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The Age of Alzheimer’s
By SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR, STANLEY PRUSINER and KEN DYCHTWALD

OUR government is ignoring what is likely to become the single greatest threat to the health of Americans: Alzheimer’s disease, an illness that is 100 percent incurable and 100 percent fatal. It attacks rich and poor, white-collar and blue, and women and men, without regard to party. A degenerative disease, it steadily robs its victims of memory, judgment and dignity, leaves them unable to care for themselves and destroys their brain and their identity — often depleting their caregivers and families both emotionally and financially.

Starting on Jan. 1, our 79-million-strong baby boom generation will be turning 65 at the rate of one every eight seconds. That means more than 10,000 people per day, or more than four million per year, for the next 19 years facing an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. Although the symptoms of this disease and other forms of dementia seldom appear before middle age, the likelihood of their appearance doubles every five years after age 65. Among people over 85 (the fastest-growing segment of the American population), dementia afflicts one in two. It is estimated that 13.5 million Americans will be stricken with Alzheimer’s by 2050 — up from five million today.

Just as President John F. Kennedy, in 1961, dedicated the United States to landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade, we must now set a goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2020. We must deploy sufficient resources, scientific talent and problem-solving technologies to save our collective future.

As things stand today, for each penny the National Institutes of Health spends on Alzheimer’s research, we spend more than $3.50 on caring for people with the condition. This explains why the financial cost of not conducting adequate research is so high. The United States spends $172 billion a year to care for people with Alzheimer’s. By 2020 the cumulative price tag, in current dollars, will be $2 trillion, and by 2050, $20 trillion.

If we could simply postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by five years, a large share of nursing home beds in the United States would empty. And if we could eliminate it, as Jonas Salk wiped out polio with his vaccine, we would greatly expand the potential of all Americans to live long, healthy and productive lives — and save trillions of dollars doing it.

Experience has taught us that we cannot avoid Alzheimer’s disease by having regular medical checkups, by being involved in nourishing relationships or by going to the gym or filling in crossword puzzles. Ronald Reagan suffered the ravages of this disease for a decade despite the support of his loving family, the extraordinary stimulation of his work, his access to the best medical care and his high level of physical fitness. What’s needed are new medicines that attack the causes of the disease directly.

So far, only a handful of medications have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat Alzheimer’s, and these can only slightly and temporarily modify symptoms like forgetfulness, disorientation and confusion. None actually slows the underlying neurodegeneration.

In the mid-1980s, when our country finally made a commitment to fight AIDS, it took roughly 10 years of sustained investment (and about $10 billion) to create the antiretroviral therapies that made AIDS a manageable disease. These medicines also added $1.4 trillion to the American economy. The National Institutes of Health still spend about $3 billion a year on AIDS research, while Alzheimer’s, with five times as many victims, receives a mere $469 million.

Most of the medical researchers who study Alzheimer’s agree on what they have to understand in order to create effective drugs: They must find out how the aberrant proteins associated with the disease develop in the brain. They need to model the progression of the illness so they can pinpoint drug targets. And ultimately they must learn how to get drugs to move safely from the blood into the brain.

A breakthrough is possible by 2020, leading Alzheimer’s scientists agree, with a well-designed and adequately financed national strategic plan. Congress has before it legislation that would raise the annual federal investment in Alzheimer’s research to $2 billion, and require that the president designate an official whose sole job would be to develop and execute a strategy against Alzheimer’s. If lawmakers could pass this legislation in their coming lame-duck session, they would take a serious first step toward meeting the 2020 goal.

Medical science has the capacity to relegate Alzheimer’s to the list of former diseases like typhoid, polio and many childhood cancers. But unless we get to work now, any breakthrough will come too late to benefit the baby boomers. Whether the aging of America turns out to be a triumph or a tragedy will depend on our ability to fight this horrific disease and beat it before it beats us.
Lessons Learned. Already.
By GAIL COLLINS

It is not too soon to consider what we’ve learned from the 2010 elections.

This is actually an old journalism trick. If you want to do a retrospective of an important event, it is really much better to do it well before the appropriate date, when you have the field all to yourself. I learned this from one of my first editors, who made me write a year-later piece about a famous murder a little more than nine months after the crime occurred. It was a big success.

So, the elections.

When we look back on the elections of 2010 — and we will look back, people, I promise you it really is going to end — we will all have our lists of best and worst moments. For best, one of my favorites was the discovery that Bill and Hillary Clinton are now the Republican Party’s favorite Democrats. You will remember Jennifer Steinhauer’s story in The Times about how Republicans in Congress are speaking nostalgically about the great bipartisanship of the Clinton years, and how Sean Hannity recently referred to the ex-president as “good old Bill.”

Meanwhile in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, when asked to point to a Democratic senator she could work with, picked Hillary. Who is of course not in the Senate any longer, but I’m sure she appreciated the shout-out. Earlier on Fox, O’Donnell had expanded on her admiration for the secretary of state, who she said “was a great senator.”

This is an important life-lesson for all of us — except the Clintons, who clearly knew it all along. Victory comes to those who hang in there.

Today, you may be the most loathed person in America who is not wanted for a capital crime. But tomorrow the people who are attempting to impeach you will get over it. And the ones who claimed that you organized the assassination of your good friend Vince Foster will forget. Then a year or 10 down the line they will be ticked off at someone else and talking about you as if you’d been best pals since sleep-away camp in the third grade.

There have been so many possible worst campaign moments that it’s impossible to pick a favorite. The woman who got stomped by a Rand Paul supporter? Rand Paul’s head-stomping response? (“It is an unusual situation to have so many people so passionate on both sides.”) The political operative in South Carolina who felt compelled to go on television and confess to a one-night stand with the gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley? Sharron Angle’s “some of you look a little more Asian to me” remark to the Latino students? Sharron Angle’s announcement that Dearborn, Mich., is governed by Islamic Sharia law? Sharron Angle?

My own personal worst campaign moment came at the New York gubernatorial debate, when the lights went up to reveal seven contenders vying for the right to lead the state, one of whom was famous only for her claim to be the madam who supplied Eliot Spitzer with prostitutes.

This was possibly the worst debate I ever saw, and while some of that was due to the fact that the Republican, Carl Paladino, was preoccupied by his need to go to the bathroom, the big problem was all those third-party candidates clogging up the stage. I’m beginning to think we make it too easy to clutter the ballot with names of people who want to run for office only because they lack the money to achieve their true objective, which is to have a large poster of their face looming over Times Square year round, or at least get a continuing part in a reality TV show.

Let’s return to the bright side. Another really good outcome in 2010 may be the decimation of the filthy rich candidate. Meg Whitman (running for California governor), Rick Scott (Florida governor) and Linda McMahon (Connecticut senator) have together spent almost a quarter billion dollars of their own money trying to get elected.

Whitman and McMahon are both running far behind while Scott is in a dead heat with his Democratic opponent. We may be looking at nearly $250,000,000 in thwarted ego, folks. So on election night, keep an eye on Scott’s fortunes, even if you don’t live in Florida and could care less that when he was making all his money in the private sector, he oversaw the biggest health care fraud scheme in the history of American government.

So, to conclude: This election has taught us that not only are there second acts in America, there are third acts. And really spectacular curtain calls.

Also, that there is nothing cool about running for high office on the Look At Me Ticket.

And finally, that money does not buy happiness. Or maybe even the governorship of California, which in a sane world you would not be able to give away.

As College Fees Climb, Aid Does Too
By TAMAR LEWIN

As their state financing dwindled, four-year public universities increased their published tuition and fees almost 8 percent this year, to an average of $7,605, according to the College Board’s annual reports. When room and board are included, the average in-state student at a public university now pays $16,140 a year.

At private nonprofit colleges and universities, tuition rose 4.5 percent to an average of $27,293, or $36,993 with room and board.

The good news in the 2010 “Trends in College Pricing” and “Trends in Student Aid” reports is that fast-rising tuition costs have been accompanied by a huge increase in financial aid, which helped keep down the actual amount students and families pay.

“In 2009-2010, students got $28 billion in Pell grants, and that’s $10 billion more than the year before,” said Sandy Baum, the economist who is the lead author of the reports. “When you look at how much students are actually paying, on average, it is lower, after adjusting for inflation, than five years earlier.”

In the last five years, the report said, average published tuition and fees increased by about 24 percent at public four-year colleges and universities, 17 percent at private nonprofit four-year institutions, and 11 percent at public two-year colleges — but in each sector, the net inflation-adjusted price, taking into account both grants and federal tax benefits, decreased over the period.

Almost everybody has been helped by the federal government’s increased spending on education, Ms. Baum said, either through Pell grants, which provide an average of $3,600 for low-income students, or through tax credits, which go further up the income scale.

The increase in federal support this year was so large that unlike former years, government grants surpassed institutional grants.

“I think that’s an aberration,” Ms. Baum said. “Pell grants are unlikely to grow so rapidly in the coming years, and institutional grants are likely to grow, so I think the ratio will flip back.”

This year, the report found, full-time students receive an average of about $6,100 in grant aid and federal tax benefits at public four-year institutions, $16,000 at private nonprofit institutions, and $3,400 at public two-year colleges.

“The College Board figures are depressing and utterly predictable,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. “When states cut funding for higher education, tuitions go up to make up for the difference. The good new is that Pell grants will cushion the increases for low-income students, but if you’re not eligible for financial aid, it’s a problem, since very few families are seeing their income go up 8 percent this year.”

Despite the weak economy, and the number of families having trouble paying tuition, the nation’s public universities continue to award most of their institutional aid without regard to financial need. Over all, the report found, 42 percent of the public institutions’ aid is awarded on the basis of need.

That is up from 28 percent the previous year, Ms. Baum said, for reasons that are unclear.

“It might be that they said, look at all these kids who need money, we should be giving more to them,” she said. “Or it might be that because of the recession so many more people have financial need that more of them happen to be getting institutional aid.”

Out-of-state students at public universities this year are paying an average of $19,595 in tuition, with total charges of $28,130, according to the report.

At public community colleges, published tuition and fees rose 6 percent, to an average of $2,713.

And at for-profit institutions, the report found, tuition and fees rose 5.1 percent, to an average of $13,935.

Over the last decade, published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities increased each year at an average of 5.6 percent beyond the rate of inflation.

“We have to figure out how to educate students in a more cost-efficient way,” Ms. Baum said. “We haven’t yet figured out how to use technology to make it cheaper. But we will.”

In Writings of Obama, a Philosophy Is Unearthed
By PATRICIA COHEN

When the Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg decided to write about the influences that shaped President Obama’s view of the world, he interviewed the president’s former professors and classmates, combed through his books, essays, and speeches, and even read every article published during the three years Mr. Obama was involved with the Harvard Law Review (“a superb cure for insomnia,” Mr. Kloppenberg said). What he did not do was speak to President Obama.

“He would have had to deny every word,” Mr. Kloppenberg said with a smile. The reason, he explained, is his conclusion that President Obama is a true intellectual — a word that is frequently considered an epithet among populists with a robust suspicion of Ivy League elites.

In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography, “Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition,” Mr. Kloppenberg explained that he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history.

“There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.

To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce. It is a philosophy that grew up after Darwin published his theory of evolution and the Civil War reached its bloody end. More and more people were coming to believe that chance rather than providence guided human affairs, and that dogged certainty led to violence.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,” Mr. Kloppenberg said.

Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause. “The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours,” said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.

Mr. Kloppenberg’s interest in the education of Barack Obama began from a distance. He spent 2008, the election year, at the University of Cambridge in England and found himself in lecture halls and at dinner tables trying to explain who this man was.

Race, temperament and family history are all crucial to understanding the White House’s current occupant, but Mr. Kloppenberg said he chose to focus on one slice of the president’s makeup: his ideas.

In the professor’s analysis the president’s worldview is the product of the country’s long history of extending democracy to disenfranchised groups, as well as the specific ideological upheavals that struck campuses in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentions, for example, that Mr. Obama was at Harvard during “the greatest intellectual ferment in law schools in the 20th century,” when competing theories about race, feminism, realism and constitutional original intent were all battling for ground.

Mr. Obama was ultimately drawn to a cluster of ideas known as civic republicanism or deliberative democracy, Mr. Kloppenberg argues in the book, which Princeton University Press will publish on Sunday. In this view the founding fathers cared as much about continuing a discussion over how to advance the common good as they did about ensuring freedom.

Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”

Mr. Kloppenberg compiled a long list of people who he said helped shape Mr. Obama’s thinking and writing, including Weber and Nietzsche, Thoreau and Emerson, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Contemporary scholars like the historian Gordon Wood, the philosophers John Rawls and Hilary Putnam, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the legal theorists Martha Minow and Cass Sunstein (who is now working at the White House) also have a place.

Despite the detailed examination, Mr. Kloppenberg concedes that President Obama remains something of a mystery.

“To critics on the left he seems a tragic failure, a man with so much potential who has not fulfilled the promise of change that partisans predicted for his presidency,” he said. “To the right he is a frightening success, a man who has transformed the federal government and ruined the economy.”

He finds both assessments flawed. Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, he said.

“Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”

And his opposition to inequality stems from Puritan preachers and the social gospel rather than socialism.

As for liberal critics, Mr. Kloppenberg took pains to differentiate the president’s philosophical pragmatism, which assumes that change emerges over decades, from the kind of “vulgar pragmatism” practiced by politicians looking only for expedient compromise. (He gave former President Bill Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation” as an example.)

Not all of the disappointed liberals who attended the lecture in New York were convinced that that distinction can be made so easily. T. J. Jackson Lears, a historian at Rutgers University, wrote in an e-mail that by “showing that Obama comes out of a tradition of philosophical pragmatism, he actually provided a basis for criticizing Obama’s slide into vulgar pragmatism.”

And despite Mr. Kloppenberg’s focus on the president’s intellectual evolution, most listeners wanted to talk about his political record.

“There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind,” Mr. Hartman said. “Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg.”
In ‘Daily Show’ Visit, Obama Defends Record
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — If you are president of the United States and you take your campaign get-out-the-vote blitz to a fake news program, do you get tweaked, or do you get a pass?

You get tweaked, as President Obama discovered Wednesday, when he made his first appearance as president on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. As the host, Jon Stewart, needled him, the president declared that he never promised transformational change overnight.

“You ran on very high rhetoric, hope and change, and the Democrats this year seem to be running on, ‘Please baby, one more chance,’ ” Mr. Stewart said at one point. At another, he wondered aloud whether Mr. Obama had traded the audacity of 2008 for pragmatism in 2010, offering a platform of “Yes we can, given certain conditions.”

Mr. Obama paused for a moment. “I think I would say, ‘Yes we can, but —— ”

Mr. Stewart, laughing, cut him off. The president pushed ahead, finishing his sentence: “But it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The gentle ribbing was perhaps a price the White House was willing to pay for the opportunity to reach Mr. Stewart’s valuable audience — young people who turned out in droves for the president, but who are deeply dissatisfied with him. Mr. Obama is spending the waning days of the election season trying to motivate that crowd to get to the polls, and he closed the interview by urging them to do just that, telling Mr. Stewart he wanted to make “a plug just to vote.”

Mr. Stewart, for his part, pressed the president with the standard liberal critique, accusing him of pursuing a legislative agenda that “felt timid at times” — a characterization Mr. Obama fiercely disputed.

The president wound up defending his health bill, members of Congress and even members of his administration. When Mr. Stewart asked why Mr. Obama, after promising to shake things up, had brought in old Democratic hands like Lawrence H. Summers, the Clinton Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama offered what, for Mr. Summers, was perhaps an unfortunate reply.

“In fairness,” he said, “Larry Summers did a heck of a job.”

Late-night television has come a long way since Bill Clinton, then a presidential candidate, played his saxophone for Arsenio Hall in 1992. The lines between entertainment and news are increasingly blurred — in part because Mr. Obama has been willing to take his presidential platform to settings his predecessors might have viewed as unconventional.

Mr. Obama has appeared as president on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Show with David Letterman”; over the summer, he dished with the doyennes of daytime television on ABC’s “The View.” (“I wanted to pick a show that Michelle actually watches,” he told them.)

“The Daily Show” interview was taped in the run-up to a rally Mr. Stewart and his fellow Comedy Central host, Stephen Colbert, are hosting Saturday on the National Mall. It went longer than anticipated — so long, in fact, that the show’s producers decided to cut the original introduction Mr. Stewart taped, which featured a riff of the host fiddling with a pen and tapping his fingers as he pretended to make the president wait in the wings, and his introduction of Mr. Obama as “White House chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Austan Goolsbee’s boss.”

In the interview, Mr. Obama conceded that he understands the feeling among his supporters that he has not fundamentally changed the way Washington does business.

“When we promised during the campaign ‘change you can believe in,’ it wasn’t ‘change you can believe in in 18 months,’ ” he said. “It was ‘change you can believe in — but we’re going to have to work for it.’ ”

‘Waiting for Superman’ and the Education Debate
By BRENT STAPLES

Take along a handkerchief if you plan to see the new education documentary “Waiting for Superman.” Steve Barr, a tough-minded charter school developer, told me on Friday that he had already seen the film four times and still can’t get through it without sobbing.

Mr. Barr believes that the film has pulled back the curtain on a world that most Americans would otherwise not have seen — the desperation of parents who struggle, often in vain, to get their children into better schools. (The Superman in the title refers to one charter school operator’s childhood belief that the ghetto in which he lived might one day be rescued by the Man of Steel.)

Mr. Barr is unnerved by the cartoonish debate that has erupted around the movie. The many complex problems that have long afflicted public schools are being laid almost solely at the feet of the nation’s teachers’ unions.

In recent days, Randi Weingarten, the leader of the American Federation of Teachers (the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union after the National Education Association) has been portrayed on the Internet as the Darth Vader of public schooling. She talks like a union chief in the film — which makes no mention of her genuine efforts to work with school systems to promote reform.

The unions deserve criticism for resisting sensible changes for far too long and for protecting inept teachers who deserve to be fired. But at least in some places that is changing. And they are by no means responsible for the country’s profound neglect of public education until about 20 years ago when the federal government began pushing the states to provide better oversight.

For years, urban politicians ransacked districts with patronage and fraud. Teachers chose to unionize in part to protect themselves from politicians.

The movie scene that pains Mr. Barr the most features a mother whose kindergartner has been barred from her parochial school on graduation day because of unpaid tuition. The family lives just across the street, which means the child has to watch as her classmates arrive.

Like other mothers in the film, this one is determined to keep her daughter out of traditional public schools that she regards as substandard. She applies to a highly respected charter school that fills seats through an excruciatingly painful lottery system. The applicants gather in an auditorium. The winners rejoice; the losers weep.

Mr. Barr has witnessed this kind of heartbreak at close range since he founded a nonprofit charter organization called Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles in 1999. Progress is being made. But the country needs many more good schools and better teacher contracts.

Charter schools run on public money but are allowed to function independently of the districts in which they reside. Nationally, most charter schools do no better in terms of student achievement, and far too many do worse. Green Dot is one of the stars of this movement.

Despite the fact that many of its 17 schools serve desperately poor, minority neighborhoods, its students significantly outperform their traditional school counterparts, on just about every academic measure, including the percentage of children who go on to four-year colleges.

Public schools generally do a horrendous job of screening and evaluating teachers, which means that they typically end up hiring and granting tenure to any warm body that comes along. Like other high-performing charter operations, Green Dot screens teachers closely — which means they get higher-quality teachers to start — and evaluates them frequently, with the aim of making them better at what they do.

The hard work pays off, including in staff stability. Despite rules that make it easier to fire staff members, last year Green Dot administrators terminated only 7 of more than 420 employees.

The film’s director, Davis Guggenheim, gives Green Dot a cameo shout-out in “Waiting for Superman.” But he did the story a serious disservice by not pointing out that these high-performing charter schools are fully unionized.

The 16 schools in California are affiliated with the National Education Association. The one recently started in the Bronx was put together by Green Dot and the New York affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. By rushing by this wrinkle, he sustained the sexy-but-mistaken impression that the country’s schools can’t move forward unless the unions are broken.

The real story is far more hopeful and more nuanced.
Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?
By RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG

Washington

TODAY’S populist moment, with a growing anger directed at the elites who manipulate the system to their advantage, is an opportune time to examine higher education’s biggest affirmative action program — for the children of alumni.

At our top universities, so-called legacy preferences affect larger numbers of students than traditional affirmative action programs for minority students, yet they have received a small fraction of the attention. Unlike the issue of racial preferences, advantages for alumni children — who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy — have been the subject of little scholarship, no state voter initiatives and no Supreme Court decisions.

Among selective research universities, public and private, almost three-quarters employ legacy preferences, as do the vast majority of selective liberal arts colleges. Some admissions departments insist they are used only as tie-breakers among deserving applicants. But studies have shown that being the child of an alumnus adds the equivalent of 160 SAT points to one’s application (using the traditional 400-to-1600-point scale, and not factoring in the new writing section of the test) and increases one’s chances of admission by almost 20 percentage points.

At many selective schools, legacies make up 10 percent to 25 percent of the student population. By contrast, at the California Institute of Technology, which has no legacy preferences, only 1.5 percent of students are the children of alumni.

Legacy preferences are often justified as a way of building loyalty among alumni, sustaining tradition and increasing donations. But there is no hard evidence to prove this. A study by Winnemac Consulting for the Century Foundation found that from 1998 to 2007, at the nation’s top 100 national universities, if one controls for the wealth of alumni, “there is no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving.” Moreover, the study found that at the seven universities that dropped legacy preferences during the time of the study, alumni giving didn’t decline.

Legacy preferences are “virtually unknown in the rest of the world,” according to Daniel Golden, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The paradox is that while they are an American contrivance, they are also un-American, standing in direct contradiction to Thomas Jefferson’s famous call to promote a “natural aristocracy” based on “virtue and talent.” The Old World nature of hereditary preferences may explain why, in a 2004 poll by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Americans opposed such preferences by 75 percent to 23 percent.

Legacy preferences may also be illegal. Although in 1976 a federal court ruled in a passing mention that legacy preferences are constitutional, the issue has never been properly litigated. Today, new legal arguments have been advanced questioning legacy preferences at both public and private universities.

Steve Shadowen and Sozi Tulante, two lawyers in private practice in Pennsylvania, have argued forcefully that preferences violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While the amendment was primarily aimed at prohibiting discrimination against blacks, it also extends to what Justice Potter Stewart called “preferences based on lineage.” In the past, the Supreme Court has read the amendment to prohibit laws that judge individuals on their parents’ actions or behaviors, such as those that punish children born out of wedlock.

Legacy preferences at private institutions may also violate the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “ancestry” as well as race.

Affirmative action policies are controversial because they pit two fundamental principles against each other — the anti-discrimination principle, which says we should not classify people by ancestry, and the anti-subordination principle, which says we must address a brutal history of discrimination. Legacy preferences, by contrast, advance neither principle — they simply classify individuals by bloodline.

Congress should outlaw alumni preferences at all universities and colleges receiving federal financing, just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws racial discrimination at them. Or lawmakers could limit the tax deductibility of alumni donations at institutions that favor legacy children on the principle that tax-deductible donations are not supposed to enrich the giver. If legislators don’t act, it will fall to lawyers to bring suit to enforce the 14th Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act and put an end to this form of discrimination in higher education.
Waiting for Somebody
By GAIL COLLINS

Let’s talk for a minute about education.

Already, I can see readers racing for the doors. This is one of the hardest subjects in the world to write about. Many, many people would rather discuss ... anything else. Sports. Crazy Tea Party candidates. Crop reports.

So kudos to the new documentary “Waiting for Superman” for ratcheting up the interest level. It follows the fortunes of five achingly adorable children and their hopeful, dedicated, worried parents in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., as they try to gain entrance to high-performing charter schools. Not everybody gets in, and by the time you leave the theater you are so sad and angry you just want to find something to burn down.

My own particular, narrow wrath was focused on the ritual at the heart of the movie, where parents and kids sit nervously in an auditorium, holding their lottery numbers while somebody pulls out balls and announces the lucky winners of seats in next fall’s charter school class. The lucky families jump up and down and scream with joy while the losing parents and kids cry. In some of the lotteries, there are 20 heartbroken children for every happy one.

Charter schools, please, stop. I had no idea you selected your kids with a piece of performance art that makes the losers go home feeling like they’re on a Train to Failure at age 6. You can do better. Use the postal system.

On a more sweeping level, the film has sparked a great debate about American education. The United States now ranks near the bottom of the industrialized countries when it comes to reading and math. It’s not so much that schools here have gotten worse. It’s just that for the last several decades, almost everybody else has gotten better. Finland, what’s your secret?

The director of “Waiting for Superman,” Davis Guggenheim, says he’s not offering an answer: “It’s not ‘pro’ anything or ‘anti’ anything. It’s really: ‘Why can’t we have enough great schools?’ ”

But plot-wise, the movie seems to suggest that what’s needed is more charter schools, which get taxpayer dollars but are run outside the regular system, unencumbered by central bureaucracy or, in most cases, unions. However, about halfway through, the narrator casually mentions that only about a fifth of American charter schools “produce amazing results.”

In fact, a study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that only 17 percent did a better job than the comparable local public school, while more than a third did “significantly worse.” I’m still haunted by a debate I stumbled across in the Texas Legislature a decade ago in which conservatives repelled any attempt to impose accountability standards on the state’s charter schools, even after only 37 percent of the charter students passed state academic achievement tests, compared with 80 percent of the public schoolchildren. There’s something about an unfettered school that lifts the hearts of the Born Free crowd.

Then there’s the matter of teachers’ unions. Guggenheim is the man who got us worried about global warming in “An Inconvenient Truth.” In his new film, the American Federation of Teachers, a union, and its president, Randi Weingarten, seem to be playing the role of carbon emissions. The movie’s heroes are people like the union-fighting District of Columbia schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and Geoffrey Canada, the chief of the much-praised, union-free Harlem Children’s Zone.

“I want to be able to get rid of teachers that we know aren’t able to teach kids,” says Canada.

That’s unarguable, and the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program has turned out to be a terrific engine for forcing politicians and unions and education experts to create better ways to get rid of inept or lazy teachers. But there’s no evidence that teachers’ unions are holding our schools back. Finland, which is currently cleaning our clock in education scores, has teachers who are almost totally unionized. The states with the best student performance on standardized tests tend to be the ones with the strongest teachers’ unions.

Older teachers tend to respond to calls for education reform with cynicism because they’ve been down this road so many times before. In 1955, a best seller, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” stunned the country with its description of a 12-year-old who suffered from being “exposed to an ordinary American school.” Since then, the calls for reform have come as regularly as the locusts. Social promotion has been eliminated repeatedly, schools have been made bigger, then smaller.

But dwelling on that won’t get us anywhere. Right now, the public is engaged. The best charter schools are laboratories for new ideas. But the regular public schools are where American education has to be saved. We can do better. Superman hasn’t arrived. But we may be ready to fly.

Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The global refrain about genocide is “Never Again,” but we may be watching how that slips into “One More Time.”

The place is southern Sudan, and the timetable is the next few months. The South, which holds more than 75 percent of Sudan’s oil, is scheduled to hold a referendum on Jan. 9 on seceding from the rest of Sudan. Here’s how one more time might unfold:

DEC. 10, 2010 Word trickles out of massacres and widespread rapes by tribal militias from the North in the boiling borderlands between North and South. The North denies responsibility.

DEC. 15 The chairman of the referendum commission (from the North) calls on the South to postpone the vote for “just one month,” pointing to insecurity and to inadequate preparations for voting. The South insists that the referendum will go on as scheduled. The North angrily responds that the vote would then be illegal.

JAN. 9, 2011 The referendum is held in secure areas of South Sudan. But it is poorly planned, and there are widespread irregularities. There is no voting in Abyei, an oil-rich area at the border of North and South, partly because the North has moved in 80,000 Misseriya Arabs who must be allowed to vote, it says, swamping the permanent residents.

JAN. 18 The South declares that 91 percent of voters have chosen secession. The North denounces the vote, saying it was illegal, tainted by violence and fraud, and invalid because the turnout fell below the 60 percent threshold required.

JAN. 20 The South issues a unilateral declaration of independence.

JAN. 25 Tribal militias from the North sweep through South Sudan villages, killing and raping inhabitants and driving them south. The governor of a border state in the North, Ahmad Haroun, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and organizing the janjaweed militia in Darfur, denies that he is now doing the same thing in the South.

JAN. 28 Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, dispatches armed forces to seize oil wells in the South. “The breakdown of security impels us to take this action to protect the nation’s natural resources,” Mr. Bashir says. “We will continue to share revenue with the South while seeking peaceful solution of our disagreements.”

FEB. 10 With hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the attacks, South Sudan collapses into chaos. “How can those people think that they can run a country?” asks Mr. Bashir. He calls for “peaceful negotiation with our brothers to resolve these problems and restore unity.”

FEB. 15 Warfare ripples through the Nuba Mountains and then Darfur as well. Militias now cover up massacres by hiding bodies in wells to reduce the risk of war crimes prosecutions.

O.K., my one prediction is that events won’t unfold precisely like that. But President Bashir seems emboldened, and I fear we’re on a track toward Sudan being the world’s bloodiest war in 2011.

The Obama administration is, belatedly, now heavily engaged in Sudan. I met Mr. Obama and his aides last week to talk about Sudan, and the White House seems as focused on Sudan as on any international issue, with daily meetings on how to avoid war. That’s terrific.

The carrots being offered to Khartoum by Mr. Obama are juicy and smart. The White House has lined up other countries to apply pressure on North and South, and it now is twisting arms for a deal on Abyei. All this is a huge step forward.

But there’s a fatal flaw: I see no evidence of serious sticks. Put yourself in President Bashir’s shoes. It may still be in his interest to plan a genocidal strategy in the coming months if that will enable him to keep the oil. Even privately, we haven’t laid out strong enough disincentives.

In contrast, the Bush administration mapped out exactly what would happen to Sudan if it did not share intelligence on Osama bin Laden. C.I.A. officers met in a London hotel with two top Sudanese leaders. An excellent new book from Yale University Press, “Sudan,” reports that the C.I.A. officers explained that America would use bombers or cruise missiles to destroy the oil refinery at Port Sudan, the port itself and the pipeline carrying oil to the port.

Sudan decided to cooperate.

Likewise, a former special envoy for Sudan, Ambassador Richard Williamson, suggested in memos to the Bush White House a series of other tough sticks to gain leverage. The Obama administration still hasn’t picked them up.

Why shouldn’t we privately make it clear to Mr. Bashir that if he initiates genocide, his oil pipeline will be destroyed and he will not be exporting any oil?

Yes, that would be a dangerous and uncertain game. But the present strategy appears to be failing, and the result may be yet another preventable genocide that we did not prevent.
The Terrible Election Race Race
By GAIL COLLINS

Which state is having the most appalling campaign season?

Wow, so much competition.

There’s Arizona, where Jan Brewer, the immigrant-bashing governor, stomped away from her horrible debate performance while reporters yelled: “Governor, please answer the question about the headless bodies!” Always hard to beat a state with a headless-bodies controversy.

Arizona got additional awfulness points when Brewer announced that she was not participating in any future debates since she only needed to do just that one to get public campaign funds. Still more when she said she would probably change her mind if her poll numbers dropped. Even more for the fact that they haven’t.

California (Fourth Month Without a Budget!) has a governor’s race that’s degenerated into a debate over whether Meg Whitman should take a lie detector test to refute the weepy claims of her undocumented ex-housekeeper. And in South Carolina, the most impossible Republican in the Senate, Jim DeMint, is opposed by an apparently delusional Democrat named Alvin Greene. He’s facing a felony charge and pushing a jobs platform that involves putting people to work creating action figures of Alvin Greene.

Whenever you’re looking for a dreadful political culture, you have to consider Illinois ($13 Billion in the Hole and Still Digging!) and its unending Chicago versus Downstate feud. The Republican Senate candidate, Mark Kirk, is running an ad downstate that telescopes his entire biography into the sliver of his life he lived somewhere in Illinois besides the Chicago area. (“Mark Kirk: Born in Champaign, attended college in Carlinville, with mainstream Illinois values.”) This calls to mind the old saying that if a cat gives birth to kittens in the oven, it does not make them muffins.

Meanwhile, Kirk’s ads demonize his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias, as a “Chicago politician,” which would seem to be the least of Giannoulias’s problems, what with his family’s bankrupt, sleazy-loan-making bank. Although to be fair to Kirk, The Associated Press reported that he managed, in a single interview, to refer to his opponent with the phrase “lent a tremendous amount of money to mobsters and felons” eight times.

I have to put in a plug for New York (Looking for Our Fourth Governor in Five Years!) where the Republican candidate, Carl Paladino, attempted to protect his love child from the prying news media by accusing his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, of having “paramours.” Paladino later admitted that he had no proof, then reversed the reversal. Once again, it appears, New Yorkers will fail to achieve their dream of having a governor whose sex life is a complete mystery.

And everybody wants to talk about Delaware and Christine O’Donnell, the Republican Senate candidate who once had a date on a “Satanic altar,” leaving us with an image even more disturbing than Eliot Spitzer’s encounter with a prostitute with his socks on.

O’Donnell keeps having résumé problems, and it appears that she has particular trouble keeping track of where she went to college. She got her bachelor’s degree last month, not in 1993. Also, the alleged stint at Claremont Graduate University was actually at a conservative think tank called the Claremont Institute. And rather than attending Oxford University, O’Donnell attended a course run by a group that had rented a room at Oxford University.

Colorado voters, in the fun-loving spirit that has filled so many Republican primaries this season, gave the gubernatorial nomination to a newcomer named Dan Maes, who had already been hit with one of the largest campaign finance violation fines in state history for claiming more than $40,000 in mileage reimbursements — which would suggest that he spent the last year driving the equivalent of more than a third of the way to the moon.

Now Maes is in résumé trouble, too, for apparently making up a story about being an undercover operative for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in Liberal, Kan. Liberal is best known as the home of a “Wizard of Oz” Museum, although, unfortunately, that had nothing to do with the investigation, which involved a drug ring but did not involve Dan Maes.

But for overall awfulness, I’m going to go with Nevada, where Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is in a battle with Republican Sharron Angle in a race in which the voters have made it clear they loathe everybody. Both Reid and Angle have decided the wisest course might be to stay out of sight and just run attack ads, helping to turn this into the Year of the Burrowing Candidate. They did both appear at a forum at a Christian school recently but made sure they were never on stage at the same time. This made for a rather noneventful event, except for the end, when two female Reid supporters and a male Angle fan got into a fistfight.

Too Funny for Words
By PETER FUNT

Washington

WHEN my dad, Allen Funt, produced “Candid Microphone” back in the mid-1940s, he used a clever ruse to titillate listeners. A few times per show he’d edit out an innocent word or phrase and replace it with a recording of a sultry woman’s voice saying, “Censored.” Audiences always laughed at the thought that something dirty had been said, even though it hadn’t.

When “Candid Camera” came to television, the female voice was replaced by a bleep and a graphic that flashed “Censored!” As my father and I learned over decades of production, ordinary folks don’t really curse much in routine conversation — even when mildly agitated — but audiences love to think otherwise.

By the mid-1950s, TV’s standards and practices people decided Dad’s gimmick was an unacceptable deception. There would be no further censoring of clean words.

I thought about all this when CBS started broadcasting a show last week titled “$#*! My Dad Says,” which the network insists with a wink should be pronounced “Bleep My Dad Says.” There is, of course, no mystery whatsoever about what the $-word stands for, because the show is based on a highly popular Twitter feed, using the real word, in which a clever guy named Justin Halpern quotes the humorous, often foul utterances of his father, Sam.

Bleeping is broadcasting’s biggest deal. Even on basic cable, the new generation of “reality” shows like “Jersey Shore” bleep like crazy, as do infotainment series like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” where scripted curses take on an anti-establishment edge when bleeped in a contrived bit of post-production. This season there is even a cable series about relationships titled “Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry?” — in which “bleep” isn’t subbing for any word in particular. The comedian Drew Carey is developing a series that CBS has decided to call “WTF!” Still winking, the network says this one stands for “Wow That’s Funny!”

Although mainstream broadcasters won a battle against censorship over the summer when a federal appeals court struck down some elements of the Federal Communications Commission’s restrictions on objectionable language, they’ve always been more driven by self-censorship than by the government-mandated kind. Eager to help are advertisers and watchdog groups, each appearing to take a tough stand on language while actually reveling in the double entendre.

For example, my father and I didn’t run across many dirty words when recording everyday conversation, but we did find that people use the terms “God” and “Jesus” frequently — often in a gentle context, like “Oh, my God” — and this, it turned out, worried broadcasting executives even more than swearing. If someone said “Jesus” in a “Candid Camera” scene, CBS made us bleep it, leaving viewers to assume that a truly foul word had been spoken. And that seemed fine with CBS, because what mainstream TV likes best is the perception of naughtiness.

TV’s often-hypocritical approach to censorship was given its grandest showcase back in 1972, when the comedian George Carlin first took note of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The bit was recreated on stage at the Kennedy Center a few years ago in a posthumous tribute to Carlin, but all the words were bleeped — not only for the PBS audience but for the theatergoers as well.

Many who saw the show believed the bleeped version played funnier. After all, when Bill Maher and his guests unleash a stream of nasty words on HBO, it’s little more than barroom banter. But when Jon Stewart says the same words, knowing they’ll be bleeped, it revs up the crowd while also seeming to challenge the censors.

In its July ruling, the appeals court concluded, “By prohibiting all ‘patently offensive’ references to sex ... without giving adequate guidance as to what ‘patently offensive’ means, the F.C.C. effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the F.C.C. will find offensive.” That’s quite reasonable — and totally beside the point. Most producers understand that when it comes to language, the sizzle has far more appeal than the steak. Broadcasters keep jousting with the F.C.C. begging not to be thrown in the briar patch of censorship, because that’s really where they most want to be.

Jimmy Kimmel has come up with a segment for his late-night ABC program called “This Week in Unnecessary Censorship.” He bleeps ordinary words in clips to make them seem obscene. How bleepin’ dare he! Censorship, it seems, remains one of the most entertaining things on television.

Fear and Favor
By PAUL KRUGMAN

A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in “The Birth of a Nation,” but you’re actually just extras in a remake of “Citizen Kane.”

True, there have been some changes in the plot. In the original, Kane tried to buy high political office for himself. In the new version, he just puts politicians on his payroll.

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Perhaps the most important thing to realize is that when billionaires put their might behind “grass roots” right-wing action, it’s not just about ideology: it’s also about business. What the Koch brothers have bought with their huge political outlays is, above all, freedom to pollute. What Mr. Murdoch is acquiring with his expanded political role is the kind of influence that lets his media empire make its own rules.

Thus in Britain, a reporter at one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers, News of the World, was caught hacking into the voice mail of prominent citizens, including members of the royal family. But Scotland Yard showed little interest in getting to the bottom of the story. Now the editor who ran the paper when the hacking was taking place is chief of communications for the Conservative government — and that government is talking about slashing the budget of the BBC, which competes with the News Corporation.

So think of those paychecks to Sarah Palin and others as smart investments. After all, if you’re a media mogul, it’s always good to have friends in high places. And the most reliable friends are the ones who know they owe it all to you.
In Vitro Revelation
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

YESTERDAY, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a man who was reviled, in his time, as doing work that was considered the greatest threat to humanity since the atomic bomb. Sweet vindication it must be for Robert Edwards, the British biologist who developed the in vitro fertilization procedure that led to the birth of Louise Brown, the first so-called test-tube baby.

It’s hard to believe today, now that I.V.F. has become mainstream, that when Ms. Brown’s imminent birth was announced in 1978, even serious scientists suspected she might be born with monstrous birth defects. How, some wondered, could it be possible to mess around with eggs and sperm in a petri dish and not do some kind of serious chromosomal mischief?

And yet, in the 32 years since, our attitude toward Dr. Edwards’s research has completely changed: I.V.F. is now used so often it is practically routine.

The history of in vitro fertilization demonstrates not only how easily the public will accept new technology once it’s demonstrated to be safe, but also that the nightmares predicted during its development almost never come true. This is a lesson to keep in mind as we debate whether to pursue other promising yet controversial medical advances, from genetic engineering to human cloning.

Dr. Edwards and his collaborator, the gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, became notorious after they announced that they had fertilized a human egg outside the mother’s womb. In England, reporters camped out on the lawn of the prospective parents, Lesley and John Brown, for weeks before the baby’s due date.

When Mrs. Brown checked into Oldham General Hospital, outside Manchester, to give birth, she did so under an assumed name. Still, reporters sneaked past security dressed as plumbers and priests in hopes of getting a glimpse of her.

Meanwhile, criticism of the pregnancy grew increasingly extreme. Religious groups denounced the two scientists as madmen who were trying to play God. Medical ethicists declared that in vitro fertilization was the first step on a slippery slope toward aberrations like artificial wombs and baby farms.

Fortunately, Louise Brown was not born a monster, but rather a healthy, 5-pound, 12-ounce blond baby girl. She had no birth defects at all, and suddenly her existence seemed to demonstrate only that there was nothing to fear about I.V.F. The birth of the “baby of the century” paved the way for a happy ending for millions of infertile couples — nearly four million babies worldwide have been conceived with the procedure.

True, I.V.F. has not been without consequences. It immediately raised new questions: Would single women or gay couples use the technology? Would it be all right for couples to create and save excess embryos to be used in later attempts if the first try failed?

It has also opened the door to new controversial concepts: “designer babies,” carrying certain selected genes; pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which allows the possibility of choosing the baby’s sex; and human cloning.

Even today, not everyone is comfortable with in vitro fertilization. In a 2005 survey, 13 percent of British adults, and a surprising 22 percent of those under 24, said the risks involved in such fertility treatments might outweigh the benefits.

Yet with I.V.F. the public has shown how it can debate the usefulness of a new medical technology, reject its abuse and in some cases embrace its benefits. We approve when a woman in her 30s who otherwise couldn’t conceive does so through in vitro fertilization, for example, but we cry foul when a 60-year-old tries to do the same.

As Dr. Edwards himself noted in the early 1970s, just because a technology can be abused doesn’t mean it will be. Electricity is a good thing, he said, regardless of its leading to the invention of the electric chair.

Science fiction is filled with dystopian stories in which the public blindly accepts destructive technologies. But in vitro fertilization offers a more optimistic model. As we continue to develop new ways of improving upon nature, the slope may be slippery, but that’s no reason to avoid taking the first step.
Change or Perish
By ROGER COHEN

LONDON — Before leggings, when there were letters, before texts and tweets, when there was time, before speed cameras, when you could speed, before graffiti management companies, when cities had souls, we managed just the same.

Before homogenization, when there was mystery, before aggregation, when the original had value, before digital, when there was vinyl, before Made in China, when there was Mao, before stress management, when there was romance, we had the impression we were doing all right.

Before apps, when there were attention spans, before “I’ve got five bars,” when bars were for boozing, before ring-tone selection, when the phone rang, before high-net-worth individuals, when love was all you needed, before hype, when there was Hendrix, we got by just the same.

Before social media, when we were social, before thumb-typing, when a thumb hitched a ride, before de-friending, when a friend was for life, before online conduct, when you conducted yourself, before “content,” when we told stories, we did get by all the same.

Before non-state actors, when states commanded, before the Bangalore back office, when jobs stayed put, before globalization, when wars were cold, we did manage O.K., it seemed.

Before celebrities, when there were stars, before Google maps, when compasses were internal, before umbilical online-ism, when we off-lined our lives, before virtual flirtation, when legs touched, we felt we managed all the same.

Before identity theft, when nobody could steal you, before global positioning systems, when we were lost, before 24/7 monitoring and alerts by text and e-mail, when there was idleness, before spin doctors, when there was character, before e-readers, when pages were turned, we did get by just the same.

Before organic, when carrots weren’t categorized, before derivatives, when your mortgage was local, before global warming, when we feared nuclear winters, before “save the planet,” when we lived in our corners, before the Greens, when we faced the Reds, it seemed we did somehow manage just the same.

Or did we? Before iPads and “Search,” in the era of print, before portable devices, when there were diaries, before the weather channel, when forecasts were farcical, before movies-on-demand, when movies were demanding, before chains and brands, in the time of the samizdat, before curved shower curtain rods, when they were straight, before productivity gains, when Britain produced things, and so did Ohio, did we really and honestly get by just the same?

Before January cherries, when fruit had seasons, before global sushi, when you ate what you got, before deep-fried Mars bars, when fish were what fried, before New World wine, when wine was tannic, before fast food and slow food, when food just was, before plate-size cookies, when greed was contained, before fusion, in scattered division, before the obesity onslaught, in our ordinariness, could we — could we — have gotten by all the same?

Before dystopia, when utopia beckoned, before rap, in Zappa’s time, before attention deficit disorders, when people turned on, before the new Prohibition, when lunches were liquid, before Lady Gaga, when we dug the Dead, before “join the conversation,” when things were disjointed, before Facebook, when there was Camelot, before reality shows, when things were real, yes, I believe we got by just the same.

Before “I’ll call you back,” when people made dates, before algorithms, when there was aimlessness, before attitude, when there was apathy, before YouTube, when there was you and me, before Gore-Tex, in the damp, before sweat-resistant fabric, when sweat was sexy, before high-tech sneakers, as we walked the walk, before remotes, in the era of distance, I’m sure we managed just the same.

Before “carbon neutral,” when carbon copied, before synching, when we lived unprompted, before multiplatform, when pen met paper, before profiling, when there was privacy, before cloud computing, when life was earthy, before a billion bits of distraction, when there were lulls, before “silent cars,” when there was silence, before virtual community, in a world with borders, before cut-and-paste, to the tap of the Selectra, before the megabyte, in disorder, before information overload, when streets were for wandering, before “sustainable,” in the heretofore, before CCTV, in invisibility, before networks, in the galaxy of strangeness, my impression, unless I’m wrong, is that we got by quite O.K.

Before I forget, while there is time, for the years pass and we don’t get younger, before the wiring accelerates, while I can pause, let me summon it back, that fragment from somewhere, that phrase that goes: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production ... and with them the whole relations of society.”

Yes, that was Marx, when he was right, before he went wrong, when he observed, before he imagined, with terrible consequences for the 20th century.

And if back in that century — back when exactly? — in the time before the tremendous technological leap, in the time of mists and drabness and dreams, if back then, without passwords, we managed just the same, even in black and white, and certainly not in hi-def, or even 3-D, how strange to think we had to change everything or we would not be managing at all.
The Soft Side
By DAVID BROOKS

By now everyone has an image of Rahm Emanuel. He’s the profanity-spewing political street-fighter. He’s the guy who once sent a dead fish to a political opponent. This past week, “Saturday Night Live” spoofed him as an abrasive pit bull. “On Friday, the White House released Rahm Emanuel back into the wild,” Seth Meyers joked during “Weekend Update.”

This image doesn’t square with the guy I’ve covered for the past decade. I began interviewing Emanuel when he was in the House, while he was building the Democratic majority. Then when he moved to the Obama White House, I was one of the many people on his long, long call list. He’d call a few times a week. The calls lasted from 45 seconds to two minutes, enough time for him to tout some speech or policy initiative, answer a question and then be off.

Every conversation, short or long, was a headlong rush. Rahm is always passionately promoting some policy idea. In Congress during the Bush era, he was pushing programs to boost America’s saving rate (which actually would have been a good thing in that debt-fueled decade). Over the past couple years he’s been boosting community colleges, education reform, innovation and job-creation schemes.

He’s like an urban cowboy poking his herd of cattle with a stick. Every head in the herd gets a poke every day. He’s willing to be a relentless noodge to keep the herd moving in the right direction.

In my experience, Rahm’s reputation for profanity and rage is vastly overstated. On several occasions I thought I was finally going to see him on the rampage. In March 2009, I wrote a column arguing that Obama was not the fiscal moderate he pretended to be. Rahm asked me to stop by his office that afternoon. I came wearing my asbestos underwear, but Rahm calmly made his case with graphs and charts.

Last year, I wrote a column opposing health care reform. First, I acknowledged the arguments for the bill. Then I criticized the lack of cost control. Rahm called that morning, but with a smile in his voice: “Hey, I loved your first four paragraphs!”

Over the summer, I wrote a tough column wondering if Obama had the tenacity to fight a long war in Afghanistan. That week, I ran into Rahm at a Bruce Springsteen concert. He was clearly angry and would barely shake my hand. “That column. ...” he said, icily, and then walked away.

That was as florid as I’ve seen him get. Far from being a head-busting capo, I’ve found him to be more thick-skinned about criticism than most people I write about.

Over all, Rahm is a warmhearted Machiavellian. On the one hand, he is a professional strategist. He surveys the landscape and figures out how he can push or maneuver people into getting what he wants. He ran a disciplined White House.

On the other hand, he is not one of these cold-eyed tacticians who is always hedging his bets. He’s not one of these butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth guys.

Any smart pat of butter would spot him at 100 yards and flee. That’s because Rahm is completely in touch with his affections and aversions. He knows who and what he loves — Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the city of Chicago — and there is nothing hedged about his devotion to those things. He may be a professional tactician, but he speaks the language of loyalty and commitment, not the language of calculations and self-interest.

I’m writing this appreciation of Rahm because success has a way of depersonalizing its beneficiaries. From the moment kids are asked to subdue their passions in order to get straight As to the time they arrive at a company and are asked to work 70 hours a week climbing the ladder, people have an incentive to suppress their passions and prune their souls.

That’s especially true in Washington, a town with more than its fair share of former hall monitors, a place where politicians engage in these pantomime gestures of faux friendship and become promotable, hollowed-out caricatures of themselves.

But Rahm has somehow managed to remain true to his whole and florid self. He’s managed to preserve the patois of Chicago, the earthy freneticism of his Augie March upbringing.

He made some big mistakes: Trying to use the financial crisis as an opportunity to do everything at once. He can sometimes be harsh. But he has generally lived up to his ample heart. He gave up the chance to be speaker of the House because of his affection for Obama. He gave up the chief of staff job and returned to Chicago because that city is in his bones.

I interview a lot of politicians. Rahm is unique. Flawed like all of us, he is a full human being, rich and fertile from the inside out.

Wayne Winterrowd
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Wayne Winterrowd once told me, in an e-mail, that he thought of me when autumn brought pig-killing time around. I was grateful for the thought. And if I ever find myself covering rosebushes with evergreen boughs — while wearing crampons — I will certainly think of Wayne, who reported doing just that a couple of years ago. Like many gardeners around the world, I will be mourning Wayne for a good long time. He died on Sept. 17, age 68, at home in Vermont where he lived with his spouse and co-author, Joe Eck.

Some gardens matter for their design or for the collection of plants they contain. But North Hill — Wayne and Joe’s garden — mattered for another reason, too: the spirit in which it was inhabited. It lay on unexpected ground — a steep slope with a runnel of water working its way downhill — so it managed to be many gardens, layered informally one above the other. I always felt it was my job to get lost, if only to discover, once again, how a garden so wild at the edges could also hide so much hospitality. Wayne was a southerner, from Shreveport, La., and to him I attribute — because he voiced it most readily — the feeling of graciousness at North Hill, the sense that the garden itself was the map of a shared life.

“I have been an agrarian all my life, by instinct,” Wayne told me once. That is the spirit in all the books he wrote with Joe, but especially in “Living Seasonally,” which is one of the most important books I’ve ever read about living with the land. It’s about the rituals of seasonal wealth from the garden, about the convergence of esthetics and appetite.
It was impossible to visit North Hill without feeling what an occasion the visit was, and I remember well how affectionately slow the cadence of departure seemed, evening gathering, small-town Vermont lying just down the road, Wayne and Joe waving goodbye yet again.

Scholarly Work, Without All the Footnotes
By ARTHUR S. BRISBANE

A RECENT Sunday Magazine article by the linguist Guy Deutscher seemed to fascinate readers, moving quickly onto The Times’s “most e-mailed” list and staying there for several days.

It is easy to understand why the article — published on Aug. 29 under the headline “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” — was so popular: it was one of those interesting science stories that capture the attention of the general reader without bogging down too heavily in scholarly detail. But it soon would draw less favorable attention, this from readers who questioned the originality of the work.

The article, adapted from Mr. Deutscher’s new book, “Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages,” delved into ways that language itself actually organizes habits of mind and influences perception in different cultures.

Mr. Deutscher, an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, offered intriguing examples from the realms of gender, space and color.

Because the word “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, he noted, Germans “tend to think of them as more slender or elegant.” Spaniards, meanwhile, attribute more “manly properties” to them, like strength.

Mr. Deutscher cited the linguist Stephen Levinson in a description of the unusual way that an Australian aboriginal group understands spatial direction: everything is spoken of in terms of the cardinal points on the compass, and the words for “left” and “right” aren’t used at all. These aborigines, amazingly, know at all times which way is north, south, east and west.

A speaker of this language, Mr. Deutscher wrote, might warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot,” or tell you he left something “on the southern edge of the western table.”

Such references seemed too familiar to some scholars. They complained to The Times of a significant “overlap” between Mr. Deutscher’s article and some recent writings by Lera Boroditsky, a Stanford University psychology professor and researcher. Ms. Boroditsky had written two articles on the same subject, one in June 2009 for the Web site edge.org and another for The Wall Street Journal just this past July. Alexander Star, the magazine’s deputy editor, who commissioned and edited the piece, said he and Mr. Deutscher discussed the criticism but discounted it because “we knew there was nothing untoward about how we put our work together.” Mr. Star said he had not read either of Ms. Boroditsky’s articles prior to publishing Mr. Deutscher’s.

The complaints persisted, however, including heated commentary on blogs. On Sept. 11, Ms. Boroditsky herself weighed in, writing to me to say that Mr. Deutscher should have credited her and that his article exhibited “an unacceptable scale of borrowing.”

Ms. Boroditsky is an established scholar who does her own field research and has been published in both the popular press and scholarly journals. The essence of her complaint was that Mr. Deutscher’s article focused on the same three subject areas that she has used repeatedly in her work — gender, space and color — and used similar examples.

Indeed, as she and bloggers noted, her recent articles and Mr. Deutscher’s did overlap in numerous ways. Ms. Boroditsky’s edge.org piece made the same point about feminine German bridges and masculine Spanish ones. And in both that article and her recent one in The Wall Street Journal, she used the quote “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” to describe an aboriginal Australian people’s distinctive language for direction.

Mr. Deutscher defended his work. He said he did not read either of Ms. Boroditsky’s articles before producing his book adaptation for The Times. Rather, he said, the specific examples and the general topic areas were drawn from a deep well of research by others. He and Ms. Boroditsky were treading the same ground because that’s where previous scholarship had been focused, he said. Mr. Deutscher noted that he had credited Mr. Levinson, the earlier researcher, with the “big ant just north of your foot” example, and wondered why Ms. Boroditsky had not done the same.

I looked for an outside perspective. Michael Silverstein, a professor of anthropology, linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, gave me an iterative history of space, time and gender as topics covered by researchers in this field. The short version is that the ground is well-traveled. Each new contribution arrives on the shoulders of a preceding one.

(Even the examples have nebulous origins. Ms. Boroditsky’s ants, it turns out, were different from Mr. Levinson’s ants, having their origin in different research involving a different aboriginal group conducted by Alice Gaby, a University of California-Berkeley linguist.)

In dealing with these issues, Mr. Silverstein said, “one could not avoid writing about these particular substantive phenomena and these particular lines of research, since that is what has fired folks up” — the “folks” being the researchers themselves.

The problem here, I conclude, is not one of intellectual theft. It’s really a problem of journalism itself.

The rules of attribution and credit in the domain of scholarship are established, strict and well-understood. Journalism, by contrast, lacks a formal code for citing scholarly work. When scholarly subject matter traverses the border into popular journalism, it simply isn’t clear how much attribution is enough.

Magazine articles, in particular, need to flow easily, and nothing kills a sentence like crediting a researcher who comes with a long title. And footnotes aren’t the answer, either. As Mr. Star, the editor of the Deutscher article, put it, “If you are citing a great number of people, at some point aesthetics and space concerns do figure as a factor.”

Peter W. Wood, an anthropologist who is president of the National Association of Scholars, observes that scholars are filling a rising appetite for science writing in the popular press and that the protocols for giving credit there remain murky.

“A scholar-beware label might be needed here,” he said.

Ideally, writers of such articles would have the opportunity to credit fully the researchers who have made contributions. John Leavitt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal, said that Mr. Deutscher might have credited Ms. Boroditsky for her work in the area of gender and language, given her significance in the field.

Space concerns in the popular press make this kind of extensive scholarly citation impractical. But I would suggest that The Times make much better use of its Web site to supplement articles like these, using links and citations in an electronic setting where space concerns don’t exist.

Some will argue that it is unsound to provide different versions of journalism in print and online. I would say instead that an electronic supplement to stories like this one is a good use of the digital medium’s distinct properties, and one that offers a solution to a significant problem for scientific subjects in the popular press.
Found in Translation
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

AS the author of “Las Horas,” “Die Stunden” and “De Uren” — ostensibly the Spanish, German and Dutch translations of my book “The Hours," but actually unique works in their own right — I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation. That is, translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well. “Translation” as a human act is, like so many human acts, a far more complicated proposition than it may initially seem to be.

Let’s take as an example one of the most famous lines in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” That, as I suspect you know, is the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” We still recognize that line, after more than 150 years.

Still. “Call me Ishmael.” Three simple words. What’s the big deal?

For one thing, they possess that most fundamental but elusive of all writerly qualities: authority. As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.

It’s a little like waltzing with a new partner for the first time. Anyone who is able to waltz, or fox-trot, or tango, or perform any sort of dance that requires physical contact with a responsive partner, knows that there is a first moment, on the dance floor, when you assess, automatically, whether the new partner in question can dance at all — and if he or she can in fact dance, how well. You know almost instantly whether you have a novice on your hands, and that if you do, you’ll have to do a fair amount of work just to keep things moving.

Authority is a rather mysterious quality, and it’s almost impossible to parse it for its components. The translator’s first task, then, is to re-render a certain forcefulness that can’t quite be described or explained.

Although the words “Call me Ishmael” have force and confidence, force and confidence alone aren’t enough. “Idiot, read this” has force and confidence too, but is less likely to produce the desired effect. What else do Melville’s words possess that “Idiot, read this” lack?

They have music. Here’s where the job of translation gets more difficult. Language in fiction is made up of equal parts meaning and music. The sentences should have rhythm and cadence, they should engage and delight the inner ear. Ideally, a sentence read aloud, in a foreign language, should still sound like something, even if the listener has no idea what it is he or she is being told.

Let’s try to forget that the words “Call me Ishmael” mean anything, and think about how they sound.

Listen to the vowel sounds: ah, ee, soft i, aa. Four of them, each different, and each a soft, soothing note. Listen too to the way the line is bracketed by consonants. We open with the hard c, hit the l at the end of “call,” and then, in a lovely act of symmetry, hit the l at the end of “Ishmael.” “Call me Arthur” or “Call me Bob” are adequate but not, for musical reasons, as satisfying.

Most readers, of course, wouldn’t be able to tell you that they respond to those three words because they are soothing and symmetrical, but most readers register the fact unconsciously. You could probably say that meaning is the force we employ, and music is the seduction. It is the translator’s job to reproduce the force as well as the music.

“Chiamami Ismaele.”

That is the Italian version of Melville’s line, and the translator has done a nice job. I can tell you, as a reader who doesn’t speak Italian, that those two words do in fact sound like something, independent of their meaning. Although different from the English, we have a new, equally lovely progression of vowel sounds — ee-a, ah, ee, a, ee — and those three m’s, nicely spaced.

If you’re translating “Moby-Dick,” that’s one sentence down, approximately a million more to go.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.

Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.

The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.

A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”

This brings us to the question of the relationship between writers and their readers, where another act of translation occurs.

I teach writing, and one of the first questions I ask my students every semester is, who are you writing for? The answer, 9 times out of 10, is that they write for themselves. I tell them that I understand — that I go home every night, make an elaborate cake and eat it all by myself. By which I mean that cakes, and books, are meant to be presented to others. And further, that books (unlike cakes) are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers, albeit separated by time and space.

I remind them, as well, that no one wants to read their stories. There are a lot of other stories out there, and by now, in the 21st century, there’s been such an accumulation of literature that few of us will live long enough to read all the great stories and novels, never mind the pretty good ones. Not to mention the fact that we, as readers, are busy.

We have large and difficult lives. We have, variously, jobs to do, spouses and children to attend to, errands to run, friends to see; we need to keep up with current events; we have gophers in our gardens; we are taking extension courses in French or wine tasting or art appreciation; we are looking for evidence that our lovers are cheating on us; we are wondering why in the world we agreed to have 40 people over on Saturday night; we are worried about money and global warming; we are TiVo-ing five or six of our favorite TV shows.

What the writer is saying, essentially, is this: Make room in all that for this. Stop what you’re doing and read this. It had better be apparent, from the opening line, that we’re offering readers something worth their while.

I should admit that when I was as young as my students are now, I too thought of myself as writing either for myself, for some ghostly ideal reader, or, at my most grandiose moments, for future generations. My work suffered as a result.

It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.

Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”

“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.

She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”

“Yep.”

Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”

Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.

I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.

It also helped me to realize that the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.

One of the more remarkable aspects of writing and publishing is that no two readers ever read the same book. We will all feel differently about a movie or a play or a painting or a song, but we have all undeniably seen or heard the same movie, play, painting or song. They are physical entities. A painting by Velázquez is purely and simply itself, as is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell. If you walk into the appropriate gallery in the Prado Museum, or if someone puts a Joni Mitchell disc on, you will see the painting or hear the music. You have no choice.

WRITING, however, does not exist without an active, consenting reader. Writing requires a different level of participation. Words on paper are abstractions, and everyone who reads words on paper brings to them a different set of associations and images. I have vivid mental pictures of Don Quixote, Anna Karenina and Huckleberry Finn, but I feel confident they are not identical to the images carried in the mind of anyone else.

Helen was, clearly, not reading the same “Crime and Punishment” I was. She wasn’t looking for an existential work of genius. She was looking for a good mystery, and she read Dostoyevsky with that thought in mind. I don’t blame her for it. I like to imagine that Dostoyevsky wouldn’t, either.

What the reader is doing, then, is translating the words on the pages into his or her own private, imaginary lexicon, according to his or her interests and needs and levels of comprehension.

Here, then, is the full process of translation. At one point we have a writer in a room, struggling to approximate the impossible vision that hovers over his head. He finishes it, with misgivings. Some time later we have a translator struggling to approximate the vision, not to mention the particulars of language and voice, of the text that lies before him. He does the best he can, but is never satisfied. And then, finally, we have the reader. The reader is the least tortured of this trio, but the reader too may very well feel that he is missing something in the book, that through sheer ineptitude he is failing to be a proper vessel for the book’s overarching vision.

I don’t mean to suggest that writer, translator and reader are all engaged in a mass exercise in disappointment. How depressing would that be? And untrue.

And still. We, as a species, are always looking for cathedrals made of fire, and part of the thrill of reading a great book is the promise of another yet to come, a book that may move us even more deeply, raise us even higher. One of the consolations of writing books is the seemingly unquenchable conviction that the next book will be better, will be bigger and bolder and more comprehensive and truer to the lives we live. We exist in a condition of hope, we love the beauty and truth that come to us, and we do our best to tamp down our doubts and disappointments.

We are on a quest, and are not discouraged by our collective suspicion that the perfection we look for in art is about as likely to turn up as is the Holy Grail. That is one of the reasons we, I mean we humans, are not only the creators, translators and consumers of literature, but also its subjects.
At Risk From the Womb
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Some people think we’re shaped primarily by genes. Others believe that the environment we grow up in is most important. But now evidence is mounting that a third factor is also critical: our uterine environment before we’re even born.

Researchers are finding indications that obesity, diabetes and mental illness among adults are all related in part to what happened in the womb decades earlier.

One of the first careful studies in this field found that birth weight (a proxy for nutrition in the womb) helped predict whether an adult would suffer from heart disease half a century later. Scrawny babies were much more likely to suffer heart problems in middle age.

That study, published in 1989, provoked skepticism at first. But now an array of research confirms that the fetal period is a crucial stage of development that affects physiology decades later.

Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.

The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.

“Given the odds stacked against poor women and their fetuses, the most effective antipoverty program might be one that starts before birth,” writes Annie Murphy Paul in a terrific and important new book called “Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.”

Another groundbreaking and provocative book this year makes the same case: “More than Genes,” by Dan Agin, a neuroscientist at the University of Chicago. Both offer a new window into the unexpected forces that shape us.

One study in this field, by a Columbia University economist, Douglas Almond, looked at children who were born after the great flu pandemic of 1918. The pandemic lasted only about five months and infected about a third of pregnant women in America, so Mr. Almond compared those who had been exposed to it while inside their mothers with others born just before or after.

Ms. Paul quotes Mr. Almond as concluding, “People who were in utero during the pandemic did worse, on average, on just about every socioeconomic outcome recorded.” They were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school, 15 percent more likely to be poor, and 20 percent more likely to have heart disease in old age.

Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious. Studies show that children who were in utero during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War of 1967 were more likely to have schizophrenia diagnosed as adults. And The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that Chinese born during the terrible famine from 1959 to 1961 were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as those born at other times.

As for obesity, Ms. Paul describes several British scientists who fed pregnant rats junk food: doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips and chocolate chip muffins. The offspring of those rats turned out to have a sweet tooth as well: they were more likely to choose junk food when it was offered and ended up 25 percent fatter than rats whose mothers were fed regular rodent chow.

This field of “fetal origins” is still in its infancy, but one implication is that we should be much more careful about exposing pregnant women to toxins, and much quicker to regulate chemicals that are now widely used even though they’ve never even been tested for safety. Professor Agin is particularly eloquent about the potential perils of lead, dioxins, PCBs, radiation and pesticides.

One study looked at Swedish children who were fetuses during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. The radiation exposure was very slight and did not seem to affect their physical health. But their cognitive abilities, especially in math, seemed affected, and they were one-third more likely to fail middle school.

The uncertainty in this field is enormous, but we have learned that a uterus is not a diving bell that insulates its occupant from the world’s perils. Chemicals like thalidomide and DES proved tragic for those exposed to them while in their mothers’ wombs. And it’s now high time to take a closer look at unregulated chemicals that envelop us — and may be shaping our progeny for decades to come.
Third Party Rising
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A friend in the U.S. military sent me an e-mail last week with a quote from the historian Lewis Mumford’s book, “The Condition of Man,” about the development of civilization. Mumford was describing Rome’s decline: “Everyone aimed at security: no one accepted responsibility. What was plainly lacking, long before the barbarian invasions had done their work, long before economic dislocations became serious, was an inner go. Rome’s life was now an imitation of life: a mere holding on. Security was the watchword — as if life knew any other stability than through constant change, or any form of security except through a constant willingness to take risks.”

It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine — way, way too close for comfort.

I’ve just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its “inner go.” But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election’s outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing “third parties” to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation’s steady incremental decline.

President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.

But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn’t deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.

Obama probably did the best he could do, and that’s the point. The best our current two parties can produce today — in the wake of the worst existential crisis in our economy and environment in a century — is suboptimal, even when one party had a huge majority. Suboptimal is O.K. for ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. We need to stop waiting for Superman and start building a superconsensus to do the superhard stuff we must do now. Pretty good is not even close to good enough today.

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” said the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Indeed, our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems. We simply will not be able to do the things we need to do as a country to move forward “with all the vested interests that have accrued around these two parties,” added Diamond. “They cannot think about the overall public good and the longer term anymore because both parties are trapped in short-term, zero-sum calculations,” where each one’s gains are seen as the other’s losses.

We have to rip open this two-party duopoly and have it challenged by a serious third party that will talk about education reform, without worrying about offending unions; financial reform, without worrying about losing donations from Wall Street; corporate tax reductions to stimulate jobs, without worrying about offending the far left; energy and climate reform, without worrying about offending the far right and coal-state Democrats; and proper health care reform, without worrying about offending insurers and drug companies.

“If competition is good for our economy,” asks Diamond, “why isn’t it good for our politics?”

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.”
The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell
By FRANK RICH

ALL it took was some 30,000 Republican primary voters in a tiny state to turn Christine O’Donnell into the brightest all-American media meteor since Balloon Boy. For embattled liberals, not to mention the axis of Comedy Central, “Saturday Night Live” and Bill Maher, she’s been pure comic gold for weeks: a bottomless trove of baldfaced lies, radical views and sheer wackiness. True, other American politicians have dismissed evolution as a myth. Some may even have denied joining a coven. But history will always remember her for taking a fearless stand against masturbation, the one national pastime with more fans than baseball.

Yet those laughing now may not have the last laugh in November. O’Donnell’s timely ascent in the election season’s final lap may well prove a godsend for the G.O.P.

At first some Republicans had trouble figuring this out. On primary eve, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee badmouthed O’Donnell’s “disturbing pattern of dishonest behavior.” On election night, Karl Rove belittled her “nutty” pronouncements and “checkered background” on Fox News. But by the morning after, bygones were bygones. The senatorial committee’s chairman, John Cornyn, rewarded O’Donnell’s “dishonest behavior” with an enthusiastic endorsement and a big check. A sweaty Rove reversed himself so fast you’d think he’d been forced to stay up all night listening to Glenn Beck’s greatest hits at top volume in a Roger Ailes re-education camp.

Rove’s flip-flop was no doubt hastened by his own cohort’s assaults on both his ideological purity and masculinity. The blogger Michelle Malkin labeled him an “effete sore loser,” and Sarah Palin publicly instructed him to “buck up.” But surely the larger motive for his retreat was the dawning recognition of just how valuable O’Donnell is to the G.O.P.’s national aspirations in November — even should she ultimately lose her own race in blue Delaware. Whatever her other talents, she’s more than willing to play the role of useful idiot for her party. She gives populist cover to the billionaires and corporate interests that have been steadily annexing the Tea Party movement and busily plotting to cash in their chips if the G.O.P. prevails.

While O’Donnell’s résumé has proved largely fictional, one crucial biographical plotline is true: She has had trouble finding a job, holding on to a home and paying her taxes. In this, at least, she is like many Americans in the Great Recession, including the angry claque that found its voice in the Tea Party. For a G.O.P. that is even more in thrall to big money than the Democrats, she couldn’t be a more perfect decoy.

By latching on to O’Donnell’s growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O’Donnell’s value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of “diversity” over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

O’Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs.

The O’Donnell template, by sharp contrast, is Palin. It was Palin’s endorsement that put O’Donnell on the map, and it’s Palin’s script that O’Donnell is assiduously following. The once obscure governor of Alaska was also tripped up by lies and gaffes when she emerged on the national stage, starting with her misrepresentation of her supposed opposition to “the bridge to nowhere.” But she quickly wove the attacks into a brilliant cloak of martyrdom that positioned her as a fierce small-town opponent of the coasts’ pointy-head elites. O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”

The more O’Donnell is vilified, the bigger the star she becomes, and the more she can reinforce the Tea Party’s preferred narrative as “a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement” (in the recent words of the pundit Charles Krauthammer) populated only by everyday folk upset by big government and the deficit. This airbrushed take has had a surprisingly long life even in some of the nonpartisan press. In a typical example just three weeks ago, the influential publication National Journal delivered a breathless report on how the Tea Party functions as a “headless” movement where “no one gives orders.” To prove the point, a head of the headless Tea Party Patriots vouched that “75 percent of the group’s funding comes from small donations, $20 or less.”

In fact, local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

However much these corporate contributors may share the Tea Party minions’ antipathy toward President Obama, their economic interests hardly overlap. The rank and file Tea Partiers say they oppose government spending and deficits. The billionaires have no problem with federal spending as long as the pork is corporate pork. They, like most Republican leaders in 2008, supported the Bush administration’s Wall Street bailout. They also don’t mind deficits as long as they get their outsize cut of the red ink — $3.8 trillion worth if all the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

But while these billionaires’ selfish interests are in conflict with the Tea Party’s agenda, they are in complete sync with the G.O.P.’s Washington leadership. The Republicans’ new “Pledge to America” promises the $3.8 trillion addition to the deficit and says nothing about serious budget cuts or governmental reforms that might remotely offset it. Surfing the Beltway talk shows last Sunday, you couldn’t find one without a G.O.P. politician adamantly refusing to specify a single program he might cut at, say, the Department of Education (Pell grants?) or the National Institutes of Health (cancer research?). And that’s just the small change. Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else.

They are acing it, these guys. Election Day is now only a month away. The demoralized Democrats are held hostage by the unemployment numbers. And along comes this marvelous gift out of nowhere, Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party everywoman, who just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge. By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from “Fox & Friends.”

A Man for All Factions
By ROSS DOUTHAT

For decades, the Democratic Party was torn by civil war.

On one side was the liberal left — populist in economics and dovish on foreign policy, in favor of lavish spending programs and suspicious of big business, and hostile to any idea that seemed to give an inch to the conservatives. On the other were the moderates and centrists — pro-market and pro-Wall Street, inclined to tiptoe rightward on issues like crime and welfare, and hawkish about deficits and dictators alike.

In the 1980s, these two factions vied for the opportunity to lose to Ronald Reagan. In the 1990s, they fought over the direction of the Clinton administration. In the 2000s, they feuded over whether to support the Iraq war.

But in George W. Bush’s second term, peace broke out. In part, this was because Democrats came to hate Bush so intensely that every other consideration faded into insignificance. In part, it was because the two camps converged on policy: the liberal left largely accepted that it had lost Clinton-era arguments over Nafta and welfare reform, the centrists mostly admitted that they’d been wrong about Iraq, and the two sides found common ground on health care, global warming and income inequality.

But peace was also possible because Barack Obama emerged to bridge the Democratic divide. The left initially wanted John Edwards as the 2008 nominee; the centrists wanted Hillary Clinton. But Obama united the party by persuading both factions that he was really on their side.

The left looked at him and saw a community organizer and Hyde Park intellectual who had been against the Iraq war before being antiwar was fashionable. Of course he was one of them!

The moderates listened to him and heard a postpartisan healer who promised to work with Republicans, cut middle-class taxes and send more troops to Afghanistan. Obviously he was a centrist at heart!

Once campaigning gave way to governing, it was inevitable that one faction or the other would be disappointed. But lately, Obama has managed the more difficult feat of alienating both of them at once.

The party’s centrists, from Blue Dog Democrats to Wall Street, insist that he’s turned out to be far more liberal than they expected. The health care bill was too expensive. The deficits are too big. He’s been too hard on business interests, and on Israel. And what happened to bipartisanship?

On the left, meanwhile, Obama is deemed a disappointment for all the things he hasn’t done. The stimulus should have been bigger. The financial reforms should have been tougher. He should have withdrawn from Afghanistan. He should have taken the fight to the Republicans, instead of letting them obstruct.

Both these arguments are self-serving, of course — a way for activists on both sides to imply, none too subtly, that the Democrats’ dispiriting poll numbers are all the other faction’s fault.

But the widespread appeal of these dueling critiques has left Obama increasingly isolated. And the White House’s attempts to preserve his above-the-fray mystique have backfired: they’ve made the president seem like an ideological enigma, and created the impression that he’s a bystander to his own achievements.

That impression took hold during the debates over health care and financial reform, where left-wing and centrist Democrats alike often complained that they didn’t know exactly where the White House stood. It’s been reinforced lately by Bob Woodward’s portrait of Obama’s Afghanistan deliberations, in which the hawks in the Pentagon and the doves in the Democratic base often seem like more powerful actors than the president himself.

As a result, what was once Obama’s great strength has been transformed into a weakness: neither the center nor the left really trusts him, and neither is prepared to stand by him at a time of crisis.

So the president finds himself alone. Many of the administration’s highest-profile centrists — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers, Rahm Emanuel — are either gone or on their way out. The left is wallowing in angst and disappointment. The White House spent recent weeks hectoring progressives about the need to turn out in November, but all these efforts earned was the mockery of Jon Stewart.

Can Obama rebuild his coalition? Perhaps, but not the way he did the first time. He won the White House by being all things to all Democrats (and quite a few independents and even Republicans as well), by making each faction see its own values reflected in his candidacy.

But the days of soaring above the grubbiness of politics are over. If Obama wants to save his presidency, he may have to do it the old-fashioned way: not by transcending his party’s divisions, but by uniting his supporters around their common fears.