rides Again), and the dependable vet Henry Hathaway.

Surprisingly, Ford provides the weakest segment, an inert Civil War vignette about the attempted assassination of Ulysses S. Grant (played by Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H and Dragnet fame). Hathaway, however, looks almost at home. His three segments move the story along and let Cinerama-friendly action build naturally. In Hathaway's hands, Cinerama's third narrative film might have really been something.

But there never was a third narrative picture. How the West Was Won performed quite well financially, coming in as the year's second highest-grossing film, behind the well-attended but still unprofitable Cleopatra and just ahead of It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. But making and screening movies in this format proved to be simply too difficult. A lot can go wrong shooting with a three-lens camera. Even more can go wrong in exhibiting films shot that way, especially once the format's then-unfamiliar multitrack sound system entered the equation. (Cinerama malfunctioned so often, in fact, that Thomas provided "breakdown reels": short, single-screen segments that could be played while technicians worked on the equipment.) Then there were the visible seams. No image created by three individual projectors will ever match up perfectly at all times, no matter how much care is taken in the setup.

Even when all went well technically, it was still difficult to tell a story with Cinerama. As one actor after another explains in David Strohmaier's excellent feature-length documentary Cinerama Adventure—included as an extra on the new How The West Was Won discs—Cinerama presented forbidding lighting challenges and made simple elements of film grammar like close-ups impossible. It makes sense for the Great Plains to stretch as far as the eye can see; Debbie Reynolds' face is another story.

Narrative films proved too forbidding, but the best parts of How the West Was Won suggest it wasn't so much a dead end as a film ahead of its time. That's even evident watching it on DVD, which flattens out the action scenes but retains some of their impact, and especially on Blu-Ray, which uses a "Smilebox" process, essentially a curved letterbox, to simulate Cinerama's curved screen.

Maybe it's up to IMAX to finish the job Cinerama began. My experience with Cinerama left me skeptical about IMAX for years. Like Cinerama, IMAX is designed to overwhelm, not necessarily to tell a story. I once asked a veteran of the quadraphonic era why four-channel sound systems never caught on. He replied, "Because humans only have two ears." I used to use a variation on this line to describe my reluctance to embrace IMAX, a format I saw as ideal for many-eyed insects but less than perfect for humans, who can't really take in all the action at once. That my most memorable trip to an IMAX theater involved the 1996 movie Special Effects: Anything Can Happen, which spent a perverse amount of time revealing the secrets behind the Shaquille O'Neal-is-a-rapping-genie movie Kazaam, didn't help.

The Dark Knight changed that in a few oversize frames. Christopher Nolan's movie is the first full-length Hollywood film to be shot in part in the IMAX format. The landscape shots of Chicago (Gotham) and Hong Kong felt vivid and immersive, and the action scenes played out with a focused intensity. Nolan's direction keeps viewers trained on what they should be seeing. The rest isn't so much extraneous as it is ambient.

Is this how all blockbuster films will soon look? Or will The Dark Knight be IMAX's How the West Was Won? The latter possibility seems unlikely, especially given the financial boost Dark Knight gave IMAX theater owners. But IMAX will need to find more directors as comfortable with and enthusiastic about the format as Nolan, maybe even one willing to pick up How the West Was Won's challenge and shoot the whole thing in the format. The shifts in framing can be a bit distracting when watching Dark Knight in IMAX, and the question of whether it can be used to tell stories not involving caped men soaring across skylines remain unanswered. The IMAX format has great potential that The Dark Knight only began to realize. But as TV screens get bigger and home theater systems crisper, the time feels right for movie theaters to restate their claim on images that stretch as far as the eye can see.

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It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was heavily promoted as being presented in Cinerama and was projected on curved screens in theaters outfitted for the process. But the movie was actually shot, like any other widescreen film, using a single-lens camera. Movies branded as having been shot in Cinerama continued to appear after 1963, but as with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, this merely meant they were projected onto Cinerama screens. These screens started to come down at the end of the '60s in the United States. European Cinerama sputtered along for a couple more years, long enough to feature a pair of films about great composers, including the Edvard Grieg biopic Song of Norway, starring Florence Henderson.

Heads of state from the Group of 20 are meeting in Washington this weekend to discuss global efforts to respond to the financial crisis. Members of the group are typically described as the world's 20 largest economies. If the financial crisis pushes No. 20 into a deep recession, does that mean it could get bumped off the next guest list?

No. The G-20 happens to include 16 of the world's 20 largest economies (PDF), but that's not a criterion for membership. Otherwise, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden would all make the list. And if—like many economists—you use purchasing-power parity to measure the size of an economy, Iran and Poland could also make a case for grabbing seats at the table. In fact, there are no official rules on how to add or drop a country from the group, and the list of participating countries has stayed constant since the G-20's creation in 1999. At that time, four countries—Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia—were included despite GDP rankings ranging from 22^nd to 29^th. While Turkey and Indonesia have since moved into the top 20, Argentina has done the opposite.

The G-20's Web site does give some indication of how the initial member countries were selected: "[I]t was considered important that countries and regions of systemic significance for the international financial system be included. Aspects such as geographical balance and population representation also played a major part." (The European Union also occupies one of the body's 20 seats, despite the presence of several European countries in the group.) Membership was restricted to keep the group from becoming unwieldy, but that also meant a few countries that had been members of the G-22 or G-33—short-lived predecessors from the late 1990s—were left out in the cold. A few nations just missed the cut: Malaysia was omitted, for example—either for instituting currency controls or for putting its finance minister in prison, depending on whom you ask.

For the more exclusive G-8 conferences, the country hosting the meeting maintains a great deal of power over the agenda and which countries get invited as guests. The G-20, on the other hand, tends to be administered by a troika—including the current host, along with the hosts from the previous and upcoming meetings—which makes ad hoc invitations a little more complicated. As a practical matter, expanding the group permanently would probably require a consensus among all—or at least the vast majority—of its current members.

Judging from gross domestic product alone, Spain—now ranked eighth—would probably be the country with the most legitimate beef over its absence from the G-20's membership slate. This weekend, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will actually be in attendance at the summit, due to an unexpected decision made by France. As the current president of the European Union, France effectively had two seats available at the summit. Last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he would give one of them to Spain—an unprecedented move in the history of the G-20. (Spain is not expected to maintain its seat after the presidency of the EU moves on.)

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

Explainer thanks Colin Bradford of the Brookings Institution and John Kirton of the University of Toronto.

The Iraqi government this week assumed responsibility from the United States for paying the salaries of the Sons of Iraq, the formerly disaffected Sunnis who now serve as neighborhood patrol officers in cities throughout the country. Their monthly salary is approximately $300. How well can a Son of Iraq live on $300 in Baghdad?

He'll need a roommate and some help from his family. Sons of Iraq who live on their own may have to avoid indulgences like air conditioning or chicken dinners. (Many rely on support payments from clans or tribal sheiks.) Rent alone can consume most of their budget. Real estate prices in Baghdad have skyrocketed. A two-bedroom apartment in a safe area currently costs around $400 per month. A small house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood is out of reach at $150,000. Real estate prices in many areas have doubled in the past year and continue to climb due to security improvements and a housing shortage.

Fortunately, basic food staples are affordable. The government's Public Distribution System supplies subsidized monthly food parcels to two-thirds of Iraqi citizens. For approximately 16 cents per month, recipients are entitled to a basket of 10 basic products, including flour, rice, sugar, salt, and cooking oil. The parcel supplies the minimum daily caloric intake requirement, but the central government has discussed steep cuts to the program.

Other food items are expensive. A Son of Iraq earns less than 8 percent of the median U.S. law-enforcement officer's salary, but he pays close to the same prices for meats and vegetables. A pound of potatoes in Baghdad costs 75 cents, slightly more than the U.S. price of 67 cents per pound. A pound of chicken would cost a Son of Iraq $1.63, compared with an average U.S. price of $2.08.

Electricity is supplied at low rates by the government, but it is unavailable for much of the day. During outages, residents turn to personal or neighborhood generators. The cost can run anywhere from $50 to $150 per month to run a fan, lights, and basic appliances. The cost of operating an air conditioner is too much for many Sons of Iraq, despite average highs of over 100 degrees in the hottest months.

Inflation also threatens the already tenuous financial position of the Sons of Iraq. Last year, Iraq's 60 percent inflation was second in the world only to the incredible 100,000 percent inflation in Zimbabwe. In one month alone this year, Iraqi food prices rose by 13.6 percent.

Relatively speaking, the Sons of Iraq are paid poorly for their line of work. Official Iraqi police officers and soldiers earn twice as much as the Sons of Iraq. The Sons' salary would be more comparable to that of a Baghdad butcher. However, many Sons of Iraq are illiterate or otherwise underqualified for official police work. The salary was also set in 2006, when the cost of living was lower, and the majority of the Sons lived in Anbar, a less expensive locale.

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

Explainer thanks Eric Davis of Rutgers University and Corey Flintoff of National Public Radio.

An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with murdering his father and another man appeared in court on Monday. Police say the boy confessed to shooting the two men with a .22-caliber gun, but his defense attorneys told reporters that "there could have been improper interview techniques done." What's the "proper" way to interrogate a kid?

With kid gloves. Based on the principle that juvenile suspects may not fully comprehend a Miranda warning, most states mandate some form of added protection for children under the age of 16. In at least 20 states, police must notify the child's guardian before questioning; and in at least 13 states, either a parent or an attorney must be present.



Under Arizona law, the state carries the "burden of proof" in juvenile interrogation cases. That is, there's a presumption that the child's statements were made involuntarily unless a preponderance of evidence indicates otherwise. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in State v. Jimenez that in determining whether a confession was voluntary (and therefore admissible), a court should evaluate the child's age, education, background, and intelligence, plus whether the child's parents were present, whether he was in good mental and physical health during the interrogations, and whether he has a mental illness.

There's evidence to suggest that juvenile suspects are more likely than adults to make a false confession. A 2004 study of 326 exoneration cases found that 13 percent of adults had falsely confessed, compared with 44 percent of suspects under 18 years old. Among children between the ages of 12 and 15, the rate was 75 percent. After the 1989 beating and rape of a woman known as the Central Park jogger, five New York teenagers served prison sentences based on false confessions. In 1998, a 14-year-old boy named Michael Crowe admitted to stabbing his 12-year-old sister to death after he'd been interrogated for 10 hours over two days. Before the murder trial began, however, the charges were dropped, with the judge ruling that the police had made "illegal promises of leniency"—telling Michael he'd get "help" if he confessed and that he'd go to jail if he didn't. (Click here for video footage of the interrogation.)

Law-enforcement officers are often trained to conduct interrogations using the Reid Technique, which involves direct confrontation, physical gestures to appear concerned, and preventing the accused from denying the crime outright. Practitioners are encouraged to use the same methods for children as for adults. This helps explain why children are more likely to offer up false confessions. Children, psychologists argue, are more suggestible than adults and thus more easily swayed by leading questions. They're also more influenced by short-term guarantees—"You can go home right away if you confess"—than by longer-term consequences like 10 years in prison. Third, juveniles are more likely to display behavior that interrogators read as "deceptive," such as saying "I swear" a lot and not making eye contact. Reformers advocate better preparation for police officers as well as mandatory recording of interrogations.

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

Explainer thanks G. Daniel Lassiter of Ohio University.

A Washington, D.C., court will hear arguments on Wednesday in the case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy who was declared dead last week by hospital officials. Though the boy's brain has stopped functioning completely, drugs and a respirator are keeping his heart beating and his lungs inflating. According to his parents' strict religious beliefs, this means that Motl is still alive, and the family is therefore arguing to keep the boy on life support. How is death defined in other religions?

Usually, the same way it has traditionally been defined in all cultures: by a lack of vital signs. Most world religions lack a clear doctrinal statement that certifies when, exactly, the moment of death can be said to have occurred. For most of human history, there was no need for one since prior to the invention of life-support equipment, the absence of circulation or respiration was the only way to diagnose death. This remains the standard of death in most religions. By the early 1980s, however, the medical and legal community also began to adopt a second definition of death—the irreversible cessation of all brain functions—and some religious groups have updated their beliefs.

Jewish arguments both for and against accepting brain death can be found in the Talmud, the sprawling record of rabbinical discussions on law and ethics. Some strands of Talmudic law hold that those who have been decapitated or had their necks broken are considered dead, even if their bodies continue to move—an argument that many take as proof that total loss of brain function counts as death. Other scholars point to a section from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Yoma, which states that if you come across a collapsed building on the Sabbath, you must uncover victims at least up to their noses to determine whether they are dead or alive, as "life manifests itself primarily through the nose as it is written: In whose nose was the breath of the spirit of life"—a reference to the Genesis story of the great flood. (For a longer discussion of the Jewish definition of death, see Chapter 12 in this book.)

Christians who ardently support the traditional circulatory-respiratory definition of death tend to be fundamentalists or evangelicals. They may point to Leviticus 17:11, which states that "the life of the flesh is in the blood," or Genesis 2:7, which describes how God "formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being." Most mainstream Protestant groups in the United States accept brain death as a valid criterion for death, as does the Roman Catholic Church, though that ruling is not without controversy.

In 1986, the Academy of Islamic Jurisprudence—a group of legal experts convened by the Organization of the Islamic Conference—issued an opinion stating that a person should be considered legally dead when either "complete cessation of the heart or respiration occurs" or "complete cessation of all functions of the brain occurs." In both cases, "expert physicians" must ascertain that the condition is irreversible. However, the academy's statement was merely a recommendation to member nations, not a binding resolution, and the question remains an open one for many Muslims.

In 2006, the family of a Buddhist man in Boston who had been declared legally brain-dead argued that, because his heart was still beating, his spirit and consciousness still lingered and that removing him from life support would be akin to killing him. In a Boston Globe article about the case, a professor of Buddhism explained that, within Tibetan Buddhism, a person has multiple levels of consciousness, which may or may not correspond with brain activity.

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

Explainer thanks Courtney Campbell of Oregon State University, Fred Rosner of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Stuart Youngner of Case Western Reserve University.

Click here for a slide-show essay on Michelle Obama's fashion choices.

Dear Mrs. Obama,

Congratulations to you and your husband on a thrilling victory. It must be unnerving to find, a week after such a historic event, that all anyone wants to talk about is your wardrobe.

Forgive us. We pro-fashion pundits can't help but chime in on the importance of clothes. Especially now that we've been treated to this absurdly style-happy election. We've spent the past 20 months talking about Clinton's décolletage, McCain's loafers, his wife's earrings, Obama's sunglasses, and, of course, Sarah Palin's pricey makeover. We just can't stop.

But we also want to talk about your wardrobe because we think you have great style. We are attracted to it and inspired by it, and—with all respect due the future first lady—I thought I'd offer a few humble thoughts on what makes your style so great and what you might keep in mind as you get dressed for the next four to eight years.

I don't take the opportunity lightly, given that you are already perched on Vanity Fair's "Best Dressed" list and rumored to be on an upcoming cover of Vogue. But what you wear is important, especially when the nation, and the world, is watching you. We'll be looking to you for optimism and for guidance. And we want you to represent.

You clearly love clothes—no woman who wears prints and color doesn't. And it seems you are one of the lucky women who likes her body—you show your curves with confidence and pride. Where most wives of politicians reach for the cheerful, standard issue skirt-suit (think Jill Biden's citrus number on Election Night), you have more imagination.

I'm thinking here of the abstracted rose-print silk dress you wore the evening your husband accepted the nomination. Few other women in a similar position would have made such a daring choice. The print was big, the colors were regal without being dour, the cut was utterly flattering—and utterly unbusinesslike. The dress said: I'm no cookie-cutter lady. The aqua short-sleeved jacket you wore over gray stripes on the campaign trail wasn't particularly "first lady like," but it was charming. And the exotic purple feather pin on Larry King showed a feminine theatricality that was just plain fun.

The choices you've made thus far demonstrate traits that will be useful in a first lady: practicality, flexibility, a sense of humor, a sense of glamour. Yours is a particularly American style—relaxed, confident, classic, and not overly label-happy. You've embraced American designers, from populist low-cost outfitters like White House/Black Market (the awkwardly named makers of the now famous $148 dress you wore on The View) to big-gun American designers like Narciso Rodriguez (who made the cranberry wool shift you wore at the debate in Nashville) and new stars like Thakoon Panichgul (who made the print dress you had on in Denver).

You've also embraced the casual chic of some classically American looks. I love the way you wear your belt over a fitted sweater, like Mary Tyler Moore. I love that you wear flat shoes with a full skirt: so Maria from West Side Story.

I even love that you make the occasional mistake. It shows that you are open-minded, even risk-taking. But the white floral-print J. Crew dress you wore to the University of Mississippi debate was too much. White is rarely good on camera and, you'll excuse me, never good from the rear view.

And I must ask because everyone wants to know: What about that Narciso Rodriguez dress in Grant Park? Wonkette called it "hell-colored." Sixty-five percent of those polled by People.com said they hated the dress. Tight satin? Beading? The obi waist? The weird little cardigan? Mrs. Obama, black with red is too jarring a color combination for a first lady. It's too dramatic. It recalls an eerie portrait by Goya or a costume from Tosca or Carmen. All too fiery when we want you to soothe. Especially in an image that will be beamed around the world and live online forever.

By now, I imagine you must find the comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy flattering but tiring. At 44, you will be the youngest first lady since Camelot; the comparisons are inevitable. That doesn't make them accurate.

Like Kennedy, you clearly understand the power of clothes to telegraph messages. In the midst of Sarah Palin's Wardrobegate, you wore wore inexpensive J. Crew separates on The Tonight Show, telling Jay Leno, "You can get a lot of great stuff online. ("All Politics Aside … this outfit gets our vote" reads a current J. Crew ad, an effort to cash in on your endorsement.) Another savvy choice: You wore evening pajamas by Isabel Toledo for a fundraiser hosted by Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour in New York last June. Toledo is an insider's designer; all black was a smart choice for meeting fashion deities (and the pope.)

Like Jackie Kennedy, you understand that dressing for your audience is important. But that's where the comparison ends. Where Kennedy's wardrobe was constant, a calculated piece of stagecraft, your style is more casual and more spontaneous. Which makes it much more interesting.

Jackie's White House wardrobe was essentially custom work from one designer, Oleg Cassini; you buy off the rack. Jackie bought clothes and returned them after wearing them. What you wear, you own. Jackie often spent tens of thousands of dollars in one shot; no one could accuse you of lavish spending.

It seems, happily, that we are more obsessed with your wardrobe than you are. Surely you are less fixated than the proprietors of MrsO, an obsessive new blog devoted to your sartorial choices. But I'd like to leave you with a few specific thoughts. (Like you, I'm sure, I hate it when people bring me a problem without bringing me a resolution.)

1. Live your life, but remember you are being photographed. I don't mean that you should leave the tracksuit at home when you take the girls for the occasional Big Mac. You're a mom, and we love it. But I do think you could be more attentive to what is photogenic for big occasions when you are not on private time. The easiest thing to do is have someone take a digital picture of you, see how your look photographs. Try a profile shot as well—cameras obviously are not always face-on, and unwanted bumps and lumps will be revealed this way. And think about the background: The Hell Dress on that blue stage was harsh.

2. Stop shopping for day clothes right now. Repeat outfits. Wear your favorites often, and change the accessories. That's a tried-and-true rule for great style during hard times. Woman across the country will appreciate it.

3. Spend, sometimes. You are allowed to indulge, especially for state dinners, meeting Queen Elizabeth and Mme. Sarkozy. We want you to look awesome. And spending is good for the economy.

4. Stick with Maria Pinto, your long-time dressmaker in Chicago. (The aqua dress she designed for your speech at the convention and the vivid coral number you wore to your recent White House visit were terrific.) She's a win-win. You can show hometown pride, support a small business, remain loyal, and she makes you look better than anyone.

5. A note on accessories. Please don't wear gumball pearls like Barbara Bush. In fact, please don't wear pearls at all. We voted for change, and we love your outsize jewelry. So far you've avoided the tired Washington classics—the pearls, the miniflags, the bald eagles, the diamond billboards for you home state. Love it. The big glittery brooches are so distinctive. Love them.

6. Beware of inaugural ball up-dos. Nancy Reagan's chignon at the 1981 inaugural looked imperious. (The fact that she was wearing a $10,000 gown didn't help.) Hillary Clinton, I hate to say, looked like a Grand Ole Opry star with curls piled high at 1993's inaugural. But you looked fabulous on the cover of Monday's New York Post, with your hair pulled back for a night out on the town with the future president. If that's preview of Jan. 20, I say do it. Just don't do it again for a while.

7. Keep wearing American designers, and wear more of them. Oscar de la Renta has been the favored designer of Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton, and there's no reason to resist his beautiful clothes on occasion.

But Donna Karan is perfect for your strength and curves. Michael Kors and Ralph Lauren make the classic sweaters and skirts you love. Isaac Mizrahi makes a beautiful gown. Diane von Fürstenberg and Tory Burch favor the easy shapes and bold prints you love. Remember, these designers collectively employ hundreds of American workers, and the American fashion industry could use your support right now.

8. Inauguration Day. Wear Maria Pinto to the swearing-in ceremony and Thakoon to the inaugural balls.

This is no time for risk-taking. Pinto has been dressing you the longest and deserves the honor. I'd say she's guaranteed to make you look your best. And if you're going to wear a hat, call Albertus Swanepoel, New York's last great milliner. Only he could pull it off.

I think you would be incredible in a Donna Karan draped gown and coat for evening. But Thakoon Panichgul is the ideal choice to design your inaugural gown. The 33-year-old Thai-born, Omaha-raised, New York-based designer represents the very best of American opportunity and hard work, and he will capture the romance and the majesty of that incredible night for the rest of us to remember.

Yes, yes, yes. I, too, took pleasure in standing in line and in exchanging pleasantries and greetings with the amazingly courteous staff at my polling station and the many citizens of my delightfully diverse Washington neighborhood. I, too, am still wearing my lapel sticker, with the jaunty words "I Voted." And I found it pretty easy to cast a vote that told the Republican Party, for which I recommended a vote last time, not to try any of this shit again. No more McCarthy tactics; no more stumblebum quitting of the campaign trail and attempting to pull out of the first presidential debate in order to wind up voting to save Lehman Bros.; no more driveling Christian fundamentalism; no more insinuation that only those silly enough to endorse them are "real Americans." No more sneers at San Francisco as if it weren't a real American city. McCain and his preposterous running mate will just have to believe in an afterlife in which they can live down the shame of what they attempted this year.

But I might possibly have voted for them all the same, clothes pin clamped over my nose in the voting booth, if only because of the crucial struggle for a free Iraq and an autonomous Kurdistan. And, in such a case, I would have been very annoyed at the suggestion that my vote was a racist one. "Historic," yelled the very headline across the top of my morning newspaper. (Just the news, please, if you would be so kind.) Would the letters have been so big for the first female vice president? And isn't it already historic that millions of white Christians voted, win or lose, for a man with one Kenyan parent, that parent having been raised as a Muslim?

So let us not over-egg the pudding. And if you think our own press and media are too uncritically adoring, just spend a second or two exposing yourself to the overseas version. On election night, I spent a little time on British and then on Australian television. For expressing a few mild doubts about the new president-elect, I was forcibly reminded in one case that the first 14 (I think it was) presidents of the United States could have owned Barack Obama, and was informed in the second case that just 40 years ago, he would not have been allowed to vote in the election, let alone win it.

Well, as it happens, our new president has no slave ancestry, and neither branch of his parentage could have been owned by anybody, or at least not by anybody American. (Muslim-run slavery, though, is an old story in Africa as well as a horribly contemporary one.) And there were not a few elected black American representatives 40 years ago, even if mainly in Northern states. The objection I make is therefore twofold. First, the election of Obama is the effect not the cause of the changes. (One of my questioners appeared to think that our president-elect had been responsible for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.) Second, a Republican victory would have had absolutely no effect on the legal or political standing of black Americans, which is a matter of our law and our Constitution and cannot be undone by any ephemeral vote or plebiscite.

The recognition of these obvious points should also alert us to a related danger, which is the cousinhood of euphoria and hysteria. Those who think that they have just voted to legalize Utopia (and I hardly exaggerate when I say this; have you been reading the moist and trusting comments of our commentariat?) are preparing for a disillusionment that I very much doubt they will blame on themselves. The national Treasury is an echoing, empty vault; our Russian and Iranian enemies are acting even more wolfishly even as they sense a repudiation of Bush-Cheney; the lines of jobless and evicted are going to lengthen, and I don't think a diet of hope is going to cover it. Nor even a diet of audacity, though can you picture anything less audacious than the gray, safety-first figures who have so far been chosen by Obama to be on his team?

There is an element of the "wannabe" about all this—something that suggests that, if the clock were to be rolled back, every living white person would now automatically stand with John Brown at Harper's Ferry and with John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. All the evidence we have is to the contrary: Abraham Lincoln ringingly denounced John Brown, and John F. Kennedy (he of the last young and pretty family to occupy the Executive Mansion) was embarrassed and annoyed by the March on Washington. In other words, there is something pain-free and self-congratulatory about the Obama surge. This has happened before, of course, with the high-sounding talk about the "New Frontier," the "Great Society," and "Morning in America." It's just that this time it's more than usually not affordable. There are many causes of the subprime and derivative horror show that has destroyed our trust in the idea of credit, but one way of defining it would be to say that everybody was promised everything, and almost everybody fell for the populist bait.

More worrying still, there are vicious enemies and rogue states in increasing positions of influence throughout the world (one of the episodes that most condemned the Republican campaign was its attempt to slander Sen. Joe Biden for his candid attempt to point this out), yet many Obama voters appear to believe that the mere charm and aspect of their new president will act as an emollient influence on these unwelcome facts and these hostile forces. I can't make myself perform this act of faith, and I won't put up with any innuendo about my inability to do so.

When my family first moved to Larchmont, N.Y., in 1946, my father had a feeling that the neighbors living behind us were Jewish. In those days, you didn't broadcast your religion, so he devised a plan that would reveal their cultural background. We would go to the Bronx and bring back some bagels. If our neighbors knew what the rolls were, they were Jewish. If they stared at them in bewilderment, we would know they were not. To my father's delight, as soon as our neighbors saw the bagels, they recognized them. Nowadays, dad's devious plan to determine a neighbor's religion wouldn't work. After all, who doesn't know what a bagel is? But what are the origins of this once-mysterious bread, and what happened between 1946 and today that turned the bagel into a trans-cultural and all-American breakfast bun?

After years of research on Jewish food in America, I thought I had discovered all there was to know about the bagel and its journey. But then I read Maria Balinska's lively and well-researched book, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread. Her book has filled in many of the questions I had about the bagel and raised new ones, too.

The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old. No surprise, really, as there's a practical advantage to this design—it's possible to thread such a roll on a stick or a string, facilitating transport. Balinska identifies several possible candidates for the ur-bagel from around the world, including the taralli—hard, round crackers flavored with fennel that have been the local snack for centuries in Puglia, Italy. She also mentions the Roman buccellatum and the Chinese girde but neglects to note that even the ancient Egyptians had a bagellike treat. Just a few weeks ago, I came across Egyptian hieroglyphics at the Louvre in Paris, and among the depictions of daily life were rolls with a hole.

The evidence suggests that the first rolls with a hole, those of ancient Egypt and of the greater Mediterranean, came in two types: the soft, sesame-studded variety, called bagele in Israel today, eaten plain or dipped in za'atar (a spice combination of wild oregano, sesame seeds, and salt); and a pretzellike crispy Syrian ka'ak flavored much like taralli. Neither is boiled, a distinguishing characteristic of American bagels.

Polish-born and half-Jewish, Balinska, who works at the BBC in London, tells us that the boiled and baked bagel as we know it comes from her homeland. She tells the story of the Krakow bagel, which was a product of the 1683 Battle of Vienna. Although the story is completely speculative and perhaps even fictitious, it is a piece of gastronomic lore that has endured throughout the ages. As the story goes, 17^th-century Poland was the breadbasket of Europe, and King Jan Sobieski was the first king not to confirm the decree of 1496 limiting the production of white bread and obwarzanek (bagellike rolls whose name derives from a word meaning "to parboil") to the Krakow bakers guild. This meant that Jews could finally bake bread within the confines of the city walls. Furthermore, when Sobieski saved Austria from the Turkish invaders, a baker made a roll in the shape of the king's stirrup and called it a beugel (the Austrian word for stirrup). As Balinska says, "Whatever its origin, the story of the bagel being created in honor of Jan Sobieski and his victory in Vienna has endured."

But the bagel has endured through the centuries not only because of its heroic legend. It also had the advantage of lasting longer than freshly baked bread because the boiling gave the roll an outer sheen and a crunchy, protective crust. As Balinska points out, if it got slightly stale, it was dunked in hot liquid to soften it. Once bagels became popular in Krakow, the Jewish bakers began making them in their own bakeries due to the strictness of Jewish dietary laws.

It is unclear when the first bagels made their way to the United States, but 70 bakeries existed on the Lower East side by 1900. In 1907 the International Beigel Bakers' Union was created and from then on monopolized bagel production in New York City. What is also certain is that immigrants from Eastern Europe, with their cravings for the foods of the old country, sparked the New York bagel craze. Balinska explains that the Jews of the Lower East Side created a demand for the breads of their homeland—rye, challah, and bagels.

The '50s were a turning point. It was after World War II, and Americans were trying to get back to normalcy and reconcile the atrocities of the war. They were, for the first time, somewhat philo-Semitic. In addition, Jews were rapidly assimilating, moving to other parts of the city, expanding their culinary horizons, and sharing their own culinary traditions with the rest of New York.

In the early 1950s, Family Circle included a recipe for bageles (their spelling). The copy read: "Stumped for the Hors d'oeuvres Ideas? Here's a grand one from Fannie Engle. 'Split these tender little triumphs in halves and then quarters. Spread with sweet butter and place a small slice of smoked salmon on each. For variations, spread with cream cheese, anchovies or red caviar. (They're also delicious served as breakfast rolls.)' " Engle, who later wrote The Jewish Festival Cookbook, did not mention the Jewish Sunday morning ritual of lox, bagel, and cream cheese—an American concoction that was just taking off, spurred on most probably by Joseph Kraft's advertising blitz for Philadelphia Cream Cheese. It soon became an American alternative to the other Sunday trilogy of bacon, eggs, and toast. In 1951, the bagel made a big appearance in the Broadway comedy Bagel and Yox, introducing the word bagel into such mainstream magazines as Time. Balinska says that "one of the attractions of Bagel and Yox was the fact that freshly baked bagels and cream cheese were handed out to the audience during intermission."

At this historical moment, Murray Lender hit upon a method for mass distribution of bagels. His father, Harry, had come from Poland to New Haven, Conn., and had opened a wholesale bagel bakery in 1927, one of the few outside of New York. In this small, diverse town, ethnic communities intermingled, sampling one another's local specialties. After a while, Balinska explains, it became clear to the Lenders that the Jewish bagel was just as appetizing to the Irish and the Italians as it was to the Jews. The turning point came when Murray, having returned from the Korean War in 1956, bought a freezer. He and his father soon realized that they could deliver thawed bagels to retailers without marring their flavor. A subsequent innovation was the packaging of bagels in batches of six in polyethylene bags, making them even more durable. Soon, Lender's Bagels shared shelf space in supermarkets with household names like Pepperidge Farm and Wonder Bread. Over the next decade, supermarket sales did nothing but grow. And with the advent of the frozen-food aisle, frozen bagels became an affordable, convenient food that could be shipped to grocery stores in far-flung parts of the country that had never before seen one.

Bagelmania hit the ground running in this country with chains opening up all over the place, replacing, to a certain extent, the doughnut shops of the earlier part of the 20^th century. (Today, America's most popular doughnut shop, Dunkin' Donuts, also sells bagels.) It is my suspicion that bagels became so popular because, unlike Mexican burritos or Chinese egg rolls, they don't taste ethnic. They weren't marketed as Jewish and weren't sold in kosher sections of grocery stores. To the bread- and sandwich-loving American population, the bagel was simply another bun with a bite—different enough to satisfy a craving for innovation, but not different enough to appear exotic.

So, it makes sense that today's bagel bakeries are not necessarily Jewish-owned or run. A Puerto Rican family owns H&H Bagels in New York. John Marx, a Cincinnatian of German background, bakes 36 different bagel varieties, including Cincinnati Red bagels, tropical fruit, and taco bagels. And the best bagel bakery in New York, according to many, is one owned by a Thai couple on the Upper West Side.

Bagels are clearly no longer specifically a Jewish food. At some point in the middle of the 20^th century, their position from the Jewish bun to the American breakfast bread shifted. The exact moment is unclear, but one moment stands out in my mind. In 1998, when I was first filming my PBS television series, Jewish Cooking in America, Lender's, which by then had been bought and sold numerous times, was one of our sponsors. For this cooking show featuring kosher food, they sent us an underwriting spot depicting a perfectly toasted bagel with Swiss cheese and ham! Oy! I almost plotzed. To me, that moment was the ultimate assimilation of the bagel into American life.

Rather faster than I would have expected—sometime around close of play last Wednesday—I began to get a familiar creepy feeling. It was that old "Princess Diana is dead, and the media coverage is too much" sensation. I'm not suggesting that the events of Nov. 5 remotely resembled those of a decade ago last August, but I don't think I'm revealing much to astute readers if I suggest that something else was mixed in with the legitimate rejoicing at a race barrier broken: a touch, just a touch, of the starry-eyed celebrity worship that, for not entirely rational reasons, attached itself to Princess Diana but not to Prince Charles; to John Paul II and not to Benedict; to Barack Obama but not to Bill Clinton. OK, more than a touch. Whatever it was that made teenage girls faint at the sight of Ringo and Paul at the height of Beatlemania also made adult men and women scream when Obama walked onstage in Chicago.

The politician-as-rock-star is nothing new, of course. Some of that same celebrity charisma—not so much messianic as pop-iconic—also drew cheering, fainting crowds to Bobby Kennedy's primary campaign in 1968. According to historian Thurston Clarke, after one RFK speech "waves of students rushed the platform, knocking over chairs and raising more dust. They grabbed at him, stroking his hair and ripping his shirtsleeves." Some of the same mix was in the air at that time, too: youth, hope, change, racial progress. The 1968 primary campaign, RFK had even declared, was about "not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is [about] our right to the moral leadership of this planet." Sound familiar?

The difference now, of course, is the way in which the RFK effect is increased and multiplied and globalized by modern media and the 24-hour news cycle. We saw so many pictures of cheering foreigners last week that we became immune to them. Actually, the phenomenon is rather weird. That Kenyans should declare a national holiday when one of their nation's sons becomes the U.S. president is just about understandable. But what's up with the cheering Germans? Their nation hasn't elected a black leader (or a Turkish leader) and isn't likely to do so anytime soon. Even so, they felt obliged to join the global party.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? Surely it's shallow, and surely it will end in disappointment? One German blogger has already made his prediction: "Condescending euphoria" will be followed by "cynicism," which in turn will be followed by "Obama is hopelessly inexperienced and thoroughly represents the fleeting and superficial nature of American society." One British journalist gives the international left six months before it unites once again behind the banner of anti-Americanism.

And there could be worse: Mass hysteria, as the RFK analogy shows, can also inspire the world's crazed assassins. This subject is borderline taboo, but I don't think I was the only one momentarily gripped by terror when Obama walked onto that stage in Chicago: What if something awful was about to happen? In some of the weirder realms of the Internet, you can already find verses from Nostradamus allegedly predicting that Obama's election heralds the end of the world, and someone out there probably believes them.

And yet—perhaps I, too, am touched by the warm afterglow—I feel the need to be positive, in spite of myself. We know it's superficial, we know it leads to disappointment, and we know it can be dangerous, but can't a mass celebration sometimes be inspiring, as well? Surely it makes a difference that the emotions expressed on Nov. 5 were not sparked by a celebrity tragedy or a rock anthem but by a genuinely meaningful event: the election of the first black American president and the symbolic end of the worst chapter of American history.

If some Americans walked away from their election-night party vowing to improve the world around them, maybe it doesn't matter that their feelings about him were enhanced by his rock-star presence. If some foreigners are now inspired to work for greater ethnic and racial equality in their own societies, maybe it doesn't matter that they know more about Obama's good looks than they do about his health care policy. If it was only celebrity charisma making people weep, as celebrity charisma made people weep for Diana, we'd be in trouble. Besides, there isn't any other good news out there—which is reason enough, perhaps, to hope that the uplifting effects last at least until the end of next week.

Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 14 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, the election, how Barack Obama will fare as president, and the future of Sarah Palin.

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

President-elect Barack Obama has the highest approval rating going into office of any president over the past 25 years. Outgoing President George W Bush, meanwhile, has the lowest approval rating of any president since the beginning of such polls.

It appears that the cautious tone of Obama's Nov. 4 acceptance speech was an attempt to tamp down expectations.

A major question for Obama will be whether he should behave like former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and work fast to capitalize on his current popularity or whether he should move more cautiously. John says he favors a bold approach, similar to what Obama promised in the campaign. But he says Obama's bold rhetoric does not match the more mainstream policies he is championing. John says Obama will be able to make some early choices that will be popular, including reversing current policies on the State Children's Health Insurance Program and stem cells.

The group discusses how to talk to children about the Obama victory and its place in the racial history of the United States.

Since the election, Sarah Palin has been talking a great deal about the campaign and her role in it, perhaps in an attempt to rehabilitate her public image. Emily says the visibility campaign may be an effort to become the national spokeswoman of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

David says Slate has received many inquiries following last week's request for a Gabfest sponsor. He also chatters about a New York Times story that says more and more women are opting to give birth at home.

Emily talks about a Supreme Court argument on whether forensic scientists working for police labs can be required to testify in court about their findings in criminal cases.

John chatters about a 2004 interview in which Obama discussed his views on religion. John says the interview occurred at a time when Obama did not yet have all the filters in place that now prevent him from speaking candidly.

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 on Nov. 14 by Dale Willman at 10:30 a.m.

Nov. 7, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 7 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 Emily Bazelon talk politics. This week, what happened, what's next, and what will become of Sarah Palin?

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

This election is significant for many reasons, among them that the voter turnout was the largest in 44 years.

Exit polls turned out to be pretty accurate predictors of the final results.

Voter turnout in the District of Columbia was huge but caused few voting glitches.

John discusses Barack Obama's final campaign rally in Manassas, Va., which drew as many as 100,000 people. At the end of that speech, Obama told the story of how, months earlier, during a visit to South Carolina, one woman helped motivate him by shouting out, "Fired up, ready to go!" That moment, he says, shows how one person can make a difference. The phrase itself became a rallying cry for the Obama campaign.

John also talks about Rahm Emanuel's appointment as Obama's chief of staff. He says it shows Obama quickly moving from election mode into governing mode. The group also discusses the baggage Emanuel could bring to the Obama White House. He is known for being ruthless and is often described as having "sharp elbows."

One major question lingering after the election concerns the fate of Sarah Palin. Some Palin supporters say she is now being blamed for McCain's loss. Newsweek reported that McCain-campaign insiders are complaining that Palin spent thousands of dollars more than previously disclosed buying clothes for herself and her husband.

David chatters about Curtis Sittenfeld's novel American Wife, which is inspired by the life of first lady Laura Bush.

Emily talks about the passage of Proposition 8 in California, a constitutional amendment that bans same-sex marriage in the state. A number of lawsuits have already been filed in an effort to overturn the measure.

John chatters about the holograms CNN used during its election-night coverage.

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 on Nov. 7 by Dale Willman at 12:30 p.m.

Oct. 31, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 31 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, it's all about the last week of the presidential campaign—with a shout-out to the Philadelphia Phillies.

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

John writes this week about a sense of hopefulness that has come over many of the people working for the McCain campaign.

Emily attempts to correct John's pronunciation of the word dour.

Emily suggests that John McCain is getting some traction with his campaign's latest effort, which is to cast Barak Obama as a socialist who wants to redistribute wealth in the country.

John talks about the size of the crowds at campaign rallies for Obama compared with those for McCain.

The gang also discusses whether attacks on Obama's character will appeal to undecided voters. John points out that undecided voters typically vote for the challenger in a presidential race, which should mean Obama, since the Republicans currently hold the White House. One factor in McCain's favor is that during the primaries, the undecided voters favored Hillary Clinton over Obama.

John says 10,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong.

John says the optimism in the McCain camp is likely misguided, because there are too many data points favoring Obama—so many red states seem to be leaning toward the Democrat or are considered likely wins for Obama. He says Obama's early strategy of challenging McCain across the country, rather than focusing on primarily Democratic states, is now paying off.

David praises Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic Party, who designed the so-called 50-state strategy after the Democratic defeat in the 2004 presidential election.

Emily breaks the discussion of politics with her cocktail chatter, in which she brags about her hometown Philadelphia Phillies winning the World Series.

John chatters about the early vote in this election. As many as one-third of all voters will have voted by Election Day, so it is possible that the election will effectively be over by then, though no one will know for sure.

David talks about Slate's effort to have staffers publicly state who they will vote for next Tuesday. Of those who took part, the count was 55 for Obama and just one for McCain. David claims that almost all major news organizations would find similar results.

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 on Oct. 31 by Dale Willman at 10:41 a.m.

Oct. 24, 2008

Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 24 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, David Plotz, and special guest Michael Newman talk politics. This week, the latest from the presidential campaign trail, a vice-presidential candidate's wardrobe, and a supersecret topic.

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

David discusses how the wheels seem to be coming off the McCain campaign. The Republican candidate can't seem to keep one theme going for more than a few days, and his running mate, Sarah Palin, has publicly disagreed with McCain several times over the past few weeks.

This phenomenon is the subject of a story by Robert Draper in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Joe Biden apparently stuck his foot in his mouth this week.

Liza Mundy has an interesting piece in Slate about how difficult it was to write a biography of Michelle Obama because the Obama campaign controls information about the candidate and his family so tightly.

The Republican Party has spent $150,000 on clothes for Sarah Palin, according to published reports, sparking controversy. Cindy McCain reportedly wore an outfit worth approximately $300,000 at the Republican convention and faced very little criticism for it.

Emily chatters about a new law in Oklahoma that requires doctors to provide ultrasounds for any woman inquiring about an abortion.

Michael discusses the recently concluded Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco. The race has sparked controversy because of an unusual occurrence—one woman crossed the finish line first, while another had the fastest time.

David wonders why so many Republican men wear Van Dykes.

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 on Oct. 24 by Dale Willman at 11:20 p.m.

If, like me, you have always wanted to get a carved, elephant-ivory snuff box for that special someone, this holiday season may well be your last opportunity. The online auction site eBay announced on Oct. 20 that it would ban nearly all ivory sales on its auction sites effective Jan. 1. Last month, the company was embarrassed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which estimated that it was hosting an elephant-ivory trade in the United States worth $3.2 million per year.

This may seem like another example of corporate greenwashing—a way for the auction site to paper over its misdeeds and parade around as a concerned environmental steward. In fact, the new policy is directly at odds with mainstream conservationists. Just one week after eBay made its big announcement, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species—with support from WWF—was going forward with a one-time auction of government ivory stockpiles from elephants that either died of natural causes or had been culled in population-control programs in four southern African countries. These sales netted $15 million, earmarked for elephant conservation and local community-development programs. Although international laws governing the ivory trade are complex, the truth is that most of the ivory being sold on eBay was totally legal. More to the point, buying ivory online may actually be a good thing for conservation: The more snuff boxes we demand, the better chance that elephants and their ecosystems have to withstand the pressures of modernization.

Wild elephants are never going to be tolerated in Africa so long as locals cannot profit from the animals' most valuable asset: those 120-pound teeth. As journalist John Frederick Walker argues in his provocative new book, Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (to be published in January), the high regard with which American zoo-goers hold these proboscideans is not shared by poverty-stricken farmers in Kenya, who must contend with 4-ton living bulldozers rampaging their cassava fields and threatening their lives. Flip through African newspapers, and you'll find lurid headlines describing trampled schoolchildren, panicked villagers, and nightly curfews. Americans would not put up with life under those conditions, yet we have imposed this imperial vision on a far-off continent that we imagine as our private zoo.

The elephant problem is equally vexing inside the national parks of Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, whose burgeoning elephant populations must be managed to avoid their overwhelming the ecosystem. Elephants are the largest living land mammal, each consuming as much as 600 pounds of vegetation a day and drinking 50 gallons of water. In 1970, a hands-off policy to Kenya's elephants in Tsavo National Park provided a bitter lesson to those who opposed culling. After ravaging the park's fragile vegetation during a season of drought, elephants began dying by the thousands. Animals whose meat could have supported the region's desperate farmers and whose ivory could have provided $3 million for conservation were rotting in the blazing sun. In the years since, South African wildlife managers have refined culling procedures to minimize trauma to elephant family groups, and they catalog and store ivory under lock and key in anticipation of future auctions.

But pragmatic approaches to elephant conservation took a blow in 1989, when celebrities Brigitte Bardot and Jimmy Stewart joined animal rights campaigns to fight the "elephant holocaust" being conducted by poachers and, by implication, wildlife managers. According to Walker, the WWF and the African Wildlife Foundation "felt it prudent … to keep quiet about the value of sustainable use policies." Although no African or Western countries initially supported a ban on the ivory trade, by the end of the year they were on the losing end of the battle for public opinion. On Oct. 8, in Lausanne, Switzerland, CITES listed African elephants as Appendix I, effectively cutting off ivory sales, putting Asian importers and carving shops out of business, and turning "white gold" into a social no-no. "In the aftermath of the decision," Walker writes, "the ivory market collapsed as ivory prices plummeted."

The latest effort to humiliate eBay represents another example of an animal rights organization hijacking the African conservation agenda with an untenable vision that may do more harm than good. Advocates for a ban on ivory claim the CITES auction gives unscrupulous traders a chance to launder poached goods. But a wildlife trade monitoring program set up by WWF and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature has found that illegal-ivory seizures have declined in the five years following the last ivory auction approved by CITES in 1999. It appears that a flush of legal ivory from these auctions knocks out black-market dealers. While poaching remains a problem in Central and East Africa, the data suggest that those activities feed domestic African markets, not online auctioneers in the United States.

Most of the ivory that was being sold on eBay may not have been illegal at all. A good deal of ivory in the country simply predates the 1989 ban, and interstate sale of ivory is not tightly regulated or monitored. As for imports, residents can bring in licensed hunting trophies for personal use or antique ivory items more than 100 years old. The IFAW report on eBay simply identified certain auctions as "likely violations" or "possible violations" of the law, based on the wording used in listings. According to the study, just 15.5 percent of ivory goods on the site fell into the "likely violation" category. Turn those figures around, and it's clear that eBay also supported a vibrant, legal ivory market.

The only way to improve this market is through transparency, and eBay was ideally suited to play such a role. Because the site maintains a database of every auction, the final sale price, and the parties involved, it could provide a valuable tool for law-enforcement officers and conservation organizations. With those data, it would be possible to track the volume of the ivory trade and help identify questionable buyers and sellers based on their transaction patterns. Once the market moves offline—and to classifieds sites such as Craigslist—this sort of monitoring will be largely impossible.

If eBay wanted to take a stand for conservation, it should have partnered with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service—and notified its users that any purchase or sale of wildlife products will be recorded in a government database. Add to this the eventual possibility of spot checks using DNA testing, and we'd be well on our way to a sustainable, digital marketplace. Given such a framework, ivory would regain its respectability, and it might even be possible to open our borders to the importation of newly worked ivory from registered sellers abroad. After two decades under the ban, it's finally time to admit that saving elephants requires pulling a few teeth.

H.L. Mencken once remarked that there is a "well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong."

That quote comes to mind when considering the vocal group of neoconservatives, agribusiness lobbyists, and politicians that claims that the best way to cut American oil imports, and thereby impoverish the petrostates (and, in theory, reduce terrorism), is to require automakers to manufacture "flex-fuel" cars that can burn motor fuel containing 85 percent ethanol or methanol.

Their rationale is simple: Using more ethanol from corn or other biomass, as well as methanol from coal or other sources, will create competition in the motor-fuel market and depose oil as the main transportation fuel. Oil prices will fall, the petrostates will suffer, and a newly energy-independent United States will zoom back to its position as the world's undisputed superpower. Their rhetoric is so attractive that several members of Congress have introduced legislation that would require automakers to produce flex-fuel cars.

Unfortunately, this idea betrays a near-complete ignorance of the world petroleum business. The ethanol producers and the flex-fuel-car advocates are wrong because their solution replaces only part of the crude-oil barrel and won't reduce demand for that entire barrel in any meaningful way. Here's why.

When it is refined, a barrel of crude yields several different "cuts" that range from light products, such as butane, to heavy products, such as asphalt. Even the best-quality barrel of crude (42 gallons) yields only about 20 gallons of gasoline. Furthermore, certain types of crude oil (such as light sweet) are better suited to gasoline or diesel production than others. The overall point is that even the most technologically advanced oil refineries cannot produce just one product from a barrel of crude—they must produce several, and the market value of those various cuts is constantly changing.

The problem for the ethanol advocates is that there's very little growth in gasoline demand, while the demand for other cuts of the barrel is booming. In short, the corn ethanol producers are making the wrong type of fuel at the wrong time. They are producing fuel that displaces gasoline at a time when gasoline demand—both in the United States and globally—is essentially flat. Meanwhile, demand for the segment of the crude barrel known as middle distillates—primarily diesel fuel and jet fuel—is growing rapidly. And corn ethanol cannot replace diesel or jet fuel, the liquids that propel the vast majority of our commercial transportation machinery.

In June, the Energy Information Administration released its Annual Energy Outlook, which expects domestic demand for diesel fuel to grow about four times faster than that of gasoline through 2015. Looking further out, toward 2030, diesel demand is expected to increase about 14 times faster than that of gasoline. Indeed, by 2030, the EIA expects U.S. diesel consumption to rise by 51 percent over 2006 consumption levels while gasoline use will increase by just 3.6 percent.

In July, the Paris-based International Energy Agency released its medium-term oil market report, which said that "distillates (jet fuel, kerosene, diesel, and other gasoil) have become—and will remain—the main growth drivers of world oil demand." Between 2007 and 2013, the IEA expects distillate demand to increase nearly double while global gasoline demand will grow only slightly.

The surge in diesel demand is due in large part to the ongoing "dieselization" of the European automobile market, as well as continued economic growth in Asia and the United States. This increasing demand for diesel, combined with a global lack of refineries that can produce the type of low-sulfur diesel that is now mandated in the United States and Europe, means that diesel will continue selling for a premium relative to gasoline. And given a chronic shortage of high-quality refining capacity in Europe, that price differential will likely persist for a decade or more to come.

That increasing diesel demand (and the increasing value of diesel fuel) means that U.S. refineries are buying more foreign crude, not less. That's a bitter fact given that cutting dependence on foreign oil has been cited ad nauseam as the justification for the corn ethanol mandates as well as continued federal research funding for the mirage of cellulosic ethanol.

As an executive at a large domestic oil refiner (who asked that his name and company not be disclosed) explained it, "ethanol is making diesel more expensive relative to gasoline because it's expanding the pool of gasoline. But to make diesel, we have to process more crude, which in turn is raising the price of crude." He went on, saying that for some refiners, "gasoline is being thrown into the market as a diesel byproduct."

In other words, ethanol is doing absolutely nothing to reduce overall U.S. oil consumption or imports because refiners have to buy the same amount of crude (or more) in order to meet the demand for products other than gasoline—that is, jet fuel, diesel fuel, fuel oil, asphalt, etc.

The most recent oil import data back up this conclusion. Since 2000 domestic crude-oil production has declined by about 600,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, domestic corn ethanol production capacity has surged about fivefold. In July, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, U.S. ethanol output stood, coincidentally, at about 600,000 barrels per day. Given those numbers, America's overall oil imports should be flat or only slightly higher, right? After all, corn ethanol boosters claim that their fuel will reduce America's need for foreign oil. But the latest numbers from the Energy Information Administration show no decrease in imports. In fact, it's just the opposite. In July 2000, the United States was importing about 11.6 million barrels of crude oil and petroleum products per day. By July 2008, total imports had increased to about 13 million barrels per day. The same trend holds true when looking only at crude oil imports. In July 2000, crude oil imports were about 9.4 million barrels per day. By July 2008, they had increased to 10.1 million barrels per day.

The punch line here is obvious: The corn ethanol scam cannot, has not, and will not significantly reduce overall oil use or significantly cut oil imports because it only replaces one segment of the crude-oil barrel. Furthermore, all the talk about "cellulosic ethanol," a substance that, in theory, can be profitably produced in commercial quantities from grass, wood chips, or other biomass, is largely misplaced because, like corn ethanol, it will only supplant gasoline.

Unless or until inventors can come up with a substance (or substances) that can replace all of the products that are refined from a barrel of crude oil—from gasoline to naphtha and diesel to asphalt—then the United States, along with every other country on the planet, is going to continue using oil as a primary energy source for decades to come. And that will be true no matter how much corn gets burned up in America's delusional quest for "energy independence."

Dear Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, David Plouffe, John Kerry, Al Gore, et al.:

First, I want to congratulate you on last week's astounding victory. I also want to take a moment to thank each of you for the many, many thoughtful and informative communications you have sent me over the weeks and months of this historic campaign. Each e-mail was like a precious gift, except that unlike a gift, each e-mail came with a request for cash.



But you know, that was OK. You were, after all, working toward a momentous goal, and I was happy to be asked to help you get there (particularly since my employer wouldn't allow me to give you money, anyhow). We climbed this mountain together, you and I, and your bulletins from the trenches never failed to set my heart to pounding: They're calling Obama a terrorist. My $50 will get them to stop! Sarah Palin thinks there are real and faux Americans. One hundred dollars from me, and she will go away! "Will you watch our response ad and make a donation of $100 or more to help us keep it on the air?" Just $25 for a limited edition car magnet, $75 for a commemorative coin, $100 for a backstage pass to Grant Park!

And, Barack. When you wrote to me on election night to tell me you were "about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there" but were taking a moment to write to me first—well, I was so touched I almost didn't notice the little "donate now" button at the bottom of the page. Also, I have to admit that in the six days between the election and yesterday morning, I even came to miss my near-daily missives from each of you, updating me, flattering me, promising me great things and then shaking me down, just as a very kind, attentive, loving parent might do if, say, you owed him a lot of money.

But imagine my dismay yesterday when I opened my inbox to discover an e-mail entitled "Your Victory T-Shirt." Instead of a free victory T-shirt, I was being offered the chance to send yet another $100 to the DNC (in exchange for which I would, in all fairness, receive a free "victory T-shirt"). It's hard to explain why it's so galling to be asked to donate yet more money to a campaign after the election has been decided. It's sort of like being asked to keep planting the victory garden, years after Armistice Day. Even having achieved the presidency, Barack Obama is still counting on little old me for financial help? What's next? Dear Dahlia, Joe Biden and I have a bunch of great ideas for fixing government. And with your $100 donation, we can ensure that the S-Chip is fully funded and that the spotted owl remains on the endangered-species list. Please watch this video and consider a contribution.

America's unprecedented showing of financial and emotional support helped the Obama campaign win the Oval Office. It was a beautiful thing. And I really am going to miss seeing "Barack Obama" in my inbox three times a day. But it's high time for us voters to get back to panicking about our 401(k)s. So please stop e-mailing to ask for money. You're president-elect now, Barack. Consider yourself cut-off.

In September 2004, shortly before George W. Bush was elected to his second term, CBS correspondent Dan Rather aired a report regarding the president's Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard. It was already known that Bush's attendance record had been spotty. The Rather report added some interesting details based partially on documents whose authenticity, it turned out, couldn't be established. Citing "serious and disturbing questions that came up after the broadcast," the network hired former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and Louis D. Boccardi, former CEO of the Associated Press, to investigate the matter. Their report, released four months later, concluded that "basic journalistic steps were not carried out in a manner consistent with accurate and fair reporting, leading to countless misstatements and omissions." Rather had already apologized publicly for a "mistake in judgment" and been persuaded to announce his retirement as anchor of the evening news broadcast, a position he'd held since 1981.

At first it seemed Rather would go quietly, accepting encomiums from the CBS brass for his four-decade career at CBS and maintaining an ongoing role as correspondent for 60 Minutes. But in semiretirement, Rather complained he was being excluded from major stories, and in June 2006, CBS ended the arrangement altogether. Fifteen months later, Rather sued CBS for breach of contract.

That lawsuit has brought to light an interesting e-mail exchange between Thornburgh and the Bush White House. Thornburgh asked President Bush to answer eight fairly blunt questions about his National Guard service (see below). These were all questions the press had previously been stonewalled on. (Examples: "Was there a waiting list to become a pilot of the Texas Air National Guard at the time you entered?" "Why were you suspended from flight status?") The next day Dan Bartlett, then a senior adviser to Bush, e-mailed Thornburgh to say the White House wouldn't answer them. "I must say," Bartlett wrote his fellow Republican, who had served under his boss's father. "I was somewhat surprised by the questions" (Page 2). Thornburgh apparently dropped the matter. In August, CBS showed how little it cared about Bartlett's noncooperation by hiring the former Bush aide as a political analyst.

Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.

In September 2007, former state Sen. Ernie Chambers filed a lawsuit against God in Nebraska's 4^th Judicial District Court. Chambers, a political independent who served in the Legislature for 38 years before retiring in April, sought "a permanent injunction" to "cease harmful activities," claiming the defendant caused "fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines, [and] devastating droughts … resulting in the wide-spread death, destruction and terrorization of millions."

Last month, Douglas County Judge Marlon Polk dismissed Chambers' claim "with prejudice" (see below and the following three pages), citing improper service due to the defendant's lack of proper address. According to the case history (below), the Almighty made a "purported" special appearance and filed three answers to the claim while an "agent of God" filed a "purported" countersuit (Page 2). These actions and Chambers' responses were subsequently nullified because, the ruling concluded, "there can never be service effectuated on the named Defendant" (Page 4). Last week, Chambers filed a notice of appeal declaring his intention to take the matter to a higher authority.

Please send ideas for Hot Document to documents@slate.com.

Nov. 4 was a good day to be black. It was not a good day to be gay. Arkansas voters approved a ballot measure to prohibit gay couples from adopting kids. Florida and Arizona voters approved measures to ban gay marriage. But the heaviest blow came in California, where a gay-marriage ban, Proposition 8, overrode a state Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriage. A surge of black turnout, inspired by Barack Obama, didn't help liberals in the Proposition 8 fight. In fact, it was a big reason why they lost. The gay marriage problem is becoming a black problem.

The National Election Pool exit poll tells the story. Whites and Asian-Americans, comprising 69 percent of California's electorate, opposed Proposition 8 by a margin of 51 percent to 49 percent. Latinos favored it, 53-47. But blacks turned out in historically high numbers—10 percent of the electorate—and 70 percent of them voted for Proposition 8.*

This is no fluke. Black support for Florida's ballot measure against gay marriage ran 11 points higher than white support and 7 points higher than Latino support. The adoption measure in Arkansas turned out differently—black support was 4 points lower than white support—but nationwide and over time, there's a clear pattern. In Maryland and New Jersey, polls have shown whites supporting gay marriage but blacks opposing it. A report from the pro-gay National Black Justice Coalition attributes President Bush's 2004 reelection in part to the near-doubling of his percentage of the black vote in Ohio, which he achieved "by appealing to Black churchgoers on the issue of marriage equality." This year, blacks in California were targeted the same way.

The NBJC report paints a stark picture of the resistance. It cites surveys showing that "65% of African-Americans are opposed to marriage equality compared to 53% of Whites" and that blacks are "less than half as likely to support marriage equality and legal recognition of same-sex civil unions as Whites." It concludes: "African-Americans are virtually the only constituency in the country that has not become more supportive over the last dozen years, falling from a high of 65% support for gay rights in 1996 to only 40% in 2004." Nor is the problem dying out: "Among African-American youth, 55% believed that homosexuality is always wrong, compared to 36% of Latino youth and 35% of White youth."

Why the gap? Most analysts blame religion. But that doesn't explain why black Protestants, for example, are far more hostile to gay rights than white Protestants are. Nor does it explain why blacks, who have felt the sting of discrimination, see no parallel in laws that deny equal rights to homosexuals. We've just elected as our next president the child of a black-white sexual relationship. So much for the old laws against interracial marriage. Why, then, are the people targeted by those laws supporting bans on same-sex marriage?

The answer is: They think sexual orientation is different from race. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of a nation in which individuals would be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Whites, on balance, have come to believe that sexual orientation, like color, is immutable. Blacks, on balance, haven't. They see homosexuality as a matter of character. "I was born black. I can't change that," one California man explained after voting for Proposition 8. "They weren't born gay; they chose it."

The NBJC report notes that blacks are "more likely than other groups to believe that homosexuality is wrong, that sexual orientation is a choice, and that sexual orientation can be changed." Polls confirm this. In a 2003 Pew survey, 32 percent of whites said homosexuality was inborn, 15 percent said it was caused by upbringing, and 40 percent said it was a lifestyle preference. Latinos answered roughly the same way. But only 15 percent of blacks agreed that homosexuality was inborn; 58 percent said it was a lifestyle preference. A plurality of whites (45 to 39 percent) said a person's homosexuality couldn't change, but a two-to-one majority of blacks (58 to 30 percent) said it could.

The pattern persists in Pew's 2006 survey. A plurality of whites said homosexuality was inborn, and a majority said it couldn't be changed. A majority of blacks said that homosexuality was just how some people preferred to live and that it could be changed.

The mutability question is hardly academic. It has been driving public opinion toward gay rights for decades. In 1977, 56 percent of Americans polled by Gallup said homosexuality was a product of upbringing and environment; only 13 percent said it was inborn. Today, a plurality says it's inborn. That 20-point shift has coincided with a 20-point shift toward the stated acceptability of homosexuality and a 30-point shift toward support for equality in job opportunities. In Pew and Gallup surveys, respondents' positions on mutability overwhelmingly predict their positions on gay marriage and homosexuality's acceptability. Pew puts the equation bluntly: "Belief that homosexuality is immutable [is] associated with positive opinions about gays and lesbians even more strongly than education, personal acquaintance with a homosexual, or general ideological beliefs."

I've covered politics for a long time. I've seen shrewd polling and message-framing turn issues and elections upside-down. Eventually, I came to believe that the most potent force in politics wasn't spin but science, which transforms reality and our understanding of it. But I've never seen a convergence like this. Here we have a left-leaning constituency (blacks) that has become politically pivotal on an issue (homosexuality) and is susceptible to a reframing of that issue (seeing sexual orientation, like color, as inborn) in accord with ongoing scientific research.

From prenatal hormones to genetics to birth order, scientists have been sifting data to nail down homosexuality's biological origins. As they advance, it will become easier and easier to persuade African-Americans that being gay is a lot like being black. The lesson of Proposition 8 isn't that blacks have stopped the march of gay rights. The lesson is that when they turn, the fight in blue America will essentially be over.

Correction, Nov. 13, 2008: I originally wrote that blacks "made the difference" on Prop 8. I calculated this based on a margin of passage of 4 percent. This was erroneous, because the final margin was 4.6 percent. To prevent Prop 8's passage, blacks would have had to vote against it by a margin of something like 53 percent to 47 percent. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Good news: Another guy got his mother-in-law pregnant.

No, not that way. It's a surrogate pregnancy. The guy supplied the sperm, his wife supplied the egg, and her mother supplied the womb.

I'd better explain. The wife is on her second marriage. In her first marriage, she had two kids. Then she had a hysterectomy and a divorce. Then she married this guy. He wanted a kid. He had the sperm, she had the eggs. All they needed was a uterus.

Enter the mother-in-law.

No, not that kind of enter. It's IVF and surrogacy, except this time the surrogate is Grandma. Nobody in the triangle has to touch anybody else. Fertility doctors mix the eggs and sperm, then transfer the fertilized results to the uterus.

In this case, the results were triplets. Grandma's 56. Imagine giving birth to triplets at 56.

No, this isn't the first time a woman has carried her own grandkids. It isn't even the fourth. It isn't even the first case of triplets. Four years ago, a 55-year-old woman in Virginia did the same thing for her daughter, whose womb was diseased. Two years ago, a Japanese woman in her 50s bore a child this way. This year, another Japanese woman did it at age 61—the fourth such case at a single clinic in Japan. The latest birth-by-Grandma took place in Ohio. Reportedly, there are other cases; nobody seems to know how many.

Now, I like to think of myself as an open-minded guy. And I love my mother-in-law, really. How many guys can honestly say they love both their home-renovation contractor and their mother-in-law? I am truly blessed. Still, the thought of my mother-in-law carrying my child … well, let's just say it hadn't occurred to me.

But now, here it is. Motherhood is splintering. You can have a genetic mother, a gestational mother, an adoptive mother, and God knows what else. When one of your moms is Grandma, it's even more confusing.

Take the Japanese case from a couple of years ago. Japanese law treated the child's gestational mother—the genetic grandmother—as its legal mother. Therefore, the genetic mother had to adopt the child from her own mother. In the Virginia case, the genetic dad ended up telling reporters, "Mommy's doing fine. Not this mommy. Grandma mommy." Imagine looking at your mom and realizing that in a way, she's your sister. Imagine getting into an argument with your mother-in-law over the way you're raising your kids—religion, discipline, whatever—and realizing that in a way, she's their mother.

Icky, huh? But the splintering and the incest are different kinds of ick. In fact, the latter mitigates the former. If you banned women from bearing their own grandchildren, it's not as though you'd stop surrogacy. People will find a way to have kids, and it'll be done through a market—if necessary, a black market. When relations between the genetic parents and the surrogate break down, it'll be a mess.

When the surrogate is Grandma, the mess is less. Mother and daughter share a genetic bond to each other and to the child. They're much more likely to work things out and give the child a stable family environment.

Now, if you really want to get icky, try it the other way around: Grandpa impregnates his daughter-in-law. You can pretty well deduce what he's supplying. No daughter-in-law would do this, right? Sorry. A British couple arranged it last year after discovering that the husband was shooting blanks. According to the Guardian, doctors "offered to provide sperm from an anonymous donor, but the couple wanted to use a member of their own family."

Makes sense, doesn't it? Just like using Grandma. Except this time, Grandpa isn't just one of the biological dads. He's the only biological dad. In every biological sense, the kid's nominal dad is his brother, not his father.

I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to spending the holidays with my mother-in-law and the mother of my children. Not necessarily at the same time.

Michigan's voters delivered a small but telling electoral shock on Nov. 4. Chief Justice Cliff Taylor, a heavy favorite, got thumped by 100,000 votes by Circuit Judge Diane Hathaway, who was nominated just 59 days before the election. Taylor raised almost five times as much money as Hathaway and enjoyed at least $1.3 million more in supportive television ads from groups like the GOP and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Yet he was the first high-court justice to be voted out in Michigan in 24 years. The business sector acknowledges Taylor's loss as a stinging defeat. But some of its members still see electing judges, in general, as good for their bottom line. And now they're pushing for more of it.

It's no secret that many chambers of commerce and trade associations and their foes, plaintiffs' attorneys and unions, have become the Itchy and Scratchy of judicial campaigns, willing to do whatever it takes to prevail. Since 2000, these rivals have spent millions to elect judges that they hope will rule their way, smashing funding records in at least 15 states. (As an Ohio AFL-CIO official put it: "We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.") In the last few election cycles, businesses have outspent the other side and won more often than not. But the specter of judges chasing after money unnerves the public: three in four Americans believe campaign cash affects courtroom decisions, according to a bipartisan poll that my organization, Justice at Stake, commissioned. The latest John Grisham thriller casts a toxic tycoon buying a court race just to win a case.

Recently, some political operatives within the business world have been talking up a bold next step. They're taking aim at states that use merit selection to pick judges and are pressing lawmakers to scrap that system in favor of contested elections, which they believe are easier to sway, losses like Taylor's notwithstanding. Such a campaign could have big repercussions, since three dozen states use nominating commissions to pick some of their judges. These nominating commissions, typically assembled by the governor, lawmakers, and bar leaders, identify a slate of qualified candidates. After a candidate is nominated and goes on the bench, he or she must periodically face the voters in a retention election—an up-or-down approval vote with no opponent.

Merit selection dates from the progressive era, when it was embraced as an antidote to corrupt politicking by judges. Since then, business leaders have generally favored merit selection, preferring the stability and quality it can offer. Traditionally, they've been wary of being drawn into high-spending races that could undermine public confidence in the courts.

But for more militant business groups and some of their ideological allies, a decade of victories in contested court races has made merit selection and retention seem harder to sway than straight-up elections. Recently, Dan Pero, head of the American Justice Partnership, a creation of the National Association of Manufacturers, began denouncing merit selection, deriding nominating commissions as undemocratic "star chambers" bent to the will of trial attorneys. The Wall Street Journal editorial board joined in, writing this spring that "picking judges behind closed doors only takes things further from our democratic ideals."

Similarly scripted efforts have been launched to weaken or scrap merit-selection systems in Missouri, Tennessee, and Kansas. There's a pattern: First, a local Federalist Society chapter publishes a paper questioning merit selection (the national Federalist Society takes no position on the matter and has published papers for and against judicial elections). Then a poll of state voters appears from the Polling Company, run by GOP pundit Kellyanne Conway. The questions are carefully crafted to elicit hostility to merit selection (in Tennessee, questioners helpfully pointed out that the commission could include "criminal defense lawyers"). CRC Communications, which ran the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans campaign, handles PR for the anti-merit effort.

So far, heartlanders aren't biting. On Election Day, voters in Johnson County, Kan., rejected a measure to do away with their local merit system. Voters in two Alabama counties chose to create selection panels to help fill court vacancies. In Greene County, Mo., locals voted to switch from contested elections to merit selection, ignoring pleas from local favorite and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Earlier this year, after the Missouri Legislature rejected an attempt to tamper with the state's merit-selection system for choosing appellate judges, supporters couldn't even find enough signers to put a petition on the ballot. The exception here could be Tennessee, where legislators failed to renew their merit commission this year. But there is active talk of reviving that effort before the commission phases out next spring.

Most Main Street businesses also seem uncertain about the would-be crusade against merit selection. In Greene County, the local chamber of commerce supported the switch to merit. Indeed, a 2007 Zogby poll showed that 71 percent of business executives supported merit selection. This presumably stems from a distaste for politicized courts and a preference for high-quality judges. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's own survey of in-house corporate litigators shows that of the 20 states the chamber ranked as best for business, only two elect their high courts. In Missouri, a study from the conservative Show-Me Institute called merit selection "superior" for promoting free-market goals. "I must say that I find it really odd that business groups have gone off on this kick," the Manhattan Institute's Walter Olson wrote this summer.

It's also worth noting that Justice Taylor's defeat isn't the only warning that the business lobby that wants more judicial elections may be investing too much confidence in them as the means to corporate ends. In Texas, for example, it's true that a decade of concerted campaigning delivered a state supreme court composed entirely of Republicans. But for how long? Two years ago, voters ousted 19 GOP judges in Dallas County. Houston-area Democrats tossed out another 22 this November. Political winds have a way of shifting in court races as well as in legislative elections.

Indeed, this year's returns offered signs that linking a judicial candidate to business can be a liability. Michigan Democrats defeated Taylor with the help of ads that accused him of being a "good soldier" who stacked the deck for business interests. In Mississippi, Chief Justice James Smith was voted off the bench amid criticisms that he tilted too much toward corporate litigants. West Virginia Chief Justice Elliott Maynard lost a spring primary after his close ties to a mining executive were mocked in an ad parodying Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

More judicial elections would also mean more spending on both sides of the arms race, by the corporations and the plaintiffs' lawyers. Maybe corporate America's silent majority, which prefers merit selection, has figured out that all that money for consultants and pollsters could be better spent. This year's election returns have given the business sector a fresh reason to consider what will really benefit it.

Earlier this week, human rights activists, civil libertarians—and, let's face it, just about every sentient American—got some good news from unnamed sources inside the emerging administration-elect: President Obama is apparently already working on a plan to close Guantanamo Bay.

This is hardly as a surprise. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who don't often find themselves lining up alongside the ACLU, went on record months ago about the need to shutter the prison camp. These days, the conventional wisdom on both left and right is that Guantanamo is not just doing serious damage to America's international reputation; its continued existence has doubtless become a valuable propaganda tool to Islamic fundamentalists. Put in starker terms, a detention facility that was intended to help protect America from another terrorist attack may well have increased the possibility of one.

So Gitmo must go. The question is: What will the Obama administration do with the approximately 250 detainees still imprisoned there?

The first thing to note is what will not happen to these detainees. They will almost certainly not be tried in military commissions. These, recall, were the special war-crimes courts that President Bush unilaterally summoned into being via military order in November 2001. In the seven years that have passed since then, a grand total of two detainees have been successfully prosecuted in military commissions: Osama Bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan, and al-Qaida propagandist Ali Hamzi al-Bahlul.

And I am using the term successfully in its loosest sense. When Hamdan was brought to trial this past summer, the government was aiming to put him behind bars for 30 years to life. After being acquitted on the most serious charge brought against him—conspiracy to support terrorism—Hamdan was given just five and a half years. Factoring in time served, that meant a sentence of less than five months. His time will have been served at the end of the year. (It remains to be seen whether Hamdan will actually be released, though, as the administration has claimed the authority to hold him as an enemy combatant until the end of the hostilities in the war on terror.)

Believe it or not, at least from the perspective of the Bush administration's legacy, that's the good news. The bad news is that these military commissions have been almost universally denounced as kangaroo courts. To underscore the point, the conservative Supreme Court has declared them unlawful not once but twice, first in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (when the justices ruled that the commissions lacked proper congressional authorization and violated due-process guarantees provided by the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice) and more recently in Boumediene v. Bush (when the justices concluded that the Military Commissions Act of 2006—Congress' legislative effort to sanction the commissions—amounted to an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus). Given the court's long-standing reluctance to check the president during times of armed conflict, between Hamdan and Boumediene—and two other dramatic war-on-terror rulings against the president—the Bush administration has made constitutional history.

All of this is to say that the military commissions are too tainted to represent a realistic venue in which to try suspected terrorists, particularly for an incoming administration that will be understandably eager to distance itself from the failed policies of its predecessor. In retrospect, it's easy enough to see where the Bush administration went wrong with the military commissions—and, for that matter, with its entire prosecution of the war on terror: In its zeal to protect our national security, it overlooked the fact that upholding such basic rule-of-law values as a defendant's right to a fair trial are important interests in their own right and also have a valuable role to play in combating terrorism.

Of course, identifying the problem is a lot easier than fixing it. The daunting challenge Obama now faces is to figure out how to preserve and promote rule-of-law values and restore civil liberties while at the same time protecting our intelligence—not to mention the sources and methods used to gather it—and ensuring that no one who poses a serious threat to the United States is set free.

Meeting that challenge will begin with carefully sifting through the classified files of the remaining prisoners to determine who warrants continued detention. The Bush administration has already identified 50 or so men whom it would like to transfer out of Guantanamo. The problem, in some cases, has been finding a country that will take them and not persecute them. In other cases, the obstacle has been reaching an agreement with their home countries—that includes you, Yemen—to either continue to imprison them or at least keep close tabs on their activities.

But even if these men are eventually released, there will be others that the new administration will want to keep behind bars. For them, one possibility would be for Obama to ask Congress to pass some sort of legislation expanding his authority to detain suspected terrorists for preventive reasons. Another option is prosecution.

It seems safe to say that Obama's preferred venue for trial will be the federal courts. This is the approach many on the left have been agitating for since 9/11. Last May, Human Rights First issued a 183-page report, "In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts," aimed at supporting this argument. As Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia who worked on detainee issues in the Defense Department, notes, the federal courts are now much better-equipped to deal with terrorism cases than they were at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. In addition to all the resources we have devoted to our federal anti-terrorism infrastructure in those intervening years, our criminal statutes have been revised to accommodate greater liability for conspiring with terrorist groups, and federal judges are now more experienced at dealing with sensitive information.

But there has also been at least one report that Obama is considering an alternative to both President Bush's much-maligned military commissions and the federal judicial system—a newly created system of national security courts. These courts would likely be composed of federal judges with lifetime tenure and would function along the lines of existing specialized courts that deal with complicated issues like bankruptcy.

In a sense, the advantages of prosecuting suspected terrorists in a national security court would be the same as its disadvantages: It would presumably afford more flexibility than a regular federal court for, say, things like the standard of proof for admitting evidence collected on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The idea was first floated in July 2007 in a New York Times op-ed co-authored by Neal Katyal, who represented Hamdan at the Supreme Court, and Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration. It has since been widely derided by human rights and civil liberties lawyers (among others) who warn that the creation of such a court would represent a rejection of fundamental principles of American constitutional law—and would, in turn, raise the same legitimacy questions as the military commissions themselves.

On Monday, the Associated Press ran a story, attributed to three unnamed Obama advisers, claiming that he was planning to go forward with a proposal for national security courts. Hours later, though, Denis McDonough, a senior Obama adviser, told CNN that no such decisions had been made. McDonough's correction—or, at the very least, qualification—makes sense. Until President Obama's national security team is in place and has studied the files of the remaining detainees, it's hard to imagine that there will be much progress on the specifics of how to deal with these men.

That day will arrive, though, and when it does, the question will come down to whether the new president feels that he can rely on the criminal-justice system to convict individuals he doesn't want to release. The Human Rights First report justly cites dozens of successful criminal terrorism prosecutions, but it's worth remembering that those were all cases that the Justice Department chose to prosecute in the federal courts.

Obama's flexibility to handle the remaining detainees as he sees fit will be constrained by the manner in which they have been treated while in U.S. custody. Remember that Hamdan was chosen as the first defendant for the military commissions in large part because the prosecution thought it has a "clean" case against him—and yet on the very first day of his trial, his military judge threw out a number of his statements to interrogators, ruling that they had been coerced from him and were therefore unreliable. And that happened in a trial system effectively designed by the Pentagon to ensure convictions.

Look at it this way: Of the 200 or so detainees left on Guantanamo who have not been cleared for release (pending the necessary arrangements), the Bush administration intended to try only some 70 or 80 before military commissions. That leaves more than 100 whom it considered too dangerous to release but was not planning to put on trial. "What lies in those files that's an obstacle to prosecution?" Waxman asks.

When Obama finds out, he may learn that his options for keeping them locked up are limited.

Of all the cruel ways the Internet offers to waste time, lifehacking may be the cruellest. A fellow goes looking for a little inspiration, and the next thing he knows, he's reading the "Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas To Simplify Your Life." A few hours later, I still have no idea what my top four-to-five goals are, and the day's already half done. Yet, like a bug to the bug zapper, I return to lifehacking sites in search of a magic aphorism for all of my deficiencies. While awaiting this moment, I have learned an elegant way to wrap my iPod headphones and acquired a near-creepy fondness for the Muji Chronotebook.

This column marks the debut effort to share the fruits of my wanderings in the self-helpy margins of the Internet. Think of it as a field guide to lifehacking. The advice here is not my own, but I have clicked on it. For Exhibit A, let's look at a subject dear to both modern lifehackers and their ancient ancestors: the morning routine. Writers, no surprise, have a lot to say about this. Edith Wharton set a fine example at her home, the Mount. Her maid would bring her breakfast in bed, and she would spend the morning writing. (In general, servants are a big help with this lifehacking stuff.) Web comic-strip author Randall Munroe updates this Whartonian ideal in a brilliant xkcd panel that points out how a laptop can give you a status report on friends scattered around the world before you leave the comfort of your bed.

Wharton and Munroe suggest the shape of the morning routine dilemma: When do you let the electronic beast loose? Perhaps some of you have friends, as I do, who wake themselves up with the alarm on their BlackBerry. That strikes me as an improvement over a simple alarm clock in terms of actually arising—nothing like a jolt of work anxiety to open the eyelids—but perhaps the CrackBerry doesn't set the appropriate "true at first light" tone that morning can have. For that, witness the routine of Leo Babauta of Zen Habits: "1. Wake at 4:30 a.m. 2. Drink water. 3. Set 3 Most Important Things (MITs) for today. 4. Fix lunches for kids and myself. 5. Eat breakfast, read. 6. Exercise (run, bike, swim, strength, or yardwork) or meditate. 7. Shower. 8. Wake wife & kids at 6:30 a.m." No. 2 shouldn't be a problem for most of us.

Leo's routine, though infinitely worthy, best suits a self-employed writer living on Guam (which he is). Most of us have two mornings: getting out of the house and settling down at work. The house-escape hacks are the most extreme. Joel Falconer, on Stepcase Lifehack, suggests this insane shower: "Grab a two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, chuck it in your hair, and use a scrubber with body wash to clean yourself up while you brush your teeth with the other hand (you can store a toothbrush and paste on the ledge of the shower wall if it's wide enough—and if you can reach up there!). From the time you've got the temperature right, you can be out in 90 seconds without sacrificing any cleanliness." I would need at least another 30 seconds to congratulate myself on my two-handed grooming dexterity. Falconer is out the door in six minutes.

The secret to the superfast morning exit seems to rely on some evening prep (putting all bags in place, choosing clothes, etc.) and not having kids. Once the lifehacker novice arrives at work, the morning becomes a question of e-mail vs. priorities. Julie Morgenstern, who titled her book of work strategies Never Check E-mail in the Morning, counsels that you not log in for an hour after getting to your desk. Instead, finish one thing that's hanging over your head (that's not an e-mail). The idea is to work on what's important instead of reacting to what's being asked of you.

Most of us, however, need to do a little Web surfing before settling into the day. For that important purpose, I recommend the Firefox add-on Morning Coffee. The program places a coffee mug icon in your browser; when clicked, it opens all of your "daily read" sites in tabs, i.e., the New York Times, A Continuous Lean, Give Me Something To Read, Arts & Letters Daily, and FAIL Blog. I find that it gets the brain up and running, and, should I spend the morning going down the blog/news rabbit hole, well, that's not such a bad thing. As of this column, it's kind of my job.

******

Got a great and/or awful morning routine? Send me an e-mail at slate.browser@gmail.com. I will compile the responses for an upcoming column.

Why not just let General Motors, and perhaps Ford and Chrysler, just go bankrupt? Even as auto industry executives and their political allies clamor for a bailout, the anti-bailout chorus is growing louder. The shrewd John Gapper makes the case in his Financial Times column, and hedge fund sharpie Bill Ackman seconds the motion. In the National Review, Jim Manzi makes the ideological case.

Of course, they're all correct. Allowing the listing Big Three to keel over would be a triumph of free markets. It would punish failure and invite new managers and investors to enter the field. I'm a big fan of creative destruction and its wondrous benefits. (I wrote a book about it.) But I also think the no-bailout folks are being too cavalier.

Yes, GM's management has been dreadful. As Israeli diplomat Abba Eban said about the Arabs, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And it's difficult to make a case that Cerberus, the private equity firm that thought it was getting a steal when it bought Chrysler, should get any taxpayer assistance. But I'm having a difficult time jumping on the anti-bailout bandwagon. Perhaps it's because I grew up in mid-Michigan and played Little League baseball in the shadow of the Fisher Body plant. Or perhaps because, for a brief period long ago, I covered bankruptcy courts. In any case, what follows is less an argument for a bailout than an argument against those agitating for a rapid Chapter 11 filing.

If the Big Three don't get government checks, it's very likely that they'll run out of cash and be forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. GM, which is bleeding fastest, would be first to fall. Chapter 11 bankruptcy is an efficient process for conducting corporate triage. A retailer fails, and the creditors assume control. Some stores remain open while other are liquidated. Trade and financial creditors accept partial payment of the debts they're owed. Leases and other pre-bankruptcy legal obligations are torn asunder. Mall owners around the country move swiftly to fill the vacant space. Several months later, the winners and losers having settled and moved on, a chastened, less-burdened company emerges from bankruptcy.

But General Motors wouldn't be a typical bankruptcy. GM's management argues that the very act of filing for bankruptcy eliminates the possibility of recovery since people would be reluctant to purchase expensive, long-lived assets (cars and trucks) from a bankrupt entity. And because of GM's size and the place it occupies in the supply chain, the company's failure would likely trigger the bankruptcy of hundreds of suppliers and other companies that rely upon it.

More significantly, Chapter 11 proceedings for GM would be far more complicated than that of a retailer or of Lehman Bros. Recent experience shows that for auto companies, Chapter 11 is like the Hotel California. You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. Auto parts supplier Delphi filed for Chapter 11 in October 2005 and still languishes there. Getting out of Chapter 11 can be tough when a) the bankrupt companies are capital-intensive manufacturers, and b) creditors are reluctant to give up on their claims. Among those with the biggest claims on the automakers in general, and GM in particular, are the United Auto Workers. It's common, especially in the fever swamps of the right, to blame the UAW for the Big Three's high cost structure and legacy costs. (Never mind that management for generations willingly entered into labor pacts, consciously trading salary increases for longer-term liabilities like guaranteeing health insurance for retirees. Such pacts allowed the Big Three to report higher profits in the short term and pushed the hard choices to the future.) Last year, the UAW and the auto companies set up a health care fund that, as the New York Times writes, would "shift a $100 billion burden off the companies' backs." Would the UAW simply give up on the health care benefits and tell hundreds of thousands of forty- and fiftysomething members to just go out and buy their own health insurance?

Another difference between this and other large bankruptcy cases is the potential collateral damage. New York will survive the failure of Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns, although it will feel the pain of lower tax revenues and retail sales. When a national retailer goes down, it hurts landlords all over the place but rarely causes an entire mall to become vacant. But already depressed Michigan, and several adjacent states, will have a much more difficult time dealing with the collapse of an automaker. This doomsday economic scenario, released by the Center for Automotive Research, says that up to 3 million jobs nationwide could be lost if the Big Three stop all production next year. That might not be in the offing. But the impact on Michigan's cities, towns, state government, housing values, and public institutions (including resources that the state has built that are national resources, such as its public university system) would suffer grievous harm.

There's a general consensus that in order to survive, the Big Three need to shrink their capacity by 40 percent, recruit new managers and corporate boards, restructure labor relations in such a way that they can have lower-cost and more flexible work forces, and shuck many of the liabilities they willingly entered into, all while raising vast new sums of capital to invest in research, development, and factory modernization.

But is a Chapter 11 filing the best way to reach these goals? Answering yes presumes that the case would be resolved quickly, that the entities would be able to obtain ample debtor-in-possession financing, that parties with legitimate legal claims on the company's assets and cash flows would give them up willingly. But many of the questions surrounding the Big Three's future can't be resolved in law firm conference rooms or in the chambers of bankruptcy court, and won't center around legal questions. The failure of the American automotive industry—and let's be honest, it has basically failed—is a matter of public policy. If the Big Three can be saved, they can be saved only by government.

For several years, I've been writing about Bushenfreude, the phenomenon of angry yuppies who've hugely benefited from President Bush's tax cuts funding angry, populist Democratic campaigns. I've theorized that people who work in financial services and related fields have become so outraged and alienated by the incompetence, crass social conservatism, and repeated insults to the nation's intelligence of the Bush-era Republican Party that they're voting with their hearts and heads instead of their wallets.

Last week's election was perhaps Bushenfreude's grandest day. As the campaign entered its final weeks, Barack Obama, who pledged to unite the country, singled out one group of people for ridicule: those making more than $250,000. At his rallies, he would ask for a show of hands of those making less than one-quarter of $1 million per year. Then he'd look around, laugh, and note that those in the virtuous majority would get their taxes cut, while the rich among them would be hit with a tax increase. And yet the exit polls show, the rich—and yes, if you make $250,000 or more you're rich—went for Obama by bigger margins than did the merely well-off. If the exit polls are to be believed, those making $200,000 or more (6 percent of the electorate) voted for Obama 52-46, while McCain won the merely well-off ($100,000 to $150,000 by a 51-48 margin and $150,000 to $200,000 by a 50-48 margin).

Right-wingers tend to dismiss such numbers as the voting behavior of trust funders or gazillionaires—people who have so much money that they just don't care about taxes. That may explain a portion of Bushenfreude. But there just aren't that many trust funders out there. Rather, it's clear that the nation's mass affluent—Steve the lawyer, Colby the financial services executive, Ari the highly paid media big shot—are trending Democratic, especially on the coasts. Indeed, Bushenfreude is not necessarily a nationwide phenomenon. As Andrew Gelman notes in the book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, the rich in poor states are likely to stick with the Republicans.

But in the ground zero of Bushenfreude, Fairfield County, Conn., it was practically an epidemic last week. Bushenfreude's most prominent victim was Rep. Chris Shays, the last Republican congressman east of the Hudson River. For the past several cycles, Shays, who played a moderate in his home district but was mainly an enabler of the Bush-DeLay Republicans in Washington, fended off well-financed challengers with relative ease. Last week, he fell victim to Jim Himes. Himes, as this New York Times profile shows, is the ultimate self-made pissed-off yuppie: a member of Harvard's crew team, a Rhodes Scholar, a former Goldman Sachs banker, and a resident of Greenwich.

Shays claims he was done in by a Democratic tsunami in Fairfield County and the state. And Connecticut's county results show Obama ran up a huge 59-41 margin in the county, which includes Bridgeport and Norwalk, densely populated cities with large poor, minority, and working-class populations. But an examination of the presidential votes in several of Fairfield County's wealthier districts (here are Connecticut's votes by town) shows the yuppies came out in the thousands to vote for a candidate who pledged to raise their taxes. In the fall of 2003, I first detected Bushenfreude in Westport (No. 5 on Money's list of 25 wealthiest American towns). The telltale symptom: Howard Dean signs stacked in the back of a brand-new BMW. The signs of an outbreak were legion this year. On our route to school, my kids would count the number of yard signs for Obama and McCain (the results: 6-to-1). On the Saturday morning before the election, I stopped by the Westport Republican headquarters to pick up some McCain-Palin buttons, only to find it locked. On Election Day, Westport voters went for Obama by a 65-35 margin. (That's bigger than the 60-40 margin Kerry won here in 2004.) Bushenfreude spread from Westport to neighboring towns. In Wilton, just to the north, which Bush carried comfortably in 2004, Obama won 54 percent of the vote.

Perhaps most surprising was the result from Greenwich, Conn. The Versailles of the tri-state metro area, the most golden of the region's gilded suburbs, the childhood home of George H.W. Bush, went for Obama by a 54-46 margin—the first time Greenwich went Democratic since 1964. Who knew the back-country estates and shoreline mansions were populated with so many traitors to their class? (In the 2004 cage match of New England-born, Yalie aristocrats, George W. Bush beat Kerry 53-47 in Greenwich.) Some towns in Fairfield County were clearly inoculated from Bushenfreude. In New Canaan and Darien, which ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, in Money's list of 25 wealthiest towns, McCain-Palin won by decent majorities. (In both towns, however, the Republican margins were down significantly from 2004.) What's the difference between these towns and these neighbors? Well, New Canaan and Darien are wealthier than their sister towns in Fairfield County. (In both, the median income is well more than $200,000.) So perhaps the concern about taxes is more acute there. Another possible explanation is that these towns differ demographically from places like Greenwich and Westport, in that they are less Jewish, and Jews voted heavily for Obama.

While there has been job loss and economic anxiety throughout Fairfield County, I don't think that economic problems alone explain the big Democratic gains in the region. In Greenwich, economic stress for many people means flying commercial or selling the ski house (while maintaining the summer house on Nantucket). There's something deeper going on when a town that is home to corporate CEOs, professional athletes, hedge-fund managers, and private-equity barons, the people who gained the most financially under the Bush years and who would seem to have the most to lose financially under an Obama administration, flips into the Democratic column. Somewhere in the back country, in a 14,000-square-foot writer's garret, an erstwhile hedge-fund manager is dictating a book proposal to his assistant, a former senior editor at Fortune who just took a buyout, that explains why many of the wealthy choose to vote for a Democrat, in plain violation of their economic self-interest. Working title: What's the Matter With Greenwich?

Quantum of Solace (Columbia Pictures), the 22^nd James Bond film since 1962 and the second starring Daniel Craig, occupies an uneasy place in the 007 canon. The novelty of Craig's decidedly unsuave take on the British superspy has worn off, though we're still eager to see where he'll take the character. And now that the audience has adjusted to the notion of Bond as a tormented brute, we're starting to remember what drew us to this series in the first place: exotic locations, nifty surveillance technology, creative villains, and babes with ridiculous names. In short, we're drawn by fantasy, pleasure, and fun, none of which figures on the to-do list of the new James Bond nor of the movie's director, Marc Forster.

Daniel Craig plays the first Bond who seems uncomfortable with his own Bond-ness. Where the previous incarnations were life-loving, skirt-chasing bon vivants, he's a study in glum anhedonia. To be sure, his dejection is not without cause: This movie begins only minutes after where the last, Casino Royale, left off, with Bond still seeking the leader of Quantum, the sinister multinational organization responsible for killing his one true love, Vesper Lynd. (Bond also believes that, before she died, Vesper tried to double-cross him, which would seem to obviate the need to avenge her death. But never mind; he's complex, OK?)

At first, Bond's personal vendetta against Quantum dovetails with the agenda of his boss, M (Judi Dench). The problem is, he keeps killing off agents who could have provided her with useful information about the supersecret crime ring. Answers to questions like: Why is French eco-entrepreneur Dominic Greene (a delectably amoral Mathieu Amalric) angling for control of huge tracts of land in Bolivia? (Even though the answer is based on a horrifying true story, it doesn't juice up this dull plot line—there's only so much suspense you can wring from the signing of a land lease.) And why does Greene's leggy consort, Camille (Olga Kurylenko), seem so eager to get close to a deposed dictator (Joaquin Cosio)? M begs Bond to rethink his kill-everyone-in-sight strategy. But when he realizes that the CIA may be in on Quantum's murky geopolitical tomfoolery, Agent 007's only choice is to go rogue, evading even his own MI6 superiors.

Forster, a director of upscale tearjerkers (Finding Neverland, Monsters' Ball, The Kite Runner), has no feel for action sequences. The big chases, of which there are several (in planes, in cars, through the streets of La Paz, and over the rooftops of Siena) could all be replaced with a title card reading, "Insert action here." Jolting a hand-held camera around while your lead actor throws punches and scowls doesn't make you Paul Greengrass—and really, why should the Bond franchise need a Paul Greengrass? Hollywood has no shortage of inexpressive gunslingers and jittery mayhem. I love the idea of starting the series from scratch with a young and introspective Bond, but when he's done looking deep into himself, I want him to find … James Bond, the irrepressible enjoyer of wine, women, and the hospitality industry. (There's a touch of that scoundrel on view here in the scenes with Gemma Arterton, as a Diana Rigg-esque British agent who helps Bond, er, settle into his luxury hotel room in Bolivia.)

Quantum of Solace, the first bona fide sequel in the Bond series, has the poky pace and expository padding of the middle chapter of a trilogy. Some characters, like Jeffrey Wright's wry Felix Leiter, seem to be doing little more than holding their places for future installments. The movie's final image suggests that Bond has finally begun to move on from the death of Vesper Lynd. (To be fair, the divine Eva Green is a hard person to forget.) Perhaps in the next Bond film, Craig's troubled but magnetic spy will be allowed not just his quantum of solace but also his modicum of fun.

Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (Warner Bros.) is a stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible. As a matter of fact, this film's implausibility is exactly what makes it irresistible. In this post-globalization update of a Horatio Alger tale, all a boy needs to rise to the pinnacle of success is true love, a pure heart, and a run of luck so extreme it can only be karma.

When the film opens, Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a teenager from the slums of Mumbai, is about to win an unprecedented sum—nearly 20 million rupees—on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? This uneducated orphan, who works fetching tea for employees at a customer-service call center, seems incapable of giving a wrong answer, whether the question concerns movies, literature, cricket, or whose face appears on the American $100 bill. The show's unctuous host (Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor) suspects fraud and arranges to have Jamal kidnapped and questioned by a local cop (Irrfan Khan).

As we learned in last year's A Mighty Heart, getting interrogated by Irrfan Khan is really not the way you want to spend your evening. After some non-Geneva Conventions-approved activities, Khan realizes that Jamal isn't lying—he really does know all this stuff. So the officer sits the boy down and goes through the tape of the game show, question by question. As Jamal recounts the moments in his life, most of them traumatic, that brought him each piece of hard-won knowledge, the movie's tricky structure reveals itself: Flashbacks of Jamal's hardscrabble childhood alternate with present-day scenes in the interrogation room and increasingly tense rounds of the televised trivia game.

In these glossy, propulsively edited flashback sequences, Jamal and his brother Salim (both played by three different actors as they age from child to adult—grown-up Salim is Madhur Mittal) lose their mother to mob violence during an anti-Muslim riot. The boys soon fall into the clutches of a loathsome entrepreneur, Maman (Ankur Vikal), who offers beggar kids food and shelter while forcing them to hand over their earnings. The brothers befriend an orphan girl, Latika (played in her adult incarnation by Freida Pinto) but lose sight of her during a terrifying escape from Maman's compound. Jamal then swears to devote the rest of his life to finding Latika—a goal that eventually, after convolutions too baroque to detail here, lands him in the hot seat on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?

Like Fernando Meirelles' City of God, Slumdog Millionaire is at times guilty of aestheticizing the poverty that it seeks to critique. (A.R. Rahman's hip-hop-influenced score and Anthony Dod Mantle's sleek cinematography don't help any.) Boyle's Mumbai is a squalid, teeming jungle of gang warfare and child exploitation, but it's also a marvel of color and music and life; there are scenes of kids scaling junk heaps that are as beautiful as a long-distance commercial. The interrogation episodes bristle with the psychological gamesmanship of The Usual Suspects, and the bits from the televised broadcast thrill like a live sports event. Boyle, co-directing with his Indian casting director, Loveleen Tandan, balances all these shifts in tone with remarkable skill. At some point near the feverish, overplotted conclusion, you start to realize how little there is to this movie: It's just boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-performs-miracle-on-live-television-in-order-to-get-girl. But by the time boy and girl perform a Bollywood-style dance number in a crowded train station, you'll be too happy to care.

BitTorrent is TiVo for the tech-savvy and the ethically flexible—a way to watch what you want when you want it without having to pay for it. Instead of flipping through the channels or putting on a DVD, you can head for the Web to grab pirated digital copies of whatever movies and television shows you want. As you might expect, downloaders gravitate to popcorn flicks and nerd-friendly TV fare—among the top search phrases on one BitTorrent search engine are Quantum of Solace, Max Payne, Saw V, Heroes, Prison Break, and Fringe. But the No. 1 search query isn't a movie title or the name of a TV show. Rather, it's the name of BitTorrent's top uploader: aXXo.

No matter what metric you choose, aXXo is BitTorrent's biggest name. The editor of the blog TorrentFreak, a 28-year-old from the Netherlands who goes by the nom de Web Ernesto, says that his weekly chart of the 10 most pirated films on BitTorrent is essentially a compilation of aXXo's latest releases. That includes last week's top four: Tropic Thunder, Wall-E, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and Kung Fu Panda. Exactly how popular are aXXo's movies? Ernesto says that the most popular aXXo titles get 500,000 to 1 million downloads per week. Eric Garland, the CEO of download-tracking firm BigChampagne, says that on a recent, randomly selected day, a remarkable 33.5 percent of the movies downloaded on BitTorrent were aXXo torrents. (The next closest competitor, FXG, is responsible for a mere 8.9 percent of movie downloads.) To judge by the fawning comments on the torrent aggregator Mininova—"i dont know what to do without you axxo," "Tks aXXo! I wish you were my father!," "axxo you are a god"—the Web is teeming with satisfied customers. That god theme is common. Last year, TorrentFreak published an aXXo prayer that begins, "Our Ripper, who art on Mininova / aXXo be thy name."

BitTorrent, as Paul Boutin explained in a 2004 Slate piece, is the smartest file-sharing mechanism yet conceived by man. Downloading something from a single source can be slow and unreliable. BitTorrent speeds things up by grabbing pieces of the file—aka torrent—from lots of different sources. The cleverest thing about the BitTorrent protocol, though, is its sharing scheme. As you're downloading, your computer simultaneously uploads the chunks of the file you've already received to others who still need them. The more popular the file, the more people share it, and the sooner your download will finish.

While simple peer-to-peer programs like Napster enabled music piracy to take off in the bandwidth-challenged 1990s and early 2000s, it was BitTorrent's rise five or so years later that allowed Web-based movie piracy to become widespread. (While BitTorrent can be used for all manner of legal file-sharing, it's made its name and reputation as a means for copyright infringement.) But even as it became possible to snare a massive video file in a matter of hours, the world of online movie filching remained treacherous. After waiting a few torturous hours for your file to download, you might be greeted by a piece of malware, a password-protected file, or a copy of Iron Man that's been shot on a camcorder by a guy with the d.t.'s.

When it's hard to know what files you can trust, downloaders gravitate to known commodities. Enter aXXo. Starting in 2005, someone with that handle began posting movie files on a message board called Darkside_RG. In the three years since, aXXo has uploaded more than 600 torrents to the Darkside board as well as more-popular torrent sites like Mininova and the Pirate Bay, all of them easy to spot on account of the word aXXo in the filename.

In the fly-by-night BitTorrent universe, aXXo quickly became a trusted brand name. For one thing, aXXo movies are always crisp DVD rips—files harvested from a digital copy of the movie rather than a shaky camcorder—and are often posted online weeks before the movies are released on video. They're never bundled with malware or protected with passwords; all you have to do is press play as soon as the download is complete. Finally, the files are a predictable size: right around 700 megabytes, the amount of data that fits on a single CD-R. That makes it easy to burn an aXXo movie to CD for archiving purposes or for watching on a compatible DVD player.

BigChampagne's Garland says that BitTorrent users flock to aXXo for the same reason people go to, say, Pixar movies—a reputation, earned over time, for quality and reliability. There are other popular uploaders ("release groups" in BitTorrent parlance): FXG and eztv are both well-known purveyors of pirated TV shows and movies.* Garland notes the parallels here to the illegal drug trade. Just as labeling the product in a dime bag "Pineapple Express" might confer a certain renown, so can slapping a label on a computer file. "If you just go looking for a particular film or a particular TV show, you never know what you're going to get," Garland explains. "The logo or the mark or the brand ... is important because there's a reasonable expectation that you're going to be getting a high-quality product."

Indeed, TorrentFreak's Ernesto says that even when aXXo uploads a relatively unknown movie—Loaded and Boy A are two recent examples—it's still liable to make his most-downloaded list. One reason for this is that BitTorrent transactions cost nothing—since you don't have to pay for the privilege, you're liable to download and watch (or download and not watch) movies that you wouldn't buy a ticket to see. Another is the way BitTorrent software works: the more popular the file, the faster the download. As a consequence, it takes less time to acquire an aXXo movie than pretty much any other torrent—quite a competitive advantage over other uploaders. Perhaps most important, though, is the fact that the BitTorrent marketplace is perilous enough that dependability often trumps selection. Even if you prefer pizza to Brussels sprouts, you might shovel down the veggies if you're worried that somebody spit on your pepperoni.

Of course, a clean reputation never lasts on the Web. The aXXo brand name is frequently used to lure in guileless downloaders. Torrents with aXXo in the filename are often used to disguise malware, and there have also been widespread allegations on the Web that the MPAA and its proxies have uploaded phony aXXo files as bait for wannabe copyright violators. (The MPAA denies this.) For those in the know, however, it's easy enough to tell the real stuff from the fakes—sites like Mininova maintain dedicated pages that host only authentic aXXo torrents.

Despite aXXo's dominant market share and generally sterling reputation, the pirate's work is not universally acclaimed. One BitTorrent faction derides his 700-megabyte DVD rips as low-quality work, inferior to larger, HD-quality files created by other release groups. ("The lunatic fringe loves quality, the mass market has always valued convenience," says Garland. "That's a reason why Blu-ray will struggle. A DVD looks really good to the average person.") Other insider-y types complain that aXXo merely "steals" and re-encodes—that is, converts to a different format and a smaller file size—movies that have originally been uploaded by members of a group of superpirates called "the scene." (You know you're in a universe with a strange moral code when people start complaining that the stolen goods they're in turn stealing weren't stolen properly.) And then there are those who simply don't like the top dog. "I think it's kind of like a monopoly thing. Some people are upset with him because he basically controls the movie pirating on the Internet," explains one astute poster on Darkside_RG. "It's like Microsoft. Everybody hates them, but they will curse the company on forums and blogs while using the damn Windows OS."

Microsoft stayed on top for two decades—can the Microsoft of movie piracy do the same? It's surprising that aXXo has even lasted three years. Ernesto of Torrentfreak says he assumed that aXXo would peter out after a few months—the typical shelf life of a BitTorrent uploader. But while aXXo has gone into hibernation for months at a time, leaving his loyal fans to pine desperately for their provider's return—during one such hiatus, a Darkside member noted the similarity between the message board's supposed aXXo spotters and the loonies who claim to have seen the Virgin Mary's face in a grilled cheese sandwich—BitTorrent's alpha dog has always returned. Ernesto, who landed a short interview with someone purporting to be aXXo in 2007, says that he used to believe the uploader was a single person, someone with insider access in the movie business. Now he's not so sure—considering that "aXXo" has uploaded as many as three movies in a single day in recent weeks, he thinks the label could encompass a larger group of pirates. (Messages that I sent to aXXo through Darkside_RG were not returned.)

One reason for aXXo's staying power might be that the MPAA has only rarely focused on individual uploaders. John Malcolm, the MPAA's director of worldwide anti-piracy operations, says the movie studios' strategy for snuffing out illegal downloads has generally been "to go as high up the piracy food chain as we can." For the MPAA, that's typically meant pursuing lawsuits against BitTorrent portals. By some measures, this has been a success: TorrentSpy, once a hugely popular torrent clearinghouse, was forced to shut down as a result of an MPAA suit. On the other hand, such site closures haven't done anything to tamp down piracy—BitTorrent traffic has soared in 2008. Shutting down a site like TorrentSpy has little effect on download rates because uploaders like aXXo don't sequester their files on a particular site—they're available all over the Web. Unless the MPAA changes its enforcement strategy, then, aXXo should continue his reign as long as he cares to remain on top. A word of advice for aXXo's fans: Don't forget to say your prayers.



Correction, Nov. 12, 2008: This piece originally and incorrectly stated that R5 is the name of a group that uploads pirated movies. It is a format for DVD releases. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Newsweek, Nov. 17

A seven-part article on how Obama won the presidency spans 50,000 words and promises inside information from a team of reporters given special access over the past year. It begins in Chicago with Barack Obama's unlikely decision to run for president on just two years' senate experience. Reporters embedded with the campaigns reveal how John McCain first found a narrative, how Hillary Clinton's campaign lost the primary death match, and how the McCain camp's "loose cannon" atmosphere continually sabotaged its own message. When McCain picked Sarah Palin behind closed doors, it "had the feel of a guerilla raid, a covert operation." The long story's final chapter explains how Obama got voters to the polls in the last days and how rifts between advisers ended the McCain campaign on a "poisonous" note. As McCain staffers fought with Palin and one another, Obama showed the same calm he'd had since the beginning.

The New Yorker, Nov. 17

An article examines the "obsessive singularity" inside the Obama campaign that led them to victory: "In their tactical view, all that was wrong with the United States could be summarized in one word: Bush." That strategy worked in both the primary and general elections, since both Hillary Clinton and John McCain could be portrayed as hardened members of the Washington establishment. Other election-deciding tactical moves included Obama's choice to opt out of public financing and his careful management of his own celebrity—particularly after McCain's effective Paris Hilton ad. … An article traces John McCain's path to "losing his soul," as one supporter describes it. Before the 2008 campaign, McCain was respected by members of both parties because of "a single belief: that he was more honorable than most politicians." Close friends confirm that his reputation wasn't a facade or a media concoction, which makes it all the more difficult to explain the angry, negative final months of his campaign.

Weekly Standard, Nov. 17

A scathing essay announces the end of conservatism and blames the movement's champions for its spectacular failure: "We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment." Among the tactical blunders are the right's pandering to the South, hysterics over Bill Clinton's personal life, interference with the public will on abortion, bumbling foreign policy, and support for expansive government spending. … An article calls unity a "recurring delusion of American politics," noting that most unifying presidents are only retrospectively acknowledged as such. Reagan is now considered successful but was a polarizing figure in office. Obama may, like Reagan, eventually be seen as effective. "But if he does, it will be because, like Reagan, he engaged his ideological and political opponents in ferocious battles and beat them."

New York, Nov. 17

The cover story rapturously calls Barack Obama "a kind of religion … one rooted in a deep faith in rationality." … A profile interviews New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, whose third book hits shelves next week. His first two, The Tipping Point and Blink, trekked in geek-cool academic research and marketing philosophy rendered as entertainment. Gladwell's critics object to his "parasitic" use of others' research, and the looseness with which he applies it to everyday situations. He tends to agree, and promises Outliers—which argues that the very successful are just very lucky—contains his "very bedrock beliefs." … An article tells the story of a bailarina, a Spanish dancer at one of the many New York clubs where men pay for dance partners or table companions. Bailarinas aren't strippers, but often manage complex, frustrating lives of multiple romances and abusive working conditions.

The Nation, Nov. 24

An article blames the current economic situation on "a mythology about the dangerous consequences of big government that does not stand up to the evidence." The numbers, rather, show that the economies of nations who spend far more of their GDPs on "social transfers" than the United States does grow at the same rates. Bold government action occasionally leads in the wrong direction, but correctly-administered programs are more likely to boost productivity than to hinder it. With a GDP of $15 trillion, the U.S. can easily afford the improvements it needs "to compete in a more competitive world." … A column backhandedly thanks Sarah Palin for her presence in the presidential race. She was "a gift to feminism" in both negative and positive ways: She clarified what feminism isn't ("feel good, 'you go girl' appreciation of the female moxie") and worked in tandem with Hillary Clinton to normalize the idea of a female president.

Talk about unfortunate timing. With the global economy reeling from the excesses of Wall Street, Mathew Bishop and Michael Green give us the incredulously titled Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. Bishop, the chief business editor at the Economist, first described how the barons of the new economy were revolutionizing philanthropy by applying their business principles—and sweeping ambition—to their charitable endeavors in 2006. Now he has teamed up with Green, an international development expert, to chronicle how this "movement" of philanthropists has "set out to change the world." The world is indeed changed: This gilded age has come to an abrupt and hard stop, and with it, perhaps, has come a tempering of irrational exuberance about the potential of outsized philanthropists to be, in Bishop's words, "superheroes for solving some of society's problems."

Bishop and Green offer an exceptional synthesis of the influence of the private sector on the field of philanthropy, and this book should be required reading in any MBA or public policy program. But the authors fail to probe some hard questions thoroughly enough: Is the "new" philanthropy really even "new"? And is the private sector the best exemplar of corporate governance, accountability, or long-term investment savvy—particularly when it comes to complex and persistent social and economic problems? With the pillars of global capitalism quaking and government bailouts that will, inevitably, limit public spending for social needs, these are more than academic questions.

In their engaging—if incomplete—history of philanthropy, the authors cite the influence of Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth, in which he described the rich as merely stewards of their economic surplus and advocated giving wealth away in one's lifetime, rather than leaving it to heirs. The Gospel has inspired tycoons from John D. Rockefeller, the world's first billionaire, to philanthrocapitalist par excellence Bill Gates, who received a copy from Warren Buffett. So, what, exactly, is philanthrocapitalism, and how does it differ from the philanthropy of those earlier titans of industry? First, the scale is unprecedented. The wealth creation of the last quarter-century—adjusted for historical inflation and the recent collapse—dwarfs any other period in history. At the start of 2008, the United States claimed 1,000 billionaires and the world 2,500. And charitable giving in the United States has increased accordingly, more than doubling from $13 billion in 1996 to nearly $32 billion in 2006. Second, this wealth has been created by entrepreneurs in tech, finance, and other industries who now channel their energy, drive, and principles to philanthropic endeavors. According to Bishop and Green,

philanthrocapitalists are developing a new (if familiar-sounding) language to describe their business like approach. Their philanthropy is "strategic," "market conscious," "impact oriented," "knowledge based," often "high engagement," and always driven by the goal of maximizing leverage of the donor's money. Seeing themselves as social investors, not traditional donors, some of them engage in "venture philanthropy." As entrepreneurial "philanthropreneurs," they love to back social entrepreneurs who offer innovative solutions to society's problems.

Bill and Melinda Gates are the most obvious example of philanthrocapitalism—huge wealth, strategic investing, risk-taking, leverage. The Gates Foundation is the world's largest, with approximately $60 billion in assets (as of early 2008). It is on track to grant $3 billion a year—improving education in the United States and fighting poverty and diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS around the world. According to the authors, Gates applies the "systems" approach of his Microsoft success to "strategic" funding choices of the foundation. New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein notes that Gates supported experiments in the reform of the city's school system that were initially too risky to fund with public dollars (e.g., piloting new small schools). Gates also understands markets—when they work and when they fail. He funds research into vaccines for diseases that disproportionately affect the world's poor since pharmaceutical R & D dollars will not flow without the prospect of a return on investment. To help create the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, Gates convened a number of corporate, philanthropic, and government agencies, then leveraged their funds to guarantee demand for vaccines for diseases like malaria.

Though the Gateses may personify philanthrocapitalism, Bishop and Green illustrate that Bill and Melinda are not alone: The tenets of philanthrocapitalism now suffuse the entire charitable sector. Venture philanthropy, for example, which draws on the lexicon and principles of venture capitalism, has grown beyond Silicon Valley to charities national (New Profit Inc., Robin Hood) and international (Absolute Return for Kids Foundation, Children's Investment Fund Foundation in the United Kingdom). Social enterprise, which once typically referred to organizations "non profit in nature, entrepreneurial in spirit," now increasingly emphasizes commercial activity and "the role of profit." According to this logic, revenue generation allows social enterprises to be "self-sustaining," and profits will attract additional capital to solve social ills. Pierre Omidyar, who founded eBay with Jeff Skoll and who describes himself as "pro-market, anti-big government, skeptical of traditional philanthropy," has created the Omidyar Network to support both nonprofit and for-profit social enterprises. Google's own hybrid approach to philanthropy allows it, in Executive Director Larry Brilliant's words, to "play with every key on the keyboard."

The influence of the private sector is not limited to new philanthropic entities like Gates and Google. Many established philanthropies have undertaken significant introspection, examining what they fund and how they fund it. Perhaps the most radical "shakeup" of traditional philanthropy has come at Rockefeller, under the leadership of Judith Rodin. Since taking the helm in 2005, Rodin has embraced the language and methods of philanthrocapitalism: Program areas are now "strategic initiatives," grants are made in "portfolio," and Rodin "leverages" private and public resources from "strategic partnerships." The Rockefeller Revolutionary, as she was called by the Economist, has been a controversial figure in the philanthropic world, particularly with those skeptical of the private sector sway.

Although they mention this controversy, Bishop and Green fail to explore it fully. The debate in philanthropy between "old" and "new" is not simply a case of the ancient regime resisting change. Rather, some of the field's veterans are asking more fundamental questions about the nature of philanthrocapitalism—just how revolutionary is it? How valuable are all its business prescriptions? And might philanthropy in fact hold some lessons for the private sector?

In his Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie championed systemic change for social ills and helping "those who will help themselves," a mantra consciously echoed today by his philanthrocapitalist successors. Rodin characterizes her own revolution as a return to the "scientific philanthropy" of John D. Rockefeller, who created his foundation to "go to the root of individual or social ill-being and misery." In 2006, Rodin teamed up with the Gates Foundation in support of a "green revolution" in Africa to enhance agricultural productivity and reduce hunger. The model for this initiative was the first Green Revolution, which was launched with funds and direction from the Rockefeller Foundation between the 1940s and 1960 and which dramatically improved farming and food production in Latin America and Asia.

Susan Berresford, who spent 37 years at the Ford Foundation, including the last 10 at its head, oversaw similar visionary and risk-taking initiatives. She has cautioned against a false and "dangerous" dichotomy between "old and new philanthropy." In 2007 Berresford told the Financial Times, "I don't think there is anything more ambitious about new philanthropy than old philanthropy. … Hundreds of foundations for decades worked to address apartheid, hundreds of foundations worked to support the civil rights movement in this country, there is nothing more ambitious than those noble aims. They were extremely results-oriented—they wanted the end of apartheid, they wanted fairness for minorities—and the use of business principles has been in the foundation world for a long time."

In Just Another Emperor: The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, Michael Edwards makes a critical distinction between the tools of business—many of which can and have helped improve the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations—and a wholesale adoption of free-market ideology. Some private sector principles, he contends, simply do not translate. Long-term "social transformation," for example, is neither easy to measure nor always cost-effective in profit-maximizing terms.

Bishop and Green dismiss Edwards in one page in their epilogue. Both his dissent and their hasty dispatch reveal a clash of cultures between the philanthrocapitalists and the charitable-world lifers that is the subtext of the philanthrocapitalism debate. Many of the early philanthrocapitalists—successful in one sphere and new to another—saw inefficiencies and opportunities in philanthropy but overlooked the knowledge and experience residing there. According to Omidyar: "[E]very business person who first engages in the nonprofit sector goes through a lot of growing pains, disappointments. It is a very different kind of sector, a different cultural environment."

Some of the more vexing assaults came not from philanthropists themselves but from members of the business management establishment. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1999, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer claimed "billions are wasted on ineffective philanthropy. … [T]he real scandal is how much money is pissed away on activities that have no real impact." Three years later, McKinsey consultants Les Silverman, Paul Jansen, and former Sen. Bill Bradley wrote in HBR of a "$100 billion dollar opportunity" if nonprofits could only fundraise more efficiently, streamline how they provided services, and distribute money more quickly. "Perhaps," they admonished in the New York Times, "non-profit executives can learn some lessons from their counterparts in the private sector."

While there are merits to many of these claims, they were also a product of a heady economic era. Some (including Jansen, et al.) have advocated for foundations to spend down, or "pay out," their endowments faster than the 5 percent per year required by law. The choice of pace (which, in economic terms, is a discount rate) effectively represents a choice between spending on the needs of present vs. future generations. Many in the philanthropic world counter that capital preservation in certain instances may be vital to the health of the social sector. Reiterating this case in the Sept. 5 Chronicle of Philanthropy, Susan Berresford and Lorie Slutsky, the president of the New York Community Trust, argued, "[D]onors who set up endowments in perpetuity understand the value of a constant resource, available in good times and bad, for causes popular and unpopular. … Many have bold ambitions and seek solutions to problems such as poverty and injustice that they know will take many lifetimes of effort. Others want to ensure that future generations can deal with the inevitable—and now unimaginable—challenges that will arise."

The unimaginable just might be a meltdown of the financial system. Since that op-ed ran, the S&P 500 has lost more than 25 percent (50 percent over the year), destroying billions of dollars at the most diversified endowed philanthropies, eviscerating Wall Street corporate and family foundations, and making charitable donations difficult for all Americans. Giving for 2009 will plummet across the country and the world. This comes at a time when enormous government bailouts leave fewer public resources for greater public need. Perhaps experience in the philanthropic sector will be better-heeded. Writes Michael Edwards, "It's time for more humility."

Evidence suggests that humility—or some common ground—had arrived before the crash. In June 2007, the Wall Street Journal and others touted a Seedco report, "The Limits to Social Enterprise," which found that many nonprofits, pressured to launch commercial enterprises, had their work derailed by the distractions of running businesses. Since this spring, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, an intellectual weathervane for the social sector, has featured articles calling for a more realistic assessment of the achievements of venture philanthropy and for the use of "social innovation" (rather than "social enterprise") as the lens for "understanding and creating social change in all of its manifestations." Accordingly, "social innovation" recognizes the "cross fertilization" that occurs between the "nonprofit, government, and business sectors" rather than the unidirectional business-influence-on-philanthropy thesis of philanthrocapitalism.

"Cross fertilization" may have found its most articulate advocate in Luis Ubiñas, who in January succeeded Susan Berresford as the head of the Ford Foundation. Ubiñas, who came to Ford from McKinsey's Silicon Valley office, seemed to many the quintessential "philanthrocapitalist" choice. Yet in one of his first public interviews with Alliance Magazine in September, Ubiñas sounds refreshingly humble:

I'm new enough to be cautious about making pronouncements across the foundation world. I think that learning across sectors is inherently valuable. I think that there are things that foundations do that would be very interesting to businesses—taking a long-term approach, taking a more holistic approach, attacking problems from multiple angles, learning about qualitative measurement. At the same time, I think there are things from business that philanthropy can learn: thinking about grants as investments, thinking about the possibility of expecting returns, thinking about grantees as partners instead of grantees, people we work with on an ongoing basis, closely, in a shared, open dialogue. I think the question isn't what can philanthropy learn from business, it's what can philanthropy learn from itself, from business, from government? Establishing a learning environment is what matters, who we learn from is secondary. …

Let's hope cross-fertilization bears fruit. Ubiñas has his work cut for him.

This anonymous poem exemplifies how poetry can join reason and unreason, method and wildness, so effectively that the opposites become part of a single process. The links and repetitions seem governed partly by rhyme and partly by some obsessive, hyperrational formula of causality. As in dreams or some forms of mental illness, the systematic becomes a form of derangement. Here, the zany yet orderly movement from thing to thing also feels fateful and pointed. Even the sudden introduction of the first person—" 'Twas like a lion at my door"—feels inevitable and foredoomed as well as crazy and unanticipated. The doubleness of deed, the doubleness of linked repetitions, the doubleness of couplet rhyme: How can these dual processes resolve themselves? With the disruptive, emphatic, and triple repetition in the final line.

There was a man of double deed,

Who sowed his garden full of seed;

When the seed began to grow,

'Twas like a garden full of snow;

When the snow began to melt,

'Twas like a ship without a belt;

When the ship began to sail,

'Twas like a bird without a tail;

When the bird began to fly,

'Twas like an eagle in the sky;

When the sky began to roar,

'Twas like a lion at my door;

When my door began to crack,

'Twas like a stick across my back;

When my back began to smart,

'Twas like a penknife in my heart;

And when my heart began to bleed,

'Twas death, and death, and death indeed.

……………………..............………—Anonymous

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

Slate Poetry Editor Robert Pinsky will be participating in the "Poem" Fray this week. Post your questions and comments on "There Was a Man of Double Deed," and he'll respond and participate.

During a presidential campaign, there's no such thing as over-sharing. Barack Obama promised to run the most transparent White House in history—disclosing donations, shunning lobbyists, and broadcasting important meetings on C-SPAN. Transition captain John Podesta reiterated the point Tuesday when he said Obama's would be "the most open and transparent transition in history."

But once a candidate becomes president, he faces a transparency trade-off: More transparency may make the government more accountable, because the public can learn the rationale behind policy. But less transparency may allow for more wide-ranging and honest deliberations, which can lead to better policy.

So what would a radically transparent administration look like? And what liabilities would come with increased transparency? With the help of a new report by OMBWatch, as well as the Sunlight Foundation and the Center for Responsive Politics, we've put together a list of ways the Obama administration can promote transparency. We've also listed some potential drawbacks.

1. Spotlight the bailout. If the purpose of transparency is to increase faith in government, there's no better place to start than the Treasury. Obama could set special disclosure standards for not just how the $700 billion is being spent but who is being hired, where they have worked in the past, and any potential conflicts of interest.
   
   Drawbacks: It's embarrassing. The fact is, the Treasury is hiring many of the bankers and traders who got us here in the first place. This isn't because the feds are in the pocket of Wall Street—it's because they are Wall Street. It's the same paradox that bedevils bans on lobbyists being involved in issues they worked on: The people with vested interests on an issue often know the most about it.
2. Force lobbyists to disclose everything. The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (PDF) now requires lobbyists to file quarterly reports that reveal who they lobby and on what issues. If Obama wanted to up the ante, he'd make lobbyists file monthly reports that detail which meetings took place when. They would also have to report which pieces of legislation they pushed for or against, as well as specific earmark requests they made. Obama would also make lobbyists release guest lists for the parties they throw for members of Congress and their staffs. Likewise, Obama would continue his policy of refusing to hire federally registered lobbyists and prohibiting anyone who lobbied in the recent past from advising on the policy area in which they lobbied.
   
   Drawbacks: If you believe that ethics legislation is a slowly tightening noose around the neck of free speech, then all this disclosure feels like a nuisance. As Hillary Clinton said, lobbyists are people, too. As for keeping lobbyists at bay, the fact is that lobbyists are some of the most knowledgeable people in Washington on policy matters. No doubt there are other qualified candidates out there without the shady ties—they're just harder to find.
3. Broadcast Cabinet meetings. It's possible Obama was exaggerating when he suggested broadcasting top-level meetings online. But doing so would give Americans more insight into the deliberative process than ever before. And it would force Cabinet secretaries to hone their ideas beforehand and defend their views eloquently. (Besides, it would be undeniably good television.)
   
   Drawbacks: Cabinet secretaries are unelected and, theoretically at least, focused on policy. Broadcasting Cabinet meetings would encourage political grandstanding and would hamper actual decision-making. (Have you seen British parliament on the BBC?) Plus, there would have to be a seven-second delay to bleep out all the classified information.
4. Publicize the president's schedule. If members of Congress have to report their meetings with influence-seekers, why shouldn't the president? Lobbyists aren't the only ones trying to peddle their wares. (Technically, they're just the ones who spend at least 20 percent of their time doing it.) Corporate chief executives, heads of state, NGO presidents, and others who pass through the West Wing also have agendas, and full transparency would require that we know when they have the president's ear. No one's asking for a live blog. Personal visits could be off-limits. But a record of who gets official face-time with the president would be a useful, and mostly harmless, influence-meter.
   
   Drawbacks: Safety, for one. Rule No. 1 of post-9/11 presidential security is: Never broadcast the commander in chief's schedule. Another, admittedly lesser problem, is jealousy. If the CEO of Apple learned that the CEO of Microsoft got a face-to-face meeting with Obama, he might demand one, too.
5. Get rid of "pseudo" classifications. Right now the intelligence classification system is a joke. In 2007 there were "107 unique markings and more than 131 different labeling or handling processes and procedures for SBU [sensitive but unclassified] information," according to one government official. These included such labels as "for official use only" and "law enforcement sensitive." President Bush issued a directive to consolidate the labels in May, but he didn't try to make them less common. To increase transparency, Obama could eliminate the gray area altogether and force officials to decide whether information is classified or not.
   
   Drawbacks: In the real world, it's never all-or-nothing. Some documents are meant for all staff members, some are restricted to the top 20 people, and some are "For Your Eyes Only." Agencies need to be able to distinguish among levels of classification. Sure, "pseudo" classifications have gotten out of hand, especially in the Bush administration's culture of secrecy. But they do serve a purpose.
6. Make all filings electronic. Senators still file financial-disclosure reports on paper, which can take weeks to process. Electronic filings make the data easier to process, organize, and search. It also helps create metadata—dates, tags, and other categories that help people sort and draw meaning from the data itself. For example, a senator can release thousands of pages of bank statements. But without metadata, it's nearly impossible to analyze them. Not to mention, it saves the state thousands of man-hours and millions of sheets of paper.
   
   Drawbacks: None—unless you're a senator with something to hide.
7. Highlight earmarks. It's impossible to ban earmarks completely. But as John McCain would say, make their authors famous. Set up a system under which legislation is published online prior to voting and last-minute changes are automatically highlighted. Better yet, track changes so the public knows which lawmaker added what.
   
   Drawbacks: Earmarks serve a useful purpose, helping to attract backing for a bill that a member may not otherwise support. (Of course, there are other ways to compromise.) At the same time, lawmakers might hesitate to make necessary but controversial changes if everyone knows who made them.

Is there such a thing as too much information? Yes—but only if there's no way of processing it. The key to increasing transparency, therefore, is to allow people to interpret what they're seeing. That means not just more documents but better databases, more navigable interfaces, and more visual aids to help people analyze information. If you've got that, there's no such thing as over-sharing.

At President-elect Barack Obama's first postelection press conference, amid questions about economic crises and foreign dangers, he was also asked to describe his ideal candidate for a particularly prominent and sensitive White House position: first dog.

Obama was noncommittal, though he did appear to rule out the one real candidate of change—a mutt "like me"—because daughter Malia required a hypoallergenic animal. Still, his answer set off a round of speculation and commentary that will not abate until the new dog becomes part of the family—and then President Obama will have a whole new set of issues to deal with. Even the family dog is not immune from presidential politics.

By stating his preference for a mutt, Obama sidestepped only part of this puppy political battle. In fact, Americans' lingering fascination with breed purity is a fading aspect of pet culture, something that may someday look as goofy as those tuxedo-clad TV announcers who pontificate about the proper size of basenji paws during the Westminster Kennel Club's annual show.

Slate V imagines Barney the Dog's farewell video:

But that's not to say that the world of pet ownership has become a carefree one. Picking the breed will be easy compared with some of the other political tasks facing the dog owner in chief. Over the past few decades, the relationship between Americans and their pets has changed dramatically, as the animals have been promoted from loyal servants to faithful pals to ersatz family members. The change has spurred the growth of a $41 billion pet industry. Only a small portion of that total represents the boutique canine couture displayed at New York's annual Pet Fashion Week. Most of it involves vast expansions in basic aspects of pet ownership: food, health, training, and care. In other words, the same basic nurturing needs of our human families. And like other family matters in a society riven by cultural politics, each category is fraught with controversy.

Take education. President Obama will want a trainer to help avoid the international incident that might ensue should the pooch, say, nip Vladimir Putin the way George Bush's Barney recently bit a Reuters reporter. Not long ago, hiring a behaviorist was something you did only if you needed to train a seeing-eye dog or a police canine. These days, it's about as ordinary as sending your teenager to driver's ed: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the nation's population of animal trainers tripled to 43,000 in the years between 2000 and 2006.

We're sharply divided, though, about what those professionals should teach. In the late 20^th century, the field was transformed by the same pedagogical revolution that reshaped human education, with sharp yanks on the choke collar replaced by a positive model that emphasized rewarding pooches when they do well. That establishment-endorsed theory now faces a backlash in the form of the tough-love model popularized by the uncredentialed TV celebrity Cesar Millan. The furious debate—with accusations of dangerous permissiveness on one side, heartless cruelty on the other—represents a four-legged version of the culture wars. Whichever side the new president takes, he'll disappoint a large chunk of the electorate.

Then there's food. Modern pet food is a mind-boggling marketplace that has, since the 1970s, transformed itself in the same way as the human-food market. Once upon a time, we all shopped at Safeway and bought 35-pound bags of basic Alpo. Now we choose among Sam's Club, Whole Foods, or the vegan co-op for ourselves—and navigate a world of ever-pricier pet selections that feature human-grade ingredients, raw meat, all-organic contents, or menu descriptions such as "grilled tuna, wild rice, broccoli and dill." Wal-Mart's low-cost house brand remains a best-seller, but it's also possible to buy an 11-pound bag of imported ZiwiPeak for $105—or order a home-delivered meal from one of the doggie bakeries that have sprung up around the country.

The investment might seem worth it to those scared by the tainted Chinese wheat gluten that poisoned dozens of mass-market brands last year. But does a president's political adviser, particularly an adviser to a president who's already been accused of being an arugula-loving elitist, want him to spend more on his dog's dinner than his constituents spend on their own?

Then there's health care. As a pet owner, Obama will find that many of the inequalities that affect human health care are present in the veterinary version, which, in scarcely a generation, has gone from basic deworming and rabies-inoculating to administering psychopharmaceuticals and practicing advanced specialties like dermatology or radiation oncology. In 1980, there were less than 2,000 vets credentialed by 12 specialty organizations; by 2007, there were about 9,000 members of 27 groups like orthopedics. American spent $1.32 billion in 2003 on anterior cruciate ligament surgery to repair dogs' knees.

The phenomenon explains why one of the industry's fastest-growing sectors is veterinary health insurance, which expanded 26 percent a year between 2003 and 2008. Of course, when you're president, the fact that your pet has insurance becomes more politically complicated, given that millions of your human constituents do not. Balancing the new pooch's life, on the one hand, and the visuals of spending thousands on intra-arterial chemotherapy during a recession, on the other, makes picking a breed look awfully simple.

In grappling with pet-ownership's contemporary dilemmas, Obama will actually embrace an old tradition. The way we live with our pets has always reflected the way we live, period. And that includes politics: Long before there was a White House, there were potentates with pets. Once upon a time, such animals—like the well-dressed lapdogs of Mary, Queen of Scots—elevated leaders above the masses who couldn't afford to feed nonworking beasts, much less outfit them in royal velvet.

In our democratic society, by contrast, dogs let presidents play everyman. The patrician FDR was humanized by pictures of him cuddling with his beloved Fala. Serving the same purpose for President Obama will be the family's new dog. Whatever breed it happens to be.

At long last, my people have an answer to the question "When will we have a Jewish president?" The answer, it turns out, is "Not before we have a black president." I imagine that all ethnic groups play this game of "when will one of ours get there?" (The question is especially common among Jews, since we're sort of white and used to success at other jobs—law, medicine, swimming.) But now that a half-African man with Muslim ancestors has defeated, for the presidency, an Episcopalian with a Roman numeral after his name, the bookmakers have to move the odds for all of us.

Which historically oppressed group will see one of its own take the oath of the presidency on a Bible/Quran/Analects/etc. next? We must admit that some groups are too small to have much of a chance—met any Zoroastrians lately?—and others seem too exotic. But plenty of others are in the running. Here, then, is a guide to which minority group will next see one of its own in the White House, in descending order of probability, and with possible candidates included:

The women: First off, they're not a minority. With so many more men than women imprisoned, unable to vote because of felony convictions, dying in battle, and murdered, there are both more women alive and more women eligible to vote. If they choose to unite behind one of their own—as many of them were inclined to do in 2008—they'll be the not-so-little voting bloc that could. Top candidates: Hillary Clinton, although by 2012 she'll be a little long in the pantsuit; Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, mentioned as a possible Democratic veep this year, but she is only six months younger than Clinton; and Sen. Claire McCaskill, from the swing state of Missouri. Many top Republican women are either too moderate for the base, like Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe; too old, like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison; or too Sarah Palin, like Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The Latter-day Saints: Learn the terminology—they often call themselves "Saints" or "LDS"—because a Mormon president is coming. The main Mormon denomination claims 5.7 million adherents in the United States, making it twice as large as the Episcopal church and the Congregationalists put together. And despite widespread prejudice against Mormons, they're overrepresented in national politics. Until Oregon's Gordon Smith lost last week, there were five Mormon senators: four Republicans and a very big Democrat, Majority Leader Harry Reid. Mormons are also an unusually affluent group, with many businessmen in their ranks, and as Mitt Romney's campaign showed, they're inclined to give to one of their own. The liberal Barack Obama may prove a boon to conservative Mormons' electoral prospects: Those least inclined to support a Mormon are Southern Protestants, a group Obama struggled with, but after they have four or eight years to get used to a black man in the White House, a Mitt Romney or an Orrin Hatch might not seem so strange. If Jeremiah Wright couldn't derail Obama, who will be afraid of Mormons' sacred underwear? Top candidates: Romney, although his sell-by date is nearing, and former Utah Gov. and current Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt. Dark horse: wildly popular, if troglodytic, radio host Glenn Beck.

The Jews: Together now, a sigh of relief: It's not going to be Lieberman! Having dirty-danced with too many political parties in the past four years, Joe's rep is tarnished; Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid are both happy to use him, but neither really wants to be seen holding hands with him the next morning. So which members of the tribe—a tribe that is about 5 million strong in America, with deep pockets, high voter turnout, and diminishing fear of the Bradley (Bernstein?) Effect—might be next on America's dance card? Top candidates: Rahm Emanuel, congressman-cum-chief of staff, a man whose debtors include every Democrat in Congress, since he led the House Dems' fundraising effort in the watershed election of 2006; rising GOP star Eric Cantor, of Virginia's 7^th congressional district; and Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, whose very name recalls that old, shattered dream known as campaign-finance reform. But Feingold, who has thought about running before, is on the record supporting same-sex marriages, so we may want to sub in Ed Rendell, the Pennsylvania governor who, after supporting Hillary, helped deliver his state to Obama. If you think Rendell (b. 1944) is too old, and you just can't see Michael Bloomberg in the Oval Office, then it might be fun to consider Al Franken—should he push aside his fellow Jew, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, in the recount still in progress.

The Muslims: Muslims, you may have heard, have a PR problem. And a Muslim running for president would be in a tricky situation: There's more hostility to Muslims in the red states, so a Muslim candidate would have to bank on the blue states. But if he or she hewed closely to traditional Islam on matters like the role of women, he would never win California or New York. To go blue, he'd have to be a pretty secular Muslim—but if he were too publicly secular, he'd lose potential donations of money and time from fellow Muslims. Of course, many American Muslims are quite secular, so nobody knows what kind of Muslim could count on ethnic politics to be an asset, rather than a detriment. Which is why the first Muslim president may well be a black Muslim, not Arab or Persian, and it so happens the only two Muslims in Congress—let's call them the top candidates—are African-American: Keith Ellison (D-Minn., raised Catholic) and André Carson (D-Ind., raised Baptist). Bonus prediction: In future years, look for a relatively secular politician to emerge from the large Iranian community in Los Angeles and achieve national prominence.

The Hindus: It's actually fairly surprising that there's no Hindu in Congress or in a governorship, given the popular perception of Indians as an industrious, nonthreatening model minority. If, like millions of Americans, you've been introduced to Indian folkways from The Simpsons and that stellar character actor who often works alongside Seth Rogen, you're probably inclined to like them. But as we learned in the aftermath of 9/11, some Americans assume that any dark-skinned, South Asian-looking person is an Arab or a Muslim—and despise him accordingly. It's likely that the first Hindu (or South Asian) president will come from a red state, having earned the white-guy seal of approval. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal would be a perfect example, except that he is a convert to Catholicism. According to the Hindu American Foundation, there are four Hindu state legislators, including Kumar Barve, the majority leader of the Maryland House of Delegates. But my bet is that the first Hindu president will be an Indian-American celebrity who, before entering the political arena, has already transcended ethnicity in people's minds. Top candidate: Kal Penn, better known as Kumar from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Penn is more intellectual than most actors (I've interviewed him, and he's impressive), was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and stumped for Barack Obama.

The gays and lesbians: Yes, I know, we may already have had a gay president—Lincoln is a much-nominated candidate for closeted commander in chief—but if we're talking about an openly gay president, it won't be for a while. Still, we know what to do to improve a gay candidate's chances: murder an old person. Younger generations are far more tolerant of homosexuality; we know, for example, that voters under 30 opposed California's Proposition 8. When the time comes, voters may feel more comfortable with a lesbian president than with a gay man, given the stereotypes about lesbian monogamy and domesticity. Top candidate: a young woman, a college freshman somewhere in the progressive Midwest, maybe Wisconsin or Minnesota, who just worked her ass off for Barack Obama and is planning her run in 2048.

The atheists: When the lion lies down with the lamb, when the president is a Republican Muslim and the Democratic speaker of the House is a vegan Mormon lesbian, when the secretary of defense is a Jain pacifist from the Green Party, they will all agree on one thing: atheists need not apply. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president. (By contrast, only 43 percent wouldn't vote for a homosexual, and only 24 percent wouldn't vote for a Mormon.) As Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, told me in an e-mail: "Atheism spells political death in this country."

Indeed. Only one current congressman has confessed to being an atheist: Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from the lefty East Bay region of Northern California. If he ever ran for president, he would need God's help just as surely as he wouldn't ask for it.

Update, Nov. 12, 2008, 9:57 p.m.: As several readers have noted in "The Fray," this guide is not exactly comprehensive. With apologies to Summum, herewith two more groups that have good odds at winning the White House in the not-too-distant future.

The Hispanics: At more than 13 percent of the population, Hispanics are considered the largest ethnic minority in the country—but what that means is murky. Not all Hispanics (or Latinos, as we more commonly say) speak Spanish, and not all have strong roots in a Spanish-speaking country: Argentine immigrants to the United States, for example, are often ethnic Italians who, having lived in Argentina for one generation, now magically share an ethnic designation with descendants of the Aztecs. This wild diversity has hindered the development of voting blocs, especially since the politically powerful Miami Cubans are more conservative than, say, reliably Democratic Puerto Ricans. Still, the sheer numbers of Hispanics, and their concentration in states rich with electoral votes, mean a señor or señora presidente is coming soon. Top candidates: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will be 69 in 2016, younger than John McCain is now. Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, could be a senator or governor before eight years have passed (but many worry about bimbo eruptions, like the one that brought down his marriage). Ed Garza served two terms as the wunderkind mayor of San Antonio before being term-limited out; he was an early Obama supporter who could end up in the administration. And it's hard to resist the Sanchez sisters, Linda and Loretta, Democrats of California, the first sister-sister pair in Congress.

East Asians: Although an old and assimilated minority group—it's not hard to find fifth-generation Japanese- or Chinese-Americans on the West Coast—there have been few national political figures with East Asian roots. Their political success has been limited by unfair prejudice in every era: against Japanese-Americans during World War II, against Chinese-Americans during the Cold War, against Vietnamese-Americans during and after the Vietnam War. Looking ahead, the strong Christianity of the Korean-American community makes it a natural place to look for politicians who could woo evangelicals, but for now most Asian-American politicians come from secular ethnic communities on the West Coast. Top candidates: Matt Fong, an Air Force Academy grad and former treasurer of California, who in 1998 ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara Boxer, then joined the Bush administration; Fiona Ma, only 42, the majority whip in the California Senate, a Democrat with a degree from Pepperdine—a conservative Christian school; and Chinese-American Gary Locke, the former governor of Washington.

In the days before the election, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley downplayed drama surrounding Barack Obama's logistically nightmarish election-night rally in Grant Park. "Could you see me saying no to Senator Obama?" he asked. Now that Obama has won and the rally is over, the question can be flipped: Can President Obama say no to Mayor Daley?

Obama spent much of his campaign crusading against the kind of chit-calling, favor-trading, and back-scratching that are a hallmark of politics in Chicago (and, to be fair, pretty much everywhere else). Still, Obama's adopted hometown will benefit hugely from his presidency—whether or not he intends it.

The biggest boon may be to the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics, which the IOC is scheduled to award in October 2009. Chicago is one of four cities competing for the Games that year, and it's fair to say that Obama has the other would-be hosts—Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro—in a panic. "I have a sense of crisis," one Japanese committeeman told the AP. Mayor Richard Daley has had his heart set on the Games for years, and Obama is expected to meet with the Olympic committee when it comes to Chicago in the spring. (Similar efforts by Tony Blair were seen as partly responsible for London's win in 2012.)

But the Olympics bid is only the most prominent example of what could be a fruitful relationship for the Daley administration. The Obama-Daley connections run deep. Bill Daley, the mayor's youngest brother, served as commerce secretary under Clinton and is now part of Obama's economic transition team. (He's also a potential Cabinet member.) Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and David Axelrod all worked for Daley at some point in their careers: Emanuel as a fundraiser, Jarrett as a deputy chief of staff, and Axelrod as a consultant.

Meanwhile, Mayor Daley has had Obama's back repeatedly during the presidential campaign. He broke his longstanding tradition of not endorsing during the primaries by backing Obama against Hillary Clinton in December—of 2006. He spoke up when Obama's prior drug use became an issue. His support culminated in the election-night blowout, which cost $2 million (the campaign promised to reimburse the city) and attracted 240,000 people—and which doubled as a not-too-subtle display of Chicago's logistical acumen (cough Olympics cough).

Another obvious boon is access to federal funds. That doesn't necessarily mean a quid pro quo. But it may mean that Obama makes urban issues a priority, which will inevitably help Chicago. Daley has long been pushing to upgrade the city's mass transit system, including a "circle line" to link up the existing lines of the Chicago L and a new high-speed rail to O'Hare International Airport. (An expansion of O'Hare itself is already under way). "If the progressive Democratic wing of the party follows through on a green revolution in transportation, that can't help but benefit Chicago," says Bill Savage, who teaches Chicago literature and history at Northwestern University. Same goes for education reform and better funding for public housing.

Surely some earmarks will get through. "I think you'll see the city gets more than its share of federal funds," says Laura Washington, a former aide to Mayor Harold Washington (no relation). The challenge for Obama, says Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman and professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, will be "to make sure his fingerprints aren't on the earmarks."

Less measurable than federal funds, but no less important, is access. At the very least, Chicago politicians will have the ear of the administration. Between Jarrett, Axelrod, Emanuel, Daley, and Obama himself, there will be no shortage of ears attuned to Chicago. It's not as if Chicago's national political profile was low—George W. Bush celebrated his 60^th birthday there, and Daley's father famously went to great lengths for JFK—but it never hurts to have your mayor and your president on a first-name basis.

Yet the high profile cuts both ways. Expect more scrutiny of Chicago's famously corrupt political machine. So far, Obama has managed to convince people he's from Chicago but not of it—a phenomenon one Chicago columnist dubbed "hopium." But just as the national media are now obsessed with Alaskan drilling, they're also likely to scrutinize city politics and speculate about potential ties to Obama. There may be only one Tony Rezko, but the media can be counted on to try to find others like him.

How else will Chicago change because of Obama? Well, people will go there—at least that's the hope. The state tourism board plans to promote a three-day vacation package featuring sites related to Barack Obama. The Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau has already set up a "Presidential Chicago" page dedicated to the Obama family's favorite shops ("The soon-to-be First Lady is frequently seen wearing designs by Chicago's Maria Pinto") and eateries ("Obama pegs MacArthur's—which serves fine soul food in a family atmosphere—as one of his top Chicago picks"). A Chicago restaurant even made T-shirts that read, "Obama Eats Here." No plans yet to sell jars of air exhaled by Barack Obama, but just wait.

Spurring tourism will be the inevitable Chicago makeover. Right now, Chicago may be known best for the Cubs and Al Capone. (And, to those of a certain age, for Biker Mice From Mars.) But if all goes well, images of futility and crime will be replaced by pictures of the motorcade cruising down the Kennedy Expressway, barbershops on the South Side, and the rustic brick of the University of Chicago. Goodbye, America's grundle. Hello, "capital of the new decade."

Chances are the city will get safer, too. Hyde Park-Kenwood has just become "the safest urban neighborhood in America." When Obama was in town for his acceptance speech, police blocked off all roads within a quarter-mile of his house. When he's not in town, the Secret Service still keeps an eye on his house. We've already seen what happens when you try to mess with the motorcade.

Some expectations will no doubt be dashed. Federal agencies will not brim with Chicagoans. Obama will not move the capital to the Windy City, as he did his campaign. The Cubs will not win the World Series. But at the very least, Chicago will force the world to acknowledge that America is more than the sum of its coasts.

Firearms scare almost everybody. But no demographic gets more wiggy about handguns, shotguns, and rifles than journalists. Ever since the Washington Post ("Gun Sales Thriving in Uncertain Times," Oct. 27) put the idea into circulation that the election and economic turmoil were spurring an increase in gun and ammo sales, a score of other news outlets have published their takes on the topic.

The Salt Lake Tribune got there on Nov. 6 ("Election Triggers Upsurge in Military-Like Firearms Sales"), the New York Times on Nov. 7 ("On Concerns Over Gun Control, Gun Sales Are Up"), the Associated Press ("Fears of Democrat Crackdown Lead to Gun Sales Boom") and Reuters on Nov. 8 ("Obama Win Triggers Run on Guns in Many Stores"), the Kansas City Star on Nov. 9 ("Election's Outcome Triggers Record Sales at Gun Shops"), the Anchorage Daily News on Nov. 10 ("Armed and Nervous in Alaska"), FoxNews.com ("Gun Owners Stockpiling Over Fear of Democratic Weapon Bans") and CNN.com on Nov. 11 ("Gun Sales Surge After Obama's Election"), the Chicago Tribune ("Obama Win Triggers Run on Guns") and the Globe and Mail on Nov. 12 ("Obama Win Spurs U.S. Gun Sales Boom"). And that's just a partial list.

The foundation upon which these outlets build their stories is solid: The primary measurement of gun purchases shows that sales are rising this year. Federal law requires licensed gun dealers to submit background check requests of all purchasers to the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The Post reports that "there were 8.4 million background checks from Jan. 1 to Sept. 28, compared with 7.7 million in the same period last year," which is a 9 percent increase.

It sounds scary, but the 2008 year-to-date increase doesn't tell the whole story. The first full year of the background check system was 1999, when 8.6 million background checks were conducted. For the next four years, background checks bubbled (PDF, Page 5) under 8 million annually and didn't break above 8 million again until in 2004. In 2007, the number of applications was essentially the same as in 1999 (8,658,000 vs. 8,621,000), which means that there was no growth in the number of gun sales over almost a decade. Considered inside the context of a decade's worth of background check data and a growing population, the 9 percent year-to-date increase doesn't seem very significant. (Nota bene: These days, 1.6 percent of gun applications are denied each year, translating into no gun sale.)

Perceived increases in gun sales tend to make news while perceived decreases do not, a realization I came to when I failed to find evidence in Nexis of any publication making a big deal out of the years that background checks fell below 8 million (2000-2003).

If all 8.6 million background checks in 2008 were for first-time buyers, one could make the potentially chilling case that growing numbers of citizens are bearing arms. But that's not very likely based on established survey data. Ownership of most of the nation's estimated 200 million guns is concentrated in relatively few hands—according to a recent article in the journal Injury Prevention, 48 percent of gun owners reported owning more than four firearms. A similar data point collected by the National Institute of Justice (PDF, Page 2) states that of "gun owners in 1994, 10 million individuals owned 105 million guns, while the remaining 87 million guns were dispersed among 34 million other owners."

This year's uptick in buyers must reflect some new gun owners, but if past surveys are a good guide, surely most of these buyers are repeat buyers. This means that the well-armed are probably getting better-armed—a point none of the recent news stories makes.

Further tamping down the fears of the nation's anti-gun nuts are data compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. NORC found that gun ownership in the United States has been falling since 1977 (PDF, Page 11), when 54 percent of households reported owning a gun, compared with 34.5 percent in 2006. More good news for anti-gun nuts: According to the Department of Justice, nonfatal firearm-related violent crimes are down sharply since 1993, and nonfatal firearm-related violent victimization rates are also down since 1994. (Both rates turned up slightly in 2005 but remained low.) Crimes committed with firearms peaked in 1993 and stabilized at late-1980s levels.

Several news outlets (AP, the Anchorage Daily News, CNN.com, and the Kansas City Star) interviewed gun dealers who claimed to be posting record sales. Placed in context, that assertion wilts. A study (PDF) by the Violence Policy Center finds that the number of U.S. gun dealers declined from 250,000 in 1994 to 50,000 in 2007. Granted, many of the original 250,000 dealers were small-timers, moving small numbers of guns, who left the trade because of the cost and hassle of increased regulation. But if gun sales over time remain static while the number of gun sellers is plunging, wouldn't you expect individual dealers to post increased sales? So take those record sales with a grain of salt.

To be fair to the press horde, some sort of "Obama effect" does exist. During the week of Nov. 3-9, the FBI received 374,000 background requests, "a nearly 49 percent increase over the same period in 2007," CNN.com reports. Anecdotes collected in some of the news stories indicate that some buyers are keen on buying so-called "assault weapons," which were banned from 1994 until 2004.

Many gun enthusiasts worry that the Obama administration and Democratic Congress will reinstitute the ban and pass other restrictive legislation. Although Obama supports "common sense" gun laws, his idea of what constitutes common sense differs from that of most gun owners. Consider:

The Chicago Tribune reports that as "an Illinois state legislator [Obama] voted to support a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons and tighter restrictions on all firearms. He has said in the past that he opposes allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons."

The AP reports that as a U.S. senator, "Obama voted to leave gun-makers and dealers open to lawsuits."

According to the Anchorage Daily News, "the pro-gun control Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence endorsed Obama and called his win Tuesday 'a major victory.' "

If a genuine run on guns exists, whose fault is it? Blame Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, a well-known "assault weapon" foe. Paradoxically, if Obama wanted to end the purported run on guns, he could do so by opposing any new regulations.

I'd love to see a spate of stories exploring that line.

*****

I fully expect to win the Stephen Hunter Second Amendment Award for this article and for the judgment to be so overwhelming that they retire it forever. Send news of other journalism prizes I qualify for to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Thanks to readers Allen Flanigan and Eric Verkerke for their nudging. (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 guns in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

At the beginning of the summer, the press considered the Drudge Report so influential that its proprietor, Matt Drudge, was thought to be in position to determine the fall election's results.

Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith of Politico wrote that he had "an uncanny ability to drive the national conversation" and quoted Mitt Romney's press secretary saying that Drudge "serves as an assignment editor for the national press corps." In a piece titled "How Matt Drudge Rules the (Political) World," Washingtonpost.com reporter Chris Cillizza wrote that Drudge and his site "sit at the junction of politics and journalism in the modern media age." Cillizza pointed to both the Politico story and the 2006 book by John F. Harris and Mark Halperin, The Way To Win: Taking the White House in 2008, which anointed Drudge as "the single most influential purveyor of information about American politics." Harris and Halperin also credited Drudge as a major reason for John Kerry's2004 defeat.

By the fall, Drudge had lost it, the press surmised. "Does Matt Drudge, an unabashed conservative, still have huge clout in shaping the media's coverage?" the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz asked on Sept. 18. "Or is his influence overstated by those seeking a simple explanation for why MSM types do what they do?" Kurtz cited TPM's Greg Sargent, who had just chronicled the decline of Drudge's influence over cable news. By late October, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was calling the Drudge Report "unplugged down the stretch." Cillizza expanded on Boehlert's theme in his blog on Oct. 30, quoting a series of wishful headlines on the Drudge Report hinting at a possible upset of Barack Obama by John McCain.

This isn't the first Drudge collapse to be recorded by the press. The media gravediggers have been sharpening their spades for him ever since he broke onto the national media scene in 1998 by previewing the Monica Lewinsky story Newsweek was reporting. In December 1999, New York Times columnist Frank Rich declared Drudge's demise as he left his weekly Fox News Channel show, noting that Drudge's Web site had dropped from the 228^th most popular to the 636^th. Drudge's "brief reign as national press mascot" was over, Rich asserted.

Not to take anything away from Drudge, but he was never as important as his promoters made him out to be. Time embarrassed itself by calling him one the world's 100 most influential people in 2006! He's recorded ups and downs, hits and misses, scoops and errors, but he's never approached the irrelevance his detractors would wish upon him.

That Drudge touted a dubious McCain comeback or that his influence over cable may have waned misses the fact that 12 years after its founding, no greater media punch can be found in a smaller Web package than the Drudge Report, reportedly just a two-person operation. According to comScore Media Metrix, the Drudge Report's number of unique visitors rose 70 percent from September 2007 to September 2008, impressive even in a year that most Web sites covering the campaign have attracted plumper audiences.

What's most remarkable about the Drudge Report after all these years is how efficient and useful it remains in the age of podcasts, Web video, RSS feeds, animations, interactive charts, interactive maps, slide shows, Digg buttons, Facebook widgets, comment pages, change-text-size buttons, print options, and all the rest. Drudge's idea of sexing up his one-page-fits-all-sizes site is adding a plain-wrap version for mobile devices. Maybe the Drudge Report derives its efficiency and usefulness from its lack of podcasts, Web video, RSS feeds, animations, interactive charts, interactive maps, slideshows, Digg buttons, Facebook widgets, comment pages, change-text-size buttons, and print options!

If you could access only one home page for breaking news and chose Washingtonpost.com or CNN.com over the Drudge Report, you'd be a blockhead. His newswire-meets-tabloid sense of story—hysterical and playful at the same time—links to both what you need to know and what you want to know, and he updates more frequently than conventional media sites do. Sure, Drudge breaks stories of his own now and again, but that's not his big draw. "The dirty little secret about Drudge," Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told the Los Angeles Times, "is that he's a gateway for conventional journalism."

It's astonishing that this late into the Web era no major media site has followed Drudge's lead and established a news fix with attitude that points to great headlines on the rest of the Web. The site is so simple that anybody could do it—but nobody has for very long, or at least not successfully. Newser tries to deliver a free-range news feed, but it's so hopelessly overloaded with technology, user options, and typography that you just want to click away when you land there. Plus, its "grid" design gives no indication of what's most important or most interesting: You might as well visit the more Drudge-esque Google News.

Drudge has his critics, and he deserves them. For starters, here's FiveThirtyEight's recent takedown on Drudge's use of polls and EW.com's Josh Wolk on the Chris Rock "Oscar" blowup. He also fell for the "Attacked and Mutilated" McCain-volunteer hoax (but give him credit for correcting the record). He made entirely too big a deal about the mysterious John Kerry affair that wasn't and got overexcited about the "clues" of an Obama-Bayh ticket.

Although he hates the left, as Philip Weiss reported in New York magazine in the summer of 2007, he's not the right-wing attack machine that some think he is. "Republicans can't count on Drudge. He praises Rosie O'Donnell and Michael Moore for their independence and fight, and seems to despise Giuliani and McCain," Weiss wrote. Drudge's brand of iconoclasm is so elastic that he found a way to accept the Hillary Clinton camp's advances even before the primaries, peppering his page with positive news about her campaign. Such resourcefulness will serve him well in the Obama administration.

Drudge endures, while imitators and newly minted Web stars fade, for a variety of reasons. He works incredibly hard. He cares about his site. He appears to have no interest in working for somebody else, and his entrepreneurial vigor makes the site come alive. And also because he appreciates something about readers they might not even know themselves: They want an information site that would rather err on the side of recklessness once in a while than be right all the time.

******

When Slate launched in the summer of 1996, Editor Michael Kinsley tried to hire Drudge. He politely declined. I reviewed Drudge Manifesto for the Wall Street Journal in 2000, where I called for "More Drudgism! … But maybe a little less Drudge." Instead, we've gotten more of both. In 1998, following the debut of the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal, I wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine about Drudgephobia in the press. I think it holds up. Let me know what you think at 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 Drudge in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

Return to article

"A Man and His Manifesto," by Jack Shafer

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 24, 2000

Drudge Manifesto

New American Library, 247 pages, $22.95

WHEN MATT DRUDGE broke the news that Monica Lewinsky had paid scores of service calls on the White House, the establishment seemed to be more outraged about the story's venue—an amateurish Web site—than about its substance.

Even when Mr. Drudge's Jan. 17, 1998, scoop turned out to be 100% true, reporters, pundits, think-tank shills and ethical watchdogs savaged him as a merchant of yellow journalism and his medium, the mercury-quick Internet, as an enemy of the truth. By year's end, one TV news newcomer with even less journalism experience than Mr. Drudge—President Clinton's former bootblack, George Stephanopoulos—was spanking him for the "lowering of standards of what is acceptable political discourse."

Blaming the lowering of standards on Matt Drudge rather than Bill Clinton seems an outrageous matter of shooting the messenger. But the administration and its factotums never really feared Matt Drudge as much as they did Drudgism—the specter of uncontrollable voices freely discussing the affairs of state. Any political parley outside the reach of its command-and-control apparatus scares the bejesus out of Washington, whether it is on the Internet, through the initiative process (against which the Washington Post's David Broder has written an entire book) or over the vox populi of talk radio.

What made Mr. Drudge so dangerous to the politico-journalistic complex was his rejection of Washington's established rules of conduct. Here was a reporter who had little interest in writing "beat sweetners" about his subjects for future access to info tidbits; who wasn't above "stealing" a story that he thought other journalists were sitting on; who believed in unvarnished partisanship; who didn't think he needed years, or even minutes, of seasoning in the provinces before taking on the U.S. president; who relished throwing dead cats into Democratic temples but wasn't above torturing Republican kittens; and who was more interested in being first than being absolutely accurate.

Mr. Drudge attempts to chronicle his pioneering Internet life and times in "Drudge Manifesto." But I can't really recommend. His collection. Of sentence fragments. To anybody seeking an intelligible account of. How Drudge. Gave American journalism. A much-needed kick in the tuchas. Besides Mr. Drudge's sentence-fragment tic, he RunsWordsTogetherForDramaticEffect as if under the spell of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, making readers struggle to follow his tale.

The real pity, though, is that Mr. Drudge and his credited ghost, Julia Phillips ("You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again"), neglect to milk the Internet badboy's saga for all it's worth: Imagine a plot line mixing the Horatio Alger myth and the hijinks of "The Front Page" with the vigilance of "All the President's Men" and the hilarity of "Scoop" and you can sense the possibilities.

A born loser and congenital loner, Mr. Drudge barely finished high school in the Washington suburb of Takoma Park before gravitating to Los Angeles in the early '90s. There he got a job in the CBS Studios gift shop and an apartment in the divey Hollywood and Vine area. For reasons apparently unknown even to his autobiographer, he started snooping in trash cans for entertainment gossip. Papa Drudge bought him a computer, and he got connected to the Internet.

What did the loser have to lose? With a cunning born of desperation, the sort known to every punk rocker ever to find an audience by banging out three energetic chords, Mr. Drudge embraced the Do It Yourself ethic and homesteaded a space on the Internet. Almost overnight, he began to fill the ether with raw and gossipy journalism, some of which helped stagger a president.

What Mr. Drudge understood about the Internet from the get-go—and many media properties have yet to absorb—was that not every member of its audience wanted to read a repurposed daily paper or a 24-hour news channel masquerading as a Web site. They wanted a "news portal" that offered the feral variety of the Web, not the world according to AOL Time Warner or CBS/Viacom/Paramount.

The Drudge homepage still includes a menu of hot political stories and links to goofball articles and columnists collected from thousands of sites. Among his innovations was a homepage with direct access to wire services, as well as an e-mail list to alert the faithful to breaking stories. For these reasons, the Drudge Report remains the political news portal of choice among my set, which includes commies, conservatives, libertarians, liberals and even folks on the middle of the wing.

While we're all titillated by the "exclusives" that decorate the Drudge Report—"SECRET WHITE HOUSE VIDEO SHOWS CLINTON WITH OTHER INTERN!"—we know from experience not to believe them until more credible outlets corroborate. Although Mr. Drudge dons the hairshirt for his biggest goof—he reported that another Clinton bootblack, Sidney Blumenthal, beat his wife, and he still faces a libel suit for doing so—he demands ethical equivalence with other media entities. Didn't NBC mistakenly identify Richard Jewell as the Atlanta bomber? Didn't ABC News prematurely report Bob Hope's death? And, besides, Mr. Drudge says, I retracted the Blumenthal story within 12 hours.

By insisting that readers acknowledge his scoops without recording his mistakes—that Clinton's distinguishing mark was an eagle tattoo; that Bill "might" have fathered a love child with a Little Rock prostitute—"Drudge Manifesto" begins to resemble the season-highlights film of a cellar-dwelling NFL team. Kick-offs returned for touchdowns! Heroic goal-line stands! But no mention that the team went 5-11 for the season.

On the long shot that Mr. Drudge's accuracy problem is a correctable vice and not a congenital disability, here's hoping that he makes the best of his six-year apprenticeship and continues his wild experiment, inspiring scrappy outsiders to make their voices heard. More Drudgism! I say. But maybe a little less Drudge.

Sarah Palin was on the receiving end of a prank call last week when a Canadian DJ pretending to be the president of France managed to get through to the governor directly. In 2006, Daniel Engber explained how world leaders actually make phone calls. The article is reprinted below.

(Click here for an "Explainer" on why some world leaders still send telegrams.)

President Bush called the prime minister of Denmark this week to offer moral support as anti-Danish riots continued throughout the world. Last week, he called to congratulate Evo Morales, the newly elected president of Bolivia. The week before that, Bush had the new prime minister of Canada on the horn. How does the president call up other world leaders?

He has his people call their people. White House operators are known for being able to get hold of just about anyone. If Bush needs to talk to Tony Blair, his situation room operators get in touch with the staff at 10 Downing Street. They set up a time to chat and patch through the call when that time comes.

White House operators have special phone numbers for some world leaders. They might use the cell-phone number of a leader's aide in one place, and call the number for a situation room in another. In some cases, they could go through the main switchboards like everybody else.

Some leader-to-leader calls apparently do arrive via the listed phone numbers. On Jan. 27, Jacques Chirac received a call from a radio DJ in Quebec who had convinced the French operators that he was Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. According to the DJ, he called Chirac's office and was told that the president would call him back. Chirac did so half an hour later.

World leaders have to put up with prank calls all the time. As a general practice, one leader's staff members will arrange to call back the staff members of another. (If someone claiming to be from the White House called Buckingham Palace, for example, the queen's staff could call the White House back to confirm.)

This verification process doesn't always work. In 2003, a pair of radio DJs in Miami had a woman with a Cuban accent call for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. She claimed she was one of Fidel Castro's operators, and that Castro was at a secret location where he couldn't be called back. It took about 10 tries to get through, but the DJs finally weaseled a direct number out of a Venezuelan officer. (A few months later they successfully called Castro, posing as Chavez.)

In 1990, then-President George Bush returned a phone call to a man posing as the president of Iran. "We were suspicious and began checking," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, "but, ultimately, the president needed to make the call as part of the check."

Sometimes a legitimate call from a world leader doesn't go through. Following the Soviet coup in 1991, newspapers reported that President Bush made at least two attempts to check in with Mikhail Gorbachev by phone. The operator at the Kremlin told the one at the White House that Gorby wasn't available.

Bonus Explainer: For calls to Russia, there's always the famous "red phone." President Kennedy first suggested "the hotline" after the Cuban Missile Crisis. A direct teletype link to Moscow was set up in 1963. The hotline didn't include a true telephone until the early 1970s, and even then communications were almost always sent in written form.

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

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev were among those who sent telegrams to Barack Obama last week upon his election as president of the United States. In 2004, Brendan I. Koerner explained why world leaders still send telegrams to one another. The article is reprinted below.

(Click here for an "Explainer" on how world leaders reach each other by telephone.)

The New York Times reports that German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder sent President Bush a congratulatory telegram on Wednesday, urging cooperation on issues ranging from security to climate change. Do politicians and diplomats really still send telegrams?

Archaic as it may seem, Schröder actually sent a telegram. It's standard practice when heads of state exchange ceremonial notes, whether to congratulate one another on political victories, mark national holidays, or offer condolences. The telegram remains the preferred means of communication partly because of tradition—Schröder, of course, could have sent a letter via FedEx instead, but that's not the way it's been done in the modern era. But a telegram is also practical for ceremonial purposes: An e-mail or fax doesn't have the same elegance, nor are they quite as suitable for framing.

Rank-and-file diplomats, on the other hand, are using telegrams less and less nowadays. American embassies and consulates still occasionally use telegrams—"cables" in diplo-speak—to send memos to one another or back to State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. They stick with cables when they want a paper trail, when Internet access is lackluster, or when they want to ensure confidentiality. (Click here for a lengthy 1998 memo on telegram preparation, including guidelines on how to produce confidential telegrams.) But the practice has tailed off as the foreign service has become more adept at e-mail security. The State Department estimates that its far-flung employees send 66 million official e-mails annually, and just 1 million cables. And the department has plans to phase out cables entirely by the end of 2006.

As recently as the early 1990s, the telegram was the primary means by which American diplomats relayed sensitive information from distant locales. This past June, for example, a secret 1989 telegram from a Beijing-based consular officer, James Huskey, was declassified. It had been the most detailed account Washington received regarding the atrocities at Tiananmen Square and included Huskey's personal account of seeing upward of 300 bodies that had been crushed by tanks.

If you'd like to follow Chancellor Schröder's lead and send your own congratulatory telegram to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., you can attempt to do so using Western Union's online telegram service. But it'll cost you $14.99, and there's no guarantee the deliveryman will pass muster at the White House gates.

Update: Western Union suspended its 150-year-old telegram service in January of 2006.

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

Explainer thanks Chester Crocker of Georgetown University, Terry Ann Knopf at Tufts University, and Kay Khandpur for asking the question.

One of the perks of being a pro athlete, you would think, is that you don't have to maintain a résumé. I'm guessing that Kobe Bryant has never suffered the indignity of typing up an "Honors & Awards" section or had to remember to put the good paper in the laser printer before running off a dozen copies of his CV. But not every athlete is Kobe Bryant. Let's assume you're a ballplayer on the fringes—you graduated from a college that's better known for honing academic credentials than frontcourt fundamentals, or maybe you didn't play college basketball at all. I've got bad news for you, friend: You're going to have to update that résumé—and quick.

As the NBA season gets under way and the league pulls back the curtain for its brightest stars, a lot of lesser-lights get pink slips. Many of these players look to take their game overseas, where an online résumé is a requirement if you want to land an on-court job. While the NBA is a self-contained circuit, the European leagues and those beyond are sprawling, often loosely connected organizations. Out on the pro-basketball frontier, teams with wildly disparate budgets search for talent across dozens of countries. It makes sense, then, that basketball's talent marketplace has evolved into something like a combination of Monster.com and Match.com, with a healthy dose of Craigslist-style unruliness.

It doesn't matter whether you're a 15-year-old Bulgarian looking for a team or an American former first-round NBA draft pick—it's time to start social networking. The first step is to get an agent. If you're not a college stud who caught the gaze of a European superagent, there are plenty of workaday representatives to choose from. Many agencies specialize in a certain type of player: Global Sports Plaza, for example, touts itself as "the first Macedonian-American based" agency. It's the agent's job not only to whisper in the ear of potential employers but also to jam their inboxes with your credentials.

One reason for the proliferation of the online résumé is speed. Coaches and general managers are under pressure to make decisions fast, and these tight deadlines mean that expediency—can you hop on the train from Brussels to Berlin in an hour?—can be as important as talent. John Patrick, the head coach and general manager of BG 74 Göttingen, a team in Germany's top league, maintains a database of players he's monitoring and also "spot checks" the 10 to 20 unsolicited player résumés he gets in his inbox daily. If Patrick is sufficiently interested, he'll double back to check stats, watch game tape, make phone calls to past coaches, and (depending on time and resources) go to see the player in person.

While the hoops CV serves more as a trailer than the full picture, it's still important to make yourself stand out in a sea of 7-footers. If you're at the top of the basketball matchmaking pool, then your Web presence is most likely a reminder that you are alive, don't weigh 300 pounds, and do, in fact, still play basketball. Former NBA-er Lamond Murray's CV, for instance, stresses that he "is still only 34 years old, injury free, and in excellent shape."

Those of us who aren't former first-round picks need to craft a fuller picture. While a glamorous college pedigree and gaudy stats may get you a second look, there are other variables, like the ability to cope with a new culture, that are just as crucial when making the leap overseas. It's just as important to "explain who you are," Patrick says. "Explain your successes on and off the court."

If you're looking for a model, you could do worse than copying off Gabriel Hughes, an out-of-work center from Cal-Berkeley who's now represented by the Dutch agency Court Side. Along with his height, weight, and stats, Hughes' résumé includes a link to a personal highlight reel—team execs look at online video to uncover non-numerical details like gimpy knees, a poor attitude, or third-rate competition—as well as a 300-word personal statement that recaps his professional highs and lows. "Big men take longer to develop and Gabriel Hughes is a prime example of this axiom," the promotional copy begins. More rationalizations quickly follow: "He got a 6-figure contract last season to play for Al-Wasl in Saudi Arabia. While the money was good, Hughes had his season shortened by injury (and the one foreigner on the court rule did not help his stats as he had to share playing time with the other American on the team)." After getting the negatives out of the way, Hughes' CV focuses on the bright spots: "For a 7-footer, Gabe runs the floor well, has leaping ability, good hands and doesn't mind contact. He also has mental toughness, having survived some of the roughest/dirtiest play. Hughes has always been able to rebound, having led the leagues in Japan and Ireland in rebounding." And in conclusion: "He plays hard and hustles. A family man, he has an excellent attitude on and off the court."

John Ebeling, an agent with the Megasport agency in Italy, says that Hughes' realistic, explanatory CV is far preferable to one that overhypes your game. James White's online résumé, for example—"Superhuman athleticism and leaping ability. Most athletic player in college basketball while playing for Cincinnati. … Dunked for the first time as a 12-year old"—might come off as a bit over-the-top. Rather than making yourself sound like a human highlight reel, Ebeling prefers technical information: plays multiple positions and excels in an up-tempo offense, not capable of jumping over small children.

Along with the good, Ebeling suggests including a sliver of the not so good. It's a dreaded question for job applicants: What are your weaknesses? This doesn't mean "going off the deep end with actual negatives," he says. If you are an atrocious defensive player, keep a lid on it. Instead, pick a positive part of your game and say you're going to improve it. Alexander Lutter provides a textbook case of snatching self-congratulation from the jaws of self-deprecation: "[Lutter] is his own harshest critic and despite his ability to easily make defences—and gravity—seem irrelevant it is difficult to find a harder working player."

One thing that the basketball-résumé writer needn't worry about is spelling. While the typical job applicant seeks to avoid having his CV sound like 99-cent Viagra spam, this is nothing to fret about in the hoops world. Sure, English is the lingua franca of the basketball world, but most agencies that represent players abroad aren't overloaded with fluent speakers. So don't fret if your representative posts this sort of gobbledygook: "[Charles Gaines'] appearance, his forcefulness, his generosity in defensive assistance, his intimidation and his consistance makes him a determinant player, able to change by himself the dynamic of a team." Just as long as they spell your name right, you're probably OK.

If you don't trust an agent even to get that much right, you can always make your own résumé. For the player going it alone, the Web site Eurobasket offers a "Make-It-Pro" service. According to Eurobasket, not playing pro basketball may be the biggest mistake of your life: "If you feel that you are a quality player and you are able to contribute to a professional team overseas, please do not miss your opportunity." For just $39.99 for three months (or $105.99 for a full year), Eurobasket will list your online profile alongside those of 120,000 other players and coaches. While there are other companies that help players spread an online résumé, Eurobasket has the advantage of listing all of its free agents together, giving the impression that you're a real player, not just a rec-league bruiser.

As an aspiring professional hoops player myself—who isn't, really?—40 bucks seems like a small price to pay for a shot at fulfilling a lifelong dream. The first step of writing my basketball profile: taking the résumé I used to land my current job and deleting everything except my name and contact info. Step 2: adding my date of birth, nationality, height, and a position. (Remember, this needs to look professional: I'm 6-foot-3, so I'm calling myself a guard.) Next, some florid prose: "A team oriented player, Hannon's interior passing often makes big men look better than they actually are and his jump shot spreads defenses and frees up teammates." And finally a bit of self-criticism: "Needs to improve inbounding." You can look at the final product here.



I grab my credit card, submit the résumé to Eurobasket, and I'm officially a free agent. But not for long. A short while later, I get an e-mail from Marek Wojtera, manager of the site. "I am really confused about adding your record to the database," he writes. "The problem is that Make-It-Pro service is aimed at the players who have real chance to make it to professional basketball." Ouch. And it gets worse: "If I were the coach of a basketball club, I would not consider you as the candidate to join their pro roster. You may have extremely impressive stats, but if they are for playing at the local team, which is not recognized anywhere, you have really 0% chance to be called for any try-out. ... I do not see any real chance for you to make it to pro basketball and I believe it will be only wasting your money to try it."



Despite that e-mail, I'm not ready to quit. Did Rudy quit when everyone told him he wasn't good enough to play football at Notre Dame? Did Michael Jordan quit after being cut from his high-school basketball team? I don't think so. So, if any general managers are reading this, don't be discouraged by Marek Wojtera. I may not be good enough for Eurobasket, but I'm always ready to hop on the train from Brussels to Berlin—just as soon as I get home from work.

Return to article

My Basketball Résumé

Hannon, Elliot

Elliotprohoops@gmail.com

12/24/78

6-foot-3, 200 lbs

Position: 2/3

USA

Bio:

Elliot is an excellent perimeter shooter, but isn't afraid to take on a much much smaller defender on the post. He has a knack for finding space and scoring on the break and excels at shooting the 15-18 foot jumper off the dribble or coming off a screen. A team oriented player, Hannon's interior passing often makes big men look better than they actually are and his jump shot spreads defenses and frees up teammates. Selfless on both ends of the court, as well as cool under pressure, any good coach would want him in the game at the foul line with the game on the line. At this point, Hannon is a student of the game and will literally be like having another coach on the floor. Occasionally compared to Jimmy Chitwood on the court and Gene Wilder off it. Needs to improve inbounding.



Stats:

2008-2009: YoCo's Hoopsters (JCC): games 22.7 pts., 6.7 rebs., 2.1 asts.

2007-2008: YoCo's Hoopsters (JCC): games 24.2 pts., 6.3 rebs., 3.2 asts.



Awards/Achievements:

TBD

FreeDarko is the Web's leading destination for the obsessive, overliterate, free-thinking NBA fan. The basketball collective's new print extravaganza, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, mines all of FreeDarko's obsessions. There are incisive profiles of players, from LeBron James to Leandro Barbosa; unique statistics (the dunk-to-layup ratio among NBA big men); and—perhaps the book's most startling innovation—the Periodic Table of Style. Below, Nathaniel Friedman explains the table's genesis and meaning. Once you've read his introduction, take in a slide-show essay featuring Style Guide depictions of Gilbert Arenas and Rasheed Wallace as well as excerpts from the Arenas and Wallace essays in The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac. (Read more book excerpts here and buy the book from Amazon.)

High-school coaches try to drill into us that basketball is a game of X's and O's, but anyone who's watched or played the game knows that's not true. Driving to the hoop, finding your man in traffic, making a wide-open three—these aren't straightforward propositions. Everything you do on the basketball court requires some level of problem-solving, something each player does in his own way, based on his strengths, weaknesses, and even his personality.



With this in mind, FreeDarko created the Style Guide. The Style Guide exists at the nexus of generic description and high-def motion capture, representing players' games as a composite of descriptive text and symbols—what we call the Periodic Table of Style. Kobe Bryant, maneuvering between defenders, isn't just driving toward the basket; he's exemplifying the practice of "lock and key." Carmelo Anthony doesn't display excellent footwork; he dances the salsa, takes baby steps, and bounds like a deer.

This is the vast vocabulary of style, and how each player pieces these components together to make the court their own is, in effect, who they are. NBA players have bodies, minds, and histories that factor into everything they do on the court. But the basic building blocks of style, basketball's instantaneous language, is certainly within our reach as students of the game. All is contained in the Periodic Table of Style, and from there, all men will be spoken for.

At this point, the FreeDarko Style Guide can be applied only in retrospect, through a second-by-second breakdown of film. Hopefully, though, someday networks the world over will build computers that map out replays in these terms and maybe even provide scripts to radio broadcasters. It may sound like a return to Morse Code or a government frequency devoted to UFO secrets, but to NBA enthusiasts, "sand dollar ... rocket ... sea gull ... mystery novel ... drain" will be the future of communication.

Click here for a slide-show essay on FreeDarko's Periodic Table of Style.

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Let's stipulate: Summum is weird. First off, having been founded in 1975, it violates my own base-line spiritual rule: "Never believe in any faith younger than you are." With its pyramids, and mummification, and nectars, and hairless blue aliens, Summum is an existential stew of transcendental Gnosticism and particle physics: Isaac Luria meets Star Trek Voyager. But, as my husband would be quick to point out, yours truly has been known to fly into a panic when a meat fork touches her milk sink, shrieking and driving the offending utensil deep into the dirt of the kitchen avocado plant and then waiting the ritual interval until its kosherness is mystically restored. All of which merely illuminates the First Aphorism of Religion Cases: Only the religious convictions of other people are weird. Yours are perfectly rational.

Mormons settled the town of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, in 1850. Since 1971, the town's "Pioneer Park" has featured the usual assortment of gardens, trees, and other historical relics, which sit alongside a massive permanent monument to the Ten Commandments—one of many such monuments donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles (working to reduce juvenile delinquency) and Cecil B. DeMille (working to promote his Charlton Heston movie The Ten Commandments). In 2003, Summum's founder, Summum "Corky" Ra, requested permission to donate a monument to the park celebrating the Seven Aphorisms upon which their beliefs are based. (The Seven Aphorisms are, in brief: the principles of psychokinesis, correspondence, vibration, opposition, rhythm, cause and effect, and gender.) Summum holds that these aphorisms were revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai, but he demurred because his people were not yet ready for them. The Decalogue was the rewrite.

The Pleasant Grove City Council denied Summum's request to erect a monument. Summum sued, alleging that their free speech rights had been violated because the city could not display the Ten Commandments while denying the Seven Aphorisms. They lost in federal district court, prevailed before a three-judge panel of the 10^th Circuit, and then blew the minds of the entire 10^th Circuit, which ultimately declined to hear the case en banc. The city appealed. This brings me to the Second Aphorism of Religion Cases: They invariably represent the most forcefully argued, passionately defended constitutional gibberish ever produced in the federal courts. Whether Summum was denied a space in the park because Mormons think Summum is weird or whether there is some kind of equal right of access for all religious groups to erect monuments in public spaces is a question that lies at the murky interstices of doctrine dealing with religion, speech, government speech, and the law about the uses of public forums. It's an unprecedented mess or, as Justice Anthony Kennedy puts it late in the morning, "a tyranny of labels."

Summum isn't before the court as a religion case. It was brought as a free speech case, and, as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice learns about three minutes into oral argument this morning, if he wins this case as a result of the court's free speech jurisprudence, he will be back in five years to lose it under the court's religion doctrine. The more zealously the city claims ownership of its Ten Commandments monument, the more it looks to be promoting religion in violation of the Constitution's Establishment Clause.

Chief Justice John Roberts puts it to him this way: "You're really just picking your poison. The more you say that the monument is 'government speech' to get out of the Free Speech Clause, the more you're walking into a trap under the Establishment Clause. … What is the government doing supporting the Ten Commandments?"

Sekulow replies that the display is 100 percent Establishment Clause kosher in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in a 2005 Ten Commandments case, which upheld a Texas display of them (on the same day it struck down a rather similar display in Kentucky). Justice Stephen Breyer was the deciding vote in each of those cases, which—read together—stand for the current Third Aphorism of Religion Cases: Government establishment of religion is only impermissible when it freaks out Justice Stephen Breyer.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggests that the difference between the Ten Commandments display in Utah and the permissible one in Texas is that the Texas monument had a "40-year history, and nobody seemed troubled by it." Sekulow retorts that the Utah display has a 36-year history, at which point Justice Antonin Scalia chuckles, "I think 38 years is the cutoff."

Sekulow is arguing that the city's display of the Ten Commandments needs to be analyzed under "government speech" doctrine and not as a debate about the park as a public forum. Once you have entered the domain of government speech, the state may pick and choose among messages without running afoul of the First Amendment. The idea is that governments get to speak their own values, even if they can't favor anyone else's. And Sekulow says a donated monument becomes government speech the very moment the government assumes control of it.

Justice John Paul Stevens wonders whether just calling something "government speech" means you can reject any one monument over another because you dislike its message. Justice David Souter says if that is the case, the city's decision about whether or not to accept control of a monument on the basis of its message is "control with a vengeance."

Of all the Summum aphorisms, my favorite is probably "everything vibrates." Whoever wrote that had yet to meet Justice Clarence Thomas, who spends this morning, as he does every morning of oral argument, in perfect, motionless repose.

The Bush administration is in this case on the side of Pleasant Grove City. Stevens asks Deputy Solicitor General Daryl Joseffer whether the government, when it erected the Vietnam memorial, could have decided "not to put up the names of any homosexual soldiers." Yes, says Joseffer: "When the government is speaking, it can choose who to memorialize and who not to."

Breyer responds that all this law is making him crazy: "The problem I have is that we seem to be applying these subcategories in a very absolute way." Thus spake the vote-one-way, vote-the-other-way justice of the last two Ten Commandment cases. Now he is balking at "artificial kinds of conceptual framework." Thus, the Fourth Aphorism for Religion Cases: Doctrine is not your friend. Those six-part tests for limited public forums vs. designated public forums vs. displays of religious items on public grounds sometimes create more problems than they solve.

Justice Samuel Alito observes that there is a difference between free speech, in the classic sense of protests, leafleting, and speech-making, and hauling around massive granite monuments, then demanding public-forum analysis be applied to "the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial." Joseffer says that when the government is "acting as curator," it can engage in viewpoint discrimination. In other words, it can choose the speech. "You can't run a museum if you have to accept everything, right?" says Scalia.

Pamela Harris has 30 minutes to represent Summum, and Roberts hits her with the hypos: "You have a Statue of Liberty; do we have to have a statue of despotism? Do we have to put any president who wants to be on Mount Rushmore?" Harris replies that if a government wants to claim its displays represent "government speech," then it needs to "adopt" or "convert" the privately donated monument into its own message. Scalia wonders why the government isn't adopting the monuments merely by taking ownership. Souter thinks that if the dispute turns on formal government "adoption" of a monument, it's a "silly exercise in formality." Harris responds that it's not just formality. Pleasant Grove refuses to endorse the message of the Ten Commandments as its own precisely because it wants to "have it both ways," sidestepping Establishment Clause concerns, on the one hand, and eluding Free Speech problems on the other. Then she and Scalia do several laps around the speedway over what a formal "adoption" of a privately donated monument would even look like.

Even Ginsburg balks at Harris' assumption that monuments and speeches are identical for First Amendment purposes: "From time immemorial," Ginsburg says, "public parks have been places where people can speak their minds. But I don't know of any tradition that says people can come to the park with monuments and just put them up." Even the most doctrine-loving justices seem to be bothered by the practical problem of city parks becoming cluttered with hate monuments, weird stuff, and, eventually, rusted-out cars. But the problems on the other side are equally glaring. Cities should not be allowed to exclude unpopular groups based only on the content of their message. The state should not be able to keep gay soldiers' names off the Vietnam Memorial. Just ask Moses if it stopped being speech just because it was carved in stone.

And thus we arrive at the Fifth (and final) Aphorism for Religion Cases: Pulling a crystalline, cogent rule out of the murk of the court's First Amendment, public forum, and Establishment Clause doctrine is an act of creation too complicated for mere mortals. In fact, after this morning's wild constitutional ride, anyone searching for clear, cogent rules need look no further than my favorite Summum aphorism: Everything vibrates.

Last month, I disclosed the contents of my computer to Slate readers: I went over the 18 programs and services that I use to surf the Web, manage e-mail, make phone calls, jot down reporting notes, and write articles.

I also asked readers for their own computing tips. The response was enormous. I got more than 100 e-mails—and dozens of "Fray" comments—from people who thought I'd overlooked certain apps or that I'd been using stuff that was hopelessly old-school. I've been trying out many of your suggestions since, and I've distilled them into this short list.

As always, if you've got any more suggestions, please send me an e-mail or post to "The Fray" and let me know. (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.)

Digsby. For many years, I'd been using a program called Trillian for all my instant-messaging needs. I loved that it connected to several different IM services (you can chat with friends on AOL, Yahoo, etc.) and that it had a slick, customizable interface. But lots of readers told me to ditch Trillian in favor of either Pidgin or Digsby. Each of these worked pretty much like Trillian, but they've both got one extra feature—they connect to the Jabber network, the same protocol that Google's chat service uses. That means both programs let you chat to Gmailers, too. (You've got to pay extra to get Trillian to do this.) Digsby is the winner because it adds alerts from Twitter and Facebook, making it a one-stop app for all-day procrastination.

AVG Anti-Virus. A few readers chided me for failing to mention any anti-virus programs in my line-up. (Mac and Linux users, you're exempt from this discussion.) The truth is, I hate anti-virus apps, and I've never used them very diligently. Many are resource-hungry (they slow down your PC and spin your hard drive for hours on end), and they're always asking you to update their virus lists, usually with some kind of pitch to get you to shell out for a "Pro" version. I'm not suggesting anti-virus apps are useless—I'm sure they've saved many machines. But in my years of using Windows computers, I've never had a serious infection, and my data is sufficiently well-backed-up that a serious infection won't bring me down. (And as I said last month, I do use an anti-spyware program, Spybot Search & Destroy.)

Still, to please the scolds, I went out in search of a good anti-virus app. AVG was the best I found: It doesn't seem to use every bit of computing power to scan my machine, and it doesn't constantly pressure me to buy an upgrade. (The basic version is free.) I set it to analyze my computer when I'm asleep, and so far, it hasn't worked my hard drive hard enough to wake me up.

VLC media player. I'd forgotten to add this great video app to my list, and lots of readers reminded me of my omission. If you download many videos in many different formats, you need VLC. This fast, free player works on Mac, Windows, and Linux machines and seems to handle just about every type of video file you throw at it, even files that are slightly broken.

PeerGuardian 2. This app prevents Internet addresses that are known to be harmful from connecting to your machine while you're using peer-to-peer file-trading programs. It's hard to know whether PeerGuardian is really keeping you safe from malware (or perhaps from detection by Hollywood), but several perhaps paranoid readers called it a must-have, and it works quietly enough in the background that I see no harm in keeping it on.

Evernote. Many readers were puzzled by my note-taking strategy—I keep a single text file and use it to store all of my thoughts, to-do lists, and other urgent messages. Lots of people told me to use Evernote instead. In fact, I've long been a fan of this online service that promises to store everything you put in it—pictures, text notes, Web pages, anything—forever. (Read my review of Evernote here.) Its best feature is its ability to extract text from photos: Imagine that you're attending a conference and you meet a guy who works at Microsoft. To remember him, just snap a picture with your cell-phone cam and stick it into Evernote. In a few minutes' time, the software will have crunched the picture, even converting your new friend's conference name tag into searchable text. So when you search Evernote for "Microsoft," you'll see the guy's photo and name tag. I still find my text-file method easier for most of my notes, but for remembering Web pages and things that I snap with my iPhone on the street, I often rely on Evernote.

Foxit Reader. This Windows app opens PDF files quicker and with fewer crashes than Adobe Reader. What's not to love?

MediaMonkey. Last month, I complained that I'd found few good alternatives to iTunes. Apple's music program looks good and is easy to use, but it's slow to load up, and it's constantly bugging me to install slightly revised updates, a process that can take 10 minutes or more. Many readers shared my frustration with iTunes, and several told me that I'd have a ball with a Windows program called MediaMonkey.

But after installing it, I can only give MediaMonkey a half-hearted recommendation. True, the app is packed with features that are great for people who are obsessive about keeping their MP3 collections under control. If many of your songs are missing "metadata"—song or album names, release dates, etc.—MediaMonkey can surely help you out. (It can extract tags from Amazon and other online repositories, and it's got several search options to let you see which songs are missing which tags.) Trouble is, you'll need to look up an online how-to—here's one, and here's another—to figure out how to use the software. MediaMonkey's interface is neither pretty nor intuitive, and it took me a while to understand how it was laying out my music and how to get it to do the many great things readers promised.

Other warnings, if you're thinking about switching: The app can't play any copy-protected songs or movies that you've purchased through the iTunes store (which, to be sure, is Apple's and the music industry's fault, not MediaMonkey's; consider buying your music from Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store). Also, some people have reported trouble getting MediaMonkey to hook up to their iPhones. But, hey, MediaMonkey is free (a slightly more feature-packed Gold version sells for $20), and it installs quickly, so give it a try. You might well find it better than iTunes.

Backup. How should you safeguard your precious data against your computer's inevitable demise? You should back it up. But how? In my last roundup, I didn't recommend any sort of backup program. That's because I don't use one—while I'm careful about saving my data, my strategies are kludgy, mainly involving manually copying important files and folders to external drives. I realize this is madness, and many readers offered better ways. But I'm still searching for the perfect backup strategy. If you've got a great backup tip, please let me know. I'll report back in a later column.

Barack Obama ran the most technologically sophisticated presidential campaign in history. In addition to siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from his online fans, Obama's team recognized the Internet's capacity to attract and organize volunteers across the country. His bloggy, YouTube-addled supporters helped shape the larger media narrative surrounding his bid; they overwhelmed social news sites like Digg and Reddit, trumpeting McCain or Clinton missteps into blogospherewide news. Most important, Obama relied on the Web's social-networking capabilities to channel boundless enthusiasm into effective campaign activity. His site encouraged supporters to connect with one another to launch their own voter-registration drives, phone banks, and door-to-door canvassing operations—efforts that proved pivotal to Obama's victory in the primaries and in last week's general election.

But the campaign's over. What will become of this new Web network now that candidate Obama has become President Obama?

Though no one in the Obama camp will discuss the specifics, Democratic Web guru Joe Trippi and others believe that the White House Web site will transform into a social network—a kind of Facebook for citizens, a place where people can learn about and work toward passing the president's agenda. Trippi argues that if Obama can use the Web to spark the same well-organized fervor for his policy goals as he did for his campaign, "I think it's going to be one of the most powerful presidencies we've seen since FDR, and maybe even more powerful. Even the best presidents have never had a way to connect directly with millions of Americans—Obama will have that."

That, anyway, is the dream. In reality, President Obama faces a bunch of challenges in transitioning his Web network from a campaign tool into a force for passing legislation. Campaign finance rules likely prohibit him from running My.BarackObama.com, his sprawling social network, out of the White House. Instead, he'll need to build a new noncampaign site and ask the country to join it. (It's unclear whether the site will be hosted on the main White House domain—Whitehouse.gov—or at some other dedicated address, like the transition site Change.gov.) If he does so, tens of millions of people would probably heed his call.

The key, of course, is what happens after everybody signs up—we've all registered for social networks before and done nothing more useful on them than SuperPoke! Obama's challenge is to make his online presence exciting, to get users as fired up to pass his tax or health care policies as they were about getting him to the White House. This will be difficult; online communities are fragile, tenuous associations, and Obama's Web coalition—millions of people with various competing interests—could very well splinter when tasked with working toward specific policy goals. It's easy to make a viral video in support of a vague, unobjectionable notion like "change." Will.i.am and Scarlett Johansson might have a tougher time coming up with a catchy ditty in support of expanding the mortgage interest tax credit.

During the campaign, Obama often discussed his plans to use the Web to reconnect Americans to their government. For instance, he wants to let people post comments on pending legislation. He'll also put up detailed information about what the White House is doing each day, as well as specific ways for Americans to get involved: Call this congressman, help get the bill through that committee, fight this lobbying group. Thomas Gensemer, a managing partner at Blue State Digital—the political consulting firm that helped build Obama's online campaign operations and Change.gov—points out that these initiatives go far beyond what you can do on President Bush's Web site. In addition to some fascinating virtual tours, today's Whitehouse.gov offers the opportunity to sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter about the administration's activities—and that's about the only interaction you get with the president.

A more engaging site, Gensemer says, will help Obama cultivate groups of "superactivists"—the tens of thousands of especially motivated people who, during the campaign, took time off from work and relocated to other states in order to volunteer full-time. Let's imagine that Obama's ambitious health care plan runs into trouble in Congress. The social network might help him identify the few hundred or few thousand health care activists in key congressional districts who agree with his proposals. In the same way that Facebook lets you plan a lavish birthday dinner for yourself, the White House Web site would let activists hold gatherings to lobby their legislators on Obama's behalf. "If a congressman goes home and sees a town hall meeting with 1,000 people in their district, that matters," Gensemer says.

Is this a realistic scenario? "Congress is the great shock absorber of American politics. Movements go there to die," says Micah Sifry, co-founder of an annual technology and politics conference called the Personal Democracy Forum. Organized interests—the health care industry, say—wield influence in this environment because they've got the money and the patience to be there every day and keep pressing their agenda. At its best, says Sifry, the social network will help Obama develop a counterweight to those groups. "The White House has always had the bully pulpit to go over the heads of Congress through the mass media," he says. "What Obama now has is the ability to go between the legs of members of Congress."

But that presumes that all of Obama's social-networking friends will support his agenda—and what if that's not the case? What happens when conservatives flock to the White House Web site to post nasty comments opposing Obama's stem-cell policy or if Sean Hannity urges his audience to use the site's tools to plan gatherings protesting Obama's tax plan? Even Obama's supporters are likely to disagree with him from time to time; already, there are online petitions and Facebook groups calling on him to skip over Larry Summers and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Cabinet positions. The opposition might be especially hairy during periods of national emergency—if Obama decides to launch military action, would the White House Web site fill up with comments showing that the country is not fully behind him?

During the campaign, we saw one vivid example of how Obama might handle online protests of his policies—he'll let them go on. In June, the senator announced that he had switched positions on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He decided to vote for an updated version of the bill even though it offered immunity to telecom companies that had worked with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, a measure that many of his supporters vehemently opposed.

Protestors immediately took to the campaign's site; a group urging Obama to reject the bill swelled to more than 20,000 members, making it by far the site's largest. Obama didn't change his mind on the eavesdropping bill. But neither did the campaign take any steps to shut down the anti-FISA group, and shortly before voting for the bill, Obama posted a lengthy note to the group explaining why he'd voted for the bill, and his policy staff answered hundreds of comments from the group explaining the nuances of the senator's position.

Alan Rosenblatt, the associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, says that if Obama does the same thing while in office, he might be able to blunt some of the inevitable criticism of his proposals. "If there's a level of back-and-forth, it creates a sense of democracy," Rosenblatt says—and that sense of democracy ends up serving the candidate well. The FISA protest took place during a key moment in the Obama campaign—just after he'd locked up the nomination, at a time when many volunteers were deciding how much work to do for the campaign. I called up Chrisi West, a 29-year-old Obama supporter who opposed his position on FISA but who, nevertheless, went on to become one of the campaign's most active supporters in her home state of Virginia. West told me that Obama's response on the eavesdropping bill helped convince her that the online community wasn't incidental to Obama—that he actually respected what people thought of his positions. That kind of openness only pushed people to work harder, West said, and when he takes office, "we'll all be ready to jump in when we're needed."

It remains to be seen, though, whether more casual online supporters will take up arms for Obama when he takes office. The sort of Web site the Obama team seems to be envisioning—one in which the president and his citizens hold deep discussions about the controversial issues of the day—will surely be much less focused than My.BarackObama.com, which had a singular goal: to get Barack Obama elected. Obama's campaign Web site connected disparate people who shared a common passion; the White House social network will connect people who disagree with each other and with the president—and whose goals might be in conflict. So far, the Web hasn't had a great record of bridging social divisions. If Obama can change that, maybe he really is a different kind of politician.

Based on the board game that has teased minds and strained friendships since 1982, Trivial Pursuit: America Plays (syndicated, check listings) makes for an approachable little quiz show, a welcome companion for a half-hour of afternoon ironing or insomniac aimlessness. Its hook is its neighborly YouTube populism. At the show’s Web site, average Americans (or "folks," as one always wants to call them after an election season) upload video clips of themselves asking questions. In the studio, standing on a six-spoked set paying homage to the home game, three pleasant contestants attempt to answer them. The host—Christopher Knight, once and forever Peter Brady—gives off vibes indicative only of good heath and family fun. The stakes are agreeably modest, and there's always a winner. If a studio contestant does not earn the booty accumulated in the "bank," then the folks from the Web videos get to divide it. It is somehow cheering to know that you may win 700 bucks and change just for wondering aloud what the capital of Belgium might be.

Brussels, Raleigh, Oslo, Ecuador; copper, the opossum, Alf; Prince, King Lear, Stephen King; Old Ironsides, Margaret Thatcher, Fanny Brice, Vanilla Ice—such are the landmarks on Trivial Pursuit's map of cultural literacy. The show has a reasonably high estimate of the lowest common denominator and a wide-ranging idea of pop culture. Overwhelmingly genial—surely a boon to retirement-home recreation rooms—it still has a slight provocative streak (unless, 20 years after Straight Outta Compton, there is nothing provocative about folks scratching their heads and trying to name two members of NWA).

Those looking for a game show that provides somewhat ruder stimulation should turn to the SciFi Channel, which is currently bringing a zany, nearly Japanese-style sense of mayhem to the genre, all for the pleasure of a demographic that must be rather young, primarily male, and hopped up on energy drinks. SciFi promotes the new Cha$e (Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) as "the world's first live-action video game"—a brave way to describe a competition that looks like a baroque game of tag, imagined by the director John Woo, complete with scattered lofts of slo-mo pigeons.

Cha$e finds its participants scurrying around some confined area for an hour—L.A.'s Terminal Island, in one episode—waiting for a finish line to materialize so that they can score $50,000. In general, the men are unduly boastful about their physical fitness, the woman outfitted in togs apparently designed by Lara Croft for Old Navy. All are on the lookout for "hunters"—expressionless pursuers dressed, like Matrix villains, in black suits and black ties. While there is a small degree of intercontestant strategery involved here, the main act is running away from bad guys who've got you in their Terminator-esque sights. Here is the only thing I do not get: Why sit in front of the television watching a "live-action video game" when you could instead be sitting in front of the television playing an actual video game? Broken thumb ligaments? Sprained front lobe? Whatever: Cha$e is American Gladiators for devotees of futuristic noir.

For admirers of B-movie exploitation, SciFi has lovingly slapped together Estate of Panic (Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET), the pun of its title creaking like the hinges of a heavy cellar door. As its tagline—"7 contestants, 1 mansion, no mercy"—suggests, Estate of Panic is Fear Factor doing a Vincent Price impression. The fog machines work overtime. The host, campily droll and casually sadistic, wears rouge. The competitors spend an evening in and around a gloomy manor, where they scrounge for cash in a fanciful array of horror-movie scenarios. Check out the hand-held camerawork as they grasp at the dollars floating by in a flooding basement. A bit later, still dripping wet, the contestants forage for money in a segment of the grounds criss-crossed with electrified wires. What tenacity they show! Says one go-getter, "I dug underneath some of the moss and some of the overgrowth, and that's where I found my $100 bills." You've got to admire that kind of hustle—and you've got to do it while simultaneously gorging on scenes of humiliation.

But if you need to feel virtuous while watching a game show, or are a connoisseur of pungent tedium and misguided good intentions, then flip to Planet Green, the Discovery Channel's "eco-tainment" spin-off, and watch Go for the Green! (Saturdays at 8 p.m. ET). It is hosted by Tom Green, the quondam prankster and gross-out artist, and every indication is that he scored the gig solely on the basis of his surname. Each single-minded episode is largely a multiple-choice affair. "Which of the following is one of the 'dirty dozen' fruits and vegetables most sprayed by pesticide?" "In Hawaii, what items must all be solar-powered by 2010?" The very awfulness of the questions almost makes them decent tests of the contestants' deductive-reasoning skills. The big prize (10 days of eco-tourism in Costa Rica) is as predictable as the stage patter ("Be sure to catch our next show, where I'll be composting the script for this week!"). But don't the rules of keeping a compost pile forbid the addition of manure?

Dear John,

When we co-reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point for Slate in 2000, we agreed his book had much to say about networking and influence but not enough about the inherent quality that word-of-mouth hits usually need. His new book, Outliers, is a more sober look at success for a post-boom audience. But it rejects the Poor Richard self-help tradition. Gladwell is skeptical about innate genius and lonely struggle. He shows that we are the products of our social origins, the centuries-old values of our geographic roots, and even of the exact year and even month of our birth. That's what Outliers has in common with The Tipping Point: Both books apply sociology and social psychology to exceptional performance. The catalogers of the Library of Congress have assigned Outliers the subject headings "1. Successful People" and "2. Success," but they might have added one they used for the first book: "Context Effects (Psychology)."

Outliers offers hope. Exceptional ability is less important than the good old work ethic. Prodigies from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to computer programmer Bill Joy required the same 10,000 hours of practice for mastery as the rest of us; Mozart just began especially young. The Beatles considered their real break the intensive practice they received playing marathon sets in the Hamburg, Germany, red-light district. Many more of us could excel if we realized the time required and worked more patiently. Math students, for example, may simply be giving up too early in problem-solving.

In fact, Outliers is positively sunny about education and training. Do arbitrary cutoff dates for youth sports give kids born early in the year an unfair advantage? Change recruitment regulations. Does a legacy of social and linguistic hierarchy endanger airline safety by inhibiting timely warnings to captains? Hire outsiders to retrain your staff and shoot up in the safety rankings, as Korean Airlines did. Do American children, especially those in inner cities, lag behind Asian counterparts? Extend the school year.

But context also has an unfair, even fatalistic side. The suave, rich, and neurotic Robert Oppenheimer received only probation and psychotherapy after trying to poison his Cambridge physics tutor (Oppie as proto-Unabomber?), while the equally brilliant blue-collar American who may indeed have the world's highest IQ, Christopher Langan, with uncaring parents and teachers, dropped out of college and still is far from academic recognition. Memo to overscheduling, hovering, upper-middle-class mothers and fathers: Keep up the good work.

Time as well as class will tell. The founders of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems were all born between 1953 and 1956, coming of age just in time to work on a handful of early academic time-sharing computers when other scientists and engineers were still punching stacks of cards. Bill Gates' prep school had rare remote access to one such machine in 1968. The lesson, John, is that we should not only choose our parents wisely but also pick the year they have us.

Seriously, though, isn't Gladwell missing an opportunity to encourage his readers with a bigger picture? Gurus of information technology, recognizing and exploiting new tools, have appeared in every decade. Larry Ellison (born 1944), founder of Oracle, is the third-richest American. And don't forget Michael Dell (born 1965) and Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergei Brin (both born 1973). A dozen or more pioneers of computing, beginning with Grace Hopper (born 1906), who created plain-English programming language, never made fortunes but are revered in industry and academia. Are they unsuccessful?

Gladwell also shows how a generation of New York lawyers from Jewish garment-industry backgrounds struggled during the Depression, while the next such generation, favored by its small size and excellent education, flourished in merger-and-acquisition work originally disdained by snobbish old-line firms. Perfectly true. But many Jewish lawyers who came of age in the 1930s also found a way to succeed in the face of economic hardships and ethnic discrimination. Lawrence A. Wien invented real estate syndication and became a major philanthropist; Chicago's Pritzkers also built a fortune buying distressed properties that ultimately soared in value. Jewish lawyers helped implement the New Deal in Washington, while others (like Daniel J. Boorstin and Studs Terkel) entered academia and journalism. And Edith Spivack, who joined the New York City Law Department as an unpaid volunteer in 1934 and did not retire until 70 years later, became its unsung mastermind, helping avert financial collapse in the 1970s.

Yes, these men and women were atypical. They were outliers; isn't that the book's title, though? As with The Tipping Point, I loved Gladwell's combination of storytelling and academic social science even when I rejected his conclusions. But John, his soft demographic determinism makes me want to paraphrase Cassius in Julius Caesar: The fault is not in our birth cohorts but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Best wishes,

Ed

Dear Ed,

My reaction to The Tipping Point eight years ago was not quite as mild as you recall. That book, which sought to transform the truism that little causes can have big effects into an all-empowering revelation, irked me. I called Gladwell a "clever idea packager" whose "engaging case histories … cannot conceal the fatuousness of his core conclusions." In fact, my review was so nasty, even for me, that I was determined to give Gladwell's new book every benefit of the doubt.

As you note, Ed, Outliers features the same "combination of storytelling and academic social science" that animated The Tipping Point and Gladwell's second book, Blink, which is a tribute to snap judgment. Like you, I found Outliers entertaining and even fascinating at times. It also advances a much more consequential theme than Gladwell's previous books. Nurture, Gladwell argues, contributes at least as much as nature to our success or lack thereof. Delve into the history of "men and women who do things out of the ordinary," and you will find that their success stems from "hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies."

With this insistence on the importance of environmental factors as shapers of our lives, Gladwell is bucking a deplorable recent trend in science. Over the past few decades, fields such as evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics have tipped the scales toward the nature side of the nature-nurture debate, implying that innate factors largely determine our personalities and talents, and hence our destiny. I call this line of reasoning "gene-whiz science."

One notorious example of gene-whiz science is the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, in which Harvard scholars Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein asserted that blacks are innately less intelligent than whites. James Watson, the Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of the double helix, reiterated this persistent claim a year ago, as did Slate's own William Saletan.

Gladwell has a personal stake in this debate. He concludes his book by telling the tale of his mother, Joyce, a Jamaican descended from African slaves. While attending University College in London, Joyce fell in love with a young mathematician, Graham Gladwell. They soon moved to Canada, where Graham became a math professor and Joyce a writer and therapist. They had three children, including Malcolm.

While acknowledging the ambition and intelligence of his mother and other ancestors, Gladwell repeatedly emphasizes the role that serendipity played in their upward journey. The first lucky break took place in the late 1700s, when a white plantation owner in Jamaica, William Ford, took a fancy to a pretty female slave, "an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa." Ford bought the woman and made her his mistress, saving her—and, more importantly, her offspring—from a life of brutal servitude. She gave birth to Ford's son, John, who was defined as "colored" rather than black and hence under Jamaican law was free.

John, who became a preacher, was the great-great–great-grandfather of Joyce, Gladwell's mother. She was lucky, too. She received a scholarship to a private school in Jamaica only after another girl who had received two scholarships relinquished one. Without the scholarship, Joyce would probably never have gained admittance to University College, where she met Gladwell's father.

Gladwell's family history engaged and even moved me. But the lessons that he gleans from this and other case histories in his book are oddly anticlimactic, even dispiriting. He concludes that success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky." To be fair, Gladwell offers more substantive analysis of the link between race and achievement elsewhere in his book when he analyzes the mathematical performance of Asian-American children and of inner-city New York kids enrolled in a special school called KIPP. Last December, he provided a sharp refutation of the Bell Curve reasoning in the pages of The New Yorker—why didn't he incorporate that material into the book, too?

Perhaps now that a man of African descent has been elected president, we have truly transcended race. But I still can't help but feel that Outliers represents a squandered opportunity for Gladwell—himself an outlier, an enormously talented and influential writer and the descendant of an African slave—to make a major contribution to our ongoing discourse about nature, nurture, and race.

Ed, maybe my problem with Gladwell is that I just expect too much of him.

Dear John,

You're not expecting too much of Malcolm Gladwell. Where I come from—university press publishing—one philosopher explained pages of arguments accompanying a favorable recommendation: "Philosophers show respect by disagreeing with each other." Physicist Wolfgang Pauli put it more negatively about a junior researcher's paper: "Not even wrong." So, we should welcome Gladwell neither as a genius (a concept he dislikes, anyway) nor as a mere packager of others' ideas. Instead, let's treat him as a colleague who deserves careful attention.

Outliers isn't wrong, but neither is it necessarily right. Gladwell doesn't see, for example, that some outliers were just the first ones to seize a unique opportunity that others could not share—a "positional good," as economist Fred Hirsch called it in his book Social Limits to Growth. After ridiculing the idea of buying "a shiny new laptop" for every student, he asks rhetorically, "[I]f a million teenagers had been given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" like Bill Gates, "how many more Microsofts would we have today?"

Some academic reviewers have also dissented from much of the research Gladwell cites. One of his favorite sources is historian David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which he uses to argue the strong persistence of values in American regional cultures over four centuries. The work, rightly admired for its rich scholarship, has also been blasted for its selective use of evidence to support its thesis. Fischer's idea (repeated by Gladwell) that the cult of honor in the U.S. South originated in medieval British border disputes has also been questioned. According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of the standard work Southern Honor, "colonial and backcountry historians in general stoutly reject" Fischer's book.

Cultures change more rapidly and thoroughly than Fischer and Gladwell acknowledge. Think of the cosmopolitan, lively Spain that followed the grim Franco years or the hypercapitalist and individualist China that came after Mao. What about postwar Germany, which now rates much lower on indexes of authoritarianism than France, at least according to one of Gladwell's notes? Or, for that matter, consider the changing values represented by Barack Obama's election victory that you mention, John, which overthrew structuralist dogmas of "blue" and "red" states and fears of concealed racism.

Obama's story has another dimension strangely neglected in Outliers: his abandonment by his father, the death of his mother, and his struggle for a new identity. The successes cited by Gladwell, including his own mother, go from strength to strength; cultural forces and good luck come together. Yet for all Obama's elite education, his years as a community organizer in Chicago while others of his age were launching lucrative careers only conforms to the "accumulative advantage" model endorsed by Gladwell in hindsight.

There isn't much suffering, for the sake of art or anything else, in Outliers. People fortunate enough to be born in the right time, place, cultural group, and profession are borne along by the current. Yet among previous presidents, even upper-class outliers had a lot to overcome. Think of Theodore Roosevelt's lifelong respiratory problems, Franklin Roosevelt's polio, John F. Kennedy's childhood scarlet fever and his war injuries. (When Kennedy said that life is unfair, he was referring to health and sickness.) John McCain's captivity was his own turning point, as PT-109 was Kennedy's. Americans aren't the only politicians to be proud of fighting adversity. Nicolas Sarkozy, with a multiethnic family tree and an absent father like Obama's, once declared, "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood."

Gladwell credits some of J. Robert Oppenheimer's success to the aristocratic social skills he absorbed from his family. But there was another side of Oppenheimer, revealed when he contracted tuberculosis as a young professor and retreated with his younger brother Frank to the hills of New Mexico; his fascination with Los Alamos began during that interlude. When Oppenheimer took his Army physical before receiving his commission in 1943, he was nearly disqualified as 11 pounds underweight with a chronic cough. But according to Gladwell's main source on Oppenheimer, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus, the physicist was able to withstand the stress of preparing for the hearings on his security clearance; as his secretary later recalled, he "had that fantastic stamina that people often have who have recovered from tuberculosis. Although he was incredibly skinny, he was incredibly tough."

Misfortunes are not like cultivated homes and great schools; their effects are unpredictable, energizing some and crushing others regardless of social class and education. In rejecting the myth of self-made men and women—and very properly revealing all the help most of them had—Gladwell also ignores important, if often mysterious, realities of endurance.

John, if our economic emergency is as serious as it appears, "accumulative advantage" will matter less and dealing creatively with crises will count more. And if this sounds like the old-style success books that Outliers is trying to replace, I can only recall an aside made by historian of science Charles C. Gillispie in my college History 101 course: "There is nothing more embarrassing to the educated mind than a true cliché."

Best wishes,

Ed

I live in a fairly rural place, and we have an oil furnace, some electric heat, and a wood stove. I've heard that wood burns pretty cleanly, but it doesn't look like it compared with what comes out of the oil-furnace chimney. Of course, wood doesn't have to be refined, and it comes from only a few dozen miles away. It's getting chilly: Should I be heating my home with firewood?

It's not just old-timey nostalgics who are mulling this question. Sales of wood stoves are up 55 percent over last season as consumers look for a greener and a cheaper alternative to oil and gas.

So how does the green case for wood stack up? The argument centers on the fact that wood is a renewable resource: When you chop down a tree for firewood, you can easily plant one to replace it. (It would take millions of years to replace spent fossil fuel.) Mile for mile, transporting firewood can be pretty energy-intensive since it's so bulky, but you are far more likely to have wood in your backyard (literally!) than you are to be located in close proximity to natural gas reserves.

But a "burn local" movement won't do much to help the environment if your stove starts spitting out toxic fumes. In some communities, wood smoke accounts for as much as 82 percent of particulate matter—tiny particles that can cause serious respiratory problems—emitted during the winter. Moreover, because that smoke is being produced right in (or outside) your house, the probability of exposure is greater—and that can have significant health effects. Existing research suggests that young children living in homes heated by wood-burning stoves "had a greater occurrence of moderate and severe chronic respiratory symptoms" than children in homes without those stoves. And it's not just that these particulates might be hard on your lungs: Wood smoke has high concentrations of toxic chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, all of which are considered possible carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The good news is that the most modern stoves—which must be manufactured under EPA requirements—are a good deal cleaner than the old models. But while the new versions cut down on emissions by more than two-thirds, they can still produce particulate matter concentrations about 100 times greater than oil or gas furnaces. And outdoor wood boilers—which have become more popular in recent years—are typically even bigger emitters than stoves.

What about greenhouse gases? All in all, using wood to heat your home is generally considered to cut down on the emissions that cause global warming. There's some debate about how to figure the carbon footprint of burning wood: After all, a tree releases carbon when it decomposes anyway, so it's conceivable that putting wood in the stove is more or less carbon-neutral. On the other hand, if we cut down trees faster than they are replaced, there's a net reduction in carbon sinks that sequester carbon dioxide. And when a tree decomposes, some of that carbon is absorbed by the soil; when you burn wood, virtually all of it will end up in the atmosphere. Still, as long as your firewood is farmed sustainably, heating by wood is less likely to contribute to heating the earth. Researchers estimate that, in total, wood may produce between three times and 10 times fewer greenhouse gas emissions per unit of heat than other energy sources.

So, is wood worth it? Taking everything into account, the Lantern doesn't recommend switching over to wood for environmental reasons. If you want to cut down on your greenhouse gas emissions, there are better ways of doing it—from changing your transportation habits to your diet—that won't involve pumping those other pollutants into the air. Instead of changing your source of fuel, you may want to think about how you might get by with less heat to begin with; to start, you can turn down the thermostat by a few degrees or improve your insulation.

Of course, if memories of the hearth or a surplus of kindling have driven you to a wood burner, make sure you're using an EPA-certified stove manufactured after 1992 to cut down on your particulate emissions. (For other tips on how to use a wood stove in a greener way, this is a good source.) After all, where there's fire, there will be smoke—but it doesn't have to be quite as bad for the environment as it used to be.

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.

Take a look at this, from Jeff Jarvis' blog BuzzMachine:

Dubai-bound

November 5th, 2008

I'm in the Emirates lounge getting ready to fly to Dubai for a World Economic Forum (Davos) meeting of the Global Agenda Councils. I'm on the one devoted to the future of the internet, which is humbling. (Full disclosure: The travel expenses are paid by the airline and the government of Dubai.) I'll report from there as wifi allows.

Jeff Jarvis is living the good life. (But he's still humble—he says so himself!) Jeff Jarvis is the very model of a modern new-media guru. Do you know about him? He started out in print media but is now a multiplatform new-media consultant. If you work in media, you probably know his work. If you consume media, you probably should. He's one of the leading Web futurists, one of the few new-media consultant types who came over from old media. (He was founding editor of Entertainment Weekly.)

After leaving EW in 1990, Jarvis worked as an editor at the New York Daily News and a critic for TV Guide. Then he took to blogging and—eventually—blogging about blogging, and now he can often be found consulting about new media and giving media-futurist speeches to international forums and self-proclaimed new-media "summits." Recently he has even begun to host international forums and self-proclaimed new-media summits, when not directing J-school programs focused on new media (at the City University of New York) or raking in consulting fees from old-media giants like the New York Times and Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast.

Jeff Jarvis seems to be seeking to be your Marshall McLuhan, and he's convinced a lot of media corporations to pay him consulting fees to tell them what is happening with these new intertubes—and what should happen.

I used to like Jeff Jarvis: I've never met him, but I felt I knew him from his blog, which I've read fairly regularly since he began blogging eloquently about 9/11. I've often enjoyed his opinions and, especially, his crankiness. I loved what he did to Dell when the company failed to fix his computer: He called it "Dell-Hell" and used his blog to mobilize the Dell-discontented multitudes to make the company pay attention to their "service" pledges. (He must have had flawless service in the Emirates lounge.)

What I liked about his blog was that it was personal and immediate. He's a natural at the form, with an ability to entwine his life and those of the rest of us in his musings. Here is a guy who literally took 9/11 to heart: He was on a PATH train near Ground Zero that morning and developed atrial fibrillation in the aftermath, a problem that still afflicts him.* He has been outspoken on the issue of anti-Semitism. And I never had a problem with his championing the idea of taking bloggers seriously and using the Web to find a new way of making journalism viable in the 21^st century. He was right about the potential of the Net when I was still being a Luddite about it. (After all, I'm a blogger, too, these days.)

But something has changed in the last year or two: He's now visibly running for New Media Pontificator in Chief. He began treating his own thoughts as profound and epigrammatic, PowerPoint-paradoxical, new-media-mystical. He acquired the habit of proclaiming "Jarvis' Laws" of new media, acting like a prophet, a John the Baptist if not the messiah. (Although he knows who the messiah is. He's about to publish a book of Google worship—What Would Google Do?—that makes that clear.)

Meanwhile, he's become increasingly heartless about the reporters, writers, and other "content providers" who have been put out on the street by the changes in the industry. Not only does he blame the victims, he denies them the right to consider themselves victims. They deserve their miserable fate—and if they don't know it, he'll tell them why at great length. Sometimes it sounds as if he's virtually dancing on their graves.

Consider Jarvis' response to an essay by Paul Farhi that suggested the current crisis in journalism might not be entirely the fault of journalists. Jarvis parried with a cruel, disdainful rant contending that writers and reporters deserve their fate:

The fall of journalism is, indeed, journalists' fault. It is our fault that we did not see the change coming soon enough and ready our craft for the transition. It is our fault that we did not see and exploit—hell, we resisted—all the opportunities new media and new relationships with the public presented. It is our fault that we did not give adequate stewardship to journalism and left the business to the business people. It is our fault that we lost readers and squandered trust. It is our fault that we sat back and expected to be supported in the manner to which we had become accustomed by some unknown princely patron. Responsibility and blame are indeed ours.

I have a strong feeling that when he says "we" and "ours," he really means everyone but him and his fellow new-media gurus. Not all reporters had the prescience to become new-media consultants. A lot of good, dedicated people who have done actual writing and reporting, as opposed to writing about writing and reporting, have been caught up in this great upheaval, and many of them may have been too deeply involved in, you know, content—"subjects," writing about real peoples' lives—to figure out that reporting just isn't where it's at, that the smart thing to do is get a consulting gig.

But Jarvis believes the failure of the old-media business models is the result of having too many of those pesky reporters. In his report on his recent new-media summit at CUNY, he noted with approval one workshop's conclusion that you'd need only 35 reporters to cover the entire city of Philadelphia. Less is more. Meta triumphs over matter.

It makes you wonder whether Jarvis has actually done any, you know, reporting. Particularly when he tells you that in doing his book on the total wonderfulness of Google, he decided it would be better not to speak to anyone who works at Google, that instead he's written about the idea of Google, as he construes it, rather than finding out how they—the actual Google people—construe it. What he's done, Jarvis claims, is to "reverse-engineer" the reality of Google. This means deducing how Google got to be what it is and do what it does by conjecturing about its effects from the outside.

Allow me to make a conjecture: Did Jarvis sound out Google informally and get rebuffed, prompting him to "decide" he wouldn't talk to them "on principle"? Of course, I could ask Jarvis about this, but that would be mere "reporting"; it's more fun to "reverse-engineer" his decision.

Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy, who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader, which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last. Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?

Here are a few excerpts from Jeff Jarvis' blog over the last month that illustrate his self-congratulatory attitude: First, the demise of a venerable print daily (and the suffering of who knows how many families) causes Jeff Jarvis to reflect on how right Jeff Jarvis was and is and probably always will be:

The Christian Science Monitor is turning off its press and going fully online. I heard about this at my conference on new business models for news last week and said it makes perfect sense.

Next his international audience of Rich Guys Who Want To Understand This Internet Thing calls:

I need to write an essay on a bold goal for the internet for a World Economic Forum (aka Davos) Global Agenda Council on the future of the internet. My thoughts:

The internet is a right.

I can't imagine a bolder notion than that. Or maybe it's not so bold. ...

Then we travel with Jarvis to the Frankfurt Book Fair, another example of the downfall of print and the rise of Jarvis:

The Frankfurt convention grounds are also jammed with books from all around the world. What struck me was the optimism of it: all that work to create books on the hope that someone would read them. And they make fun of bloggers for whistling in the wind.

I was there on Saturday to speak with Wolfgang Blau, editor-in-chief of Zeit Online for what turned out to be a sizeable audience. ...

Note his dim view of the "book people" and their foolish romantic optimism. These poor fools; they might as well be making buggy whips. Sure, they do serve some purpose—merchandizing his book—so it's good they're still in the foolish business long enough for him to monetize their death. But otherwise, if they don't make big profits, dead-tree books are not worth doing, according to the new-media gospel.

Then it's time for a little self-congratulation while scores lose their jobs:

Sometime ago, I used TV Guide as a cautionary tale to beware the cash cow in the coal mine. How now, said cow—which not long ago sold more copies every year than any other magazine—just sold for $1. Beware media and news companies that try to preserve their past: This could be you. Moo.

(I didn't make up that "Moo." That's new-media wit.)

We can learn more about Jarvis' ambition to guru-hood by studying his remarkable endorsement of the New Age boilerplate mysticism of Paulo Coelho, which we learn about as he shares with us the exciting experience of his triumph at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In one of his Frankfurt posts, he discusses a talk given by worldwide best-seller Coelho.* (He claims 100 million books sold.) In his talk, Coelho advocated giving away the digital content of books for free as a means of boosting sales.

"That has certainly been Coelho's experience," notes Jarvis (who calls Coelho—I kid you not—"the Googliest author I know"). "Freely available electronic files have led to increased print sales in territory after territory—including the US, where [Coelho's] The Alchemist has been on the NYT bestseller list for a full year even though it was among the first of his titles to be available online at Harper's web site."

Surely Jarvis is intelligent enough to see that the Coelho model won't work for everyone. Sure, if you break through to New Age guru status and peddle the notion that everyone can discover their own fabulousness (from the jacket of the Alchemest, aka New Age Mysticism for Dummies: "A discovery of the treasure found within"), you're more likely to have a audience that will support you by buying the hard cover to doubly reaffirm their vanity. (A new definition of "vanity press"?)

But what about a different kind of book? You know—a serious book. I just got in the mail a newly published book by an old friend of mine, Gordon Goldstein. It's called Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam, and it' s likely to reopen still-unresolved debates about why we did what we did and the way we did it. It is, to put it mildly, no less deserving of attention than Coelho's 100-million-seller. Will publishers pay writers to write serious books like this and then give them away for free?

If Jarvis values books (and I can't help think that despite all the digital bluster, he's an intelligent guy who likes reading), do we just listen to the market and focus-group what we should print and give away, which is likely to result in all Coelho, all the time, with maybe a little bit of Jarvis thrown in?

But Jarvis doesn't seem to recognize distinctions of value. Or to have heard of Gresham's law. (Trash drives out value.) Listen to his blog reaction to the recent bailout/economic meltdown:

Why wasn't the government better at listening to the market? Did it ever ask what it should do? That's not the way government thinks, but it's the way it should learn to think.

Wait, did I get that right? The government should have "listened to the market," the same market that created this debacle and came close to destroying the economy? It's an example of his blind allegiance to the wisdom of the consumer, to quantity over quality and expertise. Everything else is elitism. He's the Sarah Palin of gurus. The crowd is always right.

But what makes him wined, dined, and comped by Dubai to fly to self-proclaimed summits all over the world? It's not just that corporations are dumb enough to waste what's left of stockholders' money to pay for someone to tell them to "listen to the market." No, it's Jarvis' pretensions to guru-hood, his gnomic "laws" and pronouncements. Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence.

He offers chestnuts like, "The link changes everything," "Stuff sucks" ("Nobody wants to be in the business of stuff anymore. … Google's economy is more appealing"), "Atoms are a drag," and—yes, his contribution to the "X is the new Y" genre—"Small is the new big."

Yeah, down with stuff! Let them eat fake. Sleep in buildings not made with atoms. Everyone should be a new-media consultant, and then we won't need any media at all.

Look, there's nothing wrong with Jarvis doing all this thinking and decreeing. He's said some savvy, if unoriginal, things about journalism (advocating looking at the article as an ongoing process, not a product, for instance). He's among the most rational of the new thinkers. But it's the callous contempt for working journalists that grates. It's a contempt for the beautiful losers who actually made journalism an honorable profession for a brief shining moment—well, longer than that—before it became a platform for "reverse engineering."

Correction, Nov. 12, 2008: This piece originally stated that Jeff Jarvis heard the Paulo Coelho speech he later wrote about on his blog. In fact, he read about the speech before posting on it. It also stated that Jarvis was living hear Ground Zero on 9/11. In fact, he was on a PATH train near Ground Zero that morning. (Return to the corrected sentences.)

The Washington Post leads with word that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will announce a new plan today to help stem the tide of foreclosures across the country. The new plan, which would carry a $24.4 billion price tag, could help prevent 1.5 million foreclosures in the next year by offering to share losses with companies that agree to decrease monthly mortgage payments. The New York Times leads with the diminishing chances that Democratic lawmakers will be able to pass a bailout for Detroit's automakers before January. While Democrats tried to put on a happy face and say that they'll get what they want once President-elect Barack Obama takes office, some fear one of the Big Three will go under before then.

USA Today leads with this weekend's economic summit in Washington that will bring together leaders from 20 of the world's top economies. Among other issues, leaders will discuss how to increase transparency and regulation as well as the best ways to stimulate economies that are on a seemingly endless downward spiral. No one really expects any immediate, dramatic action to come out of the meeting, as the leaders will focus on long-term solutions. The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with the Food and Drug Administration's decision to block all products from China that contain milk. The FDA discovered traces of melamine contamination, which has sickened more than 50,000 babies in China, in several products; it now says importers must prove their goods are safe before they can be sold in the United States. The Los Angeles Times leads with the fire that broke out last night in the upscale community of Montecito in Santa Barbara County, Calif., and has burned at least 800 acres and destroyed as many as 80 homes.

Democratic leaders appear to be widely enthusiastic about the new plan to prevent foreclosures, but FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair continues to face resistance from the Bush administration. But that may not matter that much now because, as the WP puts it, "proponents increasingly view the Bush administration as a roadblock with an expiration date." Those who have missed at least two monthly payments would be eligible for the program. It would require lenders to decrease payments to no more than 31 percent of a borrower's monthly income. In order to encourage companies to participate, the government would essentially offer to split the loss with any lenders that lose money from most of the modified mortgages.

If the chances for the Big Three bailout are rapidly diminishing, Democrats have pretty much given up on the idea that they'll be able to pass any sort of economic stimulus package during next week's lame-duck session. Still, even if they don't have the votes, there are hints that Democrats will move ahead with the efforts to provide $25 billion to the automakers, perhaps as a way of having someone else to blame if one does go under soon. The measure would have to pass the Senate first, and Democrats would need 11 Republican votes, since neither Obama nor Vice President-elect Joe Biden is expected at the lame-duck session.

In preparation for the weekend's meetings, President Bush defended American-style capitalism and called on world leaders not to "reinvent" the system. "Our aim should not be more government," Bush said. "It should be smarter government." The WP fronts a look at the measures currently under discussion and highlights a proposal to create a new regulatory body to oversee the world's 30 largest financial institutions. The leaders of the 20 countries that will be meeting are also "close to a deal" on the creation of an "early warning system" that would aim to detect weaknesses in the financial system before they become a problem. There's also likely to be discussion on a proposal to limit executive pay as well as pressure on Bush to drop his resistance to more fiscal stimulus packages. Obama will not be attending but is sending former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Iowa Rep. Jim Leach to talk to world leaders.

The WP fronts a look at how the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may be more expensive than the Bush administration publicly suggested. This is speculative, since "not a cent has been spent," but some analysts say that because of the deteriorating conditions in the financial and housing markets, the two mortgage giants will need more than the $200 billion that was initially set aside for companies. At the time of the takeover, the Treasury Department said it was setting aside $100 billion for each merely to reassure investors and suggested that the final tab would be nowhere near that amount. Truth is, though, no one knows how much money the two companies will ultimately need since they are both at the mercy of the housing market.

During the election, Obama's campaign was famous for not airing any of its arguments and disagreements in public. But now a public battle is being waged among some of Obama's advisers who disagree on what to do about the huge network of supporters that the president-elect amassed during the campaign, reports the LAT. The standard operating procedure is that a new president turns over information about supporters to the party's national committee. Some in Obama's camp want to do just that. Others, however, say that would be the quickest way to destroy the grass-roots network that includes many political outsiders who would drop out if asked to participate in traditional partisan politics. To avoid losing the network, some say it should remain an independent entity that is "organized around the 'Obama brand,' " says the LAT.

The WP points out that the Democrats' dream of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is still alive. Yes, it's very unlikely, but as of now, the Democrats have 57 seats, and there are still three races to be decided. The Alaska contest is still too close to call, though the Democrat was slightly ahead this week. In Minnesota, Democrat Al Franken is 206 votes behind Sen. Norm Coleman, and there are hundreds of lawyers in the state to oversee a process that is quickly bringing back memories of Florida. Finally, Georgia will be voting in its runoff election on Dec. 2, and both parties have come out in force to help campaign.

The WP's Al Kamen reports "there's increasing chatter in political circles" that Sen. Hillary Clinton is being considered for secretary of state in Obama's administration.

The WP, NYT, and LAT all front the extraordinary news that two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of planets outside our solar system. One team recorded a planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. The second team identified three planets circling a star known as HR 8799 that is 130 light-years away. The fact that so-called extrasolar planets exist isn't news as more than 300 have been found over the last decade, but they were discovered indirectly.

The LAT fronts a look at how activists opposed to Proposition 8, which banned marriage between same-sex couples in California last week, are stepping up efforts to boycott businesses whose employees or owners gave money to the Yes on 8 campaign. The LAT's Joel Stein says gays are going about this all wrong. Marching with an old "No on 8" sign "makes about as much sense as holding a John McCain rally next month at John McCain's house." Instead, Stein takes a cue from Mexican immigrants and declares Dec. 5 "No Gays for a Day day." Stein called up Kathy Griffin, who, of course, was thrilled to accept the position as celebrity spokesperson for No Gays for a Day. "Now the rest of the world will find out what Griffin has known all along: We need our gays," writes Stein. "If it turns out I'm wrong, and we don't miss them, then as a married man, I can tell you this: The best way to keep them at home is to let them get married."

In the least surprising news since Barack Obama's victory last week, the Treasury Department officially announced that it has switched gears and will no longer be using the $700 billion bailout package to buy toxic securities. Instead, the money will continue to be used to inject capital into financial institutions with a stepped-up emphasis on efforts to loosen up the frozen consumer credit market. The Los Angeles Times deftly recognizes the no-duh aspect of the announcement and leads with an analysis while relegating the straight-up news story to its inside pages. "The surprise content of the announcement today is precisely zero," a finance professor tells the LAT. "This is not a change of policy, but a recognition of a policy that's already happened."

The New York Times points out that, confusingly, the "program is still called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, but it will not buy troubled assets." At a news briefing yesterday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson emphasized that the consumer credit market "has for all practical purposes ground to a halt," which is "raising the cost and reducing the availability of car loans, student loans, and credit cards." The Washington Post puts this in perspective by pointing out average interest rates on car loans "almost doubled from July to September … and borrowers were required to make much larger down payments, an average of $2,000 more down on a $20,000 car." USA Today points out that many were quick to criticize the Treasury's "herky-jerky approach, noting such changes were leading to reduced confidence that the government would help thaw frozen credit markets and prop up the economy." Indeed, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 4.7 percent yesterday. The Wall Street Journal notes that investors blamed the Treasury "switch" for at least part of the decline, "as the bailout's widening focus underscores the depth of the economy's problems as well as new strains on the government's rescue net."

The LAT notes that Paulson's announcement that the bailout funds would be directed at "both banks and non-banks" renewed fears that government officials "are failing to specifically define the purpose of TARP." It's little wonder, then, that this lack of specificity has led lawmakers to view TARP money as free cash that can be made available to troubled industries. But Paulson quickly raised the ire of Democrats in Congress by making it clear he has no intention of using TARP funds to bail out Detroit's Big Three and by acknowledging that his department still hasn't figured out how to use the bailout money to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

"Using some of the TARP money to reduce foreclosures was not only contemplated in it, it was one of our major focal points," Rep. Barney Frank said. The WP highlights that congressional leaders seem intent on keeping the markets guessing about what comes next by emphasizing that Paulson's decisions won't mean much once Obama is in the White House. "I am concerned that we may have to wait until the next administration before we have the real change in economic policy that our nation needs," Sen. Christopher Dodd said.

Truth be told, it's less than clear how much Paulson is even planning to do before he bids farewell to Washington. The Treasury has already allocated $290 billion of the first $350 billion installment, and yesterday Paulson suggested his department might keep the remaining $60 billion as a sort of rainy-day fund. Paulson would have to go back to Congress to get the remaining $350 billion but said yesterday he has no specific plans to do that yet, notes the WSJ article that also points out the Treasury secretary is wary of getting new programs started before Obama's inauguration. "I'm not looking to make anything more difficult by implementing programs that don't need to be implemented before they're here," Paulson said. So, let's see if we got this right. Paulson is running out of money, has no plans to go back to Congress to ask for more, and doesn't want to implement anything new. What's the point in all this, then? An out-loud brainstorming session to confuse the markets?

There seems to be no better example of this shoot-from-the-hip mentality than Paulson's befuddling decision to mention that Treasury and the Federal Reserve would be working together to develop a new lending facility that would aim to thaw the frozen consumer credit market. The NYT goes big with this potential new program but gives the impression that Fed officials were extremely confused as to why Paulson would even mention it in public when it's still so early in the planning stages and no one is sure how it would work except to say that "TARP would likely make an investment in the facility and the Fed would provide liquidity," as the WSJ puts it.

The NYT says Treasury officials are looking to put in about $50 billion into this new lending facility that would help companies that issue student, car, and credit card loans. Any new program is likely to require companies to raise private money and not rely solely on government funds. The NYT hears that Treasury would put in somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money, and then the Fed would raise money for the rest. This would allow the government to get a huge bang for its buck, but, scarily enough, this type of highly leveraged transaction would be eerily similar to the "eventually disastrous, special-investment vehicles that banks" created to "to hold, among other things, securities backed by subprime mortgages," explains the NYT. Still, it's important to remember that nothing has been decided, and officials emphasized there are several different ways the program could be financed.

Meanwhile, the WP off-leads a look at how the government hasn't filled any of the independent oversight posts that are supposed to keep tabs on the bailout and make sure everything is kosher. The Treasury's inspector general is overseeing the bailout program until the new position of special inspector general is filled, but he readily acknowledges he's severely short-staffed to carry out the job effectively. Congress also has failed on its end of the bargain as lawmakers haven't yet nominated the five-member Congressional Oversight Panel, although party leaders say they expect that it will all be resolved by the end of the month.

Along with Paulson, the White House also said it's opposed to a plan by Democratic lawmakers to use some of the TARP money to give $25 billion in government loans to Detroit automakers. But Democratic lawmakers insist they will move ahead with the legislation, "setting up a final showdown with the Bush administration," says the WP. All this activity by Democratic lawmakers leads the LAT to wonder: "Will Congress be leading or following the Obama administration as it gets its sea legs?" Lawmakers, of course, are quick to say they'll follow Obama's lead once he's in office, but right now they're busy asserting themselves almost as if trying to ensure they'll get a seat at the table early on in the next administration.

In an interesting front-page piece, the WP notes that Iran's leaders seem to be moving away from their repeated calls for direct, unconditional talks with the United States ever since Obama was elected. "For Iran's leaders, the only state of affairs worse than poor relations with the United States may be improved relations," notes the Post. Criticizing the United States is one of the centerpieces of Iranian politics, and there's little sign that will change, regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office.

The LAT fronts a look at how it has been a deadly week in Baghdad. According to police statistics, 58 people have been killed by some sort of bomb in Iraq's capital since Monday. After a steady decrease in violence, this week's bombings have brought back a sense of vulnerability to Iraqis just as they were starting to feel relatively safe again. Some see it as a sign that the Iraqi security forces aren't ready to protect Baghdad without the help of U.S. troops. American military officials insist that a bad week doesn't take away from all the recent progress and emphasize that there is a confluence of factors, including the end of Ramadan and the U.S. elections, that could be motivating insurgents to step up their attacks now.

The Post's Al Kamen notes that Senate Democrats are in for a lot of wheeling and dealing in the coming weeks as it has "been a while since the chairmanships of so many committees were in play." But while several senators will be moving up and Sen. Joe Lieberman might actually get to hold onto his committee chairmanship, Sen. Hillary Clinton would be left out due to seniority rules. "So, let's see: She pretty much equaled Obama in the Democratic primary race, with nearly 18 million votes, but lost," writes Kamen. "She nonetheless was out there all over the battleground states—even Nebraska—rallying the troops for Obama. And she gets bupkes? Nada? Zip?"

The WP's Dana Milbank highlights a slip by "Treasury Secretary Sigmund Freud" during his news conference yesterday: "I believe and I know that this administration believes the auto industry is a very important, critical industry in this—in this country. We're very supportive of management—excuse me. We're very supportive of—of manufacturing."

The Washington Post leads with word that the two top intelligence officers in the country expect that President-elect Barack Obama won't keep them around for very long, even though they appear eager to stay in their current jobs. There seems to be a consensus building among Democratic leaders that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden should be let go, mostly because of their support for harsh interrogation techniques and warrantless eavesdropping. The Los Angeles Times leads with the latest effort to put a brake on home foreclosures that could help several hundred thousand homeowners who have mortgages that are owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. It will do little for the vast majority of troubled borrowers who are at risk of foreclosure, but there are hopes that lenders will use it as a guide to deal with the rising number of delinquent borrowers.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's worldwide newsbox lead with Democratic leaders in Congress making it clear that they intend to pass legislation to help Detroit's Big Three during the lame-duck session that starts next week. The move sets "the stage for one last showdown with President Bush," notes the NYT. Democrats insist automakers should be allowed to tap into the $700 billion bailout package, but Bush administration officials have said the money would be best spent on financial institutions. USA Today leads with two analyses that show those on Medicare prescription drug plans will pay an average of 43 percent more in monthly premiums next year than they did in 2006, when the program began. While the Medicare drug program is costing the government less than was originally estimated, seniors are seeing the cost of premiums and drug co-payments increase each year.

Obama's transition team isn't talking much, but both Hayden and McConnell interpret the fact that the president-elect hasn't reached out to them as a sign that they will both be out of a job soon. And they're not happy about it. Of course, they're not saying anything publicly, but they have plenty of unnamed intelligence officials speaking on their behalf. And it's not a personal issue, mind you. Both Hayden and McConnell think their departures could be seen as a politicization of intelligence offices. The two officials also say that Obama will have enough on his plate with the economic crisis and so should rely on their experience with national security issues. Even though neither was directly involved in the controversies regarding the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the harsh interrogation techniques, many Democrats are pushing Obama to make a clean break from the past.

Under the mortgage-modification program announced on Tuesday, a borrower must have missed at least three payments in order to qualify for a new loan with monthly payments that will not exceed 38 percent of the homeowners' income. By offering a simplified process to determine who is eligible for a mortgage modification, officials hope to get things moving quickly. But many were quick to criticize the plan, saying that while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee almost 60 percent of all single-family residential mortgages, due to their higher lending standards the two giants hold only 20 percent of seriously delinquent mortgages. For its part, the WP is more optimistic that major lenders will extend this formula to their own loans.

Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who has been one of the loudest proponents of getting the government involved to help people stay in their homes, quickly said the new mortgage-modification plan "falls short of what is needed." The NYT points out that Bair had said she was close to reaching an agreement with the Treasury Department on a plan to spend $50 billion to modify mortgages, but Treasury officials ended the discussions abruptly last week. The NYT sees yesterday's announcement as the "clearest sign" yet that the administration is moving away from proposals that would have the government refinance a large number of mortgages.

The WSJ points out that the current situation with the Detroit automakers is just what Obama's aides "had hoped to avoid, potentially giving the president-elect responsibility for an emergency" before he can do anything about it. But time is not on the side of the Big Three. General Motors has warned it could face a cash shortage by the end of the year, and yesterday its stock fell to its lowest point since 1943. Besides giving the automakers access to the $700 billion pie, Obama also wants to speed up delivery on the $25 billion for fuel-efficient cars and emergency loans from the Federal Reserve.

The NYT gets word that Democratic leaders want to take up the issue with Bush so if he refuses to bail the automakers out then he can get blamed if one of the companies fails. The WSJ suggests that a clear sign of whether Democrats are really interested in helping the automakers rather than making a political point will be whether they present the issue individually or as part of a bigger economic stimulus package. Republicans have long been reluctant to support another big stimulus package, but Democrats are likely to convince enough GOP lawmakers to come around to their side if the issue is solely the Big Three.

The WP fronts a look at the debate over whether GM should just be allowed to go bankrupt. Of course, GM says bankruptcy is not an option and insists that its collapse would affect industries far beyond General Motors. But while buyers might not be eager to buy a car from a bankrupt manufacturer, bankruptcy protection would give GM the flexibility to impose new changes that could help it turn around.

The NYT takes a front-page look at how lobbyists have descended on the Treasury Department as many companies and associations are clamoring for their own piece of the $700 billion bailout package. The National Marine Manufacturers Association, for example, wants boat-financing companies to get help, and a Hispanic business group representing plumbers and home-heating specialists wants its members to get hired to take care of any houses the government may end up owning if it buys distressed mortgages. Bankers, and particularly community bankers, are concerned that this push to include different types of companies in the bailout could end up diluting the effort to stabilize the financial system.

USAT fronts, and everyone covers, Obama's transition team announcing a set of rules that restricts the way lobbyists can participate in the transition. Lobbyists will not be able to work in the subject area they had previously lobbied and will be barred from donating money for the transition. If someone becomes a lobbyist after working on the transition, they'll be forbidden from lobbying the administration for 12 months. John Podesta, a transition co-chair, recognized that some qualified people might be left out but said that was a price Obama is willing to pay.

Even though it might be true that the restrictions are "the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history," as Podesta said, there are a few loopholes. The rule applies only to registered federal lobbyists, though many lobbyists don't have to register. As a candidate, Obama once said that lobbyists "won't find a job in my White House," but lobbyists are free to work on the transition as long as it's not in policy areas where they have lobbied.

The LAT says the failure to impose an all-out ban on lobbyists is merely the latest example of how Obama is turning to seasoned Washington veterans in an apparent effort to avoid rookie mistakes. This is more than clear in his transition team, which "is rife with officials from the Clinton administration." As a candidate, Obama loved to criticize the Democratic establishment and often portrayed himself as an alternative to the politics of the past. But now it's "starting to look as though Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's family empire is living on."

The WP fronts a look at how many students in the Washington region are taking both the ACT and SAT to improve their chances at their college of choice. Still, no matter how obsessed Washington-area students are with college admission tests, they can't even come close to what South Korean students experience. The WSJ fronts a piece looking at how the whole country gets involved when high-school seniors take the nine-hour college entrance exam. Many offices open late to leave the roads clear for students, planes can't land or take off when students are going through the listening portions of the tests, and parents get together to participate in overnight prayer sessions.

The Washington Post leads with a look at how things haven't gone quite as planned for Fannie Mae and American International Group after the government took them over. Both say the government set up such strict terms when it effectively nationalized the companies that it's impossible for them to succeed. As was already reported yesterday, the government unveiled a new investment in AIG. In its lead story, the Los Angeles Times poignantly wonders: "Will $700 billion be enough?" When an individual company gets so much money, it's bound to get other industries to wonder why they can't get a piece of the pie as well.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with President-elect Barack Obama urging President Bush to extend financial support to the U.S. auto industry and to back a new financial stimulus package. Bush said he might be willing to support those measures if Democrats agree to drop their opposition to the Colombia free-trade deal. USA Today leads with a look at how many state and local governments continue to spend heavily despite the ongoing economic slump. In the third quarter, state and local spending increased 7.4 percent while the governments continued to increase hiring at a pace not seen in the vast majority of the private sector. Some insist the increased spending is helping to soften the economic downturn, but it also means states will be facing some steep budget shortfalls next year.

The troubles that AIG and Fannie Mae have faced since the government took a controlling stake in the companies demonstrates the difficulty that the government faces in trying to find the right balance between protecting the taxpayer-funded investment while also making sure the rescue works as intended. Yesterday, the government not only poured an extra $40 billion into the ailing insurance company, but it also eased up on its repayment terms.

For its part, Fannie Mae reported that it had a loss of $29 billion for the third quarter and said it might need an injection of cash from the Treasury before the end of the year. While the federal takeover "has largely stabilized Fannie Mae," as the WP reports, it has so far been unable to pour money into the mortgage market because of the strict conditions attached to the capital that the government made available to the mortgage giant. So far, the Treasury has proved unwilling to renegotiate the terms of its agreement with Fannie Mae.

In a front-page piece, the WSJ points out that there was another clear example of the troubles befalling financial-services companies in the decision by American Express to become a bank-holding company, which would make it eligible to receive cash from the Treasury. General Motors, which has been trying to convince the government to hand over some money, said yesterday that it might not be able to fulfill its debt obligations unless it manages to stabilize its finances.

The government has already committed to use all but $60 billion of the initial $350 billion that was authorized by Congress. As the WSJ notes, this means it's likely that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson will soon have to go back to Congress to ask for the second half of the $700 billion bailout. But even that might not be enough. "The money could go quickly," one expert tells the LAT.

As an interesting side note, the WSJ points out that the problems with AIG's bailout could cloud the chances of Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Timothy Geithner becoming the next Treasury secretary. He's widely viewed as a top candidate for the job, but he was a key architect of all the bailouts this year and the New York Fed has been overseeing AIG for the past two months.

As Democrats continue to pressure the Bush administration to extend a helping hand to Detroit's Big Three, the president-elect took the message directly to the sitting president in their first post-election meeting. Democrats want the Treasury to approve an additional $25 billion to auto makers, which would bring the total federal assistance to $50 billion. Many key Democrats insist the bailout package is worded broadly enough to allow help for Detroit's Big Three, but the Treasury isn't so sure and is allegedly looking into the issue. Democratic congressional leaders said they have no intention of calling a lame-duck session for next week unless they get some assurance that Bush would support a stimulus package. The NYT says Democrats aren't too keen on the idea of giving in to Bush on the Colombia free-trade pact, so they might just wait until Obama takes office to get what they want.

Speaking of the president-elect, the WP gets an inside look at Obama's broad plans for Afghanistan and says the Democrat wants to pursue a more regional strategy, which could include talks with Iran. As was clear before the election, Obama supports the already progressing move for dialogue between the Afghan government and some elements of the Taliban and wants to step up the search for Osama Bin Laden. Besides supporting an increase of troops in Afghanistan, Obama's advisers think the Bush administration has spent too much time trying to build a modern democracy there, instead of just a stable nation that rejects extremism and doesn't threaten the United States. There are also hints that an Obama administration might have more luck in trying to persuade NATO allies to step up their commitment to Afghanistan.

Who will direct the nation's wars under Obama? There are still more signs that Obama might ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay in his job for at least a year, notes the WSJ. Gates has made it clear he's likely to accept the offer. Of course, no decision has been made and some prominent Democrats are also being considered for the position. But, conveniently enough, Gates pretty much agrees with Obama on Afghanistan, although he has often spoken up against the idea of setting a firm timetable to withdraw troops from Iraq.

The LAT fronts word that Goldman Sachs urged investors to bet against California bonds even though it also made millions of dollars helping the state sell some of the same bonds. The piece was reported jointly with investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica, which got its hands on a report that Goldman presented to investors in September in which it advised clients on how they could "profit from California's deepening financial misery," as the LAT puts it. This strategy could effectively result in an increase in the interest rate the state would have to pay to borrow money. Although the move isn't illegal, some describe it as inappropriate and it provides an example of how these companies can profit several different ways from a financial instrument. Not only did Goldman make millions by bringing the bonds to market, it also put forth credit default swaps that are supposed to protect against a default, even though that almost never happens with municipal bonds.

The NYT's David Brooks and the LAT's Jonah Goldberg both take a look at the future of the Republican Party from slightly different perspectives. They both basically agree that the GOP is now divided between traditionalists and reformers. Goldberg insists both sides "agree on a lot more than they disagree" yet are now hampered by "an elephant named George in the room" that is "blocking each side from seeing what the other is all about." Once Bush is out of the picture, it'll be easier for the sides to come together. Brooks is far less optimistic and says the only thing he's sure of is that the traditionalists will win the short-term battle. This isn't just because the majority of congressional Republicans are traditionalists, but also because they rule the public policy institutions. "In short, the Republican Party will probably veer right in the years ahead, and suffer more defeats." Then the reformers will be able to start building new institutions and putting forward new ideas, "and the cycle of conservative ascendance will begin again."

The New York Times leads with word that a classified order issued in 2004 gave the U.S. military authority to carry out nearly a dozen of what the paper describes as "previously undisclosed attacks" against terrorist targets in Syria, Pakistan, and other countries. The order was signed by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it gave the military the authority to attack al-Qaida targets anywhere in the world, with a specific emphasis on "15 to 20 countries" that were believed to be the prime destinations for militants in hiding. The Washington Post leads with, and almost everyone else fronts, news that China announced a $586 billion stimulus package that aims to prop up the country's slowing economy. The huge package, which some are comparing to the New Deal, could also help fight the effects of a global recession.

The Los Angeles Times leads with a new study that found statin drugs can cut in half the risk that seemingly healthy people will suffer a heart attack. The findings are bound to be a boon for statins, which millions of people already take to manage their cholesterol: Experts say that if this new treatment were widely adopted, it could help prevent 50,000 heart attacks, strokes, and deaths each year. USA Today leads with the Sunday interview tour of President-elect Barack Obama's key advisers, who said that passing a new stimulus package is one of the Democrat's main priorities. The aides also made it clear that Obama plans to move full steam ahead with his plan to repeal President Bush's tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 while instituting new tax breaks that would save 95 percent of working Americans an average of $1,000 each. The Wall Street Journal also leads its worldwide newsbox with the president-elect's plans but focuses on how he is likely to reverse some of Bush's executive orders, including the restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research.

Most of the attacks that came out of the 2004 classified order were carried out by Special Operations forces, often in close coordination with the CIA. Despite the order's broad authority, each mission required approval from the highest levels of government. And "as many as a dozen" operations were canceled due to potential problems, "often to the dismay of military commanders." Although there were debates over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, officials ultimately decided against it and now insist there have been no raids inside Iran using the secret authority.

So what were these "previously undisclosed attacks" that used the authority granted by the 2004 classified document titled "Al Qaeda Network Exord"? The paper's sources aren't talking and just say they took place in "Syria, Pakistan and other countries." The only specific example of an attack provided, in fact, is one that took place in Pakistan in 2006, which hardly fits the description of "previously undisclosed," since the LAT wrote about it in July. While there's no doubt that the NYT helps advance the story about the Bush administration's anti-terrorism tactics with the details it reveals about this classified order, it can't really be considered surprising that the military has been carrying out these types of operations. By late 2006, for example, it was already clear that Special Forces had been carrying out secret missions in allied countries that were part of a classified program designed to help the United States track terrorist networks.

While China was widely expected to unveil a stimulus package, its huge size came as a welcome surprise to many economists, and Asian stock markets surged. The Shanghai composite index increased 7.3 percent today. Under the stimulus plan, the Chinese government said it would spend $586 billion over two years in social-welfare programs, health care, and infrastructure projects, to name a few. The NYT notes that it's not exactly clear how the Chinese government came up with the $586 billion figure, and officials didn't specify how much of the spending would go to projects that were already in the pipeline.

Statins were so clearly beneficial to patients that an independent safety monitoring board stopped what was supposed to be a four-year study after less than two years. In a study that involved 18,000 people, researchers found that statins reduced the risk of death from heart disease by 20 percent. The study participants didn't have high cholesterol or histories of heart disease, but they all did have high levels of a protein known as CRP, which indicates inflammation. Scientists were quick to praise the study, saying they finally found an option to prevent the heart attacks that occur in people without high cholesterol. Checking CRP involves a simple blood test, so everyone says it's only a matter of time before doctors begin prescribing statins to people with normal cholesterol levels. "It's a breakthrough study," one expert tells the Post. "It's a blockbuster. It's absolutely paradigm-shifting."

The WP fronts a fascinating piece looking at how the Treasury Department quietly slipped in a nice gift to U.S. banks at a time when the country was fixated on the debate over the $700 billion bailout package. Lawmakers were so concentrated on the bailout bill that it took them several days to realize that the administration decided simply to change 20-year-old tax policy, effectively giving American banks a "a windfall of as much as $140 billion," reports the WP. Lawmakers were angry, and many tax law experts insist that the Treasury Department had no authority to do this. But it seems many in Congress are choosing to keep this quiet for now out of fear that speaking up could further destabilize the economy, since it might reverse several recent bank mergers. Getting rid of or changing Section 382 in the tax code has been a long-running goal of conservative economists.

The NYT and WSJ front news that the U.S. government will be throwing away its original bailout deal for American International Group in favor of a new $150 billion package. This is a striking admission that the initial $85 billion emergency credit line, which has since grown to $143 billion, failed to stabilize the ailing insurer. The new deal would give AIG not only more money but more time to repay the loan at a lower interest rate. This new package is bound to raise the ire of Democrats: They're likely to say that while the Treasury seems all too willing to sink more and more money into AIG, it appears uninterested in helping Detroit's Big Three.

The NYT's Paul Krugman and the WP's E.J. Dionne Jr. both have one simple message for Obama: Be bold. Krugman says that while Roosevelt's New Deal brought real relief to many, it almost failed because it didn't create as much fiscal stimulus as many people assume. Roosevelt wanted to be prudent, and now Obama can't make the same mistake. "It's much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little," writes Krugman. For his part, Dionne says Obama needs to ignore all those who warn him not to "overreach," because it's clear that the president-elect "has been authorized to move in a new direction." Obama shouldn't be afraid to follow Ronald Reagan and make some bold first moves. In the end, "timidity is a far greater danger than overreaching," Dionne writes, "simply because it's quite easy to be cautious."

The Washington Post devotes most of its front page to a package of stories about the incoming Barack Obama administration. The paper leads with a piece on the unusually graceful transition being orchestrated between the Bush and Obama staffs. The New York Times leads with a look at the issues Obama will try to tackle first. The Los Angeles Times ran its story on Obama's priorities yesterday, and so it leads with Congress looking at using infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy.

The Bush administration has extended an unprecedented level of access to the Obama team, especially where the Treasury Department is concerned. The hope is that a smooth handoff will provide comfort to the already jittery financial markets. That's not to say that the old and new guards are really working together. Obama's team is already working on identifying Bush administration policies they can quickly undo without passing legislation, such as lifting limits on stem-cell research.

Obama says fixing the economy will be priority No. 1 when he takes office in January. But what else will he be tackling straight away? The NYT explores two philosophies vying for supremacy inside the Obama transition team. Some staffers favor being bold and ambitious, taking on every problem at once in order to take advantage of Obama's momentum. Others want to focus on a few issues at a time, in order to keep the administration from being bogged down. Both sides cite historical examples of presidents flailing in their first months because they tried to do too little or too much at once. One possible compromise is focusing on economic-stimulus programs but then using those programs to support secondary goals like expanded health care and alternative energy.

Public-works projects have been part of government strategies for spurring economic growth for decades. But this year, the LAT reports, Congress and the White House decided that simply issuing checks to taxpayers would stimulate the economy faster. But now that the economy appears to be in an extended downturn, lawmakers are taking another look at infrastructure spending, which directly creates jobs and provides a slow, steady trickle of money into the economy. Meanwhile, the WP fronts coverage of Congress' attempts to shore up the economy by securing some of the $700 billion in bailout money to aid ailing Detroit automakers.

The LAT fronts a feature on Obama's "inner circle," focusing on old friends from school or from Chicago. The trouble with the story is that it's full of details about how the president-elect relies on old friends to get him through tough times, but it's noticeably short on examples of how these people could influence the way he'll govern. It says that some of the people may well follow him to the White House but never explains what sort of impact they'd have. What do these people bring to the table? What are their agendas? What would their appointment mean for the administration?

Rounding out the WP's Obama package is a pair of stories about the inauguration. The paper reports that hotel rooms are selling out all over Washington as people come from around the world to be part of the historic occasion. Subsequently, the paper fronts an amusing piece about Washingtonians getting calls from long-lost acquaintances looking for a place to crash during the festivities.

The NYT goes under the fold with analysis of the suddenly gracious rhetoric former Obama foes are using to describe his historic victory. This wild shift in tone is far from universal, and it probably doesn't translate to an increased willingness to cooperate, says the paper. The story posits that perhaps it's just that no one wants to be remembered for booing the first black president before he even takes office.

Texas didn't turn 'blue' last Tuesday—not even close. But that's not to say that the Lone Star State will be red forever. According to the LAT, some Democratic strategists think that just as growing numbers of Democrat-leaning Latinos helped deliver New Mexico and Florida for Obama, they might someday put Texas up for grabs. The story argues that if these trends continue in state level races in 2010, then a serious push in 2012 or 2016 might not be so far-fetched. If the prospect still seems crazy to you, Virginia provides a handy example of how a highly partisan state can turn into a tossup in just a few short years. The WP goes inside with coverage of the state's changing political makeup.

The WP fronts a piece on Iraqi security forces' concerns about the U.S. pulling troops out of Iraq. While violence has died down there, the paper says the security forces are still heavily dependent on U.S. forces for support, logistics, and training.

Public defenders across the country are having trouble coping with the burgeoning number of defendants they represent each year. Lawyers in several states are refusing to take on more clients or else they're suing to limit their case loads. They argue that taking more cases would be unethical, since they're already unable to give most clients the time and effort necessary to defend them. The NYT has all the details.

What happens if an uninsured immigrant goes to a hospital in the United States and ends up needing long-term care? The answer, as the NYT discovers, is mostly up to the hospital. The patient might be given the care he needs, even if he can't pay. Or the hospital might have the patient sent back to his homeland, even if he came to the U.S. legally. The paper follows several different cases to show how the discretion of hospital administrators can make all the difference.

Remember those nifty swimsuits the U.S. Olympic swim team used to win all those gold medals? Well, the WP says that they're quickly becoming commonplace for competitive swimming at every level, despite costing hundreds of dollars and needing regular replacements. Some are worried that the cost of the suits could put competitive swimming out of the reach for lower-income families and less-affluent schools.

The WP notes inside that when the college basketball season begins tomorrow, it will do so with a revised 3-point-line, now set a foot farther back in an attempt to reinvigorate the sport's ailing midgame. The paper examines the history of the line and examines a few predictions about the new rule's impact.

Instead of raising the price of common household items, some manufacturers are simply reducing the size of the package, effectively charging more for less. Is anyone noticing? The LAT has the story.

The NYT Magazine explores the Saudi government's plan to use group therapy to deprogram would-be terrorists.

Yesterday was the first Friday of the month. That means the lead stories in today's newspapers are all about the Department of Labor's latest monthly statistics, bad ones for the 10^th month in a row: The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 6.5 percent as American employers cut more than 240,000 jobs. The New York Times highlights the fact that unemployment has reached its highest level in 14 years. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times focus on President-elect Barack Obama's call for a new economic-stimulus package. The Wall Street Journal says the hurting auto industry is Obama's most pressing challenge.

The NYT reports that almost one-third of the unemployed today receive government benefits, far fewer than their counterparts of the 1950s, half of whom received checks while jobless. To put a face on today's recipients of unemployment benefits, the Times finds a looking-for-work guy who received $562 a month from Uncle Sam under the benefits that expired last month. Now the guy's girlfriend is paying the rent, he has a tumor in his foot, and soon he will be unable to afford health insurance.*

If Congress and the current White House can't agree on a new multibillion-dollar economic stimulus package by January, Obama said in his first press conference yesterday that it would be the "first thing" he'd get done upon taking office, reports the WP. Despite Obama's call for both political parties to "set politics aside," the White House indicated it would prefer to give more time to the $700 billion banking bailout before signing off on a plan from the Democrats that would include extending unemployment benefits and increasing food-stamp funding.

General Motors and Ford posted big losses and burned through billions in cash during the third-quarter, reports the WSJ, prompting the auto giants to warn that without government assistance they may not have enough cash reserves to operate later this year. Obama called the auto industry the "backbone of American manufacturing" and endorsed efforts to convert factories to producing more fuel-efficient vehicles. In a Page One story, the NYT says the government faces a tricky choice: A bailout for GM wouldn't even guarantee the company wouldn't need another bailout later, but allowing GM to go bankrupt now would cause a devastating economic ripple effect.

The WP fronts an analysis of Obama's first press conference as president-elect, reporting that Obama spoke cautiously and emphasized that he will wait until he actually assumes the presidency before he tries to "manipulate the levers of power." Obama said he had spoken to all the "living" former presidents—after the presser, he had to call former first lady Nancy Reagan and apologize for saying he would not "get into a Nancy Reagan thing about … doing any séances." The LAT declares the séance line to be the president-elect's First Gaffe.

Below the fold, the WP trumpets Japanese convenience stores as "the most convenient convenience stores on earth," places where citizens pay their bills, order appliances, book flights, and buy earwax remover. And the stores do very well, making money even as the Japanese economy slides into recession.

The LAT takes a look at the rift between the gay community and the black community in California over the state's newly voter-approved ban on gay marriage, which was largely carried by black voters. The Times reports that pro-ban robocalls used Barack Obama's statement that marriage is "between a man and a woman," even though Obama specifically stated his opposition to a ban.

Colleges across the country are facing budget cuts and hiring freezes, according to an A1 NYT story. Rich and poor schools both are suffering in the current economy, and one way students are reacting to increased costs and reduced aid programs, allegedly, is by flocking to their state schools—though the Times offers a 50 percent increase in applications to one New York state school as the only evidence of this trend.

The NYT fronts a piece on the potentially devastating impact of geriatric falls, focusing on the divergent recovery stories of two particular women, 87 and 93, who both fell and hurt themselves in July.

The WP retraces the path of the toxic chemical that found its way into all kinds of foods in China, sickening tens of thousands. Chinese officials banned melamine in 2007 when it was discovered to have poisoned thousands of dogs and cats in the United States. The melamine scourge continued in China as farmers bought the powder from con men who told them it could boost protein in feed and make milk from water. Also to blame: greedy chemical companies.

A huge African-American crowd is coming to Washington, D.C., to attend Barack Obama's inauguration in January, reports the WSJ. The paper calls the event reminiscent of historic black gatherings here such as the Million Man March and the 1963 rally in which Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech. Many people are planning to travel to D.C. without booking a room in advance, and lots of D.C. residents are planning to host friends and relatives.

Correction, Nov. 10, 2008: This column originally did not state that the unemployment-check recipient's benefits ran out last month. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

In my youth, I knew Nov. 11 as my sister's birthday. As I aged, I learned that it was also Veterans Day. Now, having spent time with American soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines—and time elsewhere with soldiers from other nations—I think I have a much better understanding of what the day is designed to commemorate.

For the last three years, I've found myself looking past Veterans Day, to Nov. 15, which is now a more significant date on my personal calendar than many officially recognized holidays. It's only by a quirk of fate that the day means anything to me, but that quirk of fate had a lasting impact on me, and far more so on four different families.

I need to back up a little. In October 2004, I was halfway through my second stint with Time magazine's Baghdad bureau. Conditions in Iraq were rapidly deteriorating. Mobility was limited, reporting increasingly dangerous. And in several places, working as an embedded reporter almost certainly meant coming under fire.

Ramadi was one of those places. Some military men considered it more dangerous than Fallujah, but, at that point, it still seemed like a good idea to spend time there with the 2^nd Battalion, 5^th Marine Regiment, one of the outfits trying to keep the city from spiraling completely out of control. By chance, I was briefly billeted with the 2/5's Whiskey Company, which was charged with, among other things, patrolling the main thoroughfare, known as Route Michigan, which almost guaranteed they'd get attacked. A week later, I returned for a few days to report on Ramadi and on combat stress among front-line soldiers.

During that second visit, I mainly rode in company commander Capt. Pat Rapicault's Humvee, a vehicle with the call sign Whiskey Six. I'd initially thought Rapicault—"Frenchy" to his men—was Cajun, but I later learned he'd grown up in Martinique and France before attending high school and college in Mississippi and enlisting. He was joined by Cpl. Marc Ryan, a steely-eyed South Jersey native; Cpl. Lance Thompson, who hailed from Indiana farm country; and Lance Cpl. Ben Nelson, a Californian.

Late one night, Whiskey Company rode out to support other Marines. I sat behind Ryan, who drove. Rapicault was behind Thompson, who manned the radio, and Nelson was in the gunner's hole. "We'll probably get hit," Ryan said. He'd know, I thought; he'd already served a bruising tour in Ramadi with the 2/4 Marines, then he re-upped and came back after spending only two weeks at home.

Indeed, he was right. Whiskey Company was ambushed twice that night. Whiskey Six was very nearly disabled by roadside bombs that detonated a few feet from the front tires. The wheels were flattened, the windshield spider-webbed and covered with engine oil. When Rapicault bellowed at Ryan to get moving, Nelson had to shout down directions so he could steer to safety.

Now I see that night as the most frightening experience I've ever had. Then, it was part of my job—and even more so, part of theirs. At the end of the month, my stint in Iraq ended. The battle for Fallujah commenced. Fighting continued in Ramadi. And on Nov. 15, I learned from the newspaper the next day, a suicide car bomber rammed Whiskey Six, killing Patrick Rapicault, 34; Marc Ryan, 25; and Lance Thompson, 21. Ben Nelson was seriously wounded but survived.

I didn't know them well, but they may have saved my life. I happened to be in New York visiting my parents, so I went to Ryan's funeral in Gloucester City, N.J. Later, I met Rapicault's older sister, Christine Cappallino, who lived in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The next year, on Nov. 15, I joined the Ryans for a memorial they held at a local bar. Two years later, I visited Lance Thompson's family, the Rapicaults, and Ben Nelson, thinking I'd write about how they were handling their losses.

They were wary but welcoming, still mourning but generous. I think they felt the stories I'd written for Time about Ramadi gave them a window into what life "over there" was like for their sons and helped memorialize them in some way. They, in turn, gave me a window into their lives and the steps they were taking to protect and maintain the memories of those they'd lost—the gatherings, the T-shirts, the stickers and photo books, and the scholarship funds. I saw Gloucester City High pull out a stunning last-minute victory on the day they retired Marc Ryan's jersey. I saw how Lance's brothers, Matthew and Philip, his cousin Casey, and his mother, Melanie Smith, had all gotten the same tattoo Lance had on his wrist—the Chinese characters for gung-ho. And I saw that the Rapicaults, who had moved to a planned community in central Florida in the 1990s to be nearer to Patrick, were doing their mourning in isolation. Their English was shaky, leaving them largely unable to plug into the networks the Ryans and Thompsons had at their disposal. Cappallino had moved from New York to Florida to help out her father and stepmother (then 91 and 74, respectively), but she was finding it hard to adjust to the new surroundings. More to the point, they were heartbroken about Patrick, as was Vera Rapicault, his widow, who had moved to Oregon.

Ben Nelson had improved dramatically and was working again—as a radio dispatcher for the Plaster County's sheriff's office—but he still felt the effects of his injuries. The explosion had collapsed his lungs and severely burned his hands, neck, and face. Shrapnel had pierced his back, shattered his jaw, split his tongue, and broken seven teeth. His back and knee were badly bruised, likely from landing after the blast pressure popped him out of the turret into the air, which saved his life.

There had been hard times, a few ups—especially the birth of a daughter, Kaitlyn—and a lot of downs. His father and friends helped out as they could, but in the main, his greatest asset was his preternaturally poised wife, Emily. She was 21 when she got the call telling her Ben was wounded. "She grew up fast," a friend of hers told me. "She's everything to me," Nelson said last winter.

Time couldn't run the story I wrote, which was immensely frustrating for me and, I imagine, for the families as well. But they were extremely gracious about it. Melanie Smith and Linda Ryan took to comforting me about it; they told me that it was meeting each other that really counted. Our connection wasn't much when measured temporally, and I daresay we had different opinions about the war itself, but I found myself opening up to them in ways I almost never do with people I write about.

A lot of people spent more time and faced more harrowing situations in Iraq than I did, but I think I've learned a few things about war through my various experiences in conflict zones. The biggest, I'd say, is that it doesn't really end. It marks the people who experience it, and it marks their families, too. "It's not what happens to you; it's how you deal with," Ben Nelson's father told him at one of his low points. And that's true, particularly, I think, with mourning. It doesn't go away, but if you can make some peace with whatever happened—whether it's by saying someone died doing something they loved or performing certain rituals or finding others who know the feelings involved—it gets a little easier to meet the days ahead.

Last year, on Nov. 15, Melanie Smith laid four roses at Lance's gravesite in Indianapolis' Crown Hill cemetery, red ones for Lance, Marc Ryan, and Pat Rapicault and a white one for Ben Nelson. "I notice [the anniversary]," Nelson said last year when I asked about it, but "I miss them just as much every other day."

I don't know exactly what I'll do this Nov. 15, but it's already been on my mind for a while, and I'm sure it will remain that way.

It's a truism that Barack Obama faces the most intractable set of challenges that any president has faced in at least 50 years. But on a few issues in foreign and military policy, he's caught a break. Whether by luck, the effect of his election, or President George W. Bush's stepped-up drive to win last-minute kudos, Obama will enter the White House with some paths to success already marked, if not quite paved.

Iraq. Just a few days after Obama's victory, the Iraqi political factions seemed much more disposed to sign a new Status of Forces Agreement with the United States. The SOFA, which is set to expire at the end of the year, outlines the conditions under which U.S. troops are permitted to remain in the country. One condition that Iraq has been demanding is the complete withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by 2011. Several Iraqi parties have been reluctant to ratify the accord even then, doubting that George W. Bush—or, had he won, John McCain—would really withdraw. But they believe that Obama will. So they're suddenly more eager to finalize an accord. Some factions are also more keen to settle their internal differences to avoid a political collapse or a renewed civil war once the Americans leave. Obama knows that early in his presidency he'll have to figure out a way to mount a major withdrawal from Iraq while minimizing the chance that the Baghdad government falls apart. This new tenor in Iraqi politics somewhat eases the task.

Iran. After refusing to talk with Iran for seven years, on the grounds that "we don't negotiate with evil, we defeat it" (as Vice President Dick Cheney once put it), the Bush administration is preparing to set up a U.S. interests office—not quite an embassy but the beginning of renewed diplomatic relations, a forum for communiqués, anyway—in Tehran. If Obama is prepared to offer more elaborate negotiations, as he should be, a forum will exist for doing so. At the same time, a smart-sanctions campaign run out of the U.S. Treasury Department for the last two years—in which international banks have been persuaded to stop doing business with Iran—seems to be having some effect. Meanwhile, plunging oil prices have slashed Tehran's cash flow. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has been riding high on this flow, is losing popularity at home. In short, the time may be ripe for a game of carrot-and-stick diplomacy with Iran, in which the carrot may be welcome and the stick might really hurt.

Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev's recent rumblings—his threat to place short-range missiles in Kaliningrad if the United States proceeds with its plan to install missile-defense batteries in the Czech Republic and Poland—may, if played right, redound to Obama's benefit. Obama clearly doesn't share Bush's misplaced enthusiasm for the missile-defense program; he has said several times that he would deploy a system if it were proved workable—a condition that's not likely to pan out. So Obama now has a good reason to drop the deployment plan—but with a caveat. He should reiterate Bush's point (whether or not it's entirely true) that the batteries in Eastern Europe were designed to shoot down Iran's missiles, not Russia's, and if he's going to let down our guard on that front, Russia has to help him keep Iran from building nuclear weapons in the first place—in other words, Russia has to stop assisting the Iranian nuclear program and join the sanctions initiated by the United States, the European Union, and the U.N. Security Council. If this trade can be made, other avenues of cooperation can also be reopened.

Efforts to revive relations with Russia—crucial for dealing with such vital issues as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and stability in the Middle East—might also be boosted by the latest news from Georgia. Independent military groups monitoring Russia's withdrawal are reporting that Georgia might not have been the purely innocent victim of Russian aggression, after all. The evidence, though still tentative, seems to suggest that Moscow was responding to the Georgian military's indiscriminate rocket and artillery barrage against the semi-autonomous enclave of South Ossetia. This finding doesn't exonerate Medvedev or Putin from the brutality of their counterinvasion, nor should it prompt an abandonment of concern for Georgian independence. But it does create an opening for rapprochement with Moscow—for hardheaded national-security reasons—without seeming craven.

North Korea. After six years of refusing to talk seriously with the North Koreans

about their nuclear program—for the same reason that he refused to talk

with the Iranians about anything—Bush finally signed an accord that at

least stopped North Korea's plutonium project. However, this was one case in which their obstinacy was justified. The deal signed last year was a multiphase arrangement. As part of the second phase, the North Koreans were to present data on their nuclear program—at which point the United States was to take North Korea off the list of nations supporting terrorism. The North Koreans submitted the data; Bush officials then demanded that the United States be allowed to verify the information on the list through on-site inspections. The North Koreans protested—correctly—that verification is a matter to be taken up in the third phase. When Washington kept refusing to take them off the list—largely at the instigation of officials in Cheney's office—the North Koreans threatened to cancel the whole agreement. Finally, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sent Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill to Pyongyang, and the deal was straightened out. The point is this: In 2000, Bill Clinton left George W. Bush on the verge of signing a far-reaching agreement with North Korea on nuclear weapons and missiles—and Bush tore it up and threw it away. Now Bush is leaving Obama with a much less-satisfying deal—during Bush's no-talking period, Pyongyang built and tested an atomic bomb and thus gained considerably greater leverage—but Bush is leaving Obama something to take to the next level without sparking (too much) partisan rancor.

Military spending. According to a story by Bryan Bender in the Boston Globe, the Defense Business Board, a senior advisory group appointed by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, recommended huge cuts in the military budget, noting that the current level of spending on weapons is "unsustainable." Several private and congressional defense analysts have been making this point for a few years now; the U.S. Government Accountability Office recently calculated that the Pentagon's 95 largest weapons systems have accumulated cost overruns amounting to $300 billion (that's just the overruns, not the total cost, which amounts to many hundreds of billions more). It's also clear, from the Pentagon's own budget analyses, that well over half of the $700 billion-plus budget has little if anything to do with the threats the United States faces now or in the foreseeable future. The past seven years have been a free-for-all for the nation's military contractors and service chiefs; the number of canceled weapons projects can be counted on one hand; they've otherwise received nearly all the money for everything they've asked for. Even many of the beneficiaries realize that the binge is coming to an end; the nation simply can't afford it. Obama's fortune is that he can order the cuts, invoking not his own preferences but the sober-minded urgings of a business advisory group in the Bush administration.