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While most architectural firms are known simply as John Doe & Partners (or John Doe + Partners, plus signs having replaced ampersands among the smart set), over the last several decades architectural practices with names such as Mecanoo, UNStudio, and OMA have appeared—and that's just in Holland. What's going on?

When the American Institute of Architects was founded in 1857, architecture was not yet considered a profession—it was one step up from carpentry and contracting. To be taken seriously by clients, architects followed the practice of law firms—a well-established profession—and strung together the names of the principal partners. This produced Adler & Sullivan, Burnham & Root, Carrère & Hastings, and that powerhouse, McKim, Mead & White. It sounded a bit stodgy, but also reliable and, above all, respectable.

Sometime in the 1950s, a few larger architectural firms started using initials instead of names. Streamlined initials carried the cachet of efficiency and no-nonsense, just like—well, IBM. I don't know which architectural firm first used initials, but the best-known was Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or SOM. During the 1950s, SOM was the leading corporate architectural practice in the country, and its offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco produced outstanding buildings such as Lever House, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the John Hancock Center in Chicago. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill began in 1936, but over time the original founders were replaced by a later generation—Gordon Bunshaft, Walter Netsch, Bruce Graham—and using initials neatly solved the delicate issue of succession. The faceless initials underline the collective and collaborative nature of large-scale architectural practices. URS, HOK, and RTKL—to name only a few of the country's largest firms—are no longer individual offices but international organizations.

During the swinging '60s, particularly in Europe, another naming fashion took hold. You read about these firms in Domus and Architectural Design: Archigram in London, Superstudio and Archizoom in Florence, Haus-Rucker-Co in Vienna. The trendy monikers made up for the fact that these fledgling firms created more drawings than actual buildings. Impatient to make a name for themselves, the young designers did the next best thing—they made up names, usually names that made them sound both arty and avant-garde. One of the first American architectural firms—certainly the most prominent—to adopt a fanciful name was Morphosis, founded by Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi in Los Angeles in 1972. It sounded a bit like one of those bands of the '60s—Procol Harum or Iron Butterfly.

Fanciful firm names have become de rigueur for young architects who want to be seen as being on the cutting edge of design: Asymptote, Allied Works, Office dA, Studio/Gang, and, one of my favorites, a Brooklyn firm called noroof architects. The irrepressible Rem Koolhaas actually has it both ways; he has adopted a serious-sounding organizational name, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, whose corporate initials—OMA—sound like a Buddhist mantra (and the German for grandma). What's going on? Another shift. Not satisfied with being perceived as respectable or corporate professionals, these architects want to be seen as subversive artists, bad boys—and girls—with laser cutters.

Click here to read a slide-show essay about Peanuts creator Charles Schulz.

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"In other words, he was given an option: Are you with us or are you not with us? And he made a clear decision to be with us, and he's acted on that advice."—on President Pervez Musharraf, Crawford, Texas, Nov. 10, 2007

Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 23:04.

Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."

"I don't particularly like it when people put words in my mouth, either, by the way, unless I say it."—Crawford, Texas, Nov. 10, 2007

Click here to see video of Bush's comments. The Bushism is at 27:17.

Got a Bushism? Send it to bushisms@slate.com. For more, see "The Complete Bushisms."

In Albert Camus' novel The Plague, an aspiring novelist named Joseph Grand can't progress beyond writing and rewriting ad infinitum a single sentence: "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne." Lewis Lapham suffers from a similar affliction. Eight years ago in this space ("The Impenetrable Mr. Lapham"), I quoted and attempted to parse the signature Lapham sentence, which appeared in the following form in the May 1999 issue of Harper's:

The swarm of cameras following Monica Lewinsky on her progress through a Washington airport or a New York restaurant wouldn't have surprised the Roman mob familiar with the expensive claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero, their eager and well-fed sycophancy presumably equivalent to the breathless enthusiasms of Barbara Walters.

In essence, Lapham was rephrasing Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun. Western civilization to contemporary news cycle: Been there, done that. It's not a particularly penetrating thought, which is why it always needs to be dressed up with windy invocations from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias" and the like. Anyway, Lapham has a new magazine called Lapham's Quarterly, comprising nothing but writings ancient, contemporary, and in-between, juxtaposed for maximum "all is vanity" impact and arranged under thematic headings like "Calls to Arms" and "Post-Mortems." (The first issue is about war.) Under Lapham, Harper's wasn't a bad magazine (if you sped past his "Notebook" and "Easy Chair" columns), but this new venture is so thoroughly Laphamized that none but a pompous bore would seem qualified to subscribe.

At the center of Lapham's three-ring circus of human folly down the ages stands Lapham himself, who, true to form, writes in an introductory essay titled "The Gulf of Time,"

When I see Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani being bundled around the country in a flutter of media consultants fitting words into their mouths, I think of the makeup artists adjusting the ribbons in Emperor Nero's hair before sending him into an amphitheater to sing with a choir of prostitutes.

How many times can a man write the same sentence? Lapham puts Camus' Grand to shame. Here's the sentence again on Page 183 of Lapham's 2006 book, Pretensions to Empire (paperback edition):

The train from Paris to Brussels passes through fields sown for 2,000 years with the seed of war, and on the way north last February 1 to the opening sessions of this year's European Parliament, I was reminded of the brightly beribboned armies—Saxon, Roman, Norman, English, French, Spanish, Austrian, German, and American—that had enriched the soil with the compost of human glory.

Here it is again—OK, this time it's two sentences—in a Lapham column in the September 2006 Harper's:

When King Richard the Lionheart joined the Third Crusade at Acre in 1191 and there failed to find the treasure promised by God, he insisted that the infidels had swallowed their jewels and gold coins in order to deny him the reward owing to his royal majesty and Christian virtue. His companions, less discreet than the ones currently for rent in Basra and Tikrit, cut open the stomachs of 3,000 Muslims in the search for truth, which, in the event, proved as determined, if eventually as disappointing, as the Bush Administration's quest for the thermonuclear genie in Saddam Hussein's magic lamp.

Here are those two sentences again in the October 2004 Forbes Global. Lapham's piece is supposed to be about golfing in Scotland:

Although arranged like St. Andrews, the course at North Berwick presents a wider variance of hazards, and possibly because of the names of the holes ("Gate," "Perfection," "Pit"), what little I could remember of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress came suddenly to mind in the elegiac light of a slowly ebbing sunset. I played the round in the company of two other solitary golfers on the hole ahead and the hole behind, three wayfarers set forth on the Scots' equivalent of the road to Canterbury, each of us in turn raising the flag of hope for the fellow pilgrim who maybe had come thus far without having fallen afoul, at least not yet, of Worldly Wiseman or Giant Despair.

By now you're thinking: Hey, this looks easy! I can redraft the Lapham sentence (or two sentences) also! And so you can, with the aid of Slate's Mad Libs, Lewis Lapham Edition. Just fill in the blanks below.

The Bush administration's forbearance as Gen. Pervez Musharraf proclaims, like [vainglorious monarch], that [famous megalomaniacal statement] recasts [open Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to any random page, close eyes, plunge finger into text, and insert here a précis of incident described therein] as opera bouffe. The sham outrage teases forth memories of the contortions displayed by [famous Ottoman acrobat of the 15^th century] or the prevarications of [obscure three-fingered gangster of the 1930s] as the Katie Courics and Wolf Blitzers of their day distracted the starving masses with [celebratory ritual performed by an island-based indigenous people] and competitions to mimic the cry of the mighty [extinct animal from the Cretaceous period].

Readers, this is not a contest. Don't e-mail your Mad Libs to me. Instead, copy them in longhand, preferably with a quill pen, and mail to: Lapham's Quarterly, 33 Irving Place, Eighth Floor, New York, N.Y. 10003. Don't forget to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Tim,

I don't think America's CEOs deserve stratospheric pay, and have never said so (I'm not responsible for a title that an editor puts on something I write, as you well know). Quite the contrary: I've been arguing for years that CEO pay is outrageous—and it's become even more outrageous since I first began yelling about it. Even more outrageous is the pay of hedge-fund managers, private-equity managers, venture capitalists, investment bankers, and the rest of Wall Street. (According to a study by University of Chicago professors Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, the top one-half of 1 percent of American earners contains more than twice as many Wall Street financiers as corporate executives.)

What to do about exorbitant pay? Raise the marginal income tax on the superrich.

Just don't count on shareholders to constrain CEO pay. They haven't and won't. Most of us are shareholders—typically through our 401(k) plans or pension plans—and we don't even know which firms they've invested in at any given time; we've left that choice up to the managers of our pension or mutual funds. Most of us are interested in only one thing—getting as good a return as we can. That's why "shareholder democracy" is such a joke.

Of course corporate boards are often larded with a CEO's old golfing buddies, especially board committees in charge of executive pay. But even when "independent" directors are in the majority, even where executive pay is fully "disclosed" to shareholders, even—as in the United Kingdom—where shareholders are supposed to approve CEO pay, nothing slows it down.

The real outrage is that we've allowed the tax code to succumb to the blandishments of powerful CEOs and Wall Streeters. Why do you suppose private-equity and hedge-fund managers who are raking in hundreds of millions a year are subject to a 15 percent marginal tax rate, lower than most middle-class Americans? Why are Democrats so reluctant to change this or raise taxes on the superrich? Because Wall Street and CEOs have lined their campaign coffers. (And, Tim, I'm afraid that includes the coffers of your favorite presidential candidate.)

Bob

Bob,

I agree that the tax code is far too accommodating to rich corporate CEOs and to hedge-fund managers. One of the pleasures of reading Paul Krugman's new book, The Conscience of a Liberal, is to be reminded that during the Eisenhower years the U.S. economy enjoyed explosive growth even though the top income-tax rate was 91 percent! (The tax cut that made John F. Kennedy a hero to supply-side zealots brought that top rate down to 70 percent, or twice what it is today.) In his April 2007 Washington Monthly column, "Tilting at Windmills," our mutual friend Charles Peters demolished Republican claims that Bush's tax cuts were responsible for bringing the unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent:

In the twenty-two years since the end of World War II that unemployment has been less than 5 percent, taxes have been higher than they are now twenty-one times. In thirteen of those years, the top rate was 70 percent or higher. In nine, it was 90 percent. That's right, unemployment less than 5 percent and a tax rate of 90 percent. Actually, in four of those years the unemployment rate was under 4 percent, the lowest it has been.

The economy of that earlier era, as you note in Supercapitalism, was very different from the economy of today—more oligopolistic, more dominated by labor, and more closely regulated by government—but there's no reason to believe that today's super rich would deprive us of their profit-generating talents if we required them to pay more in taxes. The purpose of raising their taxes would not be to punish them for making too much money but rather to make them pay their fair share to fund necessary and vital functions of government. They have more to spare and therefore should pay more.

Since we appear to agree on this point, I won't dwell on it further.

Where we disagree is on the question of whether stratospheric CEO compensation reflects CEOs' true value in the economic sphere. You think that CEO pay is "outrageous," but only from the standpoint of social justice. From a market perspective, you don't think CEO pay is outrageous at all. You think it's economically rational and reflects the CEOs' true value to shareholders. In that sense, the headline that the Wall Street Journal's editorial page slapped on your op-ed—"CEOs Deserve Their Pay" (subscription required)—was perfectly accurate.

In the old days, you write in Supercapitalism, a CEO "did not have to be especially clever or even particularly bright" because the U.S. economy was more plodding and predictable. Today's CEO finds himself in "a different situation."

Rivals are impinging all the time—threatening to lure away consumers all too willing to be lured by a better deal, threatening to hijack investors eager to jump ship at the slightest hint of an upturn in a rival's share price. The modern CEO must therefore be sufficiently ruthless and driven to find and pull the levers that will deliver competitive advantage. There are no standard textbook moves, no well-established strategies to draw upon. … Boards of directors well understand this, which is one reason why executive talent is in such high demand.

That's true, but only up to a point. Even in today's relentlessly competitive global economy, the modern CEO is something less than the Nietzchean superman you describe here. Even when he does his job well, his performance is only one determinant of his corporation's success or failure—a very important determinant, to be sure, but not necessarily the deciding factor. Corporations are complex social organisms, and the factors that make them succeed involve all sorts of human interactions up and down the hierarchy, along with externalities that have nothing to do with corporate personnel at all. This is a reality that the business press, with its relentless focus on any given corporate chairman's personal dynamism (or lack thereof), is reluctant to face.

To whatever extent the CEO's performance is intrinsic to the success or failure of his corporation, that is seldom reflected in his level of compensation. In my earlier column, I cited Graef Crystal's discussion of a business review article arguing that giving the big boss an excess of stock options can actually hurt a corporation by encouraging the boss to take too many risks, the downside of which punish the stockholders more than the boss himself. In a Nov. 12 column, The New Yorker's James Surowiecki applied this logic to the subprime mortgage meltdown. Crystal, as I'm sure you know, has made a career out of cataloging the many, many ways that corporate boards routinely undermine the principle that CEO pay should bear some relationship to the quality of a CEO's performance. Crystal's concern isn't social justice; it's market efficiency. CEO pay, he argues, seldom makes economic sense.

In your response to my column, you argued that no reforms in corporate governance have thus far had any impact on the growth in CEO pay. The whole effort, you suggest, is futile. I invite you to stop short of that question, at least for now, to reconsider a more immediate question: Does CEO pay really make economic sense? Is it a logical allocation of resources? Does it impose economic costs (if nothing else, on employee morale)? I know you've given these questions a lot of thought—certainly more thought than I have—and I just can't believe you see no market distortions here. Again: Let's not worry just yet about whether we can figure out the proper recourse for frustrated stockholders. Is the market in CEO salaries behaving rationally?

Tim

Tim,

If you agree with me that 1) CEO pay is outrageous on social and ethical grounds; 2) the best way to rein it in (and rein in the even more outrageous pay of hedge-fund and private-equity fund managers) is by increasing the marginal tax on the highest incomes; and 3) shareholders won't and can't be counted on to do the job, then our disagreement is over the economics of CEO pay. You say the current level can't be explained by supply and demand; I say it can—at least, to a very large degree.

There's an important difference between explanation and justification.

Markets have lots of effects that cannot be justified morally—a point that market fundamentalists on the right often fail to acknowledge. One of the biggest of such effects is CEO pay, and the growing gap between it and the wages of average workers. Every two weeks, Lee Scott Jr. of Wal-Mart rakes in roughly the same amount his average employee earns in a lifetime. That's a bigger gap than used to be the case, even at Wal-Mart. Is it because CEOs such as Scott have become greedier than they used to be, or so much more adept at packing their boards with cronies who will award them princely sums? I doubt it. CEOs have always been greedy, and they used to have an easier time handpicking their boards than they do now in the post-Enron era.

A simpler explanation is that boards of directors choose their CEOs from a relatively small pool of proven executive talent. Few executives have been tested and succeeded at the top job. Boards don't want to risk error. The cost of recruiting the wrong person can be huge. This wasn't nearly as much the case decades ago, when competition for investors and customers was far less intense and shareholders were far more placid. But under supercompetitive capitalism, boards are willing to pay more and more for CEOs because their rivals are paying more and more, and the cost of making a bad decision is so much greater than before. As I argue in Supercapitalism, the stakes are higher because, in effect, consumers and investors have more choice than ever before, and are pressuring all companies to offer them better deals. If they don't get them, consumers and investors will find them somewhere else.

This doesn't mean CEOs have to be Nietzschean supermen or -women. And of course a company's overall performance depends on a lot more than the wisdom of a single head honcho. It just means that boards of directors are willing to pay far more than they used to, just as Hollywood studios are paying lots more for celebrities. As The New Yorker's James Surowiecki has reminded us, Clark Gable earned $100,000 a picture in the 1940s, which translates into roughly $800,000 today. But that was when Hollywood was dominated by a handful of big studios. Today, Tom Hanks makes closer to $20 million per film. Movie studios are now competing intensely not only with one another but with every other form of entertainment. They're willing to pay Hanks and other celebrities these colossal sums because they're still small compared with the money these stars bring in and the profits they generate.

Last year, Ford Motor Co.—which, as everyone knows, has been slashing its payrolls—gave its chief executive, Alan Mulally, a $2 million "base salary," $7.5 million as a signing bonus, options and stock units valued at more than $15 million, and more than $11 million worth of other perks and benefits, for a grand total of around $36 million. Did the Ford board offer Mulally this much because Mulally had filled the board with golfing buddies? No. He hadn't even worked at Ford before being offered this package. It was put together by Ford's board in order to lure Mulally to Ford from Boeing. Mulally had done well at Boeing, and Ford was desperate to find someone who could turn around the company and, just as importantly, convince Wall Street it had found someone who could turn around the company. Is Mulally "worth it" in social or moral or ethical terms? Of course not. Is it nonetheless understandable that Ford's board felt it needed him, and therefore was willing to pay him this much? Sadly, the answer is yes.

That the market for CEOs results in such exorbitant levels of pay doesn't make it right to pay CEOs this much; it only makes such pay understandable. This is why I've argued that we can't rely on shareholders to rein in CEO pay. It's also why our understandable moral outrage about CEO pay should be directed at changing the rules of the game—such as increasing the marginal tax on the super-rich.

Bob

Bob,

Sorry to be so late getting back to you. I got distracted by a fistfight that's broken out on the New York Times op-ed page.

Your last e-mail overstated our areas of agreement.

1) Yes, I agree, as you put it, that "CEO pay is outrageous on social and ethical grounds." But:

2) No, I never said that raising marginal taxes on high incomes was the best way to tackle this problem. I merely said that raising marginal taxes on high incomes would be a good idea. I'd be in favor of doing so even if CEOs weren't taking home 350 times what the typical worker earns. The tax system, I believe, should not be a vehicle for confiscating money from people who have too much of it. Rather, it should be a means of funding a government whose competence and breadth best serves its citizens' needs. The richest people should pay the most, proportionally, only because they have the most to spare.

From a redistributive point of view, that may be a distinction without much difference. But I want to be clear about my purpose.

3) I don't agree that reforms in corporate governance will never bring CEO pay under control. I merely sought to separate the question, "Is this a problem?" from "Can it be solved?" By "problem" I don't mean moral problem, though I think it's that, too; I mean an economic problem. In other words, is something getting in the way of the smooth functioning of market forces? I believe there is. You believe that if stockholders didn't want to shower corporate executives in greenbacks with little regard for performance, they wouldn't do it. I say: Slow down, fella! Give them a little time!

I can't seem to interest you in a recent study (by W. Gerard Sanders of Brigham Young University and Donald C. Hambrick of Penn State University) that appeared in the Academy of Management Journal. It suggested that CEO pay packages heavily dependent on stock options—probably the most significant factor driving CEO compensation into the stratosphere—were likelier to lower stock prices than to raise them, because they push CEOs into taking too many risks. I mentioned the study in my original discussion of this topic; I mentioned it again in my response to your opening salvo; I mention it a third time here. If stupendous paydays for CEOs really are pushing stock prices down, I have to believe that stockholders (and maybe even corporate boards) will wise up eventually to their folly.

According to Graef Crystal, some companies already are. In a Sept. 5 Blooomberg column, Crystal identified 35 CEOs of large corporations who performed well in 2006 despite receiving relatively modest pay. Relatively is the key word here, since they still averaged $10.8 million; their companies' average rate of return was 35 percent ("more than double that of the S&P 500 Index"). But it's a start.

I'll grant that reform in this area is seldom swift. You probably haven't spent much time lately in Rock Creek Cemetery (most famous for its Saint-Gaudens memorial to Clover Adams), but if you happen by you might consider taking in the monument that Evelyn Y. Davis, the (still-living) shareholders' rights advocate, has built for herself. The woman is so worried that no one will remember her when she departs this vale of tears that she's thrown up three pink slabs with ample room for assorted bizarre addenda ("Recognized at White House press conferences by several presidents since 1978"). This photograph will give you some idea, though it doesn't show a marble bench and a couple of pink stones lying flat on the ground. All three bear her initials. Davis' capacious final resting spot is mostly a ghoulish specimen of the particular strain of status anxiety that flourishes in our nation's capital. But it's also a sad comment on how little Ms. Davis expects to leave behind. Not for her the epitaph (to paraphrase Christopher Wren's in St. Paul's), "If you seek my monument, notice how reasonable CEO compensation has gotten."

But she's still plugging away, bless her heart, at 78. We've seen you persevere in much more quixotic causes, and at 61 you're still a relatively young man. So I hope you'll reconsider, and resume your fight to restore market sanity to the compensation of chief executives.

Tim

Tim,

If you agree with me that CEO pay is outrageous on social and ethical grounds, I don't understand why you frown on using the tax system to redistribute some of it. How and what a society taxes has every bit to do with social norms about fairness. (When you say the tax system shouldn't be a vehicle for "confiscating" money from people who have too much of it, you sound like Sean Hannity.)

If you believe shareholders can and will do a better job constraining CEO pay than a higher marginal tax would, you need to offer some evidence for this dubious proposition. The Sanders and Hambrick study, which you repeatedly mention, suggests quite the opposite. It says stock options haven't been good for shareholders. Yet, as you know, stock options continue to multiply. You say you "have to believe" stockholders and boards will wise up eventually. I say: Get real. Shareholder democracy is a sham. If you doubt me, do your own mental experiment. You probably have savings tucked away in some pension or mutual fund. How often have you actually voted the shares of the stocks you own through such a fund?

You note that 35 CEOs of large corporations gave their investors a healthy return on their investments last year despite receiving an average of $10.8 million, a relatively paltry sum as CEO pay goes these days. I'm not sure whether this proves that CEOs can be as motivated for this modest amount as they can be for twice as much, or that returns to investors have less to do with CEO performance than with other variables. But it doesn't prove that shareholders are wising up to anything.

Kudos to Evelyn Davis for persevering at the age of 78. Kudos to anyone for persevering at whatever their passion may be, by age 78. But anyone genuinely concerned about social injustice ought to persevere at something that counts. Income and wealth inequality in America is a huge and growing problem—worth our attention and effort. Yet we'll never make any headway on it if we continue to attend to the wrong things. Shareholders want a high return on their investments. Period. And notwithstanding the recent perturbations on Wall Street, shareholders have been doing just fine.

I'm going to continue fighting for quixotic causes, Tim, but shareholder rights isn't among them. A fairer tax system is.

I've enjoyed this exchange. Many thanks.

Bob

In the Nov. 15 "War Stories," Fred Kaplan incorrectly stated that the State Department had successfully lobbied against a Senate resolution that would have increased the number of special immigration visas available to Iraqis. The bill passed and is pending in the House.

In the Nov. 10 "Today's Papers," Ben Whitford misspelled the name of former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

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.

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Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007

Jurisprudence: Were White House E-Mail Actions Illegal?

The White House is facing two lawsuits related to handling of e-mails. If the White House destroyed e-mails, it may have violated federal law. Dahlia Lithwick talks to Madeleine Brand about a federal judge's order to preserve all White House e-mails. Listen to the segment.

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,

I dread Thanksgiving. My husband and I are expected to attend a family yearly Thanksgiving dinner hosted by my husband's sister and brother-in-law. We are never specifically invited by my sister-in-law, who doesn't phone or invite us personally; she does not speak with us throughout the year. My mother-in-law tells me that as long as she is alive—she's almost 80—she wants her family together for Thanksgiving. I've been honoring her wish because I love her dearly. After driving 200 miles, we're usually greeted by my brother-in-law, who invariably calls me by the wrong name. (My husband and I have been married nine years; I am that man's only sister-in-law.) I correct him, but feel embarrassed. At dinner, I'm seated near my brother-in-law, who continues to misname me. I offer to help with cleaning up and dishes, but my sister-in-law says she has "her own way" in the kitchen. We're then subjected to various grandchildren who perform, either by very bad piano or singing. We make our escape as soon as, and politely as, possible, having tried to converse with everyone but arriving at dead ends. Is there any reasonable way we can excuse ourselves from these intolerable dinners without upsetting my mother-in-law?

—A Turkey of a Day

Dear Turkey,

Before you go, read the collected works of Joe Orton; these farcical black comedies will remind you of your own family gathering, minus a dead body or two. It's too late to do anything this year except show up, at least for the sake of your beloved mother-in-law. When your brother-in-law greets you by the wrong name, you could just say, "It's good to see you again, Ralph" (assuming his name is not Ralph) and let it go. (Has your husband ever explored the possibility that there's something seriously awry with his sister and brother-in-law?) But while the day sounds dreary, it's preferable to the confrontations of more histrionic clans. After all, you arrive, eat a meal, watch the grandchildren perform (remember, their badness is part of the charm), then head back to civilization without even having to clean up. For the future, many couples alternate major holidays with their respective families—so why not visit yours next Thanksgiving, and then spend some extra time later with your mother-in-law? Or you could really shake things up and declare that since Ralph and his wife have been entertaining you for the past nine years, next year, it's your turn.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: My BFF Married My Cousin

Dear Prudence,

The other night, my fiancee suggested that we could use the diamonds in her wedding ring from her previous marriage in the setting of her new wedding ring. I protested. Didn't seem kosher. She shot back, "I was the one who bought the diamonds!" Still, I think her old ring has significance and should be kept as is, albeit locked in a drawer. My business partner thinks we should hock the ring or throw it into the fires of Mordor (he threw the wedding ring from his first marriage away—"Bad mojo."), but no way should we use the exact stones from the old ring. Three different opinions for one ring. Help!

—Ringless

Dear Ringless,

As somebody who imbues objects with (too much) meaning, I like your fiancee's practical approach. The stones are nice, she bought them herself, and the previous marriage is so over that she measures the weight of these rocks in carats, not as symbols. However, it's human nature to find meaning in things, and if every time you look at her ring it makes you feel as if her ex is somehow wrapped around her finger, then keeping those diamonds is a false economy. If the idea of using the stones continues to nag at you, she should accede to your wishes. But it's silly to keep the ring locked away. She can get pleasure from it, and remove its power, by either selling it or resetting the diamonds as a pair of earrings. No need for Mordor to claim it.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I have been married to a wonderful man for the last year. We laugh every day, have great conversations, share the chores, and really enjoy each other. There is a lot of teasing in our relationship, which is fun, usually. But what do I do when the teasing goes too far and my feelings are hurt? Recently my husband was folding laundry, and I came in to help. He told me, "If I would have known what a pain you were going to be, I would have seriously reconsidered marrying you. Seriously. Why don't you leave, I was enjoying the quiet." I'd been teasing him about beating him in fantasy football, which rarely happens, and he never has any problems letting me know when he wins. The way he said it made me feel like he wasn't joking anymore. I was speechless. I started to leave the room, and he asked me where I was going. So I stayed and finished helping with the laundry. After this conversation, things continued as if nothing big was said. I just can't seem to get those words out of my head. I've told him before when the teasing goes too far, and his reply is, "If you are going to be with me, you need to have tougher skin." Am I being oversensitive?

—Hurt Feelings in a New Marriage

Dear Hurt,

If your husband was actually expressing his reconsideration of your marriage because you teased him about fantasy football, then please put off having children and get some couples counseling immediately. However, if he was teasing, my bet is that he was trying to say something like: "I never would have believed that folding laundry could be fun—but it is when I do it with you. I'm so glad I found you. It's hard for me to say stuff like that straight out." But you're married to the guy, so if his remarks still echo in your head, just tell him that and get a clarification. Teasing can be a great release valve and a way for a couple to have their own private language. But it's only fun when you two mutually understand how not to go too far with each other. This is a partnershp, and it's not fair if the rules are that you have to be tougher, not that he has to be more tender. Have a talk (ground rule: no teasing) and tell him that while you like that you can joke with each other, sometimes it doesn't feel like a joke, and you need him to recognize that no matter how thick your skin gets, it's always going to bruise more easily than his.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I'm still in college, and work part-time. All of my co-workers are full-time, and old enough to be my mother. A courier comes in to our office several times a day, and although he may have some psychological issues and is overweight, he is always friendly to us. Most of my co-workers ignore him, but when he leaves, he's the hot topic of conversation, and it's always negative. They talk about how he smells, or was acting creepy, or, "Oh, my gosh, he stared at me!" I've never witnessed any staring, and I'm usually the only one to even say hello. I've never noticed a smell, but he must sweat a lot hauling around packages all day. I've dropped hints that he's working hard for his living—but they keep at it. Do you have any suggestions on confronting them and still keeping good relations?

—Young

Dear Young,

It's more important that you're doing the right thing than it is to confront them about doing the wrong thing. Since you see the courier several times a day, continue to be welcoming, engage in small talk ("It must be a relief now that the weather's cooler"), and thank him for his help. Do be careful not to so overcompensate for your rude co-workers that he gets the wrong idea and thinks you're coming on to him. But since their remarks are awful, next time they start trashing him, you can say—without sounding self-righteous, "Gee, I really don't know what you're talking about. Maybe he has some issues we don't understand. But I've never seen him be anything but hard-working and polite."

—Prudie

BEIJING—It may have been during our visit to the Laoshe Teahouse, a glitzy tourist trap off Tiananmen Square, that I realized how hard our Chinese hosts were trying to please us. It wasn't just the floor show—two country boys imitating jet planes, a tubby dancer "balancing porcelaneous flower jug on head and throw it in the ambience of the evening," and of course the fabulous "face smearing of the Sichuan opera also called blow facing!"

No, the really thoughtful touch was the chow waiting for us as we entered the restaurant: bags of congealed KFC french fries, with ketchup. Lots and lots of ketchup, in little foil-wrapped Heinz packets. There was a good reason for all that seasoning. I was with 44 other foreigners, most of them tomato farmers, canners, and food processors, who had come to China on a tour with the World Processing Tomato Council.

China, it turns out, now grows more tomatoes for processing—the kind that get turned into ketchup, pasta sauce, salsa—than any place in the world besides California, and maybe Italy. The precipitous rise of the country's tomato industry, which scarcely existed a decade ago, is wreaking some havoc. The Senegalese claim that cheap Chinese tomato paste is driving farmers off the land. Turks, Aussies, and Russians have similar complaints. The Italians are especially unhappy: The Silk Road over which Marco Polo brought home the pasta has turned into a pipeline of cheap tomato paste. "The phenomenon of Chinese tomato paste is grave and preoccupying," Calabrian newspaper Gazzetta del Sud opined recently.

The story of how China's tomato industry grew surely must rank as one of the weirdest of the country's economic boom. To begin with, the Chinese themselves shun tomatoes. In China, about the only way you can get a person to eat a tomato is by slicing it and liberally sprinkling sugar over each slice. After the Spanish Conquest, peppers and sweet potatoes became firmly entrenched in the Chinese diet. But the tomato found no home here. We say tomato; they say "foreign eggplant" (fan qie, in Mandarin, anyway).

Nevertheless, in 1993, a private domestic company called Tunhe decided to start growing tomatoes in China's arid western highlands, an area studded with camel herds, yurts, oil derricks, and ancient underground irrigation systems.

Most of the tomatoes are grown in the province of Xinjiang, an ancient, landlocked crossroads on the Silk Road where many of the natives are Kazakhs, Uyghurs, or members of various Muslim ethnic groups. A few years ago, Tunhe went flamboyantly bankrupt and was taken over by a Chinese state-run food conglomerate, Cofco. Its chief competitor in the tomato business is the Chinese army. The army's Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is a shadow power in the province and has about 1 million employees.

The XPCC was established in the 1950s to create work for the thousands of soldiers and ex-convicts who had been sent to the region to Sinocize it and keep an eye on the Soviets and ethnic minorities.

The point of growing all these tomatoes in Xinjiang—as well as in Inner Mongolia and Gansu province—was not so much to secure vital spaghetti Bolognese resources for China, as it was to create jobs for some of the Han Chinese sent to the region during the heroic age of Chinese communism.

The XPCC's tomato-producing affiliate and Cofco Tunhe have given small plots of land to tens of thousands of tomato farmers. At harvest, the tomatoes are collected in gunnysacks, dumped into trailers, and driven by truck, motorcycle, and even donkey cart to ultramodern, Italian-designed tomato processing factories. There, using the standard method for creating industrial tomato paste, most of the tomatoes are heated to about 200 degrees, which causes them to blow up. The resulting paste is partially evaporated and flows into sterile drums. The drums go by rail across the country to the east coast and are shipped around the world.

On my tour, some of the visiting tomatoistas were looking for business opportunities. All were gathering intelligence as to how serious a threat China's tomatoes were to enterprises back home, where in some cases tomato-growing is not only a business but a way of life. The Chinese were sensitive to these tensions and sought to reassure their guests that they were really enthusiastic about tomatoes, too, and not just for the money. At a symposium in Beijing, Ning Gaoning, the president of Cofco, offered the following happy explanation: "Tomato is such a beautiful fruit," he said. "It brings us taste and nutrition and health, and also it brings us business. It is a foreign thing. But it is more and more an important thing in the 'New Socialistic Countryside.' " Speeches like Ning's would be punctuated, during the tour, with the plinking of glasses of Chinese plonk (Cofco's Great Wall wine) and of the sickeningly sweet Cofco-brand tomato juice. And of course by lots of ketchup.

From the foreign side, one heard expressions of worry, amusement, schadenfreude, and paternalism. At a banquet, a European tomato processor rose to toast the Chinese and then gently chided them for dumping their products in overseas markets. The Cofco employee who interpreted this speech for the dignitaries on hand (including the governor of Xinjiang) excised all except for the cheerful banalities. "China is getting freer," the interpreter told me later, "but it isn't totally free."

Some Italians are especially worked up over what they view as a Faustian bargain their industry made here. In the 1990s, searching for cheap product for their export markets, Italian companies began setting up tomato-processing plants in China to provide paste, which Italian canners repackaged, slapped with "Made in Italy" stickers, and shipped to Africa. Soon, though, the Chinese figured out a way to market their paste directly to the Africans and began selling it in Europe as well. In 2002, customs agents seized 160 tons of rotting, worm-infested Chinese paste at the Italian port of Bari. Much to their horror, Italian consumers soon learned that some of the paste on their shelves had come from China, where, as it was pointed out, there were lax controls on sanitation, pesticides, and heavy-metal contamination. "Italy—Invaded by Chinese tomatoes!" screamed a Corriere della Sera article in 2005. That year, Italian tomatoes rotted in the fields because Chinese paste imports had lowered the price so far that the Italian tomatoes were no longer worth harvesting.

This is where ketchup diplomacy comes in. Eager to assure their foreign guests that Chinese tomato production was not growing at the expense of foreign producers, the Chinese stressed that their young people consume more tomatoes all the time—in the form of pizza sauce or ketchup on fries and burgers, at the 3,000 or so fast food emporiums that have opened in China over the past couple of decades.

This junk food explosion, and the recognition that China is starting to have an obesity problem, however, seemed slightly at odds with the marketing pitch. Processed tomatoes are, in fact, good for you—full of lycopene and other molecules that may help prevent cancer and heart disease. But it kind of depends on how you eat them.

"So the way to save the world's tomato industry is by getting the Chinese to eat more junk food?" I whispered to the representative of a major food processing company.

"You weren't supposed to notice that," she responded.

What of the quality of the Chinese produce? The consensus seemed to be that while China was doing a plausible job making tomato paste, it had a ways to go. Juan Jose Amezaga, a handsome, chain-smoking, hyperkinetic Spanish tomato consultant, rushed around the factories, identifying the weak spots. (Late blight! Rust in the trucks! Tomatoes rotting as farmers wait for hours to enter the cannery!)

"A sheety tomato is a sheety tomato," he was heard to say.

Amezaga wasn't the only one with doubts. Tomatoes are very difficult to keep pest-free, and in some of the Xinjiang fields, the visitors observed varieties of mold and viral infections they didn't even recognize. Jim Beecher, a hale and hearty Fresno farmer, stooped over a patch of moldy, black-spotted tomatoes and calculated that where his California fields might average 40 tons per acre, these were producing barely half that yield. His expression was one of relief.

While free land and cheap labor give China advantages, tomatoes are a finicky fruit, and tomato production a tricky business. A month ago, word arrived that China had lost nearly a quarter of its tomato crop. The cause? You guessed it: mold in Inner Mongolia.

Oregon is known as a trailblazing state, and its pioneering spirit extends to wine. Long before most Americans had ever heard of pinot noir, winemakers in Oregon were staking their futures on this ornery but immensely rewarding grape. The gamble paid off: Pinot noir has flourished in Oregon, particularly in the Willamette Valley, just southwest of Portland. Despite this success, Oregon wine country hasn't lost that frontier feeling; it's still long on pluck and blessedly short on flash, attributes that some might consider cardinal American virtues. If you are planning to go native with the wine this Thanksgiving, I suggest making it an Oregon pinot noir, and not only for the patriotic symbolism—a good Oregon pinot will pair beautifully with the bird.

Under the best of circumstances, trying to cultivate pinot noir outside of Burgundy, where the grape seems most at home and yields wines of astonishing subtlety and grace (some, anyway), requires a certain quixotism; to have planted pinot noir in Oregon in the 1960s, a time when the state was a viticultural desert (a lingering consequence of Prohibition) and America was still a wine backwater, arguably met the definition of insanity. But two University of California, Davis, enology trainees, David Lett and Dick Erath, were convinced the Willamette Valley possessed the climate and soil to produce great pinot, and their hunch turned out to be a good one: Lett's The Eyrie Vineyards and Erath's eponymous winery, both established in the mid-1960s, survived the early tribulations and became beacons that lured other pinot aspirants to Oregon—lots of them. At latest count, there are 350 bonded wineries in Oregon, around 220 of which are in the Willamette Valley.

Lett and Erath are the Lewis and Clark of Oregon winemaking, although Lett is usually referred to as Papa Pinot. In 1979, one of his pinots, the 1975 South Block Reserve, finished third in a blind tasting in Paris that included a number of red Burgundies. The event wasn't quite as seismic as the Judgment of Paris three years earlier, when a couple of Napa upstarts outpolled several heavyweight Bordeauxs and Burgundies in a blind tasting, but it earned Oregon winemaking some needed recognition. When the same Lett wine finished second to a 1959 Maison Joseph Drouhin Chambolle-Musigny (a red Burgundy from a great vintage) in a blind tasting the following year, it was enough to persuade Robert Drouhin, who had groomed the winner, to later buy a vineyard in the Willamette Valley, which has proved to be a boon for the Drouhin family and an even better advertisement for Oregon wines. In 1987, McMinnville, Ore., hosted the first International Pinot Noir Celebration, which gathered pinot producers and aficionados from around the world for a weekend of talking and drinking. It's been held every year since and has become for pinot buffs what Woodstock was for potheads.

Oregon's status as America's pinot noir capital appeared to suffer a blow several years ago, thanks to Hollywood. Sideways, released in 2004, ignited a pinot noir mania in the United States, but because the film was set on California's Central Coast and the lead character, Miles, spoke so rapturously of the local wines, it naturally created the impression that this region, rather than Oregon, was the finest source of domestic pinot. Sure enough, Central Coast wineries saw a huge increase in visitors and sales as a result of Sideways. But the Sideways effect also redounded to Oregon's benefit; by all accounts, demand for the wines surged and so did the number of wine tourists.

While the movie industry did Oregon no harm, global warming yet may. The initial attraction of the Willamette Valley was its cool climate—it was a place with Burgundian weather that from time to time was capable of producing Burgundian pinot noirs. With growing seasons in Oregon getting hotter, there is fear that the character of the wines could change, and not for the better. For now, though, the concerns seem overblown. Most Oregon pinots still put elegance above power, and even some of the richer ones come in under 14 percent alcohol—flavored water compared to many California pinot noirs. Tony Soter, an Oregon native who moved to California in the 1970s and became a celebrated winemaker there, has now returned to Oregon to raise his family and produce pinot noir. He says that global warming poses a long-term threat but that the recent spate of warmer years has proved to be an asset. Indeed, he says the increasingly benign conditions in the Willamette Valley influenced his decision to come back to Oregon. Twenty years ago, he would never have considered making wine in Oregon—there were just too many washed-out vintages. "The weather is a little more forgiving now," says Soter. He is not as sanguine about California pinot noir: He thinks warmer temperatures, combined with misguided viticultural practices, are hurting the quality of many California pinots.

As cellar practices go, Oregon also seems to have the edge over California: Oregon pinots generally exhibit a much more judicious use of new oak than their California brethren. And while Oregon may have missed out on a major motion picture, it has something that the Central Coast can't claim: Riedel is now offering an Oregon pinot noir glass, produced in collaboration with the International Pinot Noir Celebration. It's not entirely clear why Oregon pinot noir requires its own stemware, but the glass is certainly attractive. Finally, insofar as Thanksgiving is concerned, the Beaver State also boasts an advantage: Oregon pinot noirs often emit a whiff of cranberry.

With cranberries, turkeys, and imbibing relatives in mind, I tasted a number of 2004 and 2005 Oregon pinots, along with several 2006s. I enjoyed almost all the wines I tried, and some were terrific. The 2004 Domaine Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir Laurène ($65) is a ripe, elegant, beautifully proportioned pinot that would be a lethal ringer in a blind tasting of premier cru Burgundies. Ditto the 2004 Hamacher Wines Pinot Noir ($45), a medium-bodied offering with rich, briary red fruits, great freshness and verve, and superb structure. The 2005s from Cristom Vineyards were really impressive: It was one toothsome pinot after another. I especially liked the 2005 Cristom Jessie Vineyard Pinot Noir ($50) and the 2005 Cristom Eileen Vineyard Pinot Noir ($50), both of which are succulent, impeccably balanced wines that could be happily consumed now or laid away for even more fun later. The 2005 Soter Vineyards Mineral Springs Pinot Noir ($60) is another winner—a satiny pinot with fine aromatics, gracefully opulent fruit, and a good tannic spine.

Rather than choosing between California and Oregon, Adam Lee of Siduri Wines is making pinots in both places. I was particularly impressed by his entry-level Oregon pinot, the 2006 Siduri Wines Willamette Valley Pinot Noir ($19), which serves up a classic cherries 'n' dirt nose and a seamless blend of fruit, tannins, and acidity; good pinot seldom comes cheap, and this wine offers excellent quality for the price. Beaux Frères is one of Oregon's best-known producers. Having a famous proprietor helps: Critic Robert Parker is a part-owner (and no, he doesn't issue ratings for Beaux Frères). The 2005 Beaux Frères Vineyard Pinot Noir ($75) is a well-crafted, robust wine, with abundant fruit and tannins to match. Ken Wright is considered by some to be Oregon's finest winemaker. The 2005 Ken Wright Cellars Pinot Noir Angela ($52.50) is made in a richer, darker vein that will appeal to those whose taste in pinot runs more New World than Old; still, for all its lushness, the wine weighs in at less than 14 percent alcohol.

Penner-Ash Wine Cellars and Domaine Serene are two other well-regarded producers. The 2006 Penner-Ash Dussin Vineyard Pinot Noir ($60) is a laid-back, supremely poised wine, with sappy red fruit, good minerality, and a caressing texture. In addition to having a fitting name for Thanksgiving, the 2005 Domaine Serene Yamhill Cuvée Pinot Noir ($40) sports one of those utterly seductive bouquets that instantly brings a peculiar but evocative image to mind—in this case, wild strawberries on a bed of rose petals. The berries carry over to the palate, which is also marked by good acidity and sturdy tannins. Lastly, from one of the granddaddies of Oregon winemaking: the 2005 Erath Vineyards Pinot Noir ($19). This is an earthy, subtle wine with notes of black raspberries, black pepper, and violets, made in an endearingly rustic style. It's also a terrific value.

Two new (PDF) Nevada polls in advance of Thursday night's Democratic debate confirm Hillary Clinton is a front-runner in Nevada, too. That's not the only bad news for Bill Richardson, though. Richardson's campaign has never picked up much momentum in the Silver State, and the latest polls put him between 5 percent and 6 percent. The New Mexico governor was hoping Nevada's 24 percent Hispanic population and his familiarity in the region would yield a strong showing.

One housekeeping note: Election Scorecard doesn't track Nevada's poll graphs because of concerns about the pollsters' guidelines in selecting true "likely voters," given the low turnout expected. For more details, head over to Pollster.

	Delegates at stake:
	Democrats	Republicans
	Total delegates: 4323 Total delegates needed to win: 2162	Total delegates: 2302* Total delegates needed to win: 1152* *GOP delegate totals are preliminary.
	Delegates won by each candidate: Clinton: 0; Edwards: 0; Obama: 0; Richardson: 0; Biden: 0; Dodd: 0;	Delegates won by each candidate: Giuliani: 0; McCain: 0; Romney: 0; Thompson: 0; Huckabee: 0; Paul: 0;
	Want more Slate election coverage? Check out Map the Candidates, Political Futures, Trailhead, XX Factor, and our Campaign Junkie page!

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Oil from a tanker that sank in Russia's Kerch Strait on Sunday killed some 30,000 seabirds. Last week, 500 birds died in an oil spill from a tanker crash in San Francisco Bay, and wildlife rescuers are still working to rehabilitate another 700 coated in oil. How do you save an oiled bird?

With Pedialyte and Dawn soap. Contaminated birds arrive at rescue centers stressed from human contact and hypothermic. Oil clots when it gets on a seabird's plumage and destroys the airtight and waterproof insulation of the feathers. The bird will preen to try to get rid of the oil, but this incessant—and ineffectual—grooming only makes matters worse: Birds become so focused on the task that they become dehydrated, and the preening behavior can cause them to ingest toxic levels of the oil. At this point, the only way to save the animal is to feed it a liquid mixture of vitamins and medicine and, when it's stable enough, wash its feathers with dish soap.

Before rescuers can begin to remove oil from a bird, they must ensure that it is not too weak to survive the traumatic washing process, which can take up to an hour. Rehabilitators immediately feed newly collected birds (through a tube to its stomach) a rehydrating formula like Pedialyte mixed with ToxiBan, an antidote that helps the birds excrete ingested oil from their systems. To gauge the extent of contamination, rescue center staffers also take blood and feather samples. Any birds judged too weak to survive a full cleaning are euthanized; the others can be kept for up to five days until they are healthy enough to clean.

When it's time to wash the bird, specially trained workers use a solution of about 1 percent dish soap and very warm water that's been softened to remove any minerals that might hinder lathering. (To prevent hypothermia, the temperature of the solution should match the animal's body temperature—in birds, about 103 to 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) Over the years, rescue organizations have tried different detergents, acetone, and powered chalk to remove oil from wildlife, but they're most likely to use Dawn, which they receive in large donations from Proctor and Gamble.

To clean off an oiled bird, one person immerses its body in a tub, and a second bathes it with the soapy water. Once the water in the first tub becomes dirty, the pair continues the process in a neighboring tub, changing again and again until oil from the bird's feathers no longer dirties the water. Up to 15 tubs can be used for a single animal; washing a bird the size of a pelican might take 300 gallons of water. To clean sensitive areas around the head and eyes, staff use a Waterpik-like device filled with the soap solution, and they remove caked oil with soft toothbrushes or cotton swabs. Freshly rinsed birds then sit in a pen under pet-grooming dryers, where they resume preening to re-establish the alignment of their feathers.

Birds stay at rescue sites until they're ready to be released into the wild. Usually, it takes three to 10 days for a bird to recover its normal body temperature, weight, and feeding behaviors. Survival rates vary depending on the oil spill. In some cases, they can be as low as 25 percent or 50 percent; in others, rescuers can save every bird that they collect.

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

Explainer thanks Karen Benzel of the International Bird Rescue and Research Center.

Some conservative bloggers are furious about a photo showing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama without his hand on his heart during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Obama has countered that the photo was taken during the national anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance—so he didn't have to. Is that true?

No. According to U.S. law, a civilian like Obama is supposed to stand up when the anthem is played, take off his hat, face the flag, and put his right hand over his heart. Members of the military can keep their hats on and salute instead of placing their hands on their hearts.

The rules of conduct regarding the anthem, the pledge, and the American flag weren't always a matter of law. At first, they were just tradition. "The Star-Spangled Banner" lyrics were originally written during the War of 1812. Later in the 19^th century, the Army and Navy both began to use it during ceremonies, but it only became the congressionally recognized national anthem in 1931. Meanwhile, the Pledge of Allegiance was first used in public schools in 1892 to celebrate Columbus Day and only made it into the law books in the 1940s.

Specific customs for listening to the anthem or reciting the pledge were also slow to develop. The National Flag Conference, an organization made up of representatives from the armed forces and civilian organizations, created a guide to flag etiquette in 1923. But it wasn't until June of 1942, when America was fighting World War II, that Congress made this "Flag Code" official.

In its original form, the code called for a "Bellamy salute" during the Pledge of Allegiance. The salute was named after Francis Bellamy, who wrote the pledge and published it in Youth's Companion, a family magazine. Bellamy instructed people reciting the pledge to start with their hands on their hearts and then—at the words "to my flag" (later changed to "to the flag of the United States of America")—straighten their arms in a military salute. But in the late 1930s, the salute became controversial as people began to realize that this gesture looked quite similar to the arm movement favored by the Nazis. Schools in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere began to alter the salute, and in late 1942, it was eliminated from the code in favor of keeping the hand on the heart, as we do today. (Some groups, like the Daughters of the American Revolution, were initially resistant to the change from the Bellamy salute.)

So, does this mean that it's against the law to sit down for "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a baseball game? Technically, but you won't get in trouble. Though the procedure for listening to the national anthem is spelled out in the U.S. Code, you can't be punished for breaking the rules. That would likely be considered a violation of the First Amendment. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses had the right to skip the pledge.

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

Explainer thanks Joyce J. Doody of the National Flag Foundation and Richard M. Fried of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Telegraph reported on Sunday that a research team has produced dozens of embryos cloned from an adult monkey, something that had never before been accomplished. We've already cloned many other kinds of animals, like sheep, cats, and mules, but the most recent breakthrough suggests that human cloning might be just around the corner. So, what makes cloning people so hard?

The process of finding human eggs. To clone an animal, scientists need two cells: an egg and a donor cell. Scientists remove the nucleus from the egg and replace it with the one from the donor cell. For the animals we know how to clone, it can take 100 or more tries—and just as many egg cells—to complete the procedure. To develop the technology for a new species, like humans, there could be even more trial and error. That's not a problem if egg cells are easy to find. Scientists can procure cow ovaries, for instance, from slaughterhouses: A bucket of 100 ovaries can yield 1,000 eggs. To get human cells, they'd have to find women who are willing to undergo about a month of hormone treatments and then surgery to extract the eggs. Sure, women who are egg donors already do this, but it's not volunteer work—compensation can go as high as $35,000. So far, researchers haven't had enough human egg cells on hand to produce a successful clone.

There might be some other kinks that could make human cloning more difficult, but no one knows for sure. (The South Korean lab that reported the creation of 11 embryo lines in 2005 fabricated much of their data.) Each animal poses its own specific problems that must be overcome: At first, pigs couldn't be cloned because their fatty egg cells appeared black under the microscope, and scientists couldn't locate the nuclei that needed to be removed. (Now there's a way to stain the nucleus and illuminate them with ultraviolet light.) The yolks of bird eggs also make it impossible to spot the nucleus, which is why no birds have ever been cloned. Dogs are especially tricky to clone because their eggs mature in the oviduct, not in the ovary, and scientists haven't figured out how to bring the eggs to maturity in the lab. Success rates can be as high as 50 percent for cows, but just 1 percent to 3 percent for mice.

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

Explainer thanks Duane Kraemer of Texas A&M University, Alex Meissner of the Whitehead Institute, James Robl of Hematech, and Dirk Vanderwall of University of Idaho.

"Culture," said Norman Mailer, pugnaciously, in 1981, "is worth a little risk." Admittedly, he was uttering these words at a rather chaotic press conference, just after a tripwire-dangerous convict for whose release he had so ardently campaigned had stabbed a harmless waiter to death. But I remember admiring Mailer's audacity even as I slightly whistled at his promiscuity, and I suppose that no appreciation of the man is really possible without taking a comparative survey of both those capacities. I find I have to add that it's quite surprisingly difficult to picture the cultural scene without him.

"Have you read The Naked And The Dead?" wrote George Orwell to David Astor in 1949, a few months before his death. "It's awfully good, the best war book of the last war yet." For those of us who have to accept, bored as we must be with the idea, membership in the postwar "boomer" generation, it is impressive to reflect on quite how many subsequent milestones bore a Mailer imprint. The Kennedy years (with a detour for Marilyn Monroe and a long excursus for the assassination), the Cuban revolution, the agony of Vietnam, the Apollo mission, and the dark shadow of Richard Nixon: All of these were chronicled or encapsulated by Mailer episodes from The Deer Park, The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon, and many fine but lesser texts written either for glossy magazines or for the "alternative" papers (Dissent, the Village Voice) that he helped to found and energize.

Yes, he did value risk-taking and not just for the rest of society (which was what was faintly "off" about his recommendation of murderer Jack Henry Abbott, and about some of the exorbitant things that he wrote in "The White Negro") but also and proudly for himself. Flung in the back of a paddy wagon with Noam Chomsky and an American Nazi for company: mixing it up down in the Congo waiting for the Ali-Foreman brawl; running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin as a campaign manager; duking it out with the Stalinist fellow-travelers in the company of his old friend Jean Malaquais, individualist Trotskyist, as intellectual mentor; getting the point of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, and appreciating that a stone-cold killer who really wanted to die was the negation of bleeding-heart liberalism and an intuitive curtain-raiser for the Reagan years.

Pint-size Jewish fireplug that he was, Mailer also continually ran a great risk that very few are willing to run. I mean the danger of simply seeming ridiculous. He once nearly lost an eye in a bar fight, because he thought someone had implied that there was something homosexual, not about him, but about his dog! ("Nobody calls my dog a faggot.") He got whimpering drunk and made a complete idiot of himself on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner, and then reprinted the whole transcripted humiliation as part of an article. On that occasion, and on many, many others, beginning with An American Dream, he manifested an obsession with sodomy that was something a bit more (and perhaps even a bit less) than macho. I once made the mistake of asking him about this on a television show with Germaine Greer: Why was he so fixated on penetratio per anum and its occasions, male-on-male as well as male-on-female? Seizing my copy of his terrible novel Tough Guys Don't Dance, he scrawled an inscription that vowed revenge, and later gave an interview in which he said that the book had been ill-received in London because of a coterie of queer reviewers organized by me, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. (Amis and I contemplated writing a hurt response, saying that this was very unfair to Hamilton.) But all this bravado and bullshit and delinquency, including the near-fatal stabbing of one of his wives, only seemed to increase the number of people—including the stabbed wife herself—who found fresh ways of forgiving him. Even Vidal, not a professional forgiver, was once gruffly affectionate about him in my hearing. A slightly schmaltzy way of phrasing this would be to say that Norman Mailer was always somehow life-affirming, and that his justly famous cocky grin was something that even his enemies had to envy.

The life-affirming may be true even of his most embarrassing work. In "The Time of Her Time," which appeared in Advertisements for Myself in 1959, he exhausted upward of a dozen pages in a description of a heroic struggle to bring a stubborn woman to orgasm. (The method that his character finally employs is so underhanded that I shall not quote it, thus forcing you to look it up.) Quite unabashed years later, he reprinted the whole folly and claimed that its original publication had nerved a hesitant editor to publish Lolita, of which novel he straight-facedly claimed that "The Time of Her Time" was "the godfather." Chutzpah could do no more. But without chutzpah, we would have had no Norman Mailer to appreciate in the first place. He would try everything at least once, from acting to directing to boxing to (worst of all, in my experience) cooking, and if it didn't work out, hey, it had been worth taking the chance.

He used to tell me with perfect gravity that politically he was "a left conservative," and this quixotic description has a patina of truth to it. Probably more than anything, Mailer was a libertarian and a foe of any system or mind-set that involved the censorious (feminism) or the overweening and the grandiose (imperialism/communism). His masterpiece, at least in my opinion, is Harlot's Ghost (1991), a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised. Instead, he frittered away a good part of the last two decades in half-baked essays and fictions on liberation theology—of all sorry things—and callow stuff on George Bush as the macho man gone wrong. Where the hell, I always wanted to ask Mailer, was the cultural risk in that?

Rarely do morality and strategy come together in the Middle East—particularly in the case of Iraq. Yet there is one area where the right thing for Iraq is also the best option for America's long-term interests: preventing the Iraqi refugee crisis from further destabilizing the region. So far, the debate in the United States has focused on the fates of Iraqis who have worked with U.S. diplomats and soldiers, as translators and so on. Although these individuals are owed a special debt, our responsibility does not end there. The United States should accept tens of thousands of refugees and must encourage other major powers to do the same. Washington should also initiate a program to boost the capacity of neighboring states to host refugees and prevent them from becoming a source of instability.

Although casualty reports dominate the headlines, Iraq is also suffering a staggering exodus of refugees. More than 2 million Iraqis—from a total population of 27 million—have fled the chaos, and the numbers grow every day. (Even more Iraqis have fled their homes but have resettled in other parts of Iraq, thus technically avoiding the label "refugee.") So far, the migrants have clustered in nations close to Iraq, particularly in Syria and Jordan. U.S. efforts to help these refugees have ranged from feeble to nonexistent. The United States has so far taken in barely more than 1,000 Iraqi refugees but will reportedly boost this to 12,000 next year: a significant percentage increase on the surface but only when the absurdly low base rate is considered.

It is both morally abhorrent and strategically ill-advised to abandon these refugees. To state the obvious, the U.S. failure to establish security in Iraq drove them to leave their homes. Literally millions of people have fled under horrific circumstances, and the United States bears much of the responsibility. Americans may, understandably, say that they can no longer sacrifice to bring stability to Iraq, but that does not excuse us from the broader duty to help those who continue to suffer.

Putting aside our moral responsibility, the United States needs to take in refugees to offset significant strategic risks. The 1948 Israeli war of independence produced more than 700,000 refugees. Almost 60 years later, the region still suffers from the failure to solve this refugee problem. The Palestinian refugee crisis contributed to wars between Israel and its neighbors in 1956, 1967, and 1982, as well as to Israel's constant terrorism problem.

Few Iraqi refugees are incorporated into the nations that are hosting them, but there is no prospect that they will return to Iraq in large numbers in the near future. It would not be surprising if, 20 years from now, millions of Iraqis still lived outside their home country. In other words, this problem will not disappear if we ignore it.

As with the Palestinian problem, Iraq's refugees could generate numerous regional crises. Large refugee flows can overstrain the economies and even change the demographic makeup of small or weak states, upsetting what is already a delicate political balance. One million Iraqi refugees is a substantial addition to Jordan's population of less than 6 million. At times, the refugees simply bring the war with them: Fighters mingle with noncombatant refugees and launch attacks back in their home countries, while those who drove them out continue the fight in the refugees' new bases.

After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, for example, Hutu perpetrators fled to neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and continued to launch cross-border raids against Rwanda's new Tutsi-led government, which had ousted them. The Hutu fighters recruited in refugee camps, using them as bases in which to plan, organize, and launch attacks. Not surprisingly, the new Rwandan government began to attack the camps, precipitating a civil war in DRC that led to the collapse of the regime there and the death of millions. Neighboring governments may try to defend new arrivals from attacks by their enemies or exploit the refugees to fight battles on the government's behalf. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Iran armed Iraqi refugees who had fled there and used them as a proxy army, the Badr Corps, against Saddam's Iraq. These fighters have returned to Iraq, and many have joined the Iraqi police and military. Some Iraqi politicians still accuse them of surreptitiously working for Iran.

Refugee camps can also be incubators for terrorist groups. Young men—bored, embittered, and accustomed to a world of violent politics—are natural recruits. Many Palestinian refugees flocked to join terrorist groups, preferring radical solutions to the endless failed attempts to address their plight peacefully.

Over time, refugees can also radicalize the politics of their host nations. In Lebanon during the early 1970s, the presence of thousands of armed Palestinians in the country inevitably became a contentious political issue and pushed the country toward civil war. In Pakistan today, commentators fear the "Talibanization" of the country, a reference to the way in which Pakistan's support for the Afghan refugees who formed the core of the Taliban in the 1990s has come back to haunt Pakistan. Sectarian strife, suicide bombings, and religious radicalism are now far more prevalent in Pakistan.

The arguments against bringing more Iraqi refugees to the United States are considerable, but in the end unconvincing. Politically, a massive aid-and-resettlement program represents an admission of failure for the U.S. effort to bring stability to Iraq. Anti-immigrant groups will hardly be sympathetic to suggestions that we should admit thousands of refugees who are both Arabs and Muslims. More troubling from a strategic perspective, taking in refugees can encourage more refugee flows—individuals might hesitate to leave Baghdad for a slum in Amman, Jordan, but jump at a chance to live in a suburb of Seattle. What's more, some of those who take shelter in the United States will have been radicalized in Iraq, making them potential candidates for militant groups that wish to operate on U.S. soil. While these concerns are quite real, they don't outweigh America's moral responsibility and the greater strategic risk that large refugee flows can entail to regional stability.

One model to consider is the Orderly Departure Program, which brought hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to settle in the United States—refugees who eventually became model U.S. citizens. In addition to allowing more Iraqis to settle here, bringing in Iraqi refugees on a larger scale would also inspire other wealthy countries far from the Middle East to accept more. If Iraqis settled in Europe or other countries outside the region, this would break up the potentially dangerous concentrations along Iraq's borders, reducing the risk that these refugees could be recruited into terrorist or guerrilla groups. It would also reduce the likelihood that the refugee problem would radicalize the domestic politics of Jordan, Syria, or other regional hosts.

Unless the United States welcomes far more refugees, it's unlikely that Washington will be able to convince other Western nations to open their doors. Some allies will share our moral and strategic concerns, while effective diplomacy can push others into offering assistance. Still others could at least provide financial support and other help. Allies who opposed the war and criticize the U.S. occupation might find the refugee issue more politically palatable than offering direct support to the U.S. military effort.

In any event, the United States must increase its aid and technical assistance to Iraq's neighbors, particularly Jordan and also allies in the Persian Gulf. These countries must be able to police refugee communities and be sure that their already frayed social services are not completely overwhelmed by the new arrivals. Since the refugee problem is likely to grow as the United States draws down its forces, we must begin this assistance now.

It is tempting to try to offer the bare minimum, providing limited humanitarian relief and relying on Iraq's neighbors, hoping the problem will solve itself. But as we've learned in the Middle East, hope is not a policy. America must try to resolve this problem before a much greater crisis erupts. At that point, it will be too late.

The French revolution had its Jacobins; the Russian revolution erupted in Red Terror. The peaceful revolutions of more recent years weren't supposed to produce violent counterrevolutions. But now one of them has.

Indeed, in the space of a single week, the president of Georgia—Mikheil Saakashvili, or "Misha" to his friends—probably did more genuine damage to American "democracy promotion" than a dozen Pervez Musharrafs ever could have done. After all, no one ever expected much in the way of democracy from Pakistan. But a surprising amount was expected of Georgia—a small, clannish, mountainous country wedged between Russia and Turkey—expectations that have now vanished in the crowds of riot police and clouds of tear gas that Saakashvili sent pouring out over the streets of Tbilisi, breaking up street demonstrations there last Wednesday. Bruce Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, put it best: "Even for those of us who work professionally with self-destructive countries, this was an exceptionally bad day."

It is true that Georgia never attracted hordes of enthusiastic Western groupies, let alone the actors and models who flock to Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. Full-time Georgia-watchers, a small but hardy group, have long had serious doubts about "Misha," a man of whom amazing tales are told, variously involving wine, women, temper tantrums, and even Ferris wheels.

Nevertheless, during his visit to Tbilisi two years ago, the American president did go out on a limb, praising his Georgian counterpart for "building a democratic society … where a free press flourishes, a vigorous opposition is welcome, and unity is achieved through peace." Now that Saakashvili's goons have not only broken up public demonstrations with tear gas but also smashed up a private TV station largely owned by Rupert Murdoch (not, one would think, the best way to attract positive international media coverage), that speech sounds not just naive and premature but usefully idiotic, to paraphrase Lenin. That Bush has made no comment about Georgia this week is a disgrace.

For, in fact, it was not just predictable that Georgia would somehow go wrong, it was a certainty: That's because just about all revolutions, even peaceful ones, somehow go wrong. In the decade following 1989, for example, Communists were re-elected to power in pretty much every Central European country.

Over the subsequent decade, however, many of these same Communist parties were then voted out again. Meanwhile, the rest of the region's politicians gradually grew more competent, and more predictable. Over the long term, then, the question is not whether the revolution goes wrong, but how it goes wrong and how long it takes to fix itself again. Georgia has achieved many things in the past few years—investment is up, economic growth is up, infrastructure is recovering from its post-Soviet collapse—but a tradition of peaceful exchange of power has not been established. Democracy is not a single moment—one revolution and, presto, everything changes—it is a procedure, a course of development that Georgia had yet to complete. Despite Georgia's achievement in overthrowing the Soviet-style political and economic nomenklatura that had run the country since 1991, it was too early to declare "mission accomplished" in Georgia. Unfortunately, we did.

Many excuses can be made for Georgia, and Saakashvili has already made most of them. Clearly, the country's geography doesn't bode well for a peaceful evolution to democracy, and the timing isn't great, either. This is not the early 1990s, when Russia was looking inward, and the West had nothing better to do than think up interesting ways to integrate Eastern Europeans. There is no question that Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime has used every tool at its disposal to undermine Saakashvili, from economic boycotts to separatist movements to military threats. Nevertheless, for Saakashvili to accuse the entire political opposition—critical journalists, street demonstrators, and all—of collaboration with Russia is not credible. Besides, whatever problems you have, you clearly don't solve them by smashing TV equipment.

Ironically, all this has disturbing echoes of another mistake made by another American president not that long ago in the same part of the world. Over and over again, throughout the 1990s, Bill Clinton told Boris Yeltsin he was a democrat. In one summit after another, the American president praised the Russian president as an example for others to follow. Even as Yeltsin shot up his parliament, revived the KGB, and started the repressive processes that culminated in the selection of Vladimir Putin as his successor, the U.S. government kept using the words "democracy" and "free markets" about Russia, hoping it would all come out right.

It didn't. Picking democratic "friends," it seems, is no easier than picking winning horses. We'd be better off building institutions, not egos. I hope next time we will.

In 1989 Nada Nadim Prouty, a 21-year-old Lebanese student, arrived in the United States. She married a U.S. citizen the following year, was naturalized four years after that, and by 1999 had landed a job with the FBI. In 2003, Prouty moved over to the CIA.

In a plea agreement released Nov. 13, Prouty admitted in U.S. District Court that she'd conspired to defraud the United States, to commit naturalization fraud, and to perform unauthorized computer searches—i.e., she looked up FBI files that mentioned her name and those of her sister and brother-in-law, who owned a successful Detroit-area restaurant chain called La Shish. In Prouty's guilty plea (excerpt below) she describes her "marriage fraud" (she faked her marriage by paying a U.S. citizen to be her husband) and how she "defrauded" the FBI and the CIA when they hired her. The "factual basis" for her plea describes how, on an FBI computer, she looked up information about the terrorist organization Hezbollah. She "was not authorized to do so because she was not assigned to work on Hezbollah cases."

A Justice Department press release doesn't say what Prouty learned about Hezbollah, but it does relate that her brother-in-law, Talal Khalil Chahine, "is currently a fugitive believed to be in Lebanon." In 2006 Chahine and his wife were charged "in connection with a scheme to conceal more than $20 million in cash received by La Shish restaurants" and route the funds to Lebanon. Prouty's sister is currently serving 18 months in federal prison. But according to sentencing guidelines, Prouty herself will serve a maximum of nine months. As part of her plea agreement, Prouty is forfeiting her citizenship and resigning from her CIA job.

Thanks to http://www.debbieschlussel.com/ for posting the plea agreement.

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Former undercover New York police detective Bernard Kerik has led a life of major ups and downs. According to his autobiography, Kerik's mother was murdered, possibly by her pimp, when he was 9. After his Army discharge, Kerik worked security detail in Saudi Arabia until a snag with the Saudi secret police got him fired and deported. Kerik eventually found his way to the New York Police Department, which, during the 1993 mayoral election, detailed him to be Rudolph Giuliani's bodyguard. The two became close friends, and Kerik, a high-school dropout, climbed the ranks to head the corrections department and eventually to become New York City police commissioner.

Kerik was police commissioner on Sept. 11, 2001 and some of the international acclaim for Giuliani's leadership in that crisis found its way to Kerik, too. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth knighted the former mayor and gave Kerik the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Royal Order of the British Empire. Over the next two years, President Bush sent Kerik to Iraq to create a police force; gave Kerik a speaking role at the Republican National Convention; and, at Giuliani's urging, nominated Kerik for secretary of homeland security.

A week later, Kerik's meteoric rise ended abruptly. Forced to withdraw as a candidate because he'd employed an undocumented worker (awkward because Kerik would have supervised the immigration service), Kerik was soon tarred by additional allegations ranging from assigning city employees to perform research for his memoir, to hosting trysts with his HarperCollins publisher, Judith Regan, in a Lower Manhattan apartment originally set up for 9/11 rescue workers. Last week, the once-high-flying public official hit bottom when he was indicted for tax evasion and other crimes. Excerpts of the 29-page indictment are below and on the following six pages.

Kerik is accused of accepting money and other things of value, including renovations on an apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx (Page 3), in exchange for using his public post to persuade regulators that a construction and waste-management company "had rid itself of Mob ties" (Page 3). Kerik allegedly concealed from the Internal Revenue Service more than $500,000 in income (Page 6), including $75,000 he received for writing the forward to a book (Page 7). Kerik has pleaded not guilty, and Giuliani continues to defend him.

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(For discussions of the latest topics, check out the Human Nature Fray.)

Engineers are integrating robots into animal societies. Latest example: Four robotic roaches persuaded 12 real roaches to congregate in an unnaturally dangerous place. Key trick: coating the robots with roach sex hormones. Objectives: 1) Study how animal groups make decisions. 2) See whether robots can fit in well enough to participate in those decisions. 3) Make robots better at learning and adapting. Other examples: robotic spiders, snakes, dogs, and monkeys. Scientists' official reassurance: "We are not interested in people." Fine print: "The scientists plan to extend their research to higher animals," starting with a robotic chicken designed to commandeer chicks. Warning: The roach robots were freed from ongoing human control, and in 4 out of 10 cases, they followed the decisions of the real roaches, instead of the other way around. (Related: a robot controlled by a roach; a robot controlled by a moth brain; a robot controlled by a detached eel brain; remote-controlled pigeons; remote-controlled rats.)

The U.S. military is funding a project to integrate human with artificial intelligence. Problem: Human brains are superior to computers at visual recognition but inferior at information processing. Solution: human-machine integration. Human component: A soldier or analyst who scans scenes or images. Machine component: Sensors that monitor the brain's activity and relay information about it to commanders or computers. Analytical application: Computers identify images and image areas flagged by the human scan and select those for more thorough scrutiny. Battlefield applications: 1) A prototype helmet already delivers "a visual readout for combat commanders showing the cognitive patterns of individual Soldiers." 2) "Brain pattern and heart rate data from system-equipped soldiers will be transmitted wirelessly to commanders in real-time to improve overall battlefield information management and decision-making." Project buzzwords: "real-time cognitive state assessment," "networked soldiers," "Augmented Cognition," "human-computer warfighting integral." Translation: We're fielding cyborgs. Human Nature's prediction: The next step will be to remove the human component from the battlefield and let machines provide the sensor mobility as well as the information processing. (Related: civilian cyborg enthusiasts; fighting terrorists with bomb-detecting robots.)

A study documented widespread distracted driving in New York City. Sample: 3,120 drivers observed at 50 red lights. Findings: 1) 23 percent were talking on cell phones. 2) Half of these were holding the phone, which is illegal. 3) 6 percent of all drivers were smoking, 4 percent were drinking, 3 percent were eating, and 2 percent were grooming. 4) One of every three drivers was guilty of at least one of these distractions. Libertarian spins: 1) The study shows that banning handheld cell-phone calls backfired, since people on hands-free phones, thinking they're safe, are "the most likely to engage in grooming, eating, drinking and smoking" at the wheel. 2) It shows "people are smoking in their cars because it's banned in other venues," so we're forcing people to smoke in the most dangerous place. Public safety spin: No problem, we'll just ban smoking in cars and talking on hands-free cell phones, too. (Actually, we're already banning smoking in cars. For examples, look here, here, here, and here.)

Update on male birth control: A "selective androgen receptor modulator" succeeded in animal tests. Mechanism: The drug stops sperm production by suppressing a hormone in the brain. Regimen: You'd take the pill for two months or so to wipe out your sperm count. Results in rats: 1) 100 percent effective after 70 days of use. 2) 100 percent fertility restored after 100 subsequent days of nonuse. Possible bonus: "boosting muscle mass," since drug companies have already been researching the drug to prevent muscle loss. Fine print: The drug shrank the rats' prostates, so it'll be a while before it's ready for humans. Related: 1) Another sperm-suppression drug. 2) Drug companies won't develop male birth control. 3) Actually, the government is funding it. 4) Men fail to complete the vasectomy process. 5) The joy of spray-on condoms.

Scientists reportedly cloned a monkey and derived useful stem cells from its embryonic clones. If confirmed, it's the first time any primate, including humans, has been truly cloned. Key breakthrough: a technical tweak that surmounts the previous obstacle to primate cloning. Next obstacle: The scientists "tried to implant about 100 cloned embryos into the wombs of around 50 surrogate rhesus macaque mothers but have not yet succeeded with the birth of any cloned offspring." Liberal reaction: Human therapeutic cloning is next, thank God. Conservative reaction: Human reproductive cloning is next, God help us. Liberal reassurances: 1) "No one who is in a position to actually try to apply to humans what the … scientists did with monkeys has any interest in using cloning to reproduce or mass produce people." 2) "Cloning to create actual people is still very hard to do." 3) "A cloned embryo in a lab dish has no ability to develop into a person." Skeptical view: Let's make sure this isn't fraud like the last time somebody claimed to have cloned a human. Human Nature's view: Fetal harvesting is a more likely danger than reproductive cloning.

The governor of Georgia held a public prayer vigil and asked God for rain to relieve the state's drought. This is at least the third time a Georgia governor has tried it. Governor's quotes: 1) Georgians haven't conserved water enough, so the drought is God's attempt to "get our attention." 2) "We come here very reverently and respectfully to pray up a storm." 3) "God, we need you. We need rain." 4) "God can make it rain tomorrow, he can make it rain next week or next month." Ministers' quotes: 1) "Oh God, let rain fall on this land of Georgia." 2) "We are entrepreneurs for you, dear God." Results: 1) The vigil "ended with the sun shining through what had been a somewhat cloudy morning." However, 2) Wednesday's forecast calls for a 60 percent chance of showers. Critiques: 1) "Hail Priest-King Perdue." 2) "God is not an ATM machine." 3) God is not an extortionist. 4) God is already aware of the drought. 5) "You can't make up for years of water mismanagement with a prayer session." 6) Less faith, more works. Defenses: 1) It's "worth a shot." 2) It worked last time. Human Nature's view: Intercessory prayer is an experimental failure. (Add your take here.)

France plans to triple its arsenal of surveillance cameras from 340,000 to 1 million. Plans: 1) 6,500 networked cameras in the Paris transit system. 2) Connecting other cities' cameras to police control rooms. 3) Aerial surveillance drones. Rationales: 1) Fighting terrorism. 2) Fighting crime and gangs. 3) Monitoring riots. 4) We want to be more like Britain, which is thwarting terrorists with lots of cameras. Objections: 1) What about liberte? 2) The government is sending "flying robots" over our cities so it won't have to supply enough cops. Related: 1) Surveillance cameras (with loudspeakers) in Britain. 2) Surveillance cameras in China. 3) Surveillance cameras on the U.S. border. 4) Surveillance cameras in Manhattan. 5) Human Nature's take on drones vs. terrorists.

A study says curvy women are smarter. Sample: 16,000 females. Result: Women with high ratios of hip to waist size "scored significantly higher on [cognitive] tests, as did their children." Theories: 1) Hip fat contains omega3 acids, which promote "growth of the brain during pregnancy" and "could improve the woman's own mental abilities," whereas waist fat has more omega6 acids, "which are less suited to brain growth." 2) Teen mothers produce dumber kids because they're thinner and deficient in omega3. 3) Men like curvy women due to "the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child." Skeptical reactions: 1) The omega3 theory is pure speculation. 2) Diet and class are more plausible explanations. 3) Men don't care that much about waist-to-hip ratio. Rosy feminist spin: "Research that proves you can be sexy and intelligent is really positive." Cynical feminist spin: Except when it implies that being unshapely makes you stupid. (Related: Slate's XX Factor on a similar new study.)

Discoveries of genetic differences between races are worrying intellectuals. Benefits of finding differences: 1) It helps us understand diseases. 2) It helps people clarify their ancestry. 3) It helps us target drugs and prenatal tests to populations likely to benefit from them. Fears: 1) Race research will "find" differences in intelligence. 2) It'll validate supremacists. 3) It'll validate profiling. 4) It'll undermine affirmative action. 5) It'll psych out minority kids. 6) It'll scare minorities away from cooperating with genetic research. 7) It'll scare sponsors away from funding the research. Superficial worry: It's all confusion and lies. Deep worry: It might be true. Human Nature's view: Let science check out the possibilities, no matter how unwelcome they may be. (Related: Are Jews genetically intelligent?)

A study suggests the earlier you lose your virginity, the less likely you are to become a delinquent. Old finding: Kids who have early sex become delinquents. New findings: 1) When you eliminate genetic differences by comparing twins, those who have sex earlier don't become more delinquent. 2) Compared with fraternal twins, identical twins lose their virginity at relatively similar ages, which implies that the age at which you lose your virginity is genetically influenced. 3) In fact, "adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later." Researchers' conclusions: 1) Early sex and delinquency share a genetic basis, probably in propensity to take risks. 2) For teens with risk-taking genes, "sexual relationships may offer an alternative to trouble." Old advice: Pet your dog, not your date. New advice: Pop a cherry, not a cap. Bonus report: Kids who smoke pot (but not cigarettes) are "significantly more likely to practice sports and they have a better relationship with their peers" than kids who smoke neither. (Related: the case for lowering the age of sexual consent.)

Two murders—on opposite sides of the country—have transfixed the media in recent weeks, as only the most gruesome family tragedies do. In each case, a parent was murdered while dropping off a child for a court-ordered custody switch; and in each case, the surviving parent quickly became a suspect and almost immediately lost custody. Both families had been tumbling around for years in the family courts. And both murders followed immediately upon custody proceedings in which the surviving parent felt they'd gone completely unheard by a family court judge.

Two dead parents, two orphaned children, and two surviving adults certain they were robbed of a chance to be heard-out in court. It hardly justifies murder or even threats of murder. But it does go a long way toward explaining why family law judges have the toughest job on earth—persuading both sides they were fully heard, while making fundamental changes to the structure of their lives.

Last week in Las Vegas, Reno, Nev., millionaire Darren Mack shocked the court by pleading guilty, midtrial, to killing his estranged wife, Charla, in June 2006. Allegedly, Mack stabbed her to death in his garage during a custody transfer, as their 8-year-old daughter watched television upstairs. He then drove to the courthouse, shot sniper-style at his family court judge, Chuck Weller, in his third-floor chambers, and fled town. Mack also entered an Alford plea—admitting there was enough evidence to convict him of shooting the judge but claiming he had not intended to kill. (Disclosure: I worked on Mack's first divorce case when I clerked at a family law firm in Reno. I never met Judge Weller.)

Also last month, Dr. Daniel Malakov, a dentist, was shot to death at point-blank range as he entered a playground in Queens, N.Y., with his 4-year-old daughter, Michelle. They were at the playground for a visitation drop-off to her mother, Dr. Mazoltuv Borukhova. Amid all sorts of claims and cross-claims of abuse and neglect, Borukhova lost custody of Michelle last week, and the child is in foster care. Police questioned Borukhova for nine hours in an effort to determine whether she had been involved in the murder. She is not currently a suspect, although death threats by her family and other disturbing behavior have the police investigating whether this was a paid hit.

Both the Mack and Malakov families had been involved in protracted divorce and custody proceedings that were striking—even by family court standards—for their ugliness. The Macks had been arguing, among other things, over a million-dollar residence, primary physical custody of their only child, a $200,000 diamond ring, and unpaid alimony. They had been ordered to have no contact. Malakov and Borukhova had also waged a bitter custody battle over Michelle, with Borukhova's unproven allegations of sexual abuse by Malakov countered by his contention that she was interfering with his visitation rights.

We may never know what caused these two custody battles to devolve into violence and death threats. But it may not be a coincidence that both Mack and Borukhova felt wronged by the family courts. Mack was convinced his family court judge was persecuting him, and Borukhova had apparently lost custody without a hearing.

In the weeks before he murdered Charla, Darren Mack was frustrated and then enraged by Judge Weller's interim custody and support order, which resulted in shared physical custody and the requirement that Darren pay Charla $10,000 per month in interim spousal support. Darren didn't pay, Weller found him in contempt, and Darren declared bankruptcy. Convinced that Weller "had made up his mind prior to coming to court, … didn't like him and no matter what he did, Weller would rule against him," as a friend explained, Darren launched a crusade. In a video taped before the murder, he compared family judges to Nazis and claimed it was time to "take a stand" against the injustices in the court—just like "our forefathers did in 1776." After the shooting, he left a message on his cousin's answering machine demanding, "If anything happens to me, please make sure that the true story about the injustices that are going on in that courtroom get out to the media and the public."

When Mack agreed to plead guilty last week, it was only after extracting from Judge Douglas Herndon, who oversaw his murder trial, the promise that he could tell his side of the alleged crime. Mack agreed to the guilty plea because, as he put it, "at my sentencing … I will have all the time I need, because there are some very important things I would like to share. I have remained quiet thru this whole thing and now I would like to come forward and speak."

Mazoltuv Borukhova was outraged by the Oct. 3 decision of Sidney F. Strauss, a state Supreme Court judge in Queens, to transfer temporary primary custody to Malakov, evidently without a hearing. Even if a judicial move like this sounds familiar—courtesy of the Britney Spears 24-hour legal cable extravaganza—it's almost never done. Judge Strauss, however, switched custody because Borukhova "was allegedly not cooperating with supervised visitation." When her efforts to appeal that decision failed, the family went through a tumultuous custody exchange on Oct. 22, at which, according to Malakov's family, his estranged wife allegedly made death threats against him.

Like Mack, Borukhova is a parent who feels she has become the object of a legal proceeding that punishes her without listening to her. No surprise, therefore, that at a recent custody hearing, Borukhova begged the court as well as assembled reporters, "Please, I want to talk, I want people to hear me. Everyone is accusing me. Let me explain what happened." She even met with a political consultant and planned a protest at the White House before the murder, because she needed to tell her side of the story.

Family court judges cannot possibly do what they are charged with doing each day: split families in half without devastation. No mathematical formula can turn one income into two or allow the finances that supported one household to support two of them. Overnight, two full-time parents may be reduced to two half-time parents (in the best cases), and one child is magically expected to appear at two Thanksgiving dinners each year. It sucks. And faced with a legal pleading that on its very face reads Father v. Mother, parties are bound to become adversarial, and also bound to believe that one of them can "win" this thing.

There is pretty much nothing a family court can give the Darren Macks and the Mazoltuv Borukhovas that would satisfy them. But that makes it all the more vital that they at least have the opportunity to tell their stories. These stories may be repetitive and aggravating, tragic and heartbreaking, whiny or self-aggrandizing, truth or lies. But at the end of the day, when your home, your money, and your kids are all split in two before your eyes, your whole narrative is all you have left.

Maybe Judge Weller—relatively new to the family bench—did all he could for Darren Mack, although testimony from the murder trial suggests that there were serious misunderstandings following conferences, and that Mack believed he was being summarily dismissed. Likewise, Judge Strauss evidently "reviewed three years' worth of legal papers" before deciding to make the custody switch. In his mind, that was probably hearing enough. Both judges may also have been sick to death of the bickering and lying from the parties before them. But each left a parent with the lingering impression they'd been ignored.

I used to tell people that Darren Mack snapped because he had spent the better part of his adult life in family courtrooms, bickering with his ex-wives (yes, he has more than one) over who spent which holidays with the children. But I've come to suspect—and I have never met Judge Weller, so I'm spitballing here—that Mack may have snapped because, after years of feeling listened-to in the family courts, even when he lost, he came across a judge who seemed to reach swift conclusions, without always hearing him out.

After he pleaded guilty last week, Mack went out of his way to thank Judge Herndon, saying he appreciated the "integrity" the judge had shown throughout the murder trial. There is much that needs fixing in the family law system. But, at least from the perspective of these two aggrieved parents, the quickest fix seems to be a family court judge who schedules one more conference, and presides over one more hearing, and truly listens, even when she thinks she's heard it all before.

As the Senate debates a fix to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week, the battles rage fiercest over whether to grant immunity from liability to private telecom companies that assisted the administration with terrorist surveillance (aka domestic eavesdropping). Fans of immunity, which would be retroactive, have staked their position on a claim with which it's hard to disagree. If the telecom companies really acted in good faith based on the Bush administration's legal representations, they say, then it's the administration that should be on trial. Thus, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has stated that he supports immunity because he's seen the legal documents the administration gave the telecoms that vouched for the program's legality. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., have hinted the same. The president himself cares so deeply about retroactive immunity that he's said he'll veto a FISA bill that gives him everything he wants but that.

Think this is all because the administration cares about its friends and campaign contributors in the telecom lobby? We don't. Because if that's all that mattered, there would be a much simpler solution, which wouldn't require the president to threaten to veto a bill that he claims is essential to protect America. When the administration first asked the telecoms to help with its surveillance activities, the companies demanded—and received—written assurance from the White House and Justice Department that the program was lawful. If the administration really cared about the telecoms, it would simply allow them to use these legal documents to defend themselves in court.

But it won't. Instead, the administration invokes a little-known rule of evidence called the state secrets privilege, which allows the executive branch to avoid revealing evidence—or even litigating cases—if it claims that doing so might reveal a "state secret." Bush lawyers have used the state secrets privilege to convince a federal appeals court to dismiss an ACLU lawsuit against the National Security Agency asking a court to declare the spying program illegal. And in the cases that have been brought against the telecoms, the administration has invoked the same privilege to argue that courts can't let the cases go forward because the telecoms would be in the unfair position of not being able to defend themselves—because, of course, the administration won't let the companies turn over the relevant documents. Retroactive immunity isn't about letting the telecoms off the hook. It's about hiding the administration's own legal claims from any judicial or public scrutiny. The administration wants to keep these cases out of court so it can cover up for itself.

Congress can protect the telecoms without falling for this trick. In reforming FISA, Congress should enact a comprehensive law governing the state secrets privilege, one that protects our national security and also allows litigants to make their case in court. Congress figured out this sort of balancing act for criminal cases decades ago when it passed the Classified Information Procedures Act; now it's time to do the same for civil suits. We agree with the administration that state secrets should be protected at all costs. But this administration can no longer be trusted to use the privilege to protect only genuine secrets. It's instead covering up its own dubious legal reasoning—not just in the domestic surveillance cases, but also to avoid scrutiny of the torture and rendition programs at issue in the cases of Khalid El-Masri and Maher Arar. Someone other than the executive must be able to review whether the executive is abusing the privilege.

A little history shows why. The state secrets privilege is as old as the republic, but its modern history dates from the 1953 case United States v. Reynolds. In that case, the Supreme Court allowed the Truman administration to withhold a secret report on an airplane crash that had killed three Air Force contractors because the administration claimed it contained state secrets. The court did not require the administration to show the report to a judge, instead taking the executive branch at its word. We now know that the Truman administration was misleading the court in Reynolds—the report (recently declassified) contained embarrassing information suggesting that the government was negligent in the crash, but no state secrets. When it mattered, though, nobody knew, because nobody reviewed the evidence.

Since Reynolds, the state secrets privilege has become something of an automatic win for the government. If litigating a case might require a court to consider secret evidence, the government will ask the court to dismiss the case early, before looking at documents and the like. Often, the judge never reviews the evidence in question. And even when he or she does, the government need not provide an unclassified version. If a defendant might need allegedly secret evidence to prove his innocence, as is the case with the suit against the telecoms, the administration uses that fact to argue for throwing out the case. We don't think any administration should skate away like this.

A solution to the state secrets problem should achieve three goals: ensuring the administration doesn't abuse the privilege; getting justice for litigants; and guaranteeing the secrecy of genuine state secrets.

Here's how a legislative fix we've suggested to the Senate judiciary committee would meet these requirements. First, in a secure proceeding, a court would review evidence the administration claimed was protected by the state secrets privilege. The court would rule on what really must be kept secret. The law would also require the president to tell Congress when and how he is using the privilege, so that even if a court allowed the executive to keep evidence away from litigants, Congress could provide a political check.

Second, a new state secrets privilege act would require the government to create unclassified versions of the evidence where possible, so that the litigation could proceed. It would end the practice of dismissing cases at the get-go based on the administration's blanket state secret claims. Instead, the law would provide for flexible procedures so that the government could avoid admitting or denying allegations in answering a complaint if it felt doing so would endanger national security. But plaintiffs would always get a chance to make their case, and defendants would always get a chance to show a court their defense.

Finally, the new act would include extensive procedures to guarantee that actual state secrets are protected. It would take advantage of procedures already in place in criminal cases, through the Classified Information Procedures Act we've mentioned, that govern the transmission and safekeeping of secret evidence. It would also allow the government to appeal a state secrets ruling by a lower-court judge immediately, in case such a ruling might harm national security. And Congress would allow the government to get a waiver in extreme cases, in which even showing the evidence to a federal judge under seal might endanger national security.

Congress has the constitutional authority to enact all of these provisions: The Constitution explicitly grants the legislature the power to enact regulations concerning the jurisdiction of federal courts. Last month, the Supreme Court passed up its own opportunity to curb abuses of the state secrets privilege when it declined to consider El-Masri's torture and rendition case. The ongoing FISA debate gives Congress an opportunity to step in where the court has failed to. If Congress is serious about allowing the telecoms to defend themselves, while holding the administration accountable, fixing the state secrets privilege is the place to start. Then, it'll be time for the administration to state its secrets.

It's unofficial: The country is in the throes of a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. In the wake of a Supreme Court decision in September to take a case testing the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol, and after a series of stays granted by state courts and the Supreme Court, prosecutors in Texas and elsewhere announced they will stop seeking execution dates. This past October was the first month in three years in which nobody was executed in the United States.

As the machinery of death clanks to a temporary halt, the real question is whether this pause in executions is going to lead to more humane death chambers or an all-out ban. Death-penalty opponents are hoping for the latter. John Holdridge, director of the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, says the moratorium "presents a rare opportunity to reflect on why we remain the only advanced Western democracy to retain this punishment." The American Bar Association just released a controversial report calling for a serious re-examination of the ways the death penalty is administered—highlighting pervasive problems with DNA evidence, racial disparity in death sentences, the state of the capital defense bar, and overzealous prosecutors. Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold seized the moment to draw attention to his Federal Death Penalty Abolition Act. It's not surprising that foes of capital punishment are trying to turn this spontaneous moratorium into a permanent one. But why are death-penalty supporters letting it happen?

The question the court will tackle in the Kentucky case, Baze v. Rees (PDF), is a narrow one, and the likelihood of a ruling resulting in an all-out ban on executions is pretty much zero. The court will consider the standard by which to evaluate whether the state's lethal-injection protocol carries an "unnecessary" risk of pain, prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. The justices will look at the three-drug cocktail used in Kentucky and all but one of the 37 states (PDF) that permit capital punishment (Nebraska still uses electrocution). The case comes down to a constitutional quest for the somewhat-but-not-too-painful death, with different lower courts employing a mess of legal standards, including "wanton infliction of pain," "excessive pain," "unnecessary pain," "substantial risk," "unnecessary risk," and also "substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary pain."

The prevalent three-drug protocol consists of an anesthetic rendering the victim unconscious, a paralytic that stops his breathing, and a drug that stops his heart. Mounting evidence suggests some prisoners may be suffering horribly. As Justice John Paul Stevens tartly pointed out at oral argument on a related question, the lethal-injection procedure we use "would be prohibited if applied to dogs and cats." (The American Veterinary Medical Association issued guidelines in 2002 saying the mix of drugs is unacceptable for putting animals to sleep.) Terminally ill patients in Oregon can swallow a large dose of a single barbiturate that will put them in a coma in minutes, and a state commission in Tennessee recommended this in lieu of the three-drug system. Even defenders of the current protocol concede it was simply copied from state to state, each cheerfully adopting the 1977 version cooked up by Dr. Jay Chapman, formerly chief medical examiner in Oklahoma, who devised the system as a hasty alternative to the firing squad. A state-to-state game of telephone: That's how the national patchwork of lethal-injection protocols—many developed and administered in secret—was born. Thus, at a 1990 meeting with Texas corrections officials to devise a protocol for Louisiana, Texas officials were asked why they used 5 grams of sodium pentothal instead of 2 grams, like other states. According to testimony in a Louisiana appeal, Texas' prison pharmacy director just laughed: "When we did our first execution, the only thing I had on hand was a 5-gram vial. And rather than do the paperwork on wasting 3 grams, we just gave all 5."

Dr. Chapman himself recently acknowledged that it's probably time to change the method. He suggests an anesthetic called Diprivan. Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death-penalty group, agrees the cocktail is "open to criticism." He would suggest carbon monoxide instead.

If academics, doctors, and prisoners—as well as death-penalty supporters and the guy who invented the protocol—have been criticizing the three-drug protocol for years, why haven't the states switched methods? And once the court agreed to hear Baze, why didn't Texas simply change to barbiturates and keep its executions on schedule? You'd expect the states to choose doling out the barbiturates instead of acceding to a monthslong moratorium that will offer the public a chance to see that life without the death penalty may still be worth living.

The reason the states haven't acted is one part strategic and one part inertia. As the appellants' brief in Baze (PDF) points out, most of the states have persistently stood by their protocols with the argument that everyone else is doing it. Kentucky adopted Chapman's cocktail without "any independent or scientific studies" because "other states were doing it … on a regular basis."

As Richard Dieter at the Death Penalty Information Center points out, once the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Baze, the states were forced to defend their protocols en masse, even if they knew them to be flawed. If even one state were to change its procedure now, prisoners in the other states would have a constitutional claim. It's a form of—pardon the pun—prisoner's dilemma; the states backed their way into a rotten system, and now they must insist that it's the greatest, most constitutional system around.

But Dieter points to another, more important reason states aren't racing to embrace new execution methods: "The pitched battle over the death penalty is not a rational one," he says. States that allow capital punishment don't really want to kill a lot more people a lot more efficiently. They want to execute some people, sometimes, and the lethal-injection system—while flawed in substantive ways—was a political solution to a political problem.

The politics of the fight over capital punishment may also explain why, as professor Doug Berman pointed out, the Bush Justice Department seemed to be secretly accepting a moratorium on lethal injections even before the high court agreed to hear Baze. Berman's best hypothesis at the time? "Most folks on both sides of the debate seem to care a lot more about death sentences than they care about whether those sentences result in actual executions."

Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor and expert on lethal injection, highlights this same political inertia in a recent article in the Fordham Law Review (PDF). State death-penalty procedures are screwed up because while courts and lawmakers want to be tough on the death penalty, they don't want to dirty their hands with execution. Denno writes that "the entities most responsible for implementing the state's death sentence never want to be associated with the details of it—not the legislatures, not the courts, and until September 27, 2007, not the Supreme Court." Thus, lethal injection policies land in the laps of the states' department of corrections personnel, who have no expertise, and thus depend blindly on the solutions found by other states.

The reason our death-penalty methods are old and rickety is that they were cobbled together on the fly and broadly adopted without care. They are being defended for political and strategic reasons, as opposed to pragmatic ones. And the whole argument is a bad proxy for a larger fight about capital punishment. If carelessness, raw politics, and inertia should be driving policy, the current lethal-injection system is a penalogical grand slam. One shouldn't have to be opposed to the death penalty, be soft on criminals, or be a liberal crybaby to insist that procedures that are hopelessly outdated and medically suspect should be fixed.

In a rare instance of Iowa-neglect, not a single candidate spent time in the Hawkeye State Thursday. Instead, while the Democrats were partying in Vegas, the Republicans fanned out across the country. Only John McCain and Mitt Romney were forced to share a state (both were in California). Tom Tancredo—surprisingly—had New Hampshire to himself, Fred Thompson frolicked in New York and Connecticut, Rudy Giuliani continued his heavy emphasis on Florida, and Mike Huckabee went on a tour of Microsoft. Not to worry, the candidates return to Iowa tomorrow.

Explore more of the country's political landscape with Slate's Map the Candidates. And be sure to check out MTC's new interactive news feed!

Map the Candidates uses the candidates' public schedules to keep track of their comings and goings. A quick primer on your new election toolbox:

• Do you want to know who spent the most time in Iowa or New Hampshire last month? Play with the timeline sliders above the map to customize the amount of time displayed.
• Care most about who visited your home state? Then zoom in on it or type a location into the "geosearch" box below the map.
• Choose which candidates you want to follow with the check boxes on to the right of the map. If you only want to see the front-runners, then uncheck all of the fringe candidates. Voilà! You're left with the cream of the crop's travels.
• Follow the campaign trail virtually with MTC's news feed. Every day YouTube video and articles from local papers will give you a glimpse of what stump speeches really look and sound like. Just click the arrow next to the headline to get started.
• Take a closer look at candidates by clicking on their names to the right of the map. You'll get the lowdown on their travels, media coverage, and policy positions.

Click here to start using Map the Candidates.

This week, Dr. Sydney Spiesel discusses whether sex late in pregnancy makes women go into labor, the link for kids between being overweight and getting too little sleep, and the risk of serious blood clots during air travel.

Sex before baby

Question: Does sex late in pregnancy set off labor? A lot of folklore says it does and, for that reason, some obstetricians warn their patients against it. There are good scientific arguments to make us expect that the idea might be true. For instance, prostaglandin E., an ingredient of semen, stimulates uterine contraction and can start labor. So can breast stimulation, and orgasm while having sex during pregnancy increases uterine activity.

Context: Actually, it would be very desirable if sex did play this role. For sound medical reasons—usually to protect the fetus from the negative effects of more than 42 weeks gestation or from the problems associated with maternal diabetes—doctors now use artificial means to stimulate the onset of labor. The artificial methods are amniotomy ("breaking of the waters") and medications that stimulate contractions. But there are certain disadvantages: a higher rate of cesarean sections, forceps-assisted delivery, bleeding after delivery, and prolonged labor. In addition, by several different measures, the babies on average don't do quite as well.

New study: If having sex late in pregnancy proved to be an effective natural method of starting off labor, it might be superior to the artificial methods (and many women might prefer it). Three obstetricians at the University of Malaysia set out to explore this question by recruiting a group of about 200 women late in pregnancy, chosen because they were all scheduled to be induced within the week if they didn't spontaneously go into labor. Half the women were actively encouraged to have vaginal sex, and the remaining half—the control group—were neither encouraged nor discouraged.

Findings: About 60 percent of the women encouraged to have sex did so, compared with only 40 percent of the control group. So, did this increased rate of rowdiness trigger more spontaneous labor? Nope. The rate was virtually the same in both groups, as was the likelihood of complications like maternal fever, cesarean section, excess bleeding, or evidence of increased newborn stress or other problems.

Conclusion: Given these findings, then, there is no particular reason to recommend sex late in pregnancy as a way of averting artificial induction of labor. But the study suggests that there is a different benefit: pleasure. Of the women in both groups who reported having sex in the last week of pregnancy, more than 80 percent said they had an orgasm.

Too little sleep, too much weight

Question: Several large studies, both here and abroad, have established a clear association in adults between inadequate sleep and obesity. The less we sleep at night on average, the more overweight we are likely to be. Does this same relationship hold for children? A number of small studies have hinted that this is likely to be the case, but, to date, the research has been flawed.

New study: Now comes a carefully done study by Dr. Julia Lumeng of the University of Michigan and her colleagues. The data were drawn from a large National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study, beginning in 1991, that includes more than 1,000 children in 10 areas of the United States, urban and rural. The children were tracked from birth through sixth grade. The children's height and weight were measured when they were in third grade and again when they were in sixth grade. Demographic data on race, socioeconomic status, and gender were also collected because these factors are also known to be associated with the prevalence of obesity, and it was important to separate out those effects from the consequences of inadequate sleep.

Findings: Dr. Lumeng and her colleagues found a clear association in sixth graders between less sleep and more weight: For every additional hour of sleep at night, there was 20 percent less likelihood that the child would be overweight. Shorter sleep duration in third grade increased the likelihood of heaviness in sixth grade. This relationship was even more striking for children when they were measured in third grade—even those who were not then overweight. Every additional hour of nightly sleep in third grade meant a 40 percent lower chance of being overweight three years later. The critical dimension for length of sleep was bedtime. The average awakening time was exactly the same across children's weights, but the average bedtime was later for the chunky kids.

Explanations: Why should this be? There are many proposed answers, none of them definitive. Maybe less sleep makes kids irritable, and then they eat excess food to distract them from expressing their bad mood. Perhaps the relationship is biological: More of the hormone leptin, which decreases appetite, is released when people sleep, and we know that adults produce less of it when they sleep less. Or maybe the key is exercise. In general, longer sleep is associated with higher activity level (though in adult studies the increased physical activity associated with longer sleep didn't seem to be the factor that decreased the risk of obesity).

Conclusion: If, ultimately, it can be demonstrated that inadequate sleep actually causes excess weight gain, how can we help everyone get more sleep? What role do huge homework assignments play in late bedtimes? Should we rethink the early start times for many schools (even though kids' waking times weren't a factor in this study)? What else?

Economy-class syndrome

Problem: It's been known for more than 50 years that air travelers are at risk of developing dangerous blood clots in their veins. This is probably because relative immobility and the pressure of sitting lead to blood stagnation, which promotes blood clotting. When clots form in the deep veins of the pelvis or the legs, the condition is called "deep vein thrombosis." Sometimes these clots are carried to the lungs, where they become lodged, causing a pulmonary embolism—and, in some cases, sudden death. The symptoms of DVT are pain and swelling in the affected area and redness of the limb. People with pulmonary embolus typically have a sudden onset of shortness of breath, rapid breathing, chest pain, and cough. The period of risk may continue for up to eight weeks after landing.

Question: How great a risk do these conditions pose to airline travelers? Which fliers are especially at risk? What can we do to prevent these complications of travel?

New study: In a new large and comprehensive study (PDF), Saskia Kuipers of the Leiden (Netherlands) University Medical Center and her colleagues assembled a database of almost 9,000 subjects on air travel, completed by the employees of eight large companies or international organizations. (Here's the questionnaire—you can see it without a password.) The study group was clearly composed of serious travelers, since it took more than 300,000 flights over about five years, averaging 2.6 long flights per person per year.

Findings: Fifty-five of the travelers developed confirmed DVT or pulmonary embolus after flying, a rate of one in 4,650 flights, which is about triple the expected risk. Women had a higher risk than men, and it was magnified (to one in 1,800 flights) by the use of birth control pills. Being of medium height lowered the risk. Being tall increased it, and so did being short (less than 5 feet 5 inches), probably because airline seats put pressure on the back of the legs of people whose feet don't touch the floor. I would not be surprised if the risk were greater for people who were more tightly packed into the cheaper airline seats (and, in fact, the condition is sometimes called "economy-class syndrome"). Kuipers didn't address this factor or discuss whether the companies and organizations she studied bought business- or first-class tickets for employees, which might lead her calculations to underestimate the risk for the rest of us.

Prevention: In general, physical activity diminishes the risk of clotting. Another earlier study suggested that elastic stockings (which keep constant pressure on the lower extremities and prevent blood from stagnating in the veins) might help. People with a history of DVT or pulmonary embolus planning a long trip would do well to speak to their doctor about other precautions.

Conclusion: Actually, I found this study quite reassuring. The risk of these complications is less than I thought it would be. For almost all of us, it certainly doesn't outweigh the benefit of a nice vacation in a far-away place.

Compared with war correspondents, business reporters have it easy. Sure, we cope with tough challenges: relentless cold-call pitches from clueless public-relations executives (for the record, I don't cover the textile industry in New Zealand), the impenetrable thicket of jargon on conference calls, and interviews with CEOs whose hourslong monologues make Fidel Castro seem reticent. Over the years, your correspondent has endured cross-country flights in coach, spent sleepless nights in four-star hotels where room service stopped at 11 p.m., and trekked to conference rooms all over Manhattan.

I've just returned from what is likely to be the most harrowing investigative jaunt of my career, a four-day slog through teeming streets filled with screaming children. For half a week I subsisted on unhealthy, borderline inedible fare and endured the torture of loud, repetitious music and unbridled sincerity.

Yes, I survived Disney World.

Critics charge that Disney's parks are nothing more than simulacra of reality, carefully constructed capitalist fantasylands that shut out unpleasant realities. (In other words, they're a lot like Wall Street before the subprime mess hit the fan.) But Disney World, an immensely successful enterprise, clearly has a lot to teach about the realities of business. In fact, for 21 years the Disney Institute has offered businesses "the tools to apply proven systems and strategies to their own organizations." Case studies show Disney has helped the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers boost retention rates among interns and assisted General Motors' efforts to improve customer satisfaction at dealerships.

But you don't have to be a client of Disney's to learn some of the theme park's obvious commercial lessons. Many businesses and other large organizations would be well-advised to stop spending millions of dollars on the services of McKinsey & Co. and other management consultants and instead drop $248 on a three-day Park Hopper pass.

Airline executives should rush to the Haunted Mansion in the Magic Kingdom. Our heads sank when we approached and saw the sign advertising a 15-minute wait. Despair turned to elation when we were ushered into the spooky entry hall in just a few minutes. This experience was repeated time and again—at rides and restaurants—where promised delays of 20 minutes miraculously shrank in half. After a few days, it became apparent that this might be a conscious strategy of underpromising and overdelivering. Which is precisely the opposite of the tack airlines have taken lo these many years. The carriers continually promise that planes will leave or arrive at a specific time, when they know the probability of an on-time departure is only slightly greater than the probability of your suitcase being the first item to hit the luggage carousel.

Managers, maitre d's, and hostesses at every high-end restaurant in Los Angeles should be schooled on the radical innovation of the Fast Pass. At many fine-dining restaurants, customers with reservations frequently are made to wait for tables and must slip the maitre d' a $20 bill to avoid being seated in Siberia. But Disney is far more democratic. If you're willing to plan ahead, you can print out a ticket—a Fast Pass—that entitles the holder to instant access to a ride later in the day—for no extra charge!

The blanket assertion that government should be run more like a business is frequently unconvincing. (What if the Federal Emergency Management Agency were managed like Enron?) But the brass at the Department of Homeland Security, from Secretary Michael Chertoff down to the surly guards at La Guardia who single out 8-year-old girls toting pink backpacks for extra scrutiny, should spend a day at Disney's efficiently managed borders. The land of Mickey tightly controls access to its 30,500 acres through a system of checkpoints and turnstiles that combines state-of-the-art technology and old-fashioned humanity. Disney's border crossings, which in 2006 managed the flow of 49 million through the complex's six principalities, are equipped with biometric identification; adult guests can't enter unless they first scan their index-finger print, which must match prints already on file. The border guards smile effusively at the foreigners who have come to spend money heedlessly on their shores.

Finally, every CEO should take at least three or four rides on It's a Small World and then spend the rest of the day in Epcot. For years, the United States has been shrinking as a global economic force, a trend that is accelerating with the continuing boom in Asia and the domestic slowdown. For more and more companies, future growth and prosperity will depend on penetrating foreign markets. But Americans aren't so much innocents abroad as ignoramuses abroad. A day at Disney can remedy all that. It's a Small World is like an animated version of Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. Epcot allows visitors to immerse themselves in the cultures and cuisines of 11 countries, from Mexico to Norway, in 40 compact acres.

Of course, it should be noted that despite the great efforts made to create authenticity—the Japanese hibachi joint was staffed entirely by Japanese—Epcot doesn't provide a uniformly realistic experience. In Epcot's European countries, the dollar still retains some value.

Lo! Let this humble scribe unlock her word-hoard

To tell of great Zemeckis, he of Gump

And Contact, Back to th' Future, Cast Away.

He, stone-romancer, framer of Roger Rabbit,

Hollywood myth-molder, box-office bard.

Far had he fallen with Polar Express,

An animated washout whose technique

Obscured its content, thanks to CGI.

The Z-man's new technique, performance capture,

Looked creepy in those days. The critics snarled.

But brave Zemeckis takes them on again

With Beowulf, a 3-D spectacle

Like none before. The Anglo-Saxon poem,

Dreaded by school kids since the world was young,

His manly grip reshapes to graphic novel.

It all begins in Hrothgar's hallowed halls.

By Anthony Hopkins played, this Danish king

Partakes of mead and merriment one night

Alongside fair Wealthow, his noble queen

(Robin Wright Penn, snatched from the bed of Sean).

But havoc's in the works: A foul beast,

Grendel by name, by Crispin Glover voiced,

Bestrides the mead hall, butchering at will,

Head-crunching, hurling, ripping limb from limb,

Then flees with quarry to his mountain lair.

Saddened, King Hrothgar summons Beowulf,

A foreign hero, to defend the Danes.

Ray Winstone, chubby star of Sexy Beast,

Now digitally remade as a hunk,

Gives flesh to this 6-foot-6 superman.

After a splendid battle—in which, nude,

His manhood hidden Austin Powers-style

'Neath sconce and scabbard painstakingly placed,

The hero slays the monster—Grendel flees,

To die beside his mother in their den.

And what a mother! Naked, drenched in gold,

With nipples airbrushed to avoid an R

And feet tricked out with built-in high-heeled shoes,

Brad Pitt's hell-bride emerges from the bog

To take revenge on he who slew her son.

Thus bows the movie's second, lesser half,

When grief and guilt—that psychobabble stuff—

Displace the gleeful carnage of the first.

Instead of killing Grendel's sultry dam,

Dense Beowulf lies with her, then lets her live.

Two score and 10 years onward, now a king,

The 'Wulf will face the wages of his sin.

A golden dragon ravages the land,

Of origin unknown—just take a guess!—

And Beowulf must fight him, die, or both.

Despite the second hour's bogging down

In royal squabbling and dull self-reproach,

This final battle thrills and charms at once.

The airborne chase is monumental fun,

The hero's prowess whopping. None alive

Could call Zemeckis subtle; but his style

Well suits the poem's crude and earthy brawn.

Comic-Con geeks and cinephiles alike

Will gape at the resplendent imagery

(But don ye specs, and see it in 3-D).

Margot at the Wedding (Paramount Vantage), Noah Baumbach's follow-up to his intimate divorce drama, The Squid and the Whale (2005), is like a promising first draft of a movie. You can imagine the notes a good line editor might have made on the script, deleting a redundant scene here, expanding a transition there, gently reminding the director-screenwriter to watch out for his own authorial tics. It's too bad Baumbach's movie is already shot, edited, and up there on the screen, because after a few rounds with a red pencil, it could really have been something worth watching.

What Squid and the Whale did for divorce—that is, hold up one particular educated, upper-middle-class instance of it to pitiless psychological scrutiny—Margot at the Wedding tries to do for sibling rivalry. Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a successful New York novelist who travels with her almost-adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) to the East Coast beach house where she grew up, and where her semi-estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is about to marry a depressive, unemployed artist named Malcolm (Jack Black). In the few days leading up to the wedding, the adults sprawl around the house, drinking, smoking dope, and bickering, while the children (Pauline also has a preteen daughter, played by Flora Cross) draw pictures and exchange family secrets.

The screenplay wastes no time in establishing Margot as a monster—a competitive, passive-aggressive narcissist who couches her toxic barbs in the language of sisterly concern. She openly disparages the schlumpy Malcolm, breaks her vow to keep Pauline's new pregnancy under wraps, and undermines her son's budding sense of self-worth by comparing his new adolescent body to the "rounded, graceful" one he had as a child. But there's something affecting about Margot, too—Kidman manages to evoke the vulnerability beneath her brittleness, and the desire for recognition that drives her to such extreme acts of bitchery.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach's real-life wife, gives an uncharacteristically toned-down performance as the scattered, hippie-ish Pauline. She's like an older, sadder version of the fragile teenager she played 25 years ago in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Kidman and Leigh, typically cast as the ice princess and the emotionally naked waif, are unexpectedly believable as sisters, and they throw themselves into their roles with commendable passion. But the script doesn't give them any place to go besides round and round the same neurotic hamster wheel.

Baumbach has always had a knack for directing adolescent boys, from Jesse Eisenbach and Owen Kline in The Squid and the Whale to the kid who played the young Eric Stoltz in Mr. Jealousy. Twelve-year-old newcomer Zane Pais is wonderfully affecting as Margot's awkward son—you want to rush the screen and offer him bus fare to escape this dreadful family. But other characters—like Dick (Ciarán Hinds), a neighbor of Pauline's who's also Margot's writing partner and sometime lover—are barely accorded enough screen time for us to keep their faces straight. John Turturro shows up as Margot's husband in a role so brief it's almost a cameo. Yet the imminent disintegration of their marriage is critical to the story: Shouldn't we have some idea who this guy is?

Baumbach can also pack a lot into a one-liner (learning he's soon to be a father, Malcolm observes, "That thing hasn't kicked in yet where you realize you're not the center of the universe"), and he has a fine eye for the odd details that help build character. But a fully realized character is more than an accumulation of blurted non sequiturs. Margot at the Wedding abounds in details that remain simply mystifying: Why does Pauline soil herself in one crucial scene? Why does Margot interrupt a Q&A session at a bookstore with a long, possibly fabricated story about her encounter with a menacing refrigerator repairman? And what do the two sisters' hazy references to an abusive childhood finally add up to? I'm not asking for a Lifetime-network moment of pat psychological revelation, just a completed story arc every now and then.

The movie's title, and the presence of a character named Pauline, telegraph Baumbach's debt to Eric Rohmer, director of Pauline at the Beach and other wryly observed chronicles of romantic and family love. But Baumbach's claustrophobic misanthropy here is more evocative of late Woody Allen. I still have plenty of hope for this talented writer-director. But like Margot at the Wedding's compulsively blathering protagonist, he has yet to learn that good writing is also the art of knowing when to shut up.

After 20 minutes of driving around in the dark near Santa Cruz, I found the right road and pulled up in front of a cemetery. I was looking for a rock band called Wolves in the Throne Room, whose gig tonight was advertised as occurring "somewhere in the woods." Stepping into the chilly evening, I slammed the car door and started walking down an unlit lane toward a forest of cypress and eucalyptus. Where the asphalt gave way to dirt, a scruffy kid with a lantern led me and a few others along trails and over streams. A sign asked us not to smoke, to turn off our cell phones, and to try to refrain from talking. Nobody asked me for any money.

Stumbling through the weeds, I came across 30 or 40 young folks gazing at a black-and-white film loop of ravens and ravaged forests that was projected onto a sheet pegged to a massive conifer. The crowd shuffled and stared and occasionally burped and giggled. Then we lumbered through the bushes toward a nearby clearing marked by a few antique hanging lanterns, a drum kit on a carpet, and a couple of amps and guitars. There was no stage, no risers, no proper lights. A massive tree limb stretched over the clearing, and a few people had clambered up for a better view, young gents with furry hats and Rasputin beards passing around bottles of nameless homebrew. Waves of ambient electronica began flowing out of an old analog synthesizer, merging with the groan of a nearby generator. After 15 minutes of this, three rather nondescript guys shuffled out of the crowd and took up their instruments.

Given the setting, you might think that Wolves in the Throne Room was some West Coast jam band or a freak-folk combo. But what these three fellows played was melancholic and often brutal black metal. Nathan Weaver, one of the two guitarists (there was no bassist), rasped incomprehensible lyrics in the throat-shredding "Cookie Monster" vocals that mark the genre. (Sample it here.) Using tremolo picking, he and longhaired Rick Dahlin created darkly stacked melodies that soared through the rapid-fire "blast-beats" and cymbal sheen flawlessly delivered by Nathan's older brother Aaron. The band performed for about an hour and played four songs. When Nathan wasn't singing, he faced away from the rapt crowd, toward his mates.

To understand why a metal band from the Pacific Northwest was playing their ferocious and lamenting music in a forest, you need to delve into the back story of black metal, perhaps the most evocative, emotionally challenging, and risible of the many subgenres of heavy metal that have emerged since the 1970s. Black metal, which was kick-started by the bands Venom and the mighty Bathory, at the turn of the '80s, began as a raw and self-consciously devilish rejection of commercial hard rock, and it flowered in Norway in the early 1990s. Production and musical values were ranked lower than atmosphere and emotion, especially feelings of bitterness, despair, and hatred—those "serious" sentiments beloved of alienated adolescents, which is what these groups were largely composed of. Black-metal acts adopted pseudonyms like Count Grishnackh and Fenriz from mythology and Tolkien's Orc lore, wore ghoulish corpse-paint, and released crudely produced recordings decorated with spidery, unreadable logos. They earned a justified reputation for extremism and misanthropy. Satanism was proclaimed, churches were burned, bandmates occasionally stabbed.

Like gangster rap, black metal drew a great deal of its charisma from its claims of countercultural authenticity, a realness defined not by criminal boasts and urban play-by-plays but by an ultimately spiritual fidelity to misanthropy and infernal nihilism—an uncompromising (if easily parodied) Satanic sensibility salted with occasional bursts of violence, obscenity, and tabloid controversy. But as the genre grew in popularity, an interesting mythological transformation occurred. Classic bands like Ulver, Windir, and Enslaved left the Christian devil aside to reach for an older, pagan stratum of Norse and heathen lore ("Viking metal" is now its own subgenre). In their quest to express the atmosphere of awe and gloom that permeates these ancient ways, black-metal acts began extending and deepening their use of melodies, both folkloric and epic. What emerged was a powerful dark-side Romanticism, perhaps the most unalloyed descendent of old-school Sturm und Drang that we have.

So, how did three guys from Olympia, Wash., neo-hippies and veterans of the DIY punk scene, come to emulate this deeply European music, and to make it so thoroughly their own? On the surface, the Wolves are not your typical black-metal band. Besides being American—black-metal bands in the United States are few and far between—they don't go in for corpse-paint or silly pseudonyms. Most importantly, their music is unusually textured and rich. On the their recent album Two Hunters (Southern Lord), melodies slash through a shoe-gazing haze of guitars, analog synths, and shimmering cymbals. Genres are woven together, with folk, ambient, goth, and environmental samples rising and falling through the material like tides. For the first half of "Cleansing," which opens with the crackling of a fire, guest singer Jessica Kinney provides a clean and keening lament over a steady tribal beat. Most black-metal bands sound cornball when they go softy like this, but the music here conjures the mournful exotica of the Goth crossover band Dead Can Dance.

You can't understand the lyrics, of course, and the band, in a typical black-metal move, does not print them. However, the aural sleuths at the Encyclopaedia Metallum, which tracks more than 50,000 metal bands, do offer some convincing transcriptions. These suggest that Two Hunters is about an apocalyptic struggle. On one side, there's a cruel mounted priest-king, whose steed beats the earth to "lifeless chaos" with his 24-7 galloping. On the other, there's a tribe of earth folk who flee into the forest, dance in the dark of night, and prepare for a final conflagration and a cleansing rain. The album closes with the 18-minute (!) swan song "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots." While not abandoning the tragic mode, the song's shiny timbres and a yearning, hopeful chord progression sound the first glimmerings of a new dawn, when "the sun god is born anew."

The contours of this myth echo what my chat with the band after the Santa Cruz show confirmed: Wolves in the Throne Room are hard-core tree-huggers, with a Manichaean view of the environmental crisis and a pagan faith in the transformative powers of nature. I mostly talked to Aaron, an articulate and intelligent fellow wearing a green Tyrolean hat. After honing his politics in the Pacific Northwest's DIY punk scene, Aaron moved to D.C. to fight the good fight as a secular lefty. It didn't work out, and he moved back to Olympia, where a surprising series of spiritual experiences he hasn't really talked about made him a clear-eyed seeker of earth wisdom. With his brother and their respective partners, he now lives on 10 acres of land near Evergreen State College, where his posse is painstakingly crafting a sustainable life off the grid. And finding time to play hard-core, shamanic eco-metal.

"The intersection of dark, spiritual music and radical ecology is quite natural," explains Aaron, who has not given up on the DIY punk scene's penchant for packaging radical political platforms with music. In interviews, he'll make favorable mention of the Earth Liberation Front—some of whose monkey-wrenching adherents have been branded as "terrorists." He also expresses cautious admiration for Finland's merciless eco-philosopher Pentti Linkola, who argues that the best way out of the environmental crisis lies in a swift, lethal, and authoritarian process of de-industrialization.

This is disturbing stuff, and it's supposed to be. I mean, aren't you a bit disturbed? Lots of people who open their souls to today's seemingly relentless assault on wild creatures and wild places find themselves gripped by bitterness, melancholy, and misanthropy. For the Wolves, black metal just makes sense; it's melodramatic Satanism transformed into an angry lament for human folly. But the band doesn't just mourn. It also aims its epic melodies toward the old Romantic sublime, drawing the listener into the dream of a vital and resurgent earth. Which is why, as the long last stretch of blistering riffs echoed through the Santa Cruz woods that night, the crowd started headbanging like dervishes, discovering in the harsh hyperspeed beats a deeper, more archaic pulse.

Of the generation of American novelists recently passed—Bellow, Styron, Vonnegut—none is harder to come to terms with than Norman Mailer, who died last Saturday at the age of 84. In part that is because his celebrity is nearly unimaginable today, and in part because his personality was so outsized; but mostly it's because no great writer—and he was, at his best, as great as he said he was—ever wrote quite as much crap.

It's astounding, really, and almost inexplicable, that a man who could write books as keen and inexhaustible as The Executioner's Song and Why Are We in Vietnam? could also write Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, along with a half-dozen or so other works that were comparably lazy, clumsy, and fatuous. And beyond that, there were his public pronouncements about sex, art, and ambition, plastic and cancer and television, and God, and the Kennedys, and America. … As a rule, novelists are about as interesting when they talk about politics as political thinkers are when they talk about the novel. Mailer made the mistake of thinking otherwise more often—far more often—than most.

But his public persona was mostly a performance, and as such it was, not just distinct from his writing, but generally inimical to it (as Mailer himself would eventually admit). What's more, there was a teasing, theatrical quality to it that a lot of people seemed to have missed. Much has been said about Mailer's obsession with masculinity and brutality: the dicta, the focus on boxing, war, murder, and the terrible mistake he made with Jack Henry Abbott. Gore Vidal once compared him to Charles Manson, which was silly, but there's no doubt that Mailer's stance on the question of manhood was troubling, at least when he was hawking it. He was right about some things—for example, about the use, if not the necessity, of danger for turning boys into men—but he was wrong about much more: about the difference between danger and violence, about the purposes and pleasures of sex, and above all, about women, whom he often loved, sometimes hated, and almost never understood.

Still, I don't think he was merely chauvinistic—it was more complicated than that. There was always an element of self-consciousness to his bluster. He was wholly without guile, calculation, or opportunism, and he was incapable of shrewdness, a rare and appealing trait in someone with his ambition; but he knew a good role when he saw one. Some years ago, paraphrasing Auden on Rilke, I described Mailer as the greatest lesbian writer since Gertrude Stein. It's a judgment I stand by, with cheerful regards to all parties concerned. Because he wasn't macho, after all, though that's what he was usually accused of: He was butch.

Thirty books in 60 years is a relentless, punishing schedule; it would be hard on a shut-in, it must have been brutal on Mailer, and a lot of things got broken along the way. Marriages, for example, and friendships: more than a few of each. A lot of barriers got broken, too, between fiction and nonfiction, between public and private life, between genius and idiocy. And this one, which I'm not sure anyone's noticed: Mailer was the first great Jewish American novelist who didn't feel obliged to write about Jews. His only real precedent was Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein), but West was not a colossal enough figure to start a new practice. Mailer was, and since his heyday there have been two traditions: One is inward-looking, cerebral and high-strung, and it includes Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, with Jonathan Safran Foer bringing up the rear. The other is outward-looking and somewhat more violent, and it includes Mailer himself, David Mamet, and perhaps Richard Price—none of whom, coincidentally or not, have Jewish last names (as I myself do not). I wouldn't say the first tradition was a ghetto or that the second is a betrayal, but I do think the freedom to choose between them (or mix them at will) is a gift, and it came from Mailer.

He was also a first-rate aphorist—a minor skill, but one that can outlast whole books' worth of prose. His notorious essay "Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room," in which he quickly demolishes some of the most beloved of his contemporaries, is vain, vicious, profoundly unfair, and more often right than wrong. His account of how he makes his novels—"I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood"—remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the process I've ever encountered. And he said this: "Sometime I think the novelist fashions a totem just as much as an aesthetic and that his real aim, not even known necessarily to himself, is to create a diversion in the fields of dread." And this: "The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is also ready to injure them." (A typical Mailer bon mot: an impeccable thought and an elegant formulation, preceded by seven words of needless mush.) And he said this, which is perfect: "Something out there is not necessarily fooling."

Yes, and Mailer was not necessarily fooling, either. He wasn't fooling when he wrote Why Are We in Vietnam?, which for all its madness and Grand Guignol is a brilliant novel, and one I hope is still being read, now that we are in Iraq. He wasn't fooling when he wrote Harlot's Ghost—a novel that no one, alas, seems to have noticed at all. He certainly wasn't fooling when he wrote The Executioner's Song, which is as close to perfect as a book gets and will remain one of the permanent American novels of the last century. (I'm perfectly happy to let his own description of it, as a "true life novel," stand unchallenged, in large part because it pisses off both journalists, who don't write as well as Mailer did, and novelists, who are seldom handed such rich material to work with.) From the enormous welter of Lawrence Schiller's reporting, Mailer shaped a flawless and monumental narrative: a great love story, a terrifying crime novel, and a symphony of American voices, all wrapped into one. Among massive 20^th-century American novels, its only competition is The Adventures of Augie March.

If we are to make literature into a horse race (as Mailer himself compulsively did), I'd have to say Bellow was a better writer. But I'll miss Mailer more. There's no one like him around anymore, no one as fearless who isn't playing to a constituency, no one taking the risks he took. A great writer—like a great boxer, actually—chooses his fights carefully, something Mailer never really learned how to do. But he fought with all he had, and he wasn't fooling.

Today, Other Magazines reads Newsweek, the Weekly Standard, The New Yorker, New York, and Washington Monthly to find out what's worth your time—and what's not.

Must Read

An article in the New Republic reveals the qualms of many Mormons who believe that Mitt Romney is compromising his faith to court evangelical votes. "The bolder his courting of evangelicals, the more pressure he will feel to conflate his beliefs with theirs—further unnerving his fellow Mormons."—G.H.

Best Campaign Piece

Washington Monthly interviews presidential hopeful Tom Tancredo about his success with using immigration as a campaign issue. He says, "It is not the worst thing in the world to have changed the debate so significantly … that [Republicans] are willing to say things like 'We will secure the border' and 'We will go after employers.' That's the moderate position now."—J.M.

Best Look Back

As part of Newsweek's memoriam to the year 1968, an article recounts the events of the "week from hell"—Robert F. Kennedy's entrance into the presidential race, Lyndon B. Johnson's announcement that he wouldn't seek another term, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assasination. It's a familiar history, but senior correspondent Evan Thomas brings keen perception to the chronology of the moment's tumultuous emotions.—D.S.

Best International Story

The New Republic walks the streets of Pakistan to find the last supporters of Pervez Musharraf. It finds them in unlikely places, even among Musharraf's protestors, who give the dictator credit for freeing up the media and building the foundation for his own downfall.—G.H.

Best Military Piece

With the lion's share of the fighting in Iraq happening on the ground, what's the Navy up to? Reinventing itself unnecessarily, according to a Weekly Standard op-ed on the branch's new "flawed strategy."—B.F.

Best Inside Look

Washington Monthly runs an engrossing look into the inner workings of Lyndon LaRouche's cultlike political and philosophical movement by highlighting the unusual role of printing companies in the dissemination of his extremist ideas, LaRouche's financial woes, and his work for Regan's National Security Council.—J.M.

Best Investigative Reporting

The New Republic uncovers the brutal tactics of Hillary Clinton's media machine, suggesting that "breeding fear and paranoia within the press corps is itself part of the Clinton campaign's strategy."—G.H.

Best Media Piece

The Weekly Standard examines the origins of the modern obituary, sprinkling in choice pull-quotes throughout, including a tasty tidbit about a Julie Andrews love triangle.—B.F.

Best Profile

A year after his death at 56 from lung cancer, New York examines the legacy of Gerald Boyd, the first black journalist to break into the New York Times masthead and whom the paper fired amid the Jayson Blair scandal.—M.S.

Best Environment Piece

A Newsweek article reveals how Toyota has turned from "paragon to pariah" in the eyes of environmental groups. The Prius was great, but the company is vying to become the world's No. 1 automaker, and that means fighting laws that would hurt their planned line of gas-guzzling trucks.—D.S.

Best Profile

The New Yorker examines the career of the controversial French comedian Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala. Early in his career, Dieudonné parodied bigotry; now, "he has won a reputation as a committed and vocal anti-Semite."—E.G.

Best Photo Essay

Newsweek photographs the "faces of a fiery year"—key players in 1968 that are still living. The full-page photos are beautifully shot and sequenced for alternating black-white contrast.—D.S.

Best Special Feature

Fuel your holiday-induced depression with New York's preholiday guide to downer films.—M.S.

Best Cocktail-Party Fodder

According to The New Yorker, the shoulder blades of bears were once used as sickles to cut grass, and all bears descend from "a creature that was originally the size of a small terrier."—E.G.

to Frank Bidart read this poem.

Well, that was a short death spiral. Hillary Clinton is back to winning debates, something she'd been doing regularly until two weeks ago, when she seemed to put all of her mistakes into one debate performance. In the interim, she's been defending herself against anger over question planting and accusations of playing the gender card. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that one of her strongest moments of the evening was when she was asked about her gender. Stringing together lines she's been testing on the campaign trail, she won one of the night's biggest crowd reactions and looked natural and approachable in a back-and-forth with pregnant CNN questioner Campbell Brown.

Clinton ran no risk of looking weak by talking about her gender, because she was kneeing her opponents in the groin. Two weeks ago, Clinton had tried to stay above the fray, which made her look evasive and left her opponents' attacks unanswered. No more. For each candidate, she had an attack prepared to answer their jabs at her. She said that John Edwards was parroting Republican talking points and slinging mud. She attacked Barack Obama for not proposing universal health care, knocking his legitimate policy alternative as a failing lack of will. She also swatted at Obama in a discussion over Social Security when she willfully overestimated the cost of his tax increase to fix the program.

Obama couldn't let that stand. He immediately responded by comparing Clinton to Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani. He was booed. Obama has now compared Clinton to Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, and Romney. When he makes the least little claim about Clinton, her staffers roll in the fainting couches, clutch their breast, and gasp, "What happened to the politics of hope?" I'm not sympathetic to the act, but Obama went too far here. He didn't have to compare Clinton to Giuliani and Romney. It was cheap and thoroughly without the art and lightness he displays on the stump. It's not a huge gaffe, but it wasn't in sync with the author who wrote The Audacity of Hope (which I just re-read for Slate's audio book club).

The debate returned to the question of giving licenses to illegal immigrants, the topic that had bedeviled Clinton in the last debate. This time it was Obama's turn to get flummoxed. On the substance, he was so circuitous that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had to remind him that the question "is sort of available for a yes or no answer." (Wolf was possibly returning the favor from a previous debate where Obama scolded him.) Obama couldn't argue that the complexity of the issue required a longer answer, because he'd dinged Clinton for wrestling with the same complexity in the last debate. In fact, he listed her uncertainty on the issue as item No. 1 when asked why she wasn't qualified to be president. But just minutes later when Wolf Blitzer pressed him on his position on the matter, Obama tried to duck by claiming the question of licenses was a distracting wedge issue. If it was a wedge issue, he was in part responsible for making it so. If Clinton had done this zigzag, it would get her the split-screen treatment from the Edwards campaign.

How much does this debate matter? It depends what Iowa caucus voters saw and what they hear in the days afterward. That's the focal point for the Democratic race, in which all the candidates are bunched up in state polls. For a period during the Clinton and Obama exchanges, it seemed like the evening was locking in the idea that the race is just between those two, but Edwards' resilient Iowa support probably won't be affected by that dynamic on stage. The older women who are Clinton's base will love her gender answer. The Obama and Edwards voters won't be disappointed with their men. They weren't great, but both did well enough not to lose any voters. But they also didn't do anything particularly to grow their vote; doing so will ultimately depend on their ability to make the winning case for themselves more than their ability to tear Clinton down. (Luckily for them, that task is mostly done in the work off the debate stage.)

The most damning problem with Clinton's last debate performance was that she provided evidence for her opponents' claims that she was calculating and lacked candor, perhaps her biggest potential weakness. She gave no such opportunities in this debate. (Her weak answers on Social Security and NAFTA will be harder to exploit.) When Obama and Edwards tried to force Clinton into a stumble, they were booed by the occasionally raucous audience. That seemed to make them back off.

Who knows what motivated the booing. It could have been Hillary partisans. It could have been that the audience didn't like to hear the attacks. Clinton, for her part, only counter-punched, which may be why when she got pointed the crowd tolerated it. Or it could be that the people in the room, like most Democratic voters, wanted to hear the candidates on the issues. Even if the top-tier candidates are pretty close to one another in their positions, people still like to hear what they have to say on their favorite topics.

Joe Biden appealed to this civic sentiment by telling everyone to stop bickering when he got his first chance to speak—which marked the end of the most heated portion of the debate. For a guy who was mocked at the first candidate forum for his penchant for windy oratory, Biden continues to give nourishing answers in a winning, let's-get-real tone.

Biden also appeared to be the only one of Clinton's rivals to smile when Clinton gave her winning answer to the gender question. The cutaway shots were not kind to her other rivals. The women working for the male candidates should tell them to not look so dour when the woman candidate on stage is talking about progress for members of her gender. Acknowledging that fact with a little smile makes you look generous to the women who make up the largest voting bloc in those crucial caucus and primary states. Also, if Hillary's really back on her game, she might be in a position one day to really give them something to frown about.

I was at the biodiesel plant in Newton, Iowa, when Hillary Clinton was asked the now-famous question that had been set up by her staff. We had just finished a tour of the facility where Clinton nodded, as all candidates do, while officials spoke so that the cameramen wearing hard hats could film her standing among tubes and vats. (This is for B-roll that makes the candidate look engaged in local issues while the television announcer talks about her trip.) Then Clinton gave a nearly hour-long policy speech before taking questions from the audience. Nineteen-year-old Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff asked: "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?"

Now we know, though, that it was Clinton's staff that gave Gallo-Chasanoff that question to ask. Which makes the senator's answer amusing. "It's usually young people who ask me about global warming," she said. Perhaps it's usually young people because in the binder where a staffer showed Gallo-Chasanoff the question for her to ask, it was under the category marked "college student."

What are we to make of the flap over the planted question? It is tempting to recline into the posture that this is a phony media-generated noncontroversy, like the questions about whether Clinton did or didn't tip an Iowa waitress (a story we must denounce as frivolous but keep milking anyway). Except that exchanges between voters and candidates are supposed to be the antidote to the failings of the mainstream media—free of all of the gimmickry and game-playing. Q-and-As by nature aren't as phony as the candidate plant tour or the planned stop at a roadside diner. They're as close as we get to an honest exchange. So, politicians should pay a price when they try to game them.

George Bush debased the town-hall format with many stage-managed charades, and it's politically dangerous for a Democratic candidate to get tagged with imitating him. Clinton has answered hundreds of town-hall questions with no hint of this, and so her offense falls well short of Bush's repeated infractions. (The audience members didn't have little windup keys in their backs.) But the timing couldn't be worse for her. The last week or so, the Iowa campaign has seen a new phase, in which Obama and Edwards, her neck-and-neck rivals, have questioned Clinton's honesty in almost every news cycle, a job that used to be handed off to staffers. In his well-received speech Saturday to Iowa Democrats, Barack Obama talked about the poll-driven politics and triangulation that are code words for the worst noncorporal sins of the Clinton years in Democratic circles. Clinton already fueled this with her switchback answer about driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in the last debate. Now, she has produced an easy-to-tell anecdote that makes her look highly calculating.

And it's an anecdote that involves a real, live Iowa voter. A lot of media firestorms take place in Washington green rooms and cable chat shows, but this event took place in their state and to one of their own. When politicians pander to them, the whole idea of the sage Iowa voter gets so tedious, I want to flee to the border. But then you talk to Iowa voters and are reminded that they are thoroughly normal and do take the process seriously. You can make fun of them, but I'm not going to. After one of Barack Obama's speeches last week, Pam Schroder of Bettendorf told me that while she was leaning toward Obama, she wanted to see Clinton speak in person to give her a fair shot to make her case. Voters who take the process that seriously can't like being played with planted questions.

Did Clinton know what her staff was doing? She says she didn't. Can that be so? She answered only a handful of questions at the event, and she somehow found her way to the person in the crowd who'd been put up to the task. Either her luck is smashing, or she's fibbing. Any staffer who prints up audience questions and carries them in a neat little binder doesn't then leave it to chance whether the candidate finds the one plant in a room of 300. Campaign aides insist that this moment was an act of pure happenstance. That still means that staffers feel it's OK to freelance at confecting artifice. Shouldn't someone have hesitated and thought, yikes, this is the kind of campaign where if I get caught doing this, I'm going to get fired? Even if it never winds up on the Jumbo-Tron in Times Square?

On the other hand, more politically devious questions could have been planted. The question Gallo-Chasanoff was actually planning to ask on her own is one of them. How is your plan different than your opponents' plans? This would have allowed Clinton to then ding her rivals while looking like she was just answering a question. (Romney may have employed this very technique.)

I didn't think the question was a plant at the time. It sounded a little general and prerehearsed, but a lot of town-hall questions sound that way. Days before the controversy broke, Bhagyashree Garekar, a correspondent for Singapore's Straits Times, asked me if I thought the questions had been planted at Clinton events we had both attended. I said I didn't think so. No candidate would be so stupid. When news broke that at least one had been, I called Garekar to ask what had tipped her off, since she hadn't made it to the Newton event. "This is common practice in many foreign countries, particularly India," she said. What was supposed to be a free-flowing exchange sounded rehearsed to someone with firsthand knowledge of the practice.

I thought a question from a waitress last week in the town of Oelwein, about increasing the minimum wage, seemed far more likely plant material, because the woman was from a crucial voting bloc, and Clinton answered her so well and retold of the exchange throughout her visit. A campaign aide assures me the exchange was genuine. They should put that answer on tape: They'll be asked that question a lot from now on.

John McCain and Rudy Giuliani have had a cozy little truce for much of the presidential race. On background, the candidates and their aides tell supporters and the press why the other man can't get elected. In public, though, they've been sweet to each other. Giuliani even said McCain would be the man he'd vote for if he weren't running.

The era of good feeling was bound to disappear, since McCain's aides will tell you that much of his support drifted over to Rudy once the mayor got into the race. And now it's getting very personal very fast.

For the last week McCain and Giuliani have been engaged in a quasi-policy dispute over waterboarding. Giuliani suggested that he was sympathetic to the complexity of whether the tactic is torture, as a former prosecutor who sometimes had to use harsh interrogation techniques. McCain responded that such a careless comment about torture suggested Giuliani wasn't ready to lead the country.

That was the warm up. On Friday, with the indictment of Giuliani associate Bernie Kerik, McCain and supporter Tom Ridge, the former director of homeland security, started off the real offensive by suggesting that Giuliani's support for Kerik, his one-time driver whom he later made the city's police commissioner and then backed for Ridge's former job, meant he lacked judgment.

The attacks and counterattacks continued from there, in a string of charges and accusations that seemed to pop up every-other time I refreshed my email inbox:

McCain's campaign manger, Rick Davis, amplified his boss' attack: "After being briefed on Kerik's ties to organized crime, Giuliani named him chief of the New York Police Department. Without any further vetting, Giuliani asked him to join his security consulting firm. Despite obvious ethical problems, Giuliani went so far as to personally recommend Kerik for the top job at the Department of Homeland Security. A president's judgment matters and Rudy Giuliani has repeatedly placed personal loyalty over regard for the facts."

Then came this statement from Giuliani's former deputy mayor, Randy Mastro referring to McCain's famous ethical run-in:

"It's no fairer to judge Rudy Giuliani on the basis of this one issue than it would be to judge John McCain on the basis of the Keating 5 scandal."

Ouch. Then this from a McCain aide in an email to me:

"Randy Mastro might not be the best spokesman for Giuliani on this, given the fact that he represented Interstate Industrial -- the mobbed-up company at the center of Bernie Kerik's indictment today."

Which arrived shortly before this public statement from Giuliani's communication's director, Katie Levinson:

"Is this what desperation looks like? Bernie Kerik's issues have been known since 2004 and John McCain still had glowing things to say about Rudy Giuliani and his leadership. What, exactly, changed today? Best as I can tell, it's just John McCain's pure desperation in the face of a failing and flailing campaign trumping his so-called straight talk."

This put the ball in the McCain court and Jill Hazelbaker his communications director responded: "The only person who broke the law is Rudy's good buddy Bernie Kerik," she said. "And the only person who showed questionable judgment was the man pushed him to be Secretary of D.H.S., Rudy Giuliani."

Friday ended and so did the exchange of fire. Will that be the end of the fracas? The Giuliani campaign does not want to talk about Kerik any more than they have to which left the McCain campaign wondering whether to continue the pressure or call a momentary truce.

Don't pity the poor pitiful striking screenwriters—let the major daily newspapers do it for you.

Perhaps not since the air traffic controllers' strike of 1981 has the big press lavished such intense and generally sympathetic coverage on a labor dispute. Both the Washington Post ("it hasn't been easy for movie writers") and the New York Times ("my greed is fair and reasonable") have run op-eds by screenwriters demanding that the entertainment industry compensate Writers Guild of America members for digital use of their work on the Web, iPods, cell phones, etc., the sticking point of this strike.

In the opinion pages of the Los Angeles Times, writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz lectures about how corporate domination of Hollywood inconveniences him, and a nonscreenwriter laments the powerlessness of today's scribes ("there is nothing without the writer").

The news pages of these dailies likewise abound with supportive accounts of the strikers' plight. No story goes so far as to declare solidarity with the strikers, because it doesn't have to. The saturation coverage says it for them.

Given the number of stories it has run on the clash, the Los Angeles Times must think the Writers Guild strike is to it as Hurricane Katrina was to the Times-Picayune. Even before the strike, the paper was running a weekly column about the craft of writing for movies called "Scriptland."

In its desperation to find a new angle on the strike, the Times reports in its Nov. 9 edition that "The writers strike has all but cleared out L.A.'s coffee shops and other havens for Hollywood's laptop jockeys." Did the Reuther brothers win such slavish treatment from the Detroit dailies when they established the United Auto Workers? Also in peril, the piece reports, is "the Office," a Santa Monica joint that rents out space to screenwriters. "If the strike keeps up, I could lose my business," said Office owner Aleks Horvat, over the telephone. "After all, I am a luxury, not a necessity." Oh, the tragedy!

Besides coffee shops, motion pictures, and TV dramas, soap operas are threatened, too, the Times reports. For the complete overview of the paper's work, explore the gigabytes of data clogging its "The Strike Zone" Web page. There you'll find three "PostScript" columns about the strike filed by screenwriter Peter Tolan. (At least one of them has made it into the paper.) Tolan predictably sketches the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers as the villains and the Writers Guild of America as the victims. "[The AMPTP] lie every time they use the word 'negotiate,' because they haven't done it," he writes in the standard unionese that wouldn't be out of place in a plumbers' union newsletter.

Over at the New York Times, we learn that some of the screenwriters who don't live in Los Feliz mansions reside in third-floor Brooklyn walk-ups. But the Times' Mr. Walk-Up, a struggling former staff writer on HBO's Oz, maintains as much writerly pride in his craft as does Robert Towne. "To have your work go into living rooms and reach millions is a thrill that you never get tired of," Bradford Winters tells the newspaper.

The Ocala Star-Banner matches the Times story by locating its own native son, who has made it big writing in Hollywood. "We are paid well, but, at the end of the day, this is an industry where people are often unemployed. There's no job security," Brad Copeland tells the Star-Banner. "But the reality is, if you look at all the writers in the union, a lot of them are unemployed."

Why the journalistic fixation on the strike? The national impact of the strike (even a lengthy one) won't be great. But dailies such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, whose bottom lines depend on movie advertising acreage, will feel the pain if Hollywood closes shop.

Newspaper reporters tend to identify with their cinematic brethren because writers tend to look out for other writers no matter what genre they work in. One New York Times article from this week noted with no irony how book authors will suffer if Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart's shows, now crippled by the strike, don't get back into production soon. Also, from a distance, the Writers Guild strike shimmers with heroism for liberal journalists at the Los Angeles Times (which has no union) and the New York Times and Washington Post (which have weakling unions). They're living vicariously through their comrades' glorious struggle.

This identification runs deeper than labor politics. Where their predecessors once hoped to write the Great American Novel, too many of today's newspaper reporters and editors will confide over drinks the big screenplay they want to write based on that murder story they covered, that business takeover, that guerilla battle, that crime caper, that city hall corruption saga, and so on.

Some of them have even been contacted by Hollywood at some point in their careers about the stories they've written, and keep copies of one of Syd Field's screenwriting guides on their desks at home. They daydream of joining Nora Ephron, Paul Attanasio, William Broyles Jr., Cameron Crowe, Joe Eszterhas, David Simon, David Mills, Aaron Latham, or even Peter Landesman as journalist-screenwriter hyphenates.

For the daydreamers, writing about the strike is pure fantasy league.

Addendum, Nov. 14: Dan Akst adds Paul D. Zimmerman and Kurt Luedtke to the list of journos turned screenwriters. Allow me to add Jay Cocks.

Addendum, Nov. 15: Silicon Alley Insider Managing Editor Peter Kafka directs my attention to his publication's tough love for the striking screenwriters: "Hollywood Writer: Screw SAI, The Web Looks Great!," "Er, "Go Writers!": The Role of Unions in a Competitive World," "Another Writers' Strike? (CBS) Why No One Has Sympathy," and "Hollywood Writers' Strike Explained: $7.2 M Apart On Digital." Alex Parker adds Roger Ebert and to the list of journalists turned screenwriters. David Samuels does the same for William Monahan.

******

Kim Masters and Troy Patterson, who have nothing in the way of an IMDB profile, have written about the strike for Slate. Defiant (and successful!) whore Neal Pollack is another issue altogether. Why should screenwriters participate in Web revenues, anyway? Brooks Barnes explains in an August New York Times news story that it's a historical accident that residuals exist in the first place. Did I miss any important contemporary journalist-screenwriters in my list? Send nominations to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum, in a future article, or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Norman Mailer died of kidney failure Saturday at age 84. Slate frequently covered the life and work of the two-time Pulitzer winner.

Ron Rosenbaum imagined how Mailer might envision Hitler's sexuality and "its relationship to his future as a mass murderer." A.N. Wilson reviewed Mailer's fictional autobiography of Jesus, The Gospel According to the Son. Timothy Noah wondered if Mailer should be praised or ridiculed for blurbing a book he had never read, and later looked at Mailer's position in the ranking of public intellectuals.

The audacious Mailer, best known for his work on the page, was no stranger to the screen, either: Dana Stevens discussed Mailer's guest appearance on the WB drama Gilmore Girls, and Troy Patterson dissected The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer, a recent video retrospective. Patterson also examined Mailer's infamous turn on The Dick Cavett Show. After head-butting Gore Vidal in the green room, Mailer went on stage drunk and proceeded to shout at the audience. A dynamic, inimitable force, he never failed to turn "a swank salon into a churning saloon."

Today in Slate, Christopher Hitchens remembers the pugnacious writer "who continually ran the risk that very few are willing to run," the risk of "simply seeming ridiculous," and Jim Lewis argues that Norman Mailer was a "butch" writer.

An op-ed from Sunday's New York Times, "This Is Your Brain on Politics," proposes to answer what must be the most vexing question of modern American politics: What's going on inside the head of a swing voter? The authors—a team of neuroscientists and political consultants—ran 20 of these undecided volunteers through a brain scanner and showed them pictures and video of the major candidates from both parties. The results, laid out both in print and an online slide show, purport to give us some insight as to how the upcoming primaries will play out: "Mitt Romney may have some potential," the researchers conclude, and Hillary Clinton seems to have an edge at winning over her opponents.

Don't believe a word of it. To liken these neurological pundits to snake-oil salesmen would be far too generous. Their imaging study has not been published in any science journal, nor has it been vetted by experts in the field; it can't rightly be called an "experiment," since the authors weren't testing any particular hypothesis; and the arbitrary conclusions they draw from the data aren't even consistent with their own previous research.

But before we evaluate those conclusions, let's consider the source. The study comes straight from FKF Applied Research, a D.C.-based "neuromarketing" firm that conducts brain-based focus groups for Fortune 500 companies. For the past two years, FKF has finagled widespread coverage of its business by conducting spurious fMRI analyses of Super Bowl commercials and then announcing the winners and losers. (See, for example, "This Is Your Brain on a Super Bowl Ad.") Business Week, Time, Reuters, and MSNBC have all boosted the company's bottom line with free publicity, but no publication has been nearly as generous as the Times. To date, the paper has published eight articles about the company (including one on the front page) since it was founded three years ago. And now, as of Sunday, the Times has gone so far as to run two op-ed columns by FKF's Josh Freedman with exactly the same title. In neither case did the newspaper disclose his connection to the firm.

As the authors of what is essentially an extended FKF advertorial, Freedman and his colleagues have a strong incentive to tout their services and sex up the findings. Even so, many of their conclusions seem either haphazard or comically vague. Take their first point: When test subjects were shown the name of a political party—either the words Republican, Democrat, or Independent—they responded with neural activity in the amygdala, the insula, and the striatum. According to the authors, these regions of the brain correspond to feelings of anxiety, disgust, and pleasure. Really, all three? From that meaningless mishmash of emotions, they meekly conclude that "voters sense both peril and promise in party brands."

Their assessment of Hillary Clinton might be more illuminating. Subjects who claimed to dislike the senator before the experiment began showed activation of the anterior cingulate cortex—an area thought to be associated with internal conflict—when confronted with her picture. "It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton," say the authors. "This phenomenon, not found for any other candidate, suggests that Mrs. Clinton may be able to gather support from some swing voters who oppose her." Is this a hint that she's not too polarizing to get elected? Now that would be something worth knowing.

But their interpretation of the Hillary data starts to look a little fishy if you take into account a similar round of FKF brain scans from the last presidential election. In 2004, the same researchers put 20 highly partisan voters into an MRI machine and showed them pictures of George W. Bush, John Kerry, and Ralph Nader. The result: Voters showed heightened activity in the conflict areas—including the anterior cingulate cortex—when they viewed the candidate they hated, as opposed to one they loved. In other words, when a hard-core Democrat looks at a picture of the dreaded George Bush, you get the same brain activity as when a swing voter looks at Hillary Clinton. Suddenly, the Hillary results don't seem so promising.

(It's worth noting that FKF co-founder Tom Freedman—that's Josh's brother—worked on the 1996 presidential campaign and served as a senior adviser in the Clinton White House. Could his relationship with the Clintons have swayed the results in favor of Hillary? It's at least worth a disclosure.)

A look back at the findings from 2004 casts doubt on their other conclusions as well. In 2007, activation of the superior temporal sulcus and the inferior frontal cortex was deemed a good sign for Fred Thompson—he was inspiring empathy from prospective voters. But in the previous study, activation of the same so-called "mirror neuron system" occurred only when voters viewed candidates of the opposing party, whom they despised. Likewise, when brain scans turned up relatively little activity in response to images of Barack Obama and John McCain, the authors concluded that these candidates "have work to do." But similar data from the 2004 experiment suggested just the opposite: Highly partisan voters showed much less brain activity when presented with the candidates they supported.

Across two analogous studies, the FKF team has interpreted the very same patterns of brain activity in very different ways—indeed, in opposite ways. When I posed this to lead author Josh Freedman, he explained that you have to tailor your interpretations to fit the context; i.e., the same brain scan might mean something different for a partisan than it does for a swing voter. But the only way to know if your subject is a partisan or a swing voter is to ask him before he goes in the scanner. And if you can get honest answers from your subject about his political beliefs, then why bother with the brain scans at all?

So, the study's findings aren't believable on their own terms. Take a step back, and there may be more fundamental problems. At the Neuroethics and Law Blog, cognitive neuroscientist Martha Farah tweaks the FKF team for assuming that activity in a given brain region always reflects the same emotional state. When subjects looked at photos of Mitt Romney, they showed increased blood flow to the amygdala—which the researchers interpreted here and elsewhere as a sign of anxiety. That's not necessarily true: The amygdala can also light up during the experience of anger, happiness, or sexual arousal.

Why has the New York Times proved so willing to donate its column space to this private company and its sloppy experiments? Perhaps the paper's editors have fallen prey to what psychologist Frank Keil calls the "illusion of explanatory depth." As Keil has shown in his own research, even gazing dumbly at a picture of the brain makes us feel as though we're deepening our understanding of the human mind. The fMRI scans published on Sunday, and the largely unsurprising findings they are meant to support, reveal the strength of this illusion.

Sleep and I have an awkward, on-again, off-again relationship. I'm slow to fall asleep, quick to wake up, and picky about my bed. Like most people, a night of bad snoozing inevitably ruins my day. That goes double during the holiday season, when I travel between friends and family, sleeping on their pull-out couches, floors, extra beds, and air mattresses.

Oh, the air mattresses. They bring up such painful memories—like the time when, as a college student between apartments, I spent a month sleeping on one. But I had to overcome my bitterness toward them recently, when my boyfriend and I moved into our tiny one-bedroom apartment. We bought a couch, some kitchen stuff, a coffee table, and, for my boyfriend, a Nintendo Wii. As friends and family begin to visit, however, it became clear we were missing something: a comfortable place for them to sleep. I needed to get over my deep-seated resentment and buy an air mattress that could give my guests a peaceful night's sleep—and leave them looking forward to their next visit.

Methodology

I tested six full-sized air mattresses, ranging in price from $34.97 to $259.99 (lowest prices found are listed for each). I selected mattresses that didn't require me to purchase a pump separately—they either came with a built-in pump or could be inflated using a hair dryer. I spent one night on each (two nights on some that required additional testing), setting each up in my living room to better reflect the overnight-guest experience. I evaluated them on two criteria:

1) Ease of Use (10 possible points): You usually find yourself on an air mattress after traveling, eating too much, drinking too much, socializing, or generally wearing yourself out. When it's late and I'm tired, I don't want to fumble with an instruction manual. Is it a cinch to set up? Does it inflate quickly and (relatively) quietly? Can I fold it up and store it easily when I'm done? My apartment is small, so I need an air mattress that doesn't take up lots of precious closet space.

2) Snooze or Lose (10 possible points): Does it make my back ache or wake me up with squeaking noises every time I toss and turn? Does it deflate in the middle of the night? Is it easy to adjust the air volume so I can get the firmness I want? And, most of all—does it allow for a good night's sleep?

Here are the results, from sleeping like a baby's crying to sleeping like a baby:

Coleman 4-in-1 Quickbed, $39.99

This cheap air mattress is meant for the great outdoors, not the living-room floor. Despite the name, there are only three ways to set it up: You can split it into two twin beds, zip them together for one king-sized bed, or stack them on top of each other for a raised twin bed. As I began to set up the bed, I smirked—using twin beds to create one king-sized bed reminded me of 1950s sitcoms (and apparently is still an option for some couples).

It doesn't come with a pump, so at bedtime, I whipped out the hair dryer. (Using a blow dryer is safe, as long as you use it on the cool setting.) The dryer did the bulk of the work, but I had to sub in and finish it up with my lungs. Unfortunately, the zipper that holds the twin beds together is pretty flimsy, and they drifted apart during the night, creating a little gulf that I somehow kept rolling into. The gap and the gushiness of the beds, which kept losing air, combined to give me a terrible night's sleep. I'd like to take this opportunity to offer an open apology to my co-workers, fellow Metro riders, and anyone else I came into contact with the next day, when I was unreasonably cranky. The only upside to the Coleman Quickbed is that it's lightweight and easy to store. That means it won't take up much room in my trash can.

Ease of Use: 4 (out of 10)

Snooze or Lose: 1 (out of 10)

Total: 5 (out of 20)

Wenzel Insta-Bed, $34.97

Like the Coleman, the Wenzel Insta-Bed doesn't come with an air pump, so out came the blow dryer again. Unlike the Coleman, Wenzel does offer a tiny hand pump, that, while too small to inflate the entire mattress, allows you to make small firmness adjustments. The hand pump works, but it was awkward to use—the up-and-down pumping movement felt like CPR, which I haven't attempted since 10^th-grade health class.

It took me a very long time to fall asleep. In all fairness, maybe it wasn't the Insta-Bed's fault. It could have been the headache I nursed all day, but sleep just didn't come. I spent an hour or more tossing and turning, unable to get comfortable on my uninviting bed. The next morning, it took a while to deflate—as I got ready for work, I had to periodically stomp on the bed to rid it of extra air. It was easy to fold up and lightweight, making it storable. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with a satchel or bag for storage or transport. Bottom line: I'd only offer this mattress to guests I secretly don't like.

Ease of Use: 6

Comfort: 6

Total: 12

Aerobed Premier Comfort Zone, $159

Finally, a comfortable, easy-to-set-up air mattress! Its built-in electrical pump made inflation quick and easy, without any snags or incidents. (One minor complaint is the noisy pump—you would want to inflate it before any little ones go to bed, because it would surely wake them up.) A control panel connected via wire to the air pump—much like that of a hospital bed—let me adjust the firmness while still reclining. I fell asleep quickly, cushioned by the "comfort zone coils" that approximate those of a real mattress. The mattress stayed firm and full overnight. In the morning, my right shoulder was sore. Was it the air mattress's fault? Perhaps. But when I gave the Aerobed a second try, I again woke up feeling stiff and poorly rested. I was also irritated by the air mattress's height. It's just a few inches off the ground, which makes getting up in the middle of the night an awkward proposition—particularly if there's someone sleeping next to you. Deflating this one was easy enough, but it was a little cumbersome to fold up and store. I was especially picky with this one because of the steep price. There are more affordable options out there with friendlier price tags.

Ease of Use: 7

Snooze or Lose: 7

Total: 14

Air Cloud Pillowtop Full-Size Air Bed With Remote, $69.99

Like Lindsay Lohan's career, this air mattress started out with great potential but ended up a disaster. It was very easy to set up: Plug it in and hold down the "inflate" button. An inflate/deflate remote allowed me to adjust the firmness, and I appreciated the little side-pocket caddy to nestle the remote in. I went to bed happy, convinced I'd finally get a good night's slumber. But overnight, I got a sinking feeling. And by feeling, I mean I was really sinking, to the point where I could feel the floor beneath the mattress. I fumbled for the remote and inflated it again. A few hours later, I had to repeat the inflation process. At 5 a.m., on the floor yet again, I gave up and headed to my sweet bed. In the morning, I checked the mattress for obvious tears or a loose valve. No luck. The users' manual admitted that this kind of repeated deflation might happen the first night. And apparently, I'm not the only one who has had problems with the mattress losing air. I believe in second chances, so I gave the Air Cloud another shot. I inflated it early in the day and lounged on it on a Saturday afternoon while watching football, reading, and working. It leaked a little, but not too much. When bedtime came, I had some serious doubts, but the mattress stayed firm all night. I'm truly puzzled by the fact that this air mattress has an obvious defect the manufacturer refuses to address—deflating with the first use. My sleep was high-quality the second time around, but the first-use woes mean that you can't pick this air mattress up last-minute.

Ease of Use: 9

Snooze or Lose: 6

Total: 15

Home Trends Raised Air Mattress With Built-In Pump, $48.73

Sleeping snob that I am, the low price of this Wal-Mart-manufactured mattress made me suspect that it wouldn't be a good sleeping experience. But despite its affordable cost (which usually means no-frills), the Home Trends Raised Air Mattress comes with a built-in, automatic pump that you can plug in to inflate the bed with ease in just two minutes. It even features a cute little compartment where you can store the electrical cord. The pump is a bit strange—it comes with a dial you have to flip around to inflate and deflate. On the plus side, the bed is also the lightest of the pump-containing air mattresses, which is particularly surprising because it inflates to the height of a normal bed—24 inches.

I slept very well that night, since the mattress stayed fully inflated through the morning. I had no problems rolling it up and sticking it into the little carry bag that accompanies the mattress. It's perfect for travel, and at that low price, you don't have to be overly protective of it. That'll teach me not to judge a product by its price tag.

Ease of Use: 9

Comfort: 9

Total: 18

AeroBed Premier Comfort Zone Raised, $259.99

For the most part, the AeroBed Premier Comfort Zone Raised is exactly like its cheaper brethren, the AeroBed Premier Comfort Zone. It has the same internal mechanical pump, the firmness-adjustment remote, "comfort zone coils," etc. But this one, like the Home Trends mattress, is the height of a regular bed. I fell asleep quickly and got some high-quality shut eye. When my alarm went off, I hit the snooze button to continue enjoying the experience—and I never do that.

This product's only downside? It's bulky. It takes up plenty of room in my closet, and it's heavy, making it difficult to cart around. But we have a winner. I'd rather have a comfortable bed to offer my guests than space to store a few extra pairs of shoes any day. I liked the AeroBed Premier Comfort Zone Raised so much that I offered it up to a friend who visited me for four days. She had been traveling for two weeks before stopping by my place—crashing on couches, hotel beds, and floors. She, too, was pleased with the air mattress, noting that her sleep on this Aerobed was the first good night's rest she'd had in a while. Family and friends, come on over—the sleeping's fine.

Ease of Use: 9

Snooze or Lose: 10

Total: 19

By 2002, everyone in my family had become an Internet convert. For the technophobic older generation, signing up for an e-mail account was a concession to us youngsters—if the kids don't call home, they thought, we'll just reach them through the computer. Everyone was especially eager to send messages to my niece, a kid who wasn't all that chatty on the phone but was almost always glued to her PC. But while the rest of us happily exchanged forwards and life updates, she almost never piped up. Eventually, I sussed out the truth: She was too busy sending IMs and text messages to bother with e-mail. That's when I realized that my agility with e-mail no longer marked me as a tech-savvy young adult. It made me a lame old fogey.

Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change everything—nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail.

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

How have we reached this point? Not so long ago, e-mail networks formed the basic latticework of the Internet. In just a few years, electronic mail dramatically altered the way we communicate with friends, relatives, and colleagues. Sitting down and composing messages became a daily ritual, the primary way that hundreds of millions of people kept in touch.

You could chalk up the decline of e-mail to kids following the newest tech fads. You're not cool if you're not on Facebook or MySpace, and everyone wants the latest tricked-out cell phone. I've come around to the idea, though, that all of this other stuff is catching on because e-mail isn't perfect. Instant-messaging, mobile text-messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, and social-networking profiles all help compensate for e-mail's shortcomings.

Let's think about this from a teenager's perspective. First, you'd never send an e-mail to 200 friends saying, "It's Friday and I'm ready to party!!!" But with a Twitter tweet or a Facebook status update, you can broadcast such a message to all of your buddies without seeming like a total dweeb. Need to make your party plans for Friday night? You'd be a fool to send an e-mail and twiddle your thumbs waiting for responses; it's speedier to exchange IMs with your friends. If you then need to tell those friends how awesome they are for joining you, post a message on their Facebook or MySpace page so the world can see. And mobile phones take instant—and constant—contact into a whole other realm. You can argue with your girlfriend all night without having to leave the party. Then, the next morning, you can change your Facebook relationship status to "single." And there you have it—a whole weekend of social drama lived and publicized without a single e-mail.

Is any of this surprising? It's just teenagers doing what teenagers do: gabbing, hanging out, goofing around. More so than e-mail, all of these methods of instant communication mimic the interactions that kids would otherwise have in basements and dorm rooms. E-mail, by comparison, can feel stilted and plodding. Writing is methodical and time-consuming, a closer relative to letter writing than to conversation. Even the delivery speed of e-mail—sure, it takes only a few seconds—is now considered frightfully slow.

My niece and other teenagers I talked to—I mean, Facebooked and IMed with—told me that, on average, their cell phones log 50 messages each day. They all confessed to sending a text message while IMing with someone else, and they all said they are signed in to IM or Facebook from the time they get home from classes until they turn out the lights. When everyone's online, kids never have to leave the company of their pals. If you're not constantly plugged in, they say, you start to feel left out.

The sense of loss I feel about the decline of e-mail has less to do with how we communicate than with what we communicate. The means by which we deliver a message affects its content. While the rise of the BlackBerry has proven that e-mail can be adapted for fast-burst communiqués, the medium is best-suited for longer musings. As opposed to instant messaging, e-mail provides the breathing room to contemplate what we're writing and express nuanced thoughts. A well-tended e-mail inbox and outbox can serve as a sort of diary, an evolving record of your curiosities, obsessions, introspections, apologies, and heart-to-hearts. Instant messages, on the other hand, are like Post-it notes, handy for a few minutes but hardly worth saving. While IMs and text messages have a throwaway quality, e-mail is for the sentimental. I still have some of the first flirtatious e-mails I exchanged with my wife in college. I have thoughtful monologues from friends in the midst of crises. I have e-mails from my parents that I envision showing to my children someday. Aw.

Thinking more practically, there's now a generation gap between first-generation and second-generation Internet users. Colleges are finding that students increasingly ignore or never receive campus-wide e-mail announcements. All those clever forwards from Grandpa are going unread. And no matter what dominates in the dorm room, e-mail still rules in the workplace. Office-bound graduates will be forced to make Microsoft Outlook—not AIM or Facebook—their first sign-on of the day. Some may find it a vexing challenge to remediate their sloppy IM habits into professional-sounding e-mail prose.

So, is the solution to browbeat these little rebels back in line and enforce mandatory e-mail usage? Good luck. Chances are, as usual, that the grown-ups will be the ones who are forced to adapt. Colleges have already thrown up their hands and created Facebook and MySpace pages to stay in touch with students. Since Facebook opened its gates to oldsters this year, parents are coming in and setting up camp a safe viewing distance from their kids. I, too, have become a Facebook believer, and most of my friends are joining the church. There's no better way to follow the goings-on—both major and trivial—of your group of friends than skimming the Facebook news feed.

It may seem unfortunate that right when senior citizens became comfortable with e-mail, a host of new technologies are making their habits archaic. But transitioning beyond e-mail doesn't have to be as painful as transitioning to it. While its popularity may wane, it's hard to see e-mail vanishing completely—we'll always need some way to send each other long-form messages. Besides, we're already seeing technology that makes it simpler for everyone to communicate across all of these various channels. Gmail elegantly melds IM and e-mail, making it easy to chat with your contacts and file away instant-message conversations alongside your mail. You can now send and receive every kind of message—texts, IMs, e-mails, and Facebook posts—with most new mobile phones. It's not hard to imagine a future communications command center where, on a single screen, you'll be able to choose between sending an e-mail, instant message, status note, or blog post—or sending all of them at once—and then have all those bits of text neatly and securely archived. Once that happens, nostalgic e-mailers like me won't have to feel like dinosaurs.

As the Hollywood writers' strike enters its second week, the cold facts are starting to sink in. Such as: no more new Daily Shows for God knows how long (after talks broke down last Sunday, a negotiator for the studios warned that the strike could last nine months). The Daily Show may be the canary in the coal mine of this strike, the first place the writers' absence will be keenly felt by viewers. Unlike scripted dramas and sitcoms, Comedy Central's flagship show went into reruns as soon as the strike began. It's also highly topical, dependent on each day's events for content. And unlike actual news broadcasts (or the dismal-sounding new game shows the networks are proposing to fill airtime during the strike), The Daily Show is also dependent on the voices of gifted writers. While a Grey's Anatomy rerun is a bummer only if you've already seen that episode, a Daily Show rerun is the television equivalent of a day-old newspaper. It's birdcage liner.

A five-year-old episode of The Daily Show, on the other hand, is pure gold—a fact made plain by the launch of the show's new Web site last month. Before, seekers of already-aired TDS material had to make do with the limited clips available on the cluttered Comedy Central home page, or try their luck among user posts on YouTube. At the new site, they can search the past nine years of episodes in their entirety—more than 13,000 clips, with tools that allow you to sort by air date, content, number of page views, or viewer rating. It's a library of the show, organized with an archivist's attention to detail and a fan's affection for signature moments.

The writers' strike provides the ideal excuse to waste large portions of your workday combing the Daily Show archive for fondly remembered bits, like the priceless Stewart/Corddry exchange that aired the day after Dick Cheney's hunting accident:

This browsing serves not just as a stand-in for the nightly Stewart fix you're no longer getting, but as a lesson in what the strike is all about and how much is at stake in the current media wars over intellectual property. When Viacom, Comedy Central's parent company, sued Google for copyright infringement earlier this year, The Daily Show was a large part of the reason. Clips of the show were consistently among the most-viewed on YouTube (at least as far as commercially produced content goes—it's part of YouTube's charm that nothing the entertainment industry has produced can top a minute and a half of a Swedish baby laughing). When Viacom realized that there was no beating YouTube, they decided to join them, building a site that would house the show's archive in such style that viewers would simply choose to search there instead, and hence, maybe sit through the post-roll ads that follow every clip.

Playing around on the Daily Show site, I saw for the first time how the Web might really change TV—not by streaming a promotional teaser here and there or allowing users to post random screen grabs on YouTube, but by providing searchable online databases of years' worth of content that are updated to include current episodes. When The Daily Show does come back (please Lord, let it be before Super Tuesday), I may well start watching even new episodes this way: at my desk in the morning, instead of on the couch at 11 o'clock at night. Multiply that defection by the size of the show's fan base and the subsequent migration of advertising dollars from screen to Web, and the writers' demand for a piece of the online action starts to make plenty of sense.

You might argue that The Daily Show is the ultimate Web-ready television show. It's divisible into discrete chunks (the headlines at the top of the show, followed by reported segments and interviews) that tie in to the political and cultural conversations of the day, and those chunks can easily be collected, shuffled, and exchanged among friends like trading cards. Since the site's launch, readers have begun compiling "favorites" lists of old clips, like this wonderful roundup of "Jon Stewart's Greatest Gay Moments." When the site leaves its beta version next year, readers will also be able to tag clips with their own keywords, thus expanding the site's searchable database for other users. My first keyword contribution? Mayonnaise, to mark the great 2006 moment when Dan Bakkedahl finally realized his dream and fit his entire fist in his mouth.

Darkon is a LARP (live-action role-playing game) where normal people dress up in homemade armor and pretend to be inhabitants of a fantasy realm. They fight battles in parks and on soccer fields over pretend land in a pretend country that has its own pretend religions and pretend economy. It's meatspace Dungeons & Dragons, with people brandishing swords wrapped in foam and slamming each other around with padded shields. Founded in 1985, Darkon is one of America's oldest and largest LARPs, and the showdown between two kingdoms within it, Mordom and Laconia, was captured in the documentary Darkon, a movie so mighty it needed two directors (Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer). The film has its television premiere on the IFC Channel tonight at 9 p.m., where it joins the ranks of movies like Hoop Dreams and Murderball as one of the great documentary dissections of how Americans play.

In his apocalyptic nonfiction book Bowling Alone, Harvard-based political scientist Robert Putnam lays out in detail how, since the 1970s, American civic life has died like a sackful of puppies thrown onto a rush-hour freeway. He amassed a mountain of hard data showing that we're going on fewer church picnics, joining fewer bowling leagues, and taking fewer pies to our neighbors every year, and, as a result, community bonds are crumbling. We're not voting, we're not volunteering, we're not taking care of our kids; America has become a nation of demented shut-ins, dying all alone in houses full of moldering TV Guides and stray cats. One solution is to do what our parents nagged us to do on gorgeous summer days when we just wanted to sit around watching Family Feud: Turn off the TV, get out of the house, and go play with our friends.

This is what the Darkon players have been doing for years. There are tens of thousands of LARPers around the world, and in the United States, a national LARPing event like the massive Ragnarok meet held in Ohio can draw several thousand attendees. Darkon has 700 members, fielding up to 150 people at any given battle. "The documentary shows us at the height of our imperialistic pretensions," says Kenyon Wells of his country, Mordom. "We're dominating the world and reveling a bit in being the imperialistic bad guy. We hadn't lost a land fight, let alone a war, in 15 years." Mordom attracted the best new players, they had the deepest pockets, and they loved winning.

"Very few people are left who pre-date Mordom," says Skip Lipman, who leads his country of Laconia against Mordom in the documentary. "They helped create Darkon, which is one of the most successful and longest-running LARPs. They're arguably the greatest LARP nation there ever was." They are also depicted as being relentlessly evil. Starting as allies, Laconia turned on Mordom after an earlier campaign against another group of players known as the Dragonhood. "That really changed my mind about how they played the game," Lipman says. "The Dragonhood insulted the Mordomian gods, so Mordom destroyed everything they had. It was really tough on those guys. They never came back in the same strength as before. LARPing, like the real world, has a good-old-boy network, and Mordom was in control of the realm and of the game at that point."

Lipman, a shaggy extrovert and self-admitted "natural ham," became a househusband after being fired from the family business for punching his brother in the mouth. He's less of a king and more of a den father for Laconia, trying to get all of his citizens off the bench and onto the field, insisting that they play fair. Wells is blond and fair, built as solidly as a Viking, and has been playing for decades, morphing from a shy introvert into a powerful leader. "When I first got into this hobby, I was a teenager and it was an escape from the stresses and angst of high school," he says. "But over time Darkon helped me hone my leadership skills." His parents rave about its beneficial effects, and now Wells is a vice president at a large IT consulting company.

"When we originally started cooperating with the filmmakers, we were concerned with exposing this hobby—which is relatively dorky, all things considered—to the public," Wells says. Lipman adds: "There's still debate over whether the events that took place in the documentary are part of official Darkon history or was it all a dream scenario, because there's a feeling that the camera was a motivational factor. But I feel that they captured Darkon at its best."

The war between Mordom and Laconia teaches many valuable strategic lessons: Numbers and money will always carry the day; everyone wants to be on the winning team; the army that defends a large, plywood castle probably has a tactical advantage; and dark elves will most likely turn on you the second your back is turned, no matter how much money you pay them. But it's also about the serious business of play.

Play is as necessary to civic health as dreaming is to mental health, but playing makes Americans suspicious. We measure our worth by our jobs, but what happens when there are fewer and fewer meaningful jobs? Many of the Darkon players are trapped in the classic nerd conundrum: They don't find the corporate track fulfilling, and so they wind up working as Starbucks baristas and office administrators. At the same time, they're smart enough to know that being called a Starbucks "team member" is just a nicer way of being called a Starbucks slave. "Everything is gone," Andrew of Laconia says. "Everything that was once noble and good in this world is gone and it's been replaced by Wal-Mart. And McDonald's. And Burger King. Some people just want more. They're tired of working their ass off for material goods. You could just stay home and watch TV, or you could work for adventure, you know?"

So what happened in Darkon when the adventure was over and the moviemakers went home? It all depends on whom you ask. According to Wells, "Winning all the time was beginning to become a chore. Mordom dominated the game for two decades and every battle was becoming more and more stressful to us because we had to be perfect. So we decided to abandon our empire and focus on wandering the land." But according to Lipman, "Mordom spent more fighting this war than on any war in the past, there was internal strife, they had nothing more to gain and everything to lose and so, amazingly, like the Soviet Union, they folded. Also," he says, referring to a LARPer whose quest for his first girlfriend figures in the documentary, "Danny got laid. That's another really good thing that's come out of the movie."

But no matter how many people it helps to get laid, Americans will always be suspicious of adults playing a game of make-believe as gloriously and goofily unself-conscious as Darkon. Maybe if it used a ball or a racquet people could accept it but, as it is, Darkon makes outsiders cringe. So, why do these weird people in Maryland and Virginia keep playing it? "The game isn't an escape," Wells says. "It's a hobby and a sport. If other people had the guts to try it, they would love it."

Darkon players are social creatures by necessity—they can't play their game alone—and in a country where socializing is endangered, that's a sterling recommendation. But there's something else at work, too. In Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut writes: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Darkon is made up of hundreds of people who spend the majority of their lives pretending to be high-school students, soldiers back from Iraq, administrative assistants, waiters, project managers, probate lawyers, retail clerks, and textile buyers. But Darkon shows them for who they really are: warriors, princesses, magicians, kings and queens. They're hacking reality, creating a social system where the part of their lives that matters isn't the part that stresses over a PowerPoint presentation, but the part that charges into battle and does great things. They're careful about what they pretend to be, but to them, what they need to be careful about is pretending too hard that their jobs are all that they can be.

Or not.

"Darkon is an enclosed social environment. It's its own little Lord of the Flies with subcultures and cults and religions," Lipman says. "It's an excellent microcosm of the world. But mostly, we do it because we like to run around and hit each other."

Emily Bazelon: Hi Everyone,

Melinda and I are here and looking forward to your questions.

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Melinda Henneberger: Hi, I'm Melinda Henneberger, in the room and ready to be called on. I see that John McCain is actually trying to capitalize on his ho-ho-ho response to the Hillary-hating woman who asked him, "How do we beat the bitch?'' Which IS good for business—if you're Hillary, that is. I guess he figures that red meat to the base is his only shot, and that you can never underestimate the American voter.

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Worcester, Mass.: Hi Emily and Melinda! I love the "XX Factor" blog. Emily, my question is about your breastfeeding article. (I'll claim new mommy brain if you talked about this in the article and I forgot). In addition to education and class as factors why some women breastfeed and some don't, would you say there's also an experience/generation gap? I'm 39, and just had my baby a year ago. No older woman in my family—mother, aunt, stepmother, mother-in-law—nursed, and so had no experience or meaningful support to offer when my baby had trouble latching in her first days. Both my mother and MIL said that their babies did just fine with formula, look how well we turned out, that there was no shame in formula, etc. I know they were trying to make it okay for me if I ended up not being able to nurse, but their remarks really hit me the wrong way, as if they were trying to convince me not to nurse. My husband was supportive of nursing, we got help from a lactation consultant, and all was well in time. But for women who are close with their mothers who never nursed, might this also play a substantial role for today's new moms when making decisions about nursing in those crazy days after birth?

Emily Bazelon: Thanks, that's great that you're enjoying "XX Factor." Yes, I think you're right about age. In the CDC stats, this usually comes up in terms of younger women, because mothers under the age of 20 are less likely to breastfeed. But you're talking about a different phenomenon: being a mother who'se own mother (and mother in law) were of a generation that was much less likely to nurse. That's certainly true: When my mother decided to breastfeed, in 1971, she hardly knew anyone else who was doing it, and the statistics bear out that impression. So yes, what you're experiencing has a more general truth. And I think that these questions about what mothers pass on to their daughters, about breastfeeding v. formula, must be a significant reason that rates of nursing remain lower among certain groups, like African Americans (though that rate is rising).

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Femanon: I resent the fact that as a woman, I'm encouraged to vote for Hillary simply because SHE's a woman...as if I don't have a brain and can't evaluate the candidates based on merit. Isn't this reverse discrimination and sexism? No offense, but I don't care about the historical aspect—electing a woman to the presidency is the last thing on my mind. I'm in my late 40s and have seen successful women all around me—I don't need to elect a woman president to make me feel better, like "we've arrived." People, this election is SERIOUS!!

Melinda Henneberger: I have heard a lot of women say that same thing—and your feeling also lines up with polling that suggests that gender-based campaign appeals tend to backfire, especially with women under 40, who don't want to be guilted into voting for the woman in the race.

The strong feeling I got talking to women across the country for my book, "If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians to Hear,' is that we're more than ready for a woman in the White House, but that does not mean that any woman in the race automatically has our vote, any more than African-Americans take one look at Barack Obama and assume he's their guy. It's a plus, but it's not a given.

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Dupont Circle: Is this particular chat supposed to be about breastfeeding, or politics?

Emily Bazelon: politics, really, but hey, breastfeeding can have its moment.

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Harrisburg, Pa.: I often hear commentators and bystanders looking at the candidates, especially during the debates, and concluding that Hillary Clinton came across as more presidential, whereas the others came across as candidates. I wonder if acting this way deflects from the issue of her being a woman and, if so, if you think she is successfully doing so, and, if so, is this the right move for her?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, I think Hillary's "presidential" qualities are helping her, and that they do take something away from the sense that a woman just can't be president. What makes a candidate presidential? In Hillary's case, it's a combination of experience and gravitas and substance and discipline and polish, I think. You may not agree with her, and she hasn't been on her best game in the last week or two, but she generally sounds just more ready for prime time than the others. She's the one, after all, who has already been in the White House.

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Washington, D.C.: So, does Sen. Clinton need to be a flight attendant?

Emily Bazelon: No! I mean, yikes, I hope not. This is where gender roles just have to go, right? We have to be able to evaluate Hillary's candidacy in the same way we would if she were male, in the sense of assessing her relevant experience. That's not to say that her persona isn't tied to her gender, because of course it is. But in thinking about what candidates have actually done in the world, enough already. No soft and fuzzy credentials.

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Boston: Will the electorate distill down all the personality quirks and political polish to pick someone at the end of the day they are confident has the ability to make the right decision on critical issues instead of relying reflexively on ideology? Can we afford not to for another four years?

Melinda Henneberger: One thing I've been surprised by is how little we vote on ideology, and how much depends on what you describe as the quirks and the political polish. I can't tell you the number of voters who've told me their number-one issue was the environment or health care or education—and then went on to explain why they voted against the candidate who agreed with them on their own top issue. Huh? Yes, like the president we ended up with, we are inclined to go with our gut, to value instinct over information.

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Chicago: I am a 41-year-old single woman. Apparently, from what I read, this category of voters will determine the '08 election. What do I, as a woman, need out of a presidential candidate? Pretty much the same things I'd want if I were a man, I'm guessing. First and foremost, someone who will flip 180 degrees from George W. Bush and respect and obey the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Someone who understands that Congress is a legitimate branch of government. Someone who won't ignore laws Congress just passed by sneaking on a signing statement in the dark of night. Someone who understands that waterboarding (and lots of other stuff) is torture and we MUST abide by the Geneva Conventions. Someone who will unpoliticize the Justice Department. These things are so much more important to me than health care, Social Security, even the war. This is going to sound really corny, but I want America back. I want to be proud to say "I'm an American." I'm not right now.

Emily Bazelon: You are touching on the major issues, for sure, and you also sound like you're someone who is not going to vote for Hillary because she's a woman, or for a male candidate who tries to reach out to women specially. I also find myself curiously unmoved by Hillary's candidacy as a first-ever for women—I mean, of course it would be amazing if she was elected. But I'm not going to vote for her because of that. I'm not even really tempted.

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Washington: What is your take on how Clinton has been pummeled in the press after her blunder in the last debate? I watched the debate and felt that she didn't perform any differently than she has in the past—nor did her competitors. In other words, I felt it was a draw and, therefore, she won. It has since seemed to me that the press wanted something to talk about because her supposed inevitability was getting boring. Thus, the constant punditry about how she's slipping.

A friend recently said that "they" (the male establishment) saw her getting too close and have finally decided it's time to take her out. Thoughts?

For the record, I'm still undecided, but I am a Democrat and I would sell my kidneys for the chance to get my country back on track and out of the hands of the Republicans.

Melinda Henneberger: Both of Senator Clinton's closest rivals have become more aggressive lately, and Obama in particular has waited until fairly late in the game to take her on in a more direct way. As she has said, that's not because she's a woman; it's because she's ahead. In fact, I don't think they would have waited so long if she had been a man, because they do not want to risk looking ungentlemanly!

Emily Bazelon: Now, I think, they've concluded they have to take her on. Which is esp tricky for Obama, since he is supposed to be the New Way to Peace candidate.

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Richmond, Va.: Is there any chance that if Hillary doesn't win the presidency, the media WON'T come to the conclusion that it was because "America wasn't prepared to elect a female president?" I mean, there could be other reasons why we wouldn't vote for her, right?

Emily Bazelon: Yes, lots of other reasons. And you're right, that explanation could get awfully tedious awfully fast. It depends somewhat on how events unfold on the campaign trail, but for now at least Hillary's gender is only helping her, if it accounts for her huge lead over the other Democrats among women.

Melinda Henneberger: I guess that's what I object to about the current assumption that those who oppose Hillary Clinton must be doing so because she's a woman; of course mysoceny is alive and well, but it does not account for the negative response of many left-leaning, women-appreciating voters. But to answer your question, no, there is no chance that we will come to any other conclusion; if she loses, we will all know that it was on account of her gender.

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Washington, D.C.: I am not remotely tempted to vote for Hillary because she's a woman. I am voting for Hillary because she's smart and shares my democratic values and because I think she will surround herself with the best and brightest the party has to offer when she's elected!

Emily Bazelon: Democracy at work!

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Troy, N.Y.: What do you think of Anne Coulter's assertion that women who cannot get husbands want the government to be their husband and take care of them? Additionally she advocates ending women's suffrage.

Emily Bazelon: I don't think much of Ann Coulter's assertions about just about everything. Questions of individual responsibility v. the role of government are a lot more complex than that, aren't they?

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Alexandria, Va.: It would be interesting if your question, "What do women need out of a political candidate?" was changed to "What does a woman candidate need out of women?" Hillary Clinton needs support from other women. When I have voiced my support for Hillary while collecting petition signatures to get her name on the February primary ballot in Virginia, I have received, among others, the following reactions: "I'll support a woman for president, but not her," "No!" and "I don't know who HE is."

Emily Bazelon: Hmm. Your experience touches on one of Hillary's big problems: People seem to not like her, intensely, for all kinds of reasons. Melinda and I disagree about why. I think the Hillary hating is often gender related. My evidence is that often the reasons people give me for not liking Hillary—she screwed up health care as First Lady, she's a phony triangulator—seem to me reasons for disliking Bill with equal fervor. And yet these same people like Bill. Which makes me wonder. But hey Melinda, weigh in here about why I'm wrong.

Melinda Henneberger: Wrong is such an unfriendly word. Of course some people would find a reason to hate any female candidate—and oh, that scary woman who called Clinton the B word at a John McCain event the other day was one of them; she was aglow with rage. My dissent that this is THE reason mainly comes from the many women I talked to for my book who just seemed so sorry not to like her better, for reasons that genuinely seemed to have nothing to do with gender.

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Chicago: I just want to make a couple comments on whether Hillary is playing "the gender card." I noticed Jake Tapper did a segment on this on "Nightline" last night. Just because Hillary made a speech at a women's only college, Wellesley, after the debate doesn't mean she's playing the gender card. Duh, she is going to make speeches at her alma mater. Just because she accused the other candidates of "piling on" doesn't mean she's playing the gender card. (Is "piling on" supposed to have some kind of gendered, or sexual connotation I'm unaware of?) The other candidates, and Tim Russert, DID pile on Hillary Clinton in the debate. There is no question about it. I don't think they did it because she's a woman, but because she is the front runner. And pundits like Chris Matthews and Maureen Dowd make everything about gender, because they're obsessed with it and can't get beyond their bizarre 1960s Catholic mindsets. Matthews and Dowd loathe Hillary Clinton and will do whatever it takes to bring her down.

Emily Bazelon: We had an interesting debate about this on "XX Factor," and Meghan O'Rourke, one of our Slate colleagues, saw this precisely the way you do. My own feeling is that Hillary walked right up to the line of making the "pile on" about gender, and then Bill crossed it, by talking about "the boys" ganging up on her.

Here's the link to Meghan's post:

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Arlington, Va.: My wife is a moderate Republican who dislikes the Republican candidates and supports Hillary because this is the first legitimate chance to have a woman president. HRC's moderate positions are a factor of the support. Is she a statistical outlier, or is this a trend?

Emily Bazelon: Your wife isn't an outlier. Something like 58 percent of Republican women say they might support Hillary. Her numbers are dreadful, though, among Republican men.

Emily Bazelon: make that 62 percent of MODERATE Republican women, according to an August poll.

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Washington, D.C.: Yes, I understand the sentiment that "we won't vote for Hillary just because she's a woman!" but... well, I am sometimes frustrated how issues that disproportionately affect women (access to birth control, family leave, fair pay) are often considered "special interest" issues or not very central. They're central to my life! And I hate the idea that women are a special interest, when we make up more than half the population.

I'm not going to vote for Hillary because she's a woman, but the fact she is a woman is most definitely not irrelevant to my evaluation of her candidacy. I can't be positive that she'll be less likely to push off these issues as "pet causes" or unimportant, but I think it's a heck of a lot less likely.

Emily Bazelon: I am completely with you on both of those points. One of the reasons I write a family column for Slate, as well as wite about legal issues, is that I think the issues that are traditionally labeled for women or or for mothers really affect everybody, in ways that matter, a lot.

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Prescott, Ariz.: I've seen a lot of the punditry react harshly to a poll that women were more inclined to vote for Clinton because she is a woman. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson even went so far as to declare that any woman who based her vote on gender should lose the right to vote.

Why aren't these same pundits outraged that married men seem less likely to vote for Clinton because of gender (I think they said she wouldn't be very fun to go duck hunting or "have a beer with")?

Emily Bazelon: Good point! White men have been able to be identity voters forever, and invisibly. Now women get suspicion for their resaons for being Hillary supporters and African-Americans have to put up with the same for supporting Obama. Not fair.

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Portland: Hi Melinda -

I cannot figure out why Sen. Clinton has these high "negatives." Her positions are not out of the mainstream and are pretty close to those of other democratic candidates. It seems to me that this dislike for her precedes her run for the presidency.

Is there any valid polling data that points to the reason(s) for her high negatives?

I'm missing it.

Thanks

Emily Bazelon: There's no good polling data on this that I know of. And it's complicated. There is some evidnece that to the extent people have trouble with Hillary, it's bec they don't find her honest and trustworthy. Which, my colleague John Dickerson points out, is why Obama and Edwards are hitting her on precisely those points. I agree with you: I think that impression of Hillary predates her candidacy, and in fact predates her tenure as NY senator. It's her time at the White House. Some of it is self-inflicted—her defensiveness and secrecy—and some of it manufactured—Whitewater.

Melinda Henneberger:

Clinton-hating is an industry that goes back to 1991; there are shelves of books on how she sent lamps flying and lined her pockets with the White House silver. But as Emily says, what stands out in the polling is that her biggest liability is the perception that she is a phony. In my conversations with women voters, too, that's what stood out: "I just don't feel the realness from her,'' one young woman in Florida said. I don't see that as gender-related because that was also her husband's greatest liability. And even more to the point, because voters generally consider women candidates more trustworthy.

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Hillary as the "first woman President": Ladies: As a man, it may be dangerous to say this, but I think Hillary has lost much of her ability to leverage her opportunity to be the first woman president. By claiming she already has experience in the White House from helping Bill do the job, the only obvious conclusion is the same thing will happen if she wins: we get another co-Presidency. How does that make her a strong, independent woman ready to claim a role only held before by men?

Emily Bazelon: This is the legacy question, I think. I agree that it complicates Hillary's candidacy. They are a package deal, to some inevitable degree. To some voters, that's a strength: This is the closest they can get to voting for Bill a third time. For others, it's anathema, because the whole Team Clinton thing certainly had its flaws.

I don't really think this issue detracts from Hillary's would-be status as the first women president. President is a v. different title from First Lady, or perhaps I should say First Spouse. But I do think that the psychodrama that the Clintons put the country through, and the possibility of a return to all of that, has a dynamic all its own.

_______________________

Vancouver, B.C.: There's a pretty big spread between the number of men and the number of women supporting Hillary in national polls.

I've read people around the Web saying that women are only voting for Hillary because she's a woman, but there was a study reported in Slate last week that found a strong gender effect in coffee shop service.

The study demonstrated that women wait an average of 20 seconds longer for their drinks than men do when men are serving them, but there was no difference observed when women were serving.

The researchers concluded that the reason for the difference in service is that men generally feel some contempt for women. I'd interpret it as more of a demonstration of hierarchy.

If a difference in coffee shop service is only observed when men are serving women, and not when women are serving women or men, doesn't it lend credence to the argument that it's not that women are more inclined to vote for Hillary because she's a woman, it's that men are inclined NOT to vote for her because she's a woman?

Why aren't we hearing more about this?

Emily Bazelon: One reason we're not hearing more about the idea that men won't vote for Hillary is that her numbers with Democratic men aren't bad compared to the other candidates. That is to say, Hillary has a huge lead among Democratic women—30 points over Obama the last time I checked—but she's not way behind Obama and Edwards in the male vote. Those figures may change among general election voters, ie when the Republicans and Independents get added in. And if it does, then the issue you raise becomes v. salient and interesting.

_______________________

Pittsburgh: First we had "soccer moms," then after 9/11 it was "security moms." What descriptor (category) for moms do you foresee being most influential in the 2008 election?

Melinda Henneberger: If there were any "security moms,'' they disappeared into a well-stocked bunker somewhere within minutes of the 2004 election; it was catchy, but not the reason Democratic defectors went for Bush. The hip supposed swing group now is single women. But the truth is that the group that matters this time is the same as always: people who show up at the polls on election day.

_______________________

Emily Bazelon: Thanks, everyone. It was great to chat. These issues will be with us until next November, and I appreciate the opportunity to puzzle through them with all of you.

All best,

Emily

_______________________

Melinda Henneberger: Thanks, Emily and all of you who wrote in, Melinda

I'm guessing there are lots of recyclables buried in our nation's overflowing landfills. So why don't we start digging through those colossal trash heaps in search of metal, glass, plastic, and cardboard?

Sounds like you're on the same wavelength as numerous waste-management entrepreneurs, who've long touted the potential of "landfill mining." Since at least the late 1980s, someone has come along every few years to declare that there's serious money to be made from excavating landfills, then shipping off the salvaged goods to recycling plants. (For example, check out this New York Times piece from 1993.) It's not an unreasonable idea: Only 32 percent of America's garbage is recycled, which means that plenty of plastic containers and aluminum cans are languishing in our landfills.

But landfill mining has never lived up to the hype, and the Lantern must confess he's dubious about its prospects. Picking through landfills requires considerable effort and energy, and the payoffs are usually meager: There just isn't enough demand for, say, green glass to justify the cost associated with its recovery. And paper-based products are beyond salvation once they hit the landfill, due to contamination from organic waste such as food scraps and grass clippings.

Some proponents of landfill mining argue that the proliferation of high-tech waste will make the practice more viable, since the innards of computers and mobile phones contain valuable metals; as this article states, one ton of junked PCs contains more gold than 17 tons' worth of raw ore. But it's still prohibitively expensive to locate the right rubbish in a mammoth landfill, remove it using industrial machinery, and then leech out the few worthwhile scraps.

Until someone figures out how to extract those metals for a pittance, the most valuable commodity in a landfill may be something far less glamorous—dirt. Landfills need to be covered in soil on a regular basis, in order to deter rodents and squelch odors. But trucking in fresh soil can be expensive, so it can make sense to dig through the piles in search of old layers of dirt, which once formed the landfill's top but have long since been buried. That reclaimed soil is then poured over the landfill's current surface—sort of like scooping out a cake's middle layer of frosting and using it as icing instead. A decade ago, the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed the economics of soil reclamation at a landfill in Naples, Fla. It determined that mined soil cost the county $2.25 per ton, $1 less than trucking in soil from outside. The EPA also concluded that recycling mined copper, plastic, and aluminum wasn't worth the effort, since these materials "required substantial processing to upgrade their quality for sale."

Mining landfills for recyclable materials isn't just inefficient, it's also a potential waste of methane. When garbage molders in a landfill, it releases methane that gets trapped beneath the layers of rubbish; upsetting a landfill with excavating machines would release this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Many waste-management experts argue that it's better to leave landfills relatively undisturbed, so that the methane remains locked inside. The methane can then be captured in situ, using wells or vacuums inserted deep within a landfill's center. The gas can be used to generate electricity, or piped to nearby industrial operations that require natural gas. Morton A. Barlaz, an environmental engineering professor at North Carolina State University, points out that such methane-capture operations are currently in place at approximately 450 landfills nationwide. (As of 2005, there were 1,654 active landfills in the United States.) And the EPA is gung-ho to increase that number by partnering with local governments through its awkwardly named Landfill Methane Outreach Program.

Yet not everyone is thrilled about methane recovery. Some environmentalists contend that landfill methane contains trace amounts of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere when the gas is burned. The Lantern isn't convinced by the case against recovered methane, but he does agree with the naysayers on one vital point: We'd be a lot better off diverting cans, bottles, and the like to recycling plants before they wind up in landfills, rather than trying to fix our landfill woes retroactively.

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.

You've probably read about the viral—and misleading—e-mail accusing Barack Obama of refusing to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. (The video, in fact, shows him listening to the national anthem with his hands clasped in front of him, although some consider that a sacrilege, too.)

The widely circulated e-mail seems designed to play upon Obama's previous public decision to stop wearing a flag lapel pin. To suggest there's a pattern there. If so, I would say all these pledge-and-pin, hand-and-heart, loyalty-ritual fetishists are misguided about American history, especially the importance to that history of the challenge to loyalty pledges. If it's a pattern in Obama's behavior, I think it's a courageous challenge to conventional wisdom on firm constitutional grounds (however politically self-destructive it may prove in the short run). When was the last time you saw a politician make that trade-off?

Does anyone else feel the way I do? Glad to be an American, privileged and grateful for its freedoms, but conflicted about pins, pledges, flag worshipping, and other rituals of compulsory or socially enforced patriotism, like the hand over the heart during the national anthem?

I certainly feel allegiance, though less to the inanimate flag than to "the republic for which it stands," but, paradoxically, the moment when I feel most rebellious about that allegiance is when I'm being forced by state or social coercion to pledge allegiance. The America I feel allegiance to isn't the America that requires compulsory displays of loyalty.

I mean no disrespect for those, especially soldiers and veterans, for whom the flag may be more than a symbol, but I think one of the things they fight for is a nation in which "allegiance" includes the right to dissent.

Maybe it's just that I'm not a demonstrative joiner type, but even back in junior high school, I felt resentful of those who thought that love of country must be recited upon request, with hand to heart, like the ritual kissing of the ring of a feudal liege (the root of "allegiance," after all).

In fact, the first public political act I ever engaged in was when, for some reason, I was motivated to be the only person who spoke up against a showing of a House Un-American Activities Committee propaganda documentary (Operation Abolition) at my high school. I just didn't like the idea of people arrogating to themselves the power to tell me what was American and what wasn't.

The state has the right to define what is legal and illegal, sure, but there's a body of law to define those terms, not mere subjective sentiment as with "American" and "un-American"—especially the way "un-American" has been used to taint any and all dissent.

And even more un-American than the original pledge—and even more patently unconstitutional in my view—is the phrase "under God," which Congress added to the pledge in 1954, to make it "to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

It was troubling enough as a secular loyalty oath, but adding "under God" made it a religious loyalty test. It's clearly unconstitutional, as is most school prayer, although the Supreme Court has so far avoided what will be an explosive decision by finding procedural grounds to reject the most recent suit against it.

Set aside the term's crass sin against humility in its boast of an implicit endorsement from the big guy in the sky, "under God" is an advertising slogan—"we've got God on our side"—rather than a visionary ambition like "liberty and justice for all."

Don't the people who want to force this God-added pledge down our throats realize that America was founded by religious dissidents fleeing a state church that forced religious oaths on them? Mouthing that pledge is truly un-American, an insult to the courage of the Pilgrims!

This is not a critique of the feeling of allegiance, just of the coerced Pledge of Allegiance. So don't accuse me of being un-American or a lesser American than you, just less enthusiastic about an essentially anti-American practice. This was, by the way, something I felt even before I knew the Nazi origins of the famous Supreme Court decisions on Jehovah's Witnesses and the pledge.

For those who may have skipped that day in your constitutional-law class, it's worth repeating that the pledge controversy began in Hitler's Germany when the Nazis sent thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses to concentration camps to punish them for refusing to make the Hitler salute to the Nazi flag on the grounds that they don't believe in swearing allegiance to any worldly government and didn't recognize Adolf as a semi-demi-divinity.

As a result, the American leader of the Witnesses denounced the hand-over-heart flag-salute American Pledge of Allegiance on similar grounds. The flag as false idol. It would seem to me other religions should have joined in.

The clash between the Jehovah's Witness pledge-refusenik parents and children and their school boards led to two landmark Supreme Court decisions. In the first 1940 opinion, Minnersville School District v. Gobitis, the court ruled 8-1 against the Witnesses. Justice Frankfurter came up with some constitutional mumbo jumbo about how symbols are supposed to help ensure national unity and loyalty and thus override religious-freedom concerns.

Last time I read the Constitution (I admit it's been a while), I didn't find anything like that, even in the penumbra of the penumbra.

But Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, in what has become a celebrated dissent, treated even the pre-"Under God" pledge as a kind of religious ritual mandated by the state, designed to advance "conformity" rather than "religious liberty."

And then he added this great line:

History teaches us that there have been but few infringements of personal liberty by the state which have not been justified, as they are here, in the name of righteousness and the public good, and few which have not been directed, as they are now, at politically helpless minorities.

Beautiful!

And then three years later, a different Supreme Court (a couple of new justices) reversed itself in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, and speaking for the new majority, Justice Robert Jackson wrote:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Yes! The pledge is a kind of forced confession of orthodoxy. No, not water-boarding, but coercion nonetheless. Especially for peer-group-pressured school kids. Even if they have the right to opt out. In past school-prayer cases, the court has resisted the idea that the state should be implicated in even the social coercion or propagation of religion.

Busybody school boards and bombastic anthem peddlers at ball games should let people find their way to allegiance in their own fashion rather than making "allegiance" an implement of state power used to extract oaths.

Is it possible—is it conceivable—that at great risk to his political ambitions Barack Obama is doing things like doffing the flag pin and putting his hands at his sides during the anthem because he is being honest about the inner reservations he may feel at such practices?

Not the pledge. He's told an affecting story about how his grandfather taught him to put his hand over his heart while taking the pledge.

Still, that picture in the viral e-mail of Obama listening to the anthem while standing—looking all casual, with hands clasped—next to two people with hands over their hearts, could be taken two ways. It could suggest that he doesn't think there's anything wrong with the anthem, but it's not as deserving as the pledge of hand over heart. Or it could be a way of saying that sacralizing a song with hand to heart is akin in meaningfulness to wearing a flag lapel pin. And that he's not going to disguise his attitude for superficial political considerations. That, in a way, he's saying, "If you reject me for being honest about this, it's your loss as well as mine."

It's probably too much to hope that it's all that deliberate. That he feels it's worth making a point, starting a debate about real patriotism, rather than faking it for the sake of making it. If he does, though, his argument is intellectually superior, however politically inopportune. And not a distraction from "real issues" like the war, because arguments about what is and what isn't "American" and "un-American" are being thrown around indiscriminately in that debate.

Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was in an 8-1 minority when he dissented and called the pledge for what it was. Now we revere his words. As we do Justice Jackson's "fixed star" analogy. I'm sure Obama, a Harvard law school student, is quite familiar with these decisions and the thinking behind them.

Is it too much to hope that's what's going through his mind? Maybe. But Obama's all about the audacity of hope, right?

I'm a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don't seem to go for the stuff. I'd never thought too much about it until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: My female colleagues don't go to coffee shops because they're shabbily treated when they get there.

That's the conclusion of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops (PDF) in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women. (There is also evidence that blacks wait longer than whites, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Perhaps, says the skeptic, this is because women order froufrou drinks? Up to a point. The researchers found that men are more likely to order simpler drinks. Yet comparing fancy-drink-ordering men with fancy-drink-ordering women, the longer wait for women remained.

It is also hard to attribute the following finding to a female preference for wet-skinny-soy-macchiato with low-carb marshmallows: The delays facing women were larger when the coffee shop staff was all-male and almost vanished when the servers were all-female.

It is not clear whether women were held up by male staff because the men viewed them with contempt or because the male staff members were flirting furiously. The "contempt" explanation seems more likely, as the extra time that women have to wait seems to increase when the coffee shop is busy. Who would take extra time out to flirt just when the lines are longer?

This is an intriguing piece of research because coffee shops appear to be a competitive business, and one thing we economists think we know about discrimination is that competition should tend to erode it.

The idea comes from an article published 50 years ago by economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker. The reasoning is simple enough: A business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favor of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that's a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.

Becker's theory is powerful, and there is evidence to back it up. Economists Sandra Black and Elizabeth Brainerd found that the surge in international trade, which has increased competitive pressures in many markets, has reduced the ability of firms to discriminate against women.

But what Becker cannot say is how reliable the competition mechanism is at crushing discrimination, nor how quick. (In fairness to him, economics in general has a real blind spot when it comes to the question "when?") The research on coffee shops is an interesting curiosity: Coffee retailing seems to be fiercely competitive. How can discrimination continue?

One answer, perhaps, is that a rival coffee shop would have to be very close indeed to justify a trip aimed at avoiding a 20-second wait. Even coffee retailing isn't that competitive.

But an alternative explanation is that the market is still working on the problem. Over time, we've moved from gentlemen's clubs to male-dominated pubs to coffee shops, which are far more female-friendly. Perhaps it is just a matter of time before some entrepreneur decides to set up a big chain of coffee shops with "no men allowed" on the door.

Bloggers are exasperated by more bad news about airport security. They also tweak the State Department's inspector general for failing to disclose that his brother was a Blackwater board member and wax skeptical about Georgia's power of prayer.

Bombs away: The Government Accountability Office reports that its agents were able to smuggle all the parts needed to make a bomb through 16 TSA airport security checkpoints. GAO's revelation doesn't surprise bloggers.

"Air security checkpoints are more about providing the veneer of security rather than actually providing security," writes Lawhawk at A Blog for All, offering a grim prognosis. "Terrorists determined to penetrate such security may be able to do so as these tests show. That they haven't to this point is more luck than skill on our part." And it's "what we long suspected," says Time's news-roundup blog Ag. "Airport security is pretty much useless aside from being a repository for bad attitude."

Annie Jacobsen first wrote about airport security in this controversial "Terror in the Skies, Again?" piece in 2004 and started Aviation Nation one year ago. She responds to TSA's defense of the breach with the analogy that airport security "is like a combination lock. If you get through one layer of security, it doesn't mean you get through all layers of security." Jacobsen alleges TSA "assumes all passengers are stupid, or not paying attention, and don't realize the obvious: that TSA's security checkpoint for bombs is the last line of security. After that, you're on the plane!"

Finance-focused Money and Such's Shadox asks, "Do you think that they are likely to stop making you take off your shoes, relinquish your tooth-paste or search your grandmother? Not by a long shot. Here is what I foresee as the likely outcome: be prepared for more stringent and completely meaningless security measures Musing's Musings proposes: "The answer is to get serious about what we're looking for, what we need to worry about, and who is likely to carry it." Read more blogger comments on to the GOA report.

A tale of Cookie and Buzzy: State Department inspector general Howard Krongard has recused himself from "all Blackwater-related issues" after revealing that his brother served on the security firm's advisory board. Krongard previously denied his brother's involvement with Blackwater. Bloggers don't buy his excuse that he wasn't aware of his brother's position there.

TPM Muckraker's Spencer Ackerman declares, "Howard 'Cookie' Krongard ... has some explaining to do. Yesterday he told Congress that his brother, A.B. 'Buzzy' Krongard, never told him that Buzzy joined the advisory board of State Department contractor Blackwater. Only Buzzy told me that he told Cookie precisely that in a phone conversation about two or three weeks ago. It's going to be a fun Thanksgiving for the Krongards." Dave Lindorff, blogging at Democrats.com, seethes: "So now we see that the Krongard brothers have a level of integrity that is down in the sewer, with one working for a murderous mercenary outfit that has been slaughtering innocent Iraqis in the course of providing 'protection' to State Department officials in Iraq, and the other pretending to investigate the activities of that private firm."

Jon Ponder at liberal Brad Blog snipes, "The White House is probably busy right now dusting off a Medal of Freedom—as well as complete and full pardon—for Howard 'Cookie' Krongard, their inspector general (IG) at the State Dept." Lefty Mercury Rising's MEC joins in the Bush-bashing, "Howard Krongard has been accused of interfering with investigations into fraud and mismanagement by State Department contractors—i.e., doing exactly the opposite of what an inspector general is supposed to do. Considering that he's a Bush appointee, I have no difficulty believing the accusations. Wouldn't that be why Bush gave him the job?"

Read more blogger reaction to the Krongard scandal.

Power of prayer: Georgia's governor called a prayer vigil Tuesday at the state capitol in Atlanta to pray for rain to relieve the state's water shortage. Last night, about a quarter inch of rain fell across the city. Most bloggers balk at crediting the divine.

Frenchman in America SuperFrenchie wonders, "what's the difference between the Georgia governor leading an official prayer for rain, and a rain dance in some primitive culture? I'm not sure I've ever seen something as ridiculous in all my years living here." The predictably snarky Wonkette contributes, "Wow, God really must love him, eh? One other thing, though: They have on most local news shows, as well as on the Internet, this thing called an 'extended weather forecast' that can tell you when a major 'cold front' bringing 'moisture' is coming. Did God direct Perdue to that, also?"

South Dakota-based Christian blog Dakota Voice speaks up for the faithful: "I believe it was in 2006 that Governor Mike Rounds declared a day (or week?) of prayer for rain in our parched state of South Dakota. And within days the rain began to fall, and the worst drought areas in the state were downgraded and it even began to green up in August out here in the dry West River area. ... God or coincidence, both here and in Georgia? You be the judge for yourself ... but my money's on God."

Read more bloggers on Georgia's prayers for rain.

Eliot Spitzer backtracked on his plan to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, but it might be too little, too late for his approval ratings. Also, bloggers respond to the latest developments in Pakistan and Georgia.

No license to drive: Turns out all that grief for Hillary was for naught. Amid protests and plummeting approval ratings, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced Wednesday that he's scrapping his plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Spitzer nevertheless chided critics who "equated minimum-wage, undocumented dishwashers with Osama Bin Laden" and blamed the federal government for not doing enough to protect U.S. borders.

Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics notes that Spitzer's climb-down came too late to save his approval ratings: "Seven months ago Spitzer's net approval rating was +23. In their latest poll, it's at -20. Republicans give him a 29% approval, Independents 33%, and even among members of his own party he's only at 41% - a 36% job approval rating over all. No wonder Spitzer cried 'Uncle' yesterday." "If Spitzer's position was truly principled," submits conservative California Yankee, "should it not be worth fighting for to the better end? The truth is more likely that Spitzer's decision is simply unprincipled and poll-driven."

Susan Davis of the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire writes: "Spitzer's backpedaling won't close the book on an issue that has proved a rallying point for Republicans and further demonstrated how divisive illegal immigration proposals have become." Righty Michelle Malkin cautions: "Don't celebrate too hard, though. Several other states continue to provide licenses to illegal aliens and it is the Bush administration that continues to approve the use of the illegal alien matricula consular card. Spitzer's retreat is a significant victory and a symbolic victory, but a small one in the continuing struggle between Sanctuary Nation and Sovereign Nation."

Conservative Cassy Fiano fumes at Spitzer's claims that the federal government is to blame: "Got that? It's not his fault that the plan failed. It's the nasty federal government that is ruining his brilliant plan, and now New York is stuck with one million 'undocumented workers'. Notice how there was no mention of how handing out these licenses to illegal aliens would undermine security."

At the Moderate Voice, Joe Gandelman asks in sympathy: "But when you're under attack by Republicans, pressured by Democrats, pointed to as possibly causing the deconstruction of a Presidential candidate, vilified by talk show hosts and called names by Lou Dobbs, what's a governor to do?"

Read more about Spitzer's folly.

The wrath of Khan: Under its continuing emergency rule, the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf has arrested national cricket icon and opposition leader Imran Khan. Khan had been a vocal critic of the country's implementation of martial law and—in a turn that has many questioning Musharraf's ostensible commitment to fighting Islamists—it was an Islamist student group that handed the sports star over to police.

Hasan Mubarak at Metroblogging Lahore offers details of Khan's arrest: "According to the plan, Imran Khan, arrived at the University's New Campus at around 12 noon and was immediately surrounded by members of the IJT who pushed him into the university's Centre for Higher Energy Physics (CHEPS) building. While he was being kept 'hostage' in there, Mr. Khan was reportedly tortured and manhandled by the IJT workers and plain-clothed men of the secret agencies. Hundreds of students including the IJT members and Khan's supporters gathered at the place and exchanged harsh words and fought with each other."

Winter Patriot assesses the situation: "[T]he Musharraf government appears to be orchestrating an elaborate charade, with [radical cleric] Maulana Fazlulla as the ever-elusive villain, Benazir Bhutto as the 'power-sharing' leader of the enabling opposition, and the real opposition figures either in exile (like Nawaz Sharif) or under house arrest (if not in prison)." He adds: "Imran Khan not only sees this; he even talks about it. He's a proven leader and an independent politician; a man of honor and dignity; an utter nightmare for the Musharraf government and a danger to the grand charade."

At Fanonite, Pakistani native and Scotland postgraduate student Muhammad Idrees Ahmad had his own run-in with the Jamaat-e-Islami student wing that arrested Khan and, which "has a sordid history of collaboration with dictatorships and state repression. On campuses they terrorize students for not adhering to a moral code, which in their own case remains highly flexible. Back when I was studying at the University of Peshawar, I was once issued a threat by the 'Nazim' (campus leader for the student wing) for visiting the campus cafeteria with fellow students of the other gender."

Read more about Imran Khan's arrest.

Georgia on your mind: Another state of emergency, this one in Georgia, is going to be lifted Friday, according to the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili. The Caucasian crackdown on media, opposition groups, and civil liberties came just four years after the Rose Revolution, which saw the election of Saakashvili, a pro-American post-Soviet leader thought to be a friend of democracy and the open society.

Foreign-policy blogger Pundita wonders if the State Department's $10 billion annual budget is too much, given its records of backing losers: "It's not enough to promote democracy or 'American interests' in the world. It's a matter of training your eyes to be quicker than the card player's hands in regions of the world where corruption and bad faith are synonymous with government. The case of Georgia is an instructive example."

Mark Almond Oxford posts about how billionaire and self-described "philosophical speculator" George Soros strongly supported Saakashvili's government and the "Rose Revolution" that emplaced it. Yet why has Soros been quiet on the state of emergency? "In the past, Soros has had no problem ditching politicians whom he had backed when they disappointed him or stepped out of line in some way. Is his silence today about Saakashvili's clampdown a sign of shame or indifference to then regime's resort to force to stay in power."

Read more about Georgia.

More accounts of planted questions by Hillary Clinton's staffers keep popping up, the National Right to Life Committee endorses Fred Thompson, and the New Oxford American Dictionary picks a word of the year. Bloggers respond.

Plants are sprouting: Campaign staffers for Hillary Clinton asked a college student and a minister to feed the presidential candidate specific questions at two Iowa events. The senator insists she doesn't condone question-planting, and claims she didn't know what her staffers were up to, but not everyone buys her story.

"The Clinton campaign has admitted planting the question. Why would they bother if they weren't going to ensure that Hillary called on the plant?" asks Mark Finkelstein at conservative NewsBusters. James Joyner from Outside the Beltway assumes that the college student, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, and the minister, Geoff Mitchell, are just the tip of the iceberg: "The campaign acknowledges the practice and, given that it's happened at least twice, it's not unreasonable to presume they've done this as a matter of course."

Over at Hot Air, Bryan has déjà vu: "This reminds me of something I observed during the first Clinton run for the White House. I was a radio news reporter in East Texas, and Clinton's bus tour came through. There wasn't a lot of support for him in the area, so they resorted to busing crowds in from elsewhere to make it look like a groundswell was building for him in Bush country. The main difference between then and now, I guess, is that what they did then wasn't so much planting questions as planting whole crowds."

Left-leaning Mersman also has déjà vu, but draws a comparison to a different politician: the current president: "This series of incidences by the Clinton campaign just shows that she is more of the same and does not represent real change for Democrats over the current administration. While dodging positions for political gain throughout the campaign, she is now practicing the same tactics of President Bush."

Writing for The Nation's Campaign 08, Ari Melber wonders how the controversy stacks up against "the big issues." "As a 'process' complaint, sure, it ranks lower than public policy. But how candidates relate to voters -- just like how they deal with the press or disclose information -- affects the electorate's ability to appraise them." He also posits that "primary voters may not feel completely assured until they see her take more tough questions on the road."

Read more about the scandal.

Thompson gets life: Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, who touts himself as a "consistent conservative," scored the National Right to Life Committee's official endorsement Tuesday. As Thompson is on the record opposing a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, bloggers find the NRLC's choice rather confusing.

Politico's Jonathan Martin points out Thompson's inconsistencies: "While his voting record is pure, Thompson indicated he supported abortion rights when he ran for the Senate in 1994." And at Captain's Quarters, Ed Morrissey posits that "the NRLC's selection may be even odder than Pat Robertson's endorsement of Rudy Giuliani."

Over at the National Review's water-cooler blog, the Corner, Kathryn Jean Lopez wonders if the NRLC endorsement could boost support for Giuliani: "Pro-lifers listen to Thompson and respond, 'If this is the best pro-lifer the GOP has to offer, why don't I just vote for the pro-choice guy.' "

Writing for the Los Angeles Times' Top of the Ticket, Andrew Malcolm notes that some pro-lifers are miffed and speculates that "heightened concerns over terrorism and national security may be trumping the traditional party litmus test of abortion opposition." Brennan at American Pundit concurs: "Here's what's most interesting: Major players in the social conservative movement are all split, supporting different candidates. Just in the last week we've seen Pat Robertson go to Rudy and now NRLC go to Fred."

Michelle Malkin has a poll: 33 percent say "woo hoo," 15 percent chose the "What the …?!" option, and 52 percent couldn't care less.

Read more about the NRLC's endorsement.

What's in a word? Oxford University Press has announced its 2007 word of the year. It's locavore—a term coined two years ago by four San Franciscans who "proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius."

Mike Nizza at the New York Times' The Lede notes that the word may be new, but the "movement has been building for years, from Chef Alice Waters's pioneering work in the 1970's to the opening of a Whole Foods grocery store in the middle of Manhattan."

Some bloggers aren't impressed. At the Sundries Shack, Jimmie breaks down the etymology of the neologism and complains: "That's the best the folks at Oxford could find for a Word of the Year? ... I don't think 'Creature that eats lots of places' is exactly what our well-meaning friends intended for us to get from that word since it is likely to remind people more of The Blob than it will how desirable it might be to shop for your food at friendly local markets." And at SF Weekly's All Shook Down, Brian Bernbaum offers a snarky history lesson: "Back in the 90's we also had a word for people like this: incorrigible yuppie scum."

Read more about Oxford University Press' word of the year.

Bloggers are considering Norman Mailer's legacy and parsing a New York Times article about the implications of genetic difference between the races.

Returned to sender: Novelist Norman Mailer, who died Saturday at age 84, commands two pages in the A-section of the Sunday New York Times. His six decades as an acclaimed novelist garnered him a slew of other obituaries in print and online publications.

Book bloggers tip their hats to Mailer. "Seeing it in print, it still feels like a shock," writes John Freeman at Critical Mass, who also reruns a recent interview he did with Mailer. "[H]ere was a novelist whose vigor and ambition seemed to almost carve an exception in the laws of physiology." Mark Sarvas finds today's literary pool devoid of any Mailers at literary Elegant Variation. "There are a lot of young overeducated upstarts and pretenders these days who fancy themselves entitled to be latter-day Mailers. They haven't an ounce of the real thing. He will not be so readily replaced."

Writer's Blog reminds us that Mailer coined the much-beloved term fug. "The word 'fug' is thrown around quite a bit on the Internet. But did you know that it was Norman Mailer who coined the word in 1948 in his first book, The Naked and the Dead?"

John Nichols at the Nation's Online Beat lauds the late rabble-rouser for his tough stance on Bush. "[T]he pugilistic pensman would perhaps be most pleased to have it known that he went down swinging. … He went after George Bush with a fury, and a precision, that was born of his faith that all politicians--including 1969 New York City mayoral candidate Norman Mailer - had to be viewed skeptically. And, when found to be lacking, had to be dealt with using all tools available to a writer who had pocketed two Pulitzers."

Huffington Post is awash with Mailer remembrances. "More than another death, a time has gone by," eulogizes television writer and producer Norman Lear. "Mailer was as much a piece of extraordinary theater as he was 'towering writer.' … And, reading about this man, this character, himself as startling and colorful as any he'd written, I cried." Elsewhere on the site, blogger RJ Eskow declares that Mailer shaped his world into its present form. "It's not a matter of liking Norman Mailer. It never was. Thousands of us, maybe millions, grew up in his umbra, swimming in his turbulent and inconsiderate wake," he writes. "I suppose I'm grateful for Norman Mailer, but then I can't conceive of a world where he had never existed. I never had to worry whether a Jew, and a writer, could also be a man. That was my father's struggle, and Norman's. It wasn't mine, or my brothers'. Instead, we wondered whether half-Jewish suburban kids could play rhythm & blues."

The former prof at One-Way Street is among those shedding no tears: "Mailer was an asshole--and he made sure everyone knew it. In many ways, being an asshole was his life's work; the Times obituary reminds us that it was a deliberate construct of Mailer's. Even his novels--especially the late, bloated ones--placed the author's own audacity in front of the story he had to tell."

Finally, no one puts it quite like Gawker. "Norman Mailer—Jewish pugilist, a writer equally at home with fiction and fact, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a lover and a hater of women and one of three founders of the Village Voice—died today. He was married repeatedly, and although he did stab his second wife, four more yet followed," Choire Sicha sums up.

Read more about Norman Mailer. In Slate, Christopher Hitchens looks at Mailer's risk-taking and Jim Lewis explains why Mailer was butch.

DNA and race: The New York Times grapples with how society will deal with emerging scientific studies on the genetic differences between the races. Some worry that it will spark "a new era of racism," with racists using fuzzy science to prop up existing biases on race and IQ.

"What is the right response? What should progressives do if and when scientists demonstrate a genetic link between 'race' and intelligence?" asks Ted at Blue Mass Group, a Massachusetts-based group blog. "My own view is that such a finding would have, or should have, few if any implications."

At Eye on DNA, epidemiologist and biotech consulant Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei stresses the importance of one's environment. "Here's what I can say about the influence of genetics on intelligence and performance in everyday life - I don't even think about it. … What's important to remember in the discussion about genetics and intelligence is that our genes carry us a certain distance but our environment–the people we come into contact with and the resources that are available to us–is also critically important in determining our future."

Liberal Jason Malloy at Gene Expression, who was quoted in the article, calls on his fellow liberals to prepare themselves for science that proves racial difference has a genetic basis. "I urged progressives to stop predicating their ideas of justice so religiously on empirical matters which might very well get falsified (leaving the door wide open for rival ideologies). When they do this, open talk or diverse public opinions about genetic differences will not evoke the same level of political threat."

Another of the bloggers interviewed for the article, Half Sigma, elaborates on his beliefs: "I assure my new readers that I am neither a skinhead nor a white supremacist living in some compound in Idaho stocked with survivalist gear. I am an over-educated professional living in Manhattan. Once upon a time, I too believed the politically correct view that everyone had equal intelligence and it was all a matter of environment."

Read more reaction to the article. In Slate, William Saletan explored what it means if genetics "predispose [Jewish] children both to genius and to early death."

The New York Times leads with news that a federal court of appeals in California ordered the Bush administration to come up with new fuel economy standards for light trucks and SUVs. The three-judge panel said the government failed to fully take into account how carbon emissions contribute to global warming when it set new standards that were barely higher than the old ones. The Washington Post leads, and everyone else fronts, the indictment of Barry Bonds on five felony charges. Baseball's all-time home run leader faces a maximum of 30 years in prison from four perjury charges and one obstruction of justice charge for his testimony in 2003, when he declared that he never knowingly used steroids.

The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with the latest from Pakistan, where the government released former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from house arrest and allowed private news channels to resume their broadcasts just hours before the arrival of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte. The U.S. envoy will urge President Pervez Musharraf to end emergency rule, resign from his army post, and work with opposition leaders. The Bush administration wants to try to save Musharraf's presidency but plans to make it clear that it would be ready to work with someone else if he doesn't cooperate. USA Today leads with President Bush's announcement that commercial airlines will be able to use air space that is normally reserved for the military during the days of peak Thanksgiving travel. The administration also announced it's planning to institute new penalties against airlines that are chronically late and double the compensation passengers receive from airlines when bumped from a flight.

The WP and LAT also front the California fuel standards decision, which said the government must explain why it treats light trucks and SUVs in a different category than other cars when evidence shows that they're "manufactured primarily for the purpose of transporting passengers." It was the third federal court ruling this year that pressed the government to pay more attention to climate change. "Climate change has ushered in a whole new era of judicial review," an environmental law professor tells the NYT. An appeal to the Supreme Court is likely, and customers probably won't notice any difference for a while since automakers are planning on carrying on with last year's standards for now.

The NYT notes the indictment of Bonds came 100 days after he broke Hank Aaron's record. And even though this whole controversy has been swirling around for almost four years, yesterday's indictment was the first time that the government revealed it could prove that Bonds had failed a test for steroids "and other performance enhancing substances." But, of course, the case is not whether Bonds actually took performance-enhancing drugs, but rather whether the government can prove that he "knowingly and willingly" lied during his grand jury testimony in 2003. USAT is the most direct and says the indictment "probably ends the 43-year–old slugger's career."

The NYT fronts a look at how militants in Pakistan have been gaining ground in the last few days, despite Musharraf's claim that he imposed emergency rule in order to more effectively push back against the extremists. There's no evidence that Musharraf has taken any extra steps to combat the militants and, in fact, many believe the emergency rule "has proved more of a distraction … forcing General Musharraf to concentrate on his own political survival."

The WP and NYT front last night's Democratic debate, where the big highlight of the night was that Sen. Hillary Clinton was more forceful when fighting back against criticism from the other contenders. Clinton "stepped down from her front-runner's pedestal" (LAT), "fired back" (USAT), "was much more aggressive" (WP), "shifted to a much more assertive tone" (NYT), and overall had "a newly combative stance" (WSJ). It was a confrontational night, and as the WSJ notes this seemed to be exactly what the moderators wanted. Clinton joked she was wearing an "asbestos" pantsuit and at one point accused Edwards of "throwing mud … right out of the Republican playbook" when he said that she is part of a corrupt system. Obama also accused Clinton of acting like a Republican when she said one of his plans for Social Security would amount to "a $1 trillion tax increase."

The WP and LAT front a new analysis of satellite images that shows hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed about 320 million trees in Mississippi and Louisiana. It amounts to "the largest single forestry disaster on record in the nation," says the Post. The dead, and decomposing, trees will ultimately put as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as what all the U.S. forests absorb in one year. The LAT notes that although 367 million tons of carbon dioxide is not much in the grand scheme of things, it does exceed "an entire season's worth of emissions from U.S. forest fires."

The NYT also has a Page One story on the effects of Katrina and notes that most of the money to help citizens of Mississippi has "benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses." Mississippi is the only state that got an approval from the federal government to not worry about the rule that 50 percent of the grant money has to go to low-income programs.

Everyone notes the full Senate will now have to debate whether to grant immunity to telephone companies that helped the administration's warrantless surveillance programs. The Senate judiciary committee approved a bill that added more court oversight to the surveillance but did not decide one way or another on immunity, which the intelligence committee had already approved. Meanwhile, the House voted on a bill that would deny immunity to the companies.

The LAT catches late-breaking news out of Bangladesh, where a powerful cyclone killed at least 242 people today.

The WP's Eugene Robinson writes about the now-famous incident where Sen. John McCain was asked at a camapign event, "How do we beat the bitch?" Except he can't write the word "bitch" because, even though it's regular fodder for prime-time programming, it's "a word that most editors won't print in a family newspaper." Doesn't this extreme puritanism surrounding "naughty words" ultimately just seem condescending to readers? And, just for the record, the Post has published the word several times, and the the NYT doesn't seem to have a problem with it.

The New York Times leads with word that there's a growing number of Bush administration officials that believe Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf won't survive the current crisis. Consequently, there have been an increasing number of discussions about Pakistan's future and how they could ensure a smooth transition to a new leader, all while making it seem as if they're not actually playing a behind-the-scenes role in the process. The Los Angeles Times leads with a new report by the Government Accountability Office that says investigators were able to pass easily available bomb components through security checkpoints in 19 airports across the country.

The Washington Post leads with a dispatch from Iraq and reports that U.S. military officials are frustrated with the Iraqi government, which they see as the biggest obstacle to further progress in Iraq. The officials contend the government has failed to take advantage of a crucial "window of opportunity" that currently exists because of the decline in violence. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox (online) with the House passing a $50 billion bill to provide funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill directs President Bush to withdraw most troops from Iraq by the end of 2008 so it will almost certainly be blocked in the Senate. While security in Iraq improves, USA Today leads with a look at how things are getting worse for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, which has "seen its bloodiest year since the U.S. invasion in 2001." Instead of attacking Western troops head-on, Taliban militants are increasingly relying on roadside bombs and suicide attacks in what is characterized by one expert as a return to "guerilla warfare."

There was a time when the Bush administration feared that if Musharraf were to be forced out, he would be replaced by an Islamic extremist. But they now recognize it's more likely that he'll be pushed out by other army officers and they would probably want to appoint a civilian president. This doesn't mean the administration is giving up on current strategy, and, in fact, the administration is still holding out hope that Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte can save the power-sharing deal between Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto when he arrives in Pakistan on Friday, although the odds aren't good. The NYT says there are debates going on within the administration about what message Negroponte should convey to other top officers in the army. Although the paper doesn't explicitly mention it, there are hints that Negroponte might inform Pakistan's elite generals that the United States would stand behind a new government, particularly since Musharraf's designated army successor is seen as friendly to U.S. interests.

In other news out of Pakistan, everyone reports that Musharraf told the Associated Press that he would stop wearing his army uniform by the end of the month. Of course, opposition leaders said they're skeptical. The LAT notes inside that if Musharraf gives up his army role it would "almost certainly diminish his power" and he might have trouble retaining support from other members of the military, particularly if protests increase. Meanwhile, the government continued its crackdown and arrested opposition politician and former cricket star Imran Khan soon after he came out of hiding.

At hearings yesterday, which will continue today, lawmakers were flabbergasted that investigators were able to pass so much prohibited material through airport screeners. The failure was compounded by evidence that suggests the Transportation Security Administration warned employees about the covert tests, which the agency denies. TSA officials recognized there are problems but emphasized security operations have many "layers" that go far beyond screeners.

The Post notes that the lack of initiative from Iraqi politicians to make progress in key legislation "calls into question the core rationale behind the troop buildup." Everyone seems to recognize that this has become a sort of moment of truth for Iraq since the decrease in violence won't mean anything if it isn't accompanied by political progress. As an intelligence officer says, the government and security forces "are at the point where they can make it or break it."

As the Democratic presidential hopefuls prepare for yet another debate tonight, there are hints that this one may be more interesting than usual. The NYT goes inside with a look at how all eyes will be on Sen. Hillary Clinton tonight, who will have a golden opportunity to improve her image, which took a downturn after her much-talked about performance at the last debate. Clinton faced attacks from all the other contenders and was accused of waffling on some issues, and her problems only got worse with some other recent controversies, including accusations that her campaign planted questions at campaign events.

As a good primer for the debate, the Post goes inside with a story that examines just how much the top Democratic contenders have changed since the beginning of the campaign. Sen. Barack Obama began the campaign with a call to unite Americans, but has recently stepped up his partisan rhetoric. Meanwhile, John Edwards was once a champion of poverty issues, but that word has barely escaped his lips in the last few campaign events as he has focused instead on attacking Clinton. ("He's running around like a rabid gerbil," writes the NYT's Gail Collins, "telling people he should be president because he's the angriest.") For her part, Clinton used to shy away from attacking other Democrats but has now started to engage "more seriously in a back-and-forth with rivals," says the Post.

Retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor writes an op-ed for the WSJ and notes that although voters in most states don't seem to care much about the election of judges, special interest groups are paying attention and have been pouring large sums of money into the races. "These efforts threaten the integrity of judicial selection and compromise public perception of judicial decisions," O'Connor writes. If states aren't willing to do away with partisan elections of judges, they should at least make a concerted effort to educate the voting public about the importance of judicial independence.

Remember Manuel Miranda? He was the senior aide for the Senate's GOP leadership who led an effort to obtain internal documents from the computer and networks of Democratic staff. His big defense back then was that the stealing was OK because the documents weren't password-protected. These days Miranda is "giving instruction on democratic principles to Iraqi lawyers and lawmakers," reports the WP. Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin had a simple request when he found out Miranda was showing a group of Iraqis around Capitol Hil: "Tell him to stay away from my computer."

The New York Times leads with the first glimpse into the FBI's investigation of the Sept. 16 shooting incident in Baghdad involving Blackwater security guards that killed 17 civilians. And it doesn't amount to good news for the government contractor, as federal agents have found that at least 14 of the killings were unprovoked and unjustified. The Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox leads with, and almost everyone else fronts, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto calling on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to resign. Bhutto made a clear break with the president and seemed to quash all possibilities of a power-sharing deal by saying that she wouldn't serve in his government. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how rising gasoline prices will affect the wider economy. It's not just that people will have to spend more on fuel but also higher gasoline costs are increasing prices on a variety of products.

USA Today leads with news that Bank of America will devote $600 million to support its money market funds to ensure they don't fall below the $1-a-share mark. Other institutions have also taken similar steps but this move was seen as particularly significant since it came from the nation's second-largest bank. Bank of America also announced it will write down $3 billion of its debt and warned it could face bigger losses in the future. The Washington Post leads with more from "the biggest corruption case in local government history" and says the multimillion-dollar scam involving employees of a Washington, D.C., tax office could be larger than authorities have publicly acknowledged. The paper analyzed city records and discovered $31.7 million "in questionable property tax refunds" during the last seven years.

Although the FBI investigation of the shooting is still ongoing, the NYT got word of some initial findings that have already been forwarded to the Justice Department. It seems at least five Blackwater guards opened fire because they mistakenly believed they were under attack when they heard shots that were actually fired by other members of their unit. The FBI agents said that three of the killings may have been justified because guards could have felt legitimately threatened. But an official who was part of an earlier military review that found all 17 killings unjustified said FBI investigators were clearly giving Blackwater guards the benefit of the doubt. "I wouldn't call it a massacre, but to say it was unwarranted is an understatement," a government official tells the NYT.

The findings are now being reviewed by Justice Department officials and the NYT says that deciding whether to prosecute the killings "could be one of the first thorny issues to be decided by Michael Mukasey," the new attorney general who was sworn in a few days ago.

Since emergency rule was declared in Pakistan, there have been suspicions that Bhutto continued to negotiate with Musharraf on a possible power-sharing deal. But yesterday she clearly stated that "Pakistan and Musharraf cannot co-exist" and started to seek alliances with other political parties to oppose the president. Although the opposition is fractured and has been largely ineffectual, Bhutto's participation might give it the support and leadership it needs, reports the LAT. Everyone notes the Bush administration will send John Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, to Pakistan for talks with Musharraf later in the week.

The NYT got an interview with Musharraf and fronts the encounter. Notably, Musharraf met the reporters wearing a suit and not his military uniform, which makes for a very nonthreatening Page One picture. Although he doesn't say anything that's really surprising, the interview does give some insight into Musharraf's way of thinking, much of which could be funny if it weren't so tragic. Musharraf strongly believes that the majority of people support his emergency decree. "Their view, is why have I done it so late," he said. He also chastised Western media and governments for spending too much time with human rights advocates who "sleep on the day of elections." When asked about closing down private television channels Musharraf insisted "the media is independent" and all he wants to do is "bring some responsibility to them."

While the Post lends space in its op-ed page to yet another piece by Benazir Bhutto that gives us quotable, but ultimately meaningless, sentences like "[t]he only terror that Musharraf's regime seems able to confront is the terror of his own illegitimacy," the LAT makes things more interesting by publishing a piece by her niece, Fatima Bhutto. Fatima notes that the "most bizarre part" of the emergency rule "has been the hijacking of the democratic cause by my aunt." She's hardly an objective source, but the piece is notable because she writes about how Bhutto has been accused of "massive corruption" at a time when many are portraying her as Pakistan's savior and it's a good reminder of why so many Pakistanis can't get around to trusting her.

Although the price of oil went down yesterday and, as the WSJ details in a Page One article, it seems increasingly unlikely that the much-talked about $100 price tag will be reached in the near future, the cost of gasoline will probably keep increasing for now. The big concern is for lower income households that spend a significant part of their budget on gasoline and will have to cut back on other expenses right at the start of the shopping season.

The NYT fronts an interesting counterintuitive column by David Leonhardt that attempts to throw a little bit of cold water on all the hyperactive economic coverage. Barring a major catastrophe, Leonhardt argues that falls in the stock market, home prices, and the dollar really aren't so bad. And for all those who are not close to retirement, "a market correction is your friend." The urge to treat the economy "as a local sports team that is either winning or losing, up or down" fails to capture the many levels in which it operates and how some people always benefit when others lose.

The NYT notes that controversy has hit the "genteel world of bridge" because one of the women in a team of players that won the Venice Cup in Shangahi held up a sign at an awards dinner that read, "We did not vote for Bush." Some bridge players have called it "treason" and a few of the team members could face suspension, probation, and community service.

The Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with the rising political tensions in Pakistan, where former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was placed under house arrest for the second time in less than a week. Police officers surrounded Bhutto's house and the Pakistani government said her party would not be allowed to carry out its planned protest that was scheduled for today because it had intelligence suggesting it would be targeted by suicide bombers. The New York Times leads with two new studies that suggest behavior problems in children during the early years of school are not necessarily a marker of academic success or failure later in life.

USA Today leads with a report that shows U.S. troops in Iraq found far fewer roadside bombs in August and September than earlier in the year. In September, troops found 2,022 improvised explosive devices, which was almost a 40 percent decrease from March. Roadside bombs cause at least 60 percent of all U.S. casualties in Iraq and officials say there might be fewer of them around because American forces have been discovering an unusually large number of ammunition caches this year. The Washington Post leads with a look at how the U.S. Sentencing Commission will consider today whether it should retroactively apply recent changes to the guidelines for crack cocaine offenders. If the plan is approved, almost 4,000 prisoners could be eligible for release within the next year.

Bhutto said the "long march" planned from Lahore to Islamabad would still take place, but it's unclear who would participate since at least 1,500 opponents to President Pervez Musharraf's government were arrested overnight. According to members of her party, Bhutto was placed under house arrest for seven days. Meanwhile, opposition parties threatened to call for a boycott of the elections, which are planned for early January, if the emergency rule isn't lifted. Early-morning wire stories report that there were more arrests today and Bhutto called on Musharraf to resign, saying she will try to form an alliance with other opposition parties.

The NYT goes inside with word that the Bush administration is sending a "high-level" envoy to Pakistan to pressure Musharraf to call off emergency rule before the elections. The Commonwealth, a group of 53 nations that were mostly British colonies, also tried to exert pressure by threatening to remove Pakistan from the group if Musharraf doesn't release political prisoners and restores the constitution as well as basic civil liberties. The LAT cites a "well-placed Western diplomat" who says Musharraf is likely to end emergency rule and leave his post as head of the army in the next few days.

The WP fronts a look at how Musharraf hasn't made any headway in battling extremists that have taken control of vast areas "of the country's rugged and wild northwest." Some say the government has been so occupied with stifling civilian protests and detaining opponents since the imposition of emergency rule that the insurgent groups have been able to gain some new ground.

One study found that kindergarteners with behavioral problems did as well as their peers in fifth grade. The other says that the brains of children who suffer from attention deficit disorder merely develop more slowly, which means it's not caused by "a deficit or flaw" in the child and could amount to a temporary condition, says the NYT. Some experts are suggesting that the new studies could drastically change the way behavioral problems are treated, particularly since half of the children diagnosed with attention deficit disorder are treated with drugs such as Ritalin, the LAT reports. A factor that could actually determine future academic success is how well a child does on math tests during the early years.

The NYT fronts news that at least six people were killed in the Gaza Strip yesterday after Hamas militants tried to stop a rally by the rival Fatah movement. It was the largest gathering of Fatah supporters since Hamas took control of Gaza in the summer. Although a Hamas spokesman accused Fatah of firing "on the Palestinian masses in the rally so as to spread anarchy and chaos," the Post says one of its reporters was at the scene and didn't see any Fatah gunmen. The NYT notes that a new poll shows the popularity of Fatah is growing and the movement has greater support than Hamas among the residents of Gaza.

The WP fronts a new study that shows that African-American children born into middle-class families are far more likely to fall into poverty later in life than whites. Almost 50 percent of African-Americans who had middle-class parents in 1968 "grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners," says the Post. That sort of drastic change occurred in only 16 percent of whites. Although most Americans do end up being better off than their parents, the large number of "downwardly mobile" African-Americans surprised researchers.

Everybody notes that a prominent anti-abortion group, the National Right to Life Committee, will endorse Fred Thompson. The move is a particular blow to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, both of whom have been busy touting their anti-abortion beliefs, while Thompson has made it clear he doesn't support a constitutional amendment banning the practice. The decision further illustrates how the Christian right is divided and how many seem willing to back candidates that may not fully support their beliefs, which is why these types of endorsements may not really be influential.

The NYT goes inside with news of an "environmental disaster" in Russia, where an oil spill on the Black Sea from a tanker that broke apart in a heavy storm will kill more than 30,000 birds and countless fish. At least 11 ships broke apart in the storm and three bodies were found on the shore.

The Washington Post leads with a look at the difficult task of converting local Iraqi fighters into members of the police force and army. Although U.S. commanders have often said that recruiting members of local Iraqi tribes and former insurgents is a crucial part of the war against extremists, the plan hasn't gotten very far because of logistical problems and general distrust from Iraqi leaders. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's news conference, where he announced that parliamentary elections will be held in early January but refused to say when emergency rule will end. This makes it likely the emergency rule will continue until the elections, which angered opposition leaders and activists who said it would be impossible to campaign and ensure a legitimate voting process while the constitution is suspended and basic civil liberties are curtailed.

USA Today leads with a new Pentagon report that says the military could save lives and money if it allocated almost $200 million over the next two years to improve its "CSI-style forensic science program." The military currently spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire contractors who oversee the forensic labs, but if it trained more of its own people, the Pentagon could save money, centralize the programs, and make them more efficient. The Los Angeles Times leads with a look at how 19,500 federal prisoners may be released early under a plan currently being considered by the U.S. Sentencing Commission to retroactively apply new, more lenient guidelines for crack cocaine offenders. The Justice Department isn't a fan of the plan and says that it could put dangerous criminals back on the streets, but advocates insist a judge could always refuse to reduce the sentence of anyone who is deemed a threat.

As more local Iraqi "volunteers" keep coming forward "by the hundreds every week," U.S. officials have to deal with the massive logistical hurdle that is involved in organizing thousands of recruits. Iraqi leaders are in no rush to accept them into the security forces as they're worried that the United States is arming a group of people that could lead an effort to topple the government. Even though more than 67,000 people have signed up as "Concerned Local Citizens," only about 1,600 of the fighters have been incorporated into Iraq's security forces, and the government continues to restrict the movement of some of the local fighters. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are concerned that if the whole process doesn't speed up, the volunteers will get frustrated and abandon their efforts to join the system.

Musharraf's statements came during the president's first news conference since the emergency declaration. Some think that setting a date for the elections was an attempt by Musharraf to see how far he could push the emergency declaration without suffering repercussions from opponents and Western governments. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quickly praised the decision but also emphasized that emergency rule needs to end as soon as possible. Benazir Bhutto said the plan was "a first positive step," which raised further questions of whether she is still hoping to salvage a power-sharing agreement.

Throughout the news conference, which both the NYT and LAT call "combative," Musharraf insisted the emergency rule is necessary to fight terrorists. He also said that all suspended judges will not be allowed to return, and defended his decision to deport three correspondents for a British newspaper that called Musharraf "our sonofabitch."

The NYT fronts news that a guard working with Dyncorp, a private security company under contract with the State Department in Iraq, shot and killed a taxi driver in Baghdad. Witnesses said the taxi driver never posed a threat and there were no weapons in his car.

The NYT off-leads a look at how we're beginning to see the "first trickle" of what is expected to become hundreds of millions of dollars that will be spent by nonprofit groups in the presidential campaign. Because of a recent Supreme Court decision, nonprofit groups will be able to spend money in advertisement almost without restrictions as long as they have some sort of stated purpose besides promoting a candidate. Many interest groups are rushing to create new nonprofits, which have fewer reporting requirements than the so-called 527 groups that were much-talked-about during the last presidential elections. Ironically enough, the NYT highlights how one of the first efforts by this type of group is a thinly veiled ad for Sen. John McCain, who has long worked on campaign finance reform.

The WSJ fronts a look at disgraced fundraiser Norman Hsu, who is now in prison, and the paper tries to figure out how a failed businessman was able to become one of the top contributors for Democrats. Hsu was always seeking a way to get wealth and power, and since his business ventures frequently failed, he found that politics was an easy way to get respectability and gain new "clients."

In honor of Veterans Day, today's must read is a LAT story by the photographer who took the famous picture of a bloodied Marine with a cigarette in his mouth. The picture ended up on the front page of more than 150 newspapers and it immediately made Marine Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller "an emblem of the war in Iraq." But his celebrity didn't protect him from the all-too-common affliction of post-traumatic stress disorder. In a two-part series that began yesterday, the LAT's Luis Sinco writes about how Miller's life was turned upside-down after returning from Iraq. Despite the photographer's constant worries that he was getting too close to his subject, he dropped everything to try to help the "Marlboro Marine" get out of a destructive cycle. It's a riveting and emotional story that sheds light onto one man's struggle to adjust to life after war, and is only made more poignant by the thought of how many other veterans are suffering from the effects of combat and have been permanently scarred by what they lived through in Iraq.

"All too often, soldiers who return from Iraq or Afghanistan—and those who served in Vietnam or Korea—have been left to fend for themselves with little help from the government," says a NYT editorial. "The least a grateful nation should do is support the troops upon their return."

The Los Angeles Times leads by arguing that Pakistani President Perez Musharraf will weather the current political storm, at least in the short term, due to the opposition's inability to galvanize support for an ouster. The New York Times leads with an investigation into the corruption and mismanagement that allowed U.S. forces to lose 190,000 guns in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. The Washington Post leads locally, with federal agents' investigation of corruption at a D.C. tax office.

The LAT says Musharraf has managed to avert disaster by pitting his foes against each other and diffusing the opposition's momentum with strategic crackdowns. Musharraff is also emboldened by a lack of international pressure, particularly from the United States, though all that could change down the line if he doesn't follow through on promises to lift emergency rule and hold elections.

Not sure what to make of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto? The NYT says no one can really be sure what she's up to, as she seems to be fighting Musharraf and brokering peace with him simultaneously. Whether that flexibility ends up preserving or destroying democracy in Pakistan is anyone's guess.

And amid all that turmoil, the WP would like to take a moment to remind you that Pakistan is a nuclear power. Pakistan's track record of secrecy with the United States and proliferation of nuclear technology with al-Qaeda makes maintaining the country's stability all the more vital, even as it constricts U.S. policy options. An accompanying feature traces the history of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan. The NYT adds its two cents on the matter in its "Week in Review" section.

The NYT's Iraqi guns story doesn't lay blame upon a single person or group for the proliferation of ill-gotten arms in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency. It instead paints a picture of a time and place where small-arms distribution was a fool's errand rife with illicit opportunities. Even more unsatisfying is the piece's conclusion that no one will ever know exactly where all those guns went or how they've affected the war in the years since.

Federal law enforcement authorities believe more than $20 million may have been stolen from a Washington D.C. tax office by five employees who were arrested last Wednesday. Even though the investigation had been going on since July, the secrecy surrounding the case was so tight that even Mayor Adrian M. Fenty wasn't told about the probe until after the arrests had been made.

Everyone fronts a feature on Norman Mailer, an American novelist who died Saturday of renal failure at the age of 84. The papers' assessments of Mailer are stunningly uniform: As a novelist, critic, provocateur and demagogue, Mailer was a man defined as much by the tone of his voice as by what he was trying to say.

The NYT fronts a feature on the collapse of a secret spy-satellite program that cost the government $18 billion between 1998 and 2005. The paper says the program was crippled from the get-go by unrealistic expectations and a lack of oversight. The piece focuses on the naive promises made by Boeing to secure the contract and the financial costs of the program's failure. The heart of the story, however, is something the paper can just barely hint at: the strategic cost of forcing intelligence agencies to rely on outdated technology.

Democrats are increasingly divided on immigration, says the LAT. Democratic candidates have met with electoral success by taking tougher stances on immigration issues, but some officials worry the party could alienate Hispanic voters if it moves too far to the right. The article suggests, however, that the debate's importance lies less in choosing a particular position and more in keeping Republicans from defining the issue ahead of the 2008 elections.

A stagehand strike has hobbled Broadway and could cost the city millions of dollars a day in lost tourism revenues, reports the NYT. The paper says the strike occurred with little warning, despite the union's promises not to "blindside" producers with a work stoppage. While tourists and producers alike are dismayed, the strike is a boon to at least one group: scalpers, who are jubilant at the prospect of higher prices for the eight Broadway shows unaffected by the strike.

The WP teases a piece on the 25th anniversary of the Vietnam War memorial, an event that drew thousands of aging Vietnam veterans to the district.

The NYT examines the possible impact of genetic tests that highlight the differences between one racial group and another.

Like sushi? The growing global popularity of bluefin tuna is threatening both the species and its culinary legacy, says the WP.

In a late-breaking story, the NYT covers a Democratic presidential campaign event in Iowa that turned into the most combative campaign stop yet.

A writer from The Daily Show keeps a diary of picket line experiences from the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike for the NYT. Apparently writing about not writing doesn't violate any union rules.

The New York Times leads, and the Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox, with the escalating tension in Pakistan, where security forces thwarted a protest rally by placing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest. After 15 hours, officials said they had lifted the detention order; it remained unclear last night whether the former prime minister was in fact free to leave her home. The Washington Post—the only paper not to front the news from Pakistan—leads with a big-picture look at the global impact of rising fuel prices. The LA Times leads local, with news that the LA school system, still tussling with a badly flawed payroll system, is to ask teachers to hand back $53 million in accidental overpayments.

Six days after President Pervez Musharraf declared de facto martial law, riot police yesterday threw metal barricades and barbed wire around Bhutto's home; the NYT reports that the opposition leader remained defiant, speaking to the media and repeatedly attempting to breach the cordon around her house. The Post reports that police blanketed Rawalpindi, where the protest had been scheduled to take place; there were clashes with demonstrators as police sought to seal all routes between the city and Islamabad.

The LAT notes that confinement served to bolster Bhutto's credibility while preventing her from burning bridges with Musharraf; the NYT is more skeptical, reading the clash as a blow for State Department officials who had hoped to broker a power-sharing deal between the two figures. In a lengthy front-page analysis, the WSJ argues that the breakdown of the tentative Bhutto-Musharraf alliance could accelerate the growth of Pakistan's Islamist insurgency; inside, the paper carries a useful recap of the week's developments.

The WSJ's editorial board takes wry delight in Democratic Sen. Joe Biden's denouncement of Bush's failure to aggressively promote democracy in Pakistan; still, the paper agrees that restoring democratic institutions must take center stage in any further engagement "even if we have to call it the Bush-Biden Doctrine."

With crude prices closing in on $100 a barrel, consumers are paying up to $5 billion a day more for oil than they did five years ago, fueling what may be the greatest transfer of wealth in history—and sparking social and economic turmoil from Burma to Brazil and from Saudi Arabia to Senegal. The Post makes a valiant effort to sketch the global fallout though inevitably only scrapes the surface. The WSJ notes that OPEC leaders aren't likely to provide much relief when they meet next week in Riyadh; they blame the sky-high prices on bottlenecks further down the supply chain.

The Post fronts word that North Korea has given U.S. experts access to equipment and documents in a bid to refute claims that it sought to produce enriched uranium for use in nuclear weapons. That could deal a blow to the credibility of the U.S. intelligence community; reports of a uranium-enrichment program helped trigger the collapse of a Clinton-era deal freezing North Korea's plutonium reactor and ultimately cleared the way for Pyongyang to build several plutonium-based bombs.

The FCC will announce a major overhaul of cable television regulations next month in a bid to open the industry to independent programming, reports the NYT. The new rules would cap the size of Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, and prevent other large companies from making significant new cable acquisitions. The move stands in contrast to the agency's plans to relax rules limiting regional cross-media ownership.

The House narrowly approved a $73.8 billion measure easing the impact of the alternative minimum tax on middle-income families; the move is offset by tax increases for the superrich. The Post goes above the fold, reporting on a fiery debate that flagged the difficulties facing Democrats, who have pledged to pay for all new tax measures with corresponding tax increases. The NYT relegates the story to the front of its business section, noting that Senate Democrats are unlikely to be able to rally enough votes to overcome a GOP filibuster.

The Post reports that former New York police commissioner Bernard Keric* yesterday pledged to fight federal corruption charges. The NYT notes the case could prove awkward for Kerik's onetime mentor, Rudy Giuliani and argues that the "extraordinarily close bond" between the two men raises questions about Giuliani's judgment. Columnist Gail Collins is less restrained, lambasting the former mayor's habit of valuing personal loyalty above all else.

The WSJ fronts a lengthy look at Barack Obama's appeal to white voters. To many, the senator offers a chance to buy into a vision of a colorblind America. The paper also eyes Mitt Romney, who recently gave his sales pitch to the editorial board. He apparently came across as a wonk who daydreams of calling in management consultants to remodel the executive branch.

Calm returned to the streets of Georgia yesterday, reports the Post, two days after President Mikheil Saakashvili suspended civil liberties. Bowing to international and domestic pressure, President Saakashvili has now called a snap election; he should win, but the WSJ questions whether it will be enough to restore confidence in his democratic credentials. In an editorial, the NYT calls for Bush to push his ally to fully restore Georgia's freedoms.

Condoleezza Rice's management of the State Department is drawing increasing criticism, following a string of damaging crises. In a front-page report, the Post notes that Rice's aloof leadership style has alienated underlings more used to the more personable approach of her predecessor, Colin Powell.

Correction, Nov. 11, 2007: This article originally misspelled Bernard Kerik's last name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

One of the great looming disasters of the war in Iraq, a moral abdication of immense proportion, is the Bush administration's failure to help those Iraqis who have risked their lives to help us.

The Iraqi translators, drivers, and assistants of all sorts face near-certain death, at the hands of one militia or another, once U.S. forces begin to pull out (and, rhetoric aside, the pullout has begun). Scores have been kidnapped or killed already. Whatever one's feelings about the war, it is beyond dispute that these people have earned our commitment to their safety. If they want to leave, we have an obligation to get them out.

George Packer, the New Yorker writer who first drew attention to this crisis and who continues to shame officials for not doing more to resolve it, proposed a solution in his blog last week. The idea is eminently practical and logically unassailable—so much so that if Bush and his top aides don't take him up on it, there can be only one explanation: They simply don't want to.

The answer lies in America's own experience. In 1996, the U.S. military evacuated over 6,000 Iraqis, mainly Kurds, who had helped Americans during the 1991 war and its aftermath and who faced deadly reprisals from Saddam Hussein. They were flown to the huge American base in Guam, where they were screened for asylum and, if approved, matched up with sponsors. Nearly all of them ended up in the United States within seven months. Packer quotes Maj. Gen. John Dallager, who was the Joint Task Force Commander of Operation Pacific Haven, as saying, "Our success will undoubtedly be a role model for future humanitarian efforts."

A mere decade years later, the great triumph—which involved more than 1,000 American soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers in a coordinated effort—has apparently been forgotten.

Today's State Department has promised to resettle 7,000 Iraqis; they have so far processed a mere 1,600. A former USAID official named Kirk Johnson has presented a list of 800 Iraqis who helped American officers and diplomats and who urgently need to leave the country; only 10 of them have received visas.

The State Department went so far as to lobby against a Senate resolution that would have increased by tenfold the number of special immigration visas for Iraqis and would have allowed applications for these visas to be reviewed inside Iraq. (The bill passed anyway, and is pending in the House.)*

The current application process is a bureaucratic nightmare beyond belief. The final papers cannot be processed inside the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad's green zone (supposedly for security reasons). Instead, applicants have to go to the embassy in Amman, Jordan. They have to make their own way there—and they have to lie about why they're visiting. (If they say their purpose is to seek a U.S. visa, the Jordanian border guards—many of them Sunnis who still revere Saddam Hussein and despise the U.S. occupation—turn them back.)

A few officials and officers are doing what they can to help the Iraqis working under their supervision. In a March 2007 New Yorker article titled "Betrayed," Packer quoted Lt. Col. Steven Miska, deputy commander of a U.S. brigade in Iraq, as saying that he had set up (in Miska's words) "a bit of an underground railroad" to get his unit's Iraqi helpers across the border into Jordan.

But these efforts, heroic as they are, amount to a trickle.

Hence, the idea of mounting an airlift to Guam. The effort wouldn't even have to be so massive. All 800 Iraqis on Kirk Johnson's list could be flown out on a half-dozen or so U.S. Air Force C-130 transport planes in the course of a single day.

The officials handling their cases in Guam would have to treat security concerns very carefully. The fear of jihadists getting a free ride onto American soil is a legitimate one. But it shouldn't be used as an excuse to deny sanctuary to those Iraqis—the vast majority of applicants—who have earned it. And at least in Guam, their appeals can be heard.

Some midlevel State Department officials, I'm told, are reviewing the records of the '96 evacuation and are mulling over the possibility of reprising the effort now.

But they're not likely to get far, because the real obstacle isn't bureaucratic blundering or lazy paper-pushers or even hyper-caution about security. The real obstacle is the president of the United States.

If the president wanted to cut through all the red tape, he could do so with a single declaration.

Here's why he probably won't make that declaration: Helping our Iraqi helpers leave the country would be to acknowledge implicitly that they're in danger because they've been helping us. And that would be an admission that many Iraqis still violently oppose our presence—that the insurgency is hardly defeated.

Helping them leave would also be an acknowledgment that Iraq holds no future for these people—some of whom are among the country's educated elite. And that would be tantamount to acknowledging that the war will not end in victory, at least not as the term was originally defined.

To save face—his face—Bush appears willing to sacrifice those Iraqis who served his cause at great risk and without whom American soldiers, diplomats, and aid workers would have wandered even more cluelessly in the dark. That is the deepest shame.

Correction, Oct. 16, 2007: This article originally and incorrectly stated that the State Department lobbied successfully against the Senate resolution. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Last week, in a column inspired in part by Karen Hughes' departure as the State Department's public diplomat and in part by Tom Stoppard's new play, Rock 'n' Roll, I asked readers for ideas on how to improve America's image in the world.

During the Cold War, our freewheeling jazz, rock, and movies appealed to millions of people behind the Iron Curtain. Today, the vast phenomenon of anti-Americanism stems mainly from our government's policies. But if the next president changed some of those policies, is there anything in our culture that might restore our luster, or at least make us less hateful, not just to Arabs and Muslims, but also to the Asians and Europeans who were once our closest friends?

I received 120 responses, nearly all of them from foreigners or from Americans living abroad. On the one hand, this is satisfying; here are ideas sent by people who know what they're talking about. On the other hand, it's a bit disconcerting; doesn't anybody stateside care what the rest of the world thinks?

In any case, the letters are, for the most part, extremely thoughtful—and most of them make the point that American pop culture just isn't enough. Our music and movies are already omnipresent, through the Internet and satellite TV—yet there has been no payoff for America's popularity.

Rhick Bose, an American studying in South Africa, notes that globalization has stripped pop culture of nationality. "Young people like Beyoncé," he writes, "but they don't associate her with America."

To the extent that people do link the culture with the country, the effect is not always for the better. Foreigners watch shows like MTV's My Super Sweet 16 and think it reflects the way most Americans live. Bose's classmates, he says, "asked me what kind of car I got for my sweet sixteenth birthday party."

Several readers emphasize that many foreigners, even those with high levels of education, have no concept of American life. They don't know that most Americans are religious people. They don't know that most of us aren't wildly rich. They're skeptical of reports that many black people live here—or dismiss them as not "real Americans." (This tendency appears to be true even of otherwise sophisticated world leaders such as the new French president, who, during his recent trip to Washington, marveled that our recent secretaries of state have come from other parts of the world. True, Madeleine Albright is the daughter of a Czech émigré, but Condoleezza Rice's American heritage goes back generations.)

And so the most prominent suggestion on how to improve America's face in the world—a suggestion made by well over half of those who wrote me—is to send the world more American faces and to bring more of the world's faces into America.

In other words, these readers say, there should be a vast expansion in the Peace Corps, in Fulbright fellowships, and, above all, in student-exchange programs.

An American exchange student in Jordan writes of the foreigners he's met: "Once they see Americans—blacks, Jews, Asians, and 'real' Americans, as they call blonde-haired Caucasians—and hear their diverse opinions on issues from the War in Iraq to pop music, then people realize how much diversity there is in our country."

With this same idea in mind, an American in Sudan adds that we should put particular emphasis on sending ethnically diverse Americans abroad.

A Fulbright fellow in Budapest, Hungary, further adds that it would be good to brief these students in advance on the countries where they're going. Foreigners, he writes, "are quite impressed when they meet an American who knows at least a little something about their culture," who has "an appreciation for their pop entertainment, their great modern novels, movies, and music."

The flip side—inviting more foreign students to spend a year in America (a practice that has been cut back since 9/11)—is no less valuable. A British journalist recalls that the pro-democracy and human rights activists that he's interviewed in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, and elsewhere have had one thing in common: They all spent some time studying on an American campus.

But there are more commonplace benefits, as well. An American who teaches English in Egypt writes: "Many an Egyptian is shocked, on arriving in America, to find that we spend most of our time in humdrum routines of work, friends, and family. … Most come away with a greater respect for the American work ethic" and a realization "that we are not demons, nor are we angels."

In short, our greatest selling point may be our sheer, mundane humanity. A Dutch student writes, "America must (re-)consider itself an ordinary country—special and of great importance, but not playing in a league of its own. If America joins the world … the world will gladly receive America."

Along these lines is a letter from the aptly named Joshua Mensch, an American in the Czech Republic. When Mensch was a student in Prague in the late 1990s, the Czechs he met regarded him as cool, the arbiter of taste, the beacon of all that is desirable. "Being American," he writes, "gave you a certain cachet."

In 2004, after the deterioration in Iraq and George W. Bush's re-election, the atmosphere changed. He wasn't shunned for being an American—not usually, anyway—but the "cachet" evaporated.

Now, Mensch writes, he is polite to everybody; he speaks Czech as much as possible; he's always hoping to find lost wallets or cell phones, so he can return them to their owners, as a way of demonstrating that American people are decent.

"Americans abroad in every city I visit," he continues, "are quietly re-appreciating their identities as American." They are openly and unashamedly American. But they also behave "in a manner that is worldly, attentive to the differences between the cultures and not brutish about it. … The Americans who act like America is part of the world and not the commander of it, not the evil ruler or the bane of it, and not the ultimate signifier of it, will be the Americans who make America look good."

There were many other suggestions on how to open up the pathways between America and the rest of the world.

Many readers seconded my points about the rudeness and paranoia on display at U.S. embassies and customs desks. Americans living in Europe say that some of their friends—even those who studied in American universities—refuse to come here anymore because they've been treated so horribly at the airports.

Eric Henry, a doctoral student at Cornell who has spent much time in Shenyang, China, recalls that the U.S. Consulate used to open its libraries, film screenings, and Fourth of July celebrations. Now, he says, the consulate is a "razor-wired compound"; an American friend of his was recently arrested for taking pictures of the front gate. "Expats and Chinese who used to visit the consulate quite regularly now only grouse about the things that used to go on there," he writes.

Certainly there are ways of staying on alert without tripping alarm bells on everyone who comes across the border.

There are also ways to get the American message out there without making it seem like propaganda. One reason Karen Hughes' PR trip to the Middle East two years ago was such a disaster, besides the fact that she seemed so ill-suited for the mission, was that it was clearly a PR mission. She was, after all, a government official and thus by nature suspect. Several readers, including a few State Department officials, endorsed my idea of reviving the U.S. Information Agency as an independent entity that promotes American values and culture, not an administration's policies.

One American stationed in south Asia writes that, during Gen. Musharraf's state of emergency and the blackout of independent news stations, many Pakistanis have appreciated Voice of America's news broadcasts—though he adds they will continue to be appreciated only if they are seen as straight news, free of any government's interference. "When tribal elites in Waziristan trust Voice of America to bring them the news," he writes, "it can't be a bad thing for the United States."

A few common themes emerge from these suggestions: Government-sponsored PR has its limits, mainly because people see it for what it is; the important thing is to change policy, and part of that involves aligning America's approach to the world with the most attractive aspects of our culture (in the broadest sense of that word). One of those aspects is what the Bush administration constantly boasts about—our openness and our freedom. But those boasts ring hollow when the rest of the world sees us as closed down and locked shut. The first step, then, is to reopen the doors to the world.