Wednesday, November 3, 2010

nytm text

Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom
By SARA CORBETT

One morning last winter I watched a middle-school teacher named Al Doyle give a lesson, though not your typical lesson. This was New York City, a noncharter public school in an old building on a nondescript street near Gramercy Park, inside an ordinary room that looked a lot like all the other rooms around it, with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors and steam-driven radiators that hissed and clanked endlessly.

Doyle was, at 54, a veteran teacher and had logged 32 years in schools all over Manhattan, where he primarily taught art and computer graphics. In the school, which was called Quest to Learn, he was teaching a class, Sports for the Mind, which every student attended three times a week. It was described in a jargony flourish on the school’s Web site as “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” What it was, really, was a class in technology and game design.

The lesson that day was on enemy movement, and the enemy was a dastardly collection of spiky-headed robots roving inside a computer game. The students — a pack of about 20 boisterous sixth graders — were meant to observe how the robots moved, then chart any patterns they saw on pieces of graph paper. Later in the class period, working on laptops, they would design their own games. For the moment, though, they were spectators.

Doyle, who is thin and gray-haired with a neatly trimmed goatee, sat at a desk in the center of the room, his eyeglasses perched low on his nose, his fingers frenetically tapping the keyboard of a MacBook. The laptop was connected to a wall-mounted interactive whiteboard, giving the students who were sprawled on the floor in front of it an excellent view of his computer screen. Which was a good thing, because at least as they saw it, Doyle was going to die an embarrassing death without their help. Doyle had 60 seconds to steer a little bubble-shaped sprite — a toddling avatar dressed in a royal blue cape and matching helmet — through a two-dimensional maze without bumping into the proliferating robots. In order to win, he would need to gobble up some number of yellow reward points, Pac-Man style.

“Go right! Go right! Go right!” the students were shouting. “Now down, down, down, downdowndown!” A few had lifted themselves onto their knees and were pounding invisible keyboards in front of them. “Whoa!” they yelled in unison, some of them instinctively ducking as Doyle’s sprite narrowly avoided a patrolling enemy.

Beauchamp, a round-faced boy wearing a dark sweatshirt, watched Doyle backtrack to snap up more points and calmly offered a piece of advice. “That extra movement cost you some precious time, Al,” he said, sounding almost professorial. “There are more points up there than what you need to finish.”

“How much time do I have?” Doyle asked.

“Nineteen seconds.”

“Thanks,” said Doyle, his eyes not leaving the screen. He added, “See, us older people, we don’t have the peripheral vision to check the time because we didn’t grow up with these games.”

For a few seconds, it was quiet. Doyle pinged through a row of reward points and then, hitting a little cul-de-sac in the maze, he paused. His avatar’s tiny yellow feet pedaled uselessly against a wall. The students began to yowl. A girl named Shianne pressed her hand to her forehead in faux anguish.

“Go! Go! Turn around. Don’t slow down. What are you waiting for?” someone called out.

“How much time do I have left?”

“Thirteen seconds!”

Doyle smiled. “All the time in the world,” he said, before taking his sprite on a deliberate detour to get even more reward points. The move, like a premature touchdown dance, put his students in agony.

“To the goal! To the goal! Al, run to the goal!”

And as the clock wound down and the students hollered and the steam radiator in the corner let out another long hiss, Doyle’s little blue self rounded a final corner, waited out a passing robot and charged into the goal at the end of the maze with less than two seconds to spare. This caused a microriot in the classroom. Cheers erupted. Fists pumped. A few kids lay back on the floor as if knocked out by the drama. Several made notes on their graph paper. Doyle leaned back in his chair. Had he taught anything? Had they learned anything? It depended, really, on how you wanted to think about teaching and learning.

WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels our world became the source and organizing principle of our children’s learning? What if, instead of seeing school the way we’ve known it, we saw it for what our children dreamed it might be: a big, delicious video game?

It is a radical proposition, sure. But during an era in which just about everything is downloadable and remixable, when children are frequently more digitally savvy than the adults around them, it’s perhaps not so crazy to think that schools — or at least one school, anyway — might try to remix our assumptions about how to reach and educate those children. What makes Quest to Learn unique is not so much that it has been loaded with laptops or even that it bills itself expressly as a home for “digital kids,” but rather that it is the brainchild of a professional game designer named Katie Salen. Salen, like many people interested in education, has spent a lot of time thinking about whether there is a way to make learning feel simultaneously more relevant to students and more connected to the world beyond school. And the answer, as she sees it, lies in games.

Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration. Salen, a professor of design and technology at Parsons the New School for Design, also directs a research-based organization called Institute of Play, which examines the connections between games and learning. Working with Robert Torres, a learning scientist who is a former school principal, and a small team of curriculum and game designers, Salen spent two years planning Quest to Learn in conjunction with the education-reform group New Visions for Public Schools. Her work was financed by a research grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which is pouring $50 million into exploring the possibilities of digital media and learning in a variety of settings nationwide. The school was approved by New York City’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein, as one of a handful of “demonstration sites” for innovative technology-based instructional methods and is part of a larger effort on the city’s part to create and experiment with new models for schools.

Quest to Learn is now beginning its second year, with about 145 sixth and seventh graders, all of whom were admitted by a districtwide lottery. (The intention is to add a grade level each year until it is a 6th-through-12th-grade school; Quest to Learn recently relocated to a larger but equally unmodern building in Chelsea.) Operating on a public-school budget but powered by additional grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others, it is a well-financed and carefully watched educational experiment concerning children, video games and the thrumming, largely unexplored force field between them.

Salen and Torres are at the forefront of a small but increasingly influential group of education specialists who believe that going to school can and should be more like playing a game, which is to say it could be made more participatory, more immersive and also, well, fun. Nearly every aspect of life at Quest to Learn is thus designed to be gamelike, even when it doesn’t involve using a computer. Students don’t receive grades but rather achieve levels of expertise, denoted on their report cards as “pre-novice,” “novice,” “apprentice,” “senior” and “master.” They are enlisted to do things like defeat villains and lend a hand to struggling aliens, mostly by working in groups to overcome multifaceted challenges, all created by a collection of behind-the-scenes game designers. The principles are similar to those used in problem-based learning, a more established educational method in which students collaborate to tackle broad, open-ended problems, with a teacher providing guidance though not necessarily a lot of instruction. But at Quest to Learn, the problems have been expertly aerated with fantasy.

Once it has been worked over by game designers, a lesson doesn’t look like a lesson anymore. It is now a quest. And while students at the school are put through the usual rigors of studying pre-algebra, basic physics, ancient civilizations and writing, they do it inside interdisciplinary classes with names like Codeworlds — a hybrid of math and English class — where the quests blend skills from different subject areas. Students have been called upon to balance the budget and brainstorm business ideas for an imaginary community called Creepytown, for example, and to design architectural blueprints for a village of bumbling little creatures called the Troggles. There are elements of the school’s curriculum that look familiar — nightly independent reading assignments, weekly reading-comprehension packets and plenty of work with pencils and paper — and others that don’t. Quest to Learn students record podcasts, film and edit videos, play video games, blog avidly and occasionally receive video messages from aliens.

They also spend significant time building their own games. Sometimes they design board games using cardboard and markers and ungodly amounts of tape. Most of the time, though, they invent games for the computer. Salen’s theory goes like this: building a game — even the kind of simple game a sixth grader might build — is equivalent to building a miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, computer programming, deductive reasoning and critical thinking skills. If children can build, play and understand games that work, it’s possible that someday they will understand and design systems that work. And the world is full of complicated systems.

Does this educational approach actually work? And is it something that can, or should, find its way into schools in other parts of the country? As we fret about the perils of multitasking and digital distraction in adult life, the question arises: should a school provide practice with or relief from those things? It is still too early to say. But the introduction of Quest to Learn is tied to a continuing and sometimes heated national dialogue about what skills today’s learners most need to prepare them for success in a rapidly evolving, digitally mediated world. There is, at least, growing support for experimentation: in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet “aggressive goals” and “grand” challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a “new kind of R.& D. for education” that encourages bold ideas and “high risk/high gain” endeavors — possibly even a school built around aliens, villains and video games.

SALEN IS 43, reddish-haired, hyperorganized and a quirky dresser. Some would consider her an unlikely prophet when it comes to education. Among Quest to Learn students, she is clearly beloved. Unlike most authority figures they know, she is a gifted player of Guitar Hero and has been spotted playing her Nintendo DSi on the subway. Until a few years ago she knew little about educational pedagogy and was instead immersed in doing things like converting an ice-cream truck into a mobile karaoke unit that traveled around San Jose, Calif., with a man dressed as a squirrel dispensing free frozen treats and encouraging city residents to pick up a microphone and belt out tunes. This was a community-building sort of game — or as Salen describes it, “an interactive play-based experience” — as was the race she helped design in Minneapolis and St. Paul, in which randomly organized groups of people carried 25-foot-high inflatable playing pieces modeled after those used in the board game Sorry through the streets of the cities.

A game, as Salen sees it, is really just a “designed experience,” in which a participant is motivated to achieve a goal while operating inside a prescribed system of boundaries and rules. In this way, school itself is one giant designed experience. It could be viewed, in fact, as the biggest and most important game any child will ever play. To this end, Quest to Learn has three full-time game designers supporting the work of the school’s 11 teachers — a ratio that reflects a trend more familiar to the business world, where designers and design-thinking have ascended to new and voguish heights.

Salen, like many designers, views things in terms of their ideal potential and also the physical space they occupy. She is thus less apt to refer to a school as “school” but rather as a “learning space” or a “discovery space” or sometimes as a “possibility space.” She and her colleagues are wrapped up in the idea that technology is doing for learning what it has done for pretty much every other aspect of living, which is to say that it has dismantled the walls between spaces. As anyone who has ever checked e-mail from a bathroom stall or browsed eBay from a chairlift can attest, what once occurred in just one space now happens in practically every space. This has revolutionized design, media, most workplaces and especially the lives of children, who routinely tap into vast social and information pools outside school. Yet, generally speaking, it has hardly touched public education.

The traditional school structure strikes Salen as “weird.” “You go to a math class, and that is the only place math is happening, and you are supposed to learn math just in that one space,” she told me one day, sitting in the small room at the school that served as Quest to Learn’s operational headquarters. She was dressed in a purple skirt with a hot pink scarf knotted around her neck. “There’s been this assumption that school is the only place that learning is happening, that everything a kid is supposed to know is delivered between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., and it happens in the confines of a building,” she said. “But the fact is that kids are doing a lot of interesting learning outside of school. We acknowledge that, and we are trying to bring that into their learning here.”

WAITING IN THE HALLWAY LINE to go into Sports for the Mind class one day last winter, I met a boy named Kai Goree. He was dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. He had a puckish mouth, vivid brown eyes and short dark hair, pieces of which had been dyed in vibrant shingles of blue and green, not unlike what you might expect to find on the roof of a fairy-tale house.

Kai was 11. He sometimes got into trouble with teachers for talking too much. In the next 10 minutes, as we wandered into class and found seats and waited for everybody else to settle in, plus a few minutes beyond that, Kai relayed the following bits of information: he lived with his parents and older brother in an apartment on East 56th Street. He was a huge fan of professional wrestling. At home he sometimes filmed and edited his own wrestling-­news commentaries or demonstrated wrestling moves on a giant plush gorilla he had named Green Gangsta. Then he put them on YouTube, where he had several personal channels. At home, his family had a “very awesome big computer.” He also had an Android phone, but at that point was lusting after a Flip camera and a MacBook as well. He preferred OS X, but his dad, alas, was “a die-hard Windows fan,” so the prospects for a Mac were unclear. If I was interested, I could follow him on Twitter. (Sample post from Kai: “I AM SO ANGRY. My mom is not letting me get a coolatta from dunkin donuts…”) He used to have a blog, but it took too much time so he dropped it.

What he cared about most was games. “Games and games and games,” he said. He had been playing games since he was about 18 months old, when his mother, who is a college professor, introduced him to a computer game called Reader Rabbit, intended to teach literacy skills. Like many of his friends, as he grew, he migrated from educational computer games to hand-held games to the Xbox 360.

At the start of middle school, Kai was almost a full decade into his digital life. This might have put him slightly ahead of his peers, but also, arguably, it made him more like the sixth grader of the near future. Research shows that, on average, children who have access to computers have mastered pointing and clicking with a mouse by the time they are 3½. They are also, thanks in part to mobile-phone apps, playing more games earlier in life. According to research by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, an arm of the Sesame Workshop that explores the educational potential of interactive media, 60 percent of the top-selling iPhone apps on the education store are made for toddlers and preschoolers.

In the evenings, once he met the requirements for parental face time and homework, Kai could be found riding an armored dune buggy around a post-apocalyptic African landscape, blasting his machine gun at squads of alien jackals (Halo 3) or catching and juking for a touchdown (Madden NFL 09) or maybe adding wikki wikki scratches to a Jay-Z tune (DJ Hero). Sometimes he fired up the family Wii and did virtually assisted yoga. I came to learn that Kai could dissect, analyze and recommend video games with the acuity of a French sommelier. He was waiting anxiously, he said, to hear back from “some people at Lucas” who may or may not use him to beta test a multiplayer Star Wars game that wasn’t yet on the market.

Kai’s passion for games was unusual, but only a little. Earlier this year, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a national survey in which 60 percent of children 8 to 18 reported that a typical day included playing games on hand-held or console devices. Their average daily investment was about two hours. According to Kaiser’s data, the percentage of children playing digital games has increased by more than 50 percent in the last 10 years, and the amount of time they spend playing games has almost doubled. This follows research showing that the more time children spend playing video games, the less time they spend on homework. For educators, it’s a sorry equation and one that mirrors a larger paradox when it comes to the divergent and often competing paths of children and their schools.

Even as technology spending in K-12 public education has risen steadily in the last 20 years, student performance — as measured by test results — has improved only incrementally. Meanwhile, children are proving to be wildly adaptive when it comes to using media outside school. They are fervently making YouTube videos, piloting avatars through complex game scenarios, sampling music, lighting up social networks and inventing or retooling (or purists would say, bludgeoning) language so that it better suits the text-messaging pay plan on their cellphones, only to show up to school to find cellphones outlawed, Internet access filtered and computers partitioned off from the rest of the classroom — at least in many cases. Michael H. Levine, who directs the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, acknowledges the conundrum. While there may be sound reasons behind limiting things like Internet browsing and social networking at school, he says, it does little to teach students how to live in the 21st century. It also may contribute to a broader relevancy issue. A 2006 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended, among other things, that educators take steps to “make school more relevant and engaging.”

One way to do this, according to Levine, would be to stop looking so critically at the way children use media and to start exploring how that energy might best be harnessed to help drive them academically. “Kids are literally wearing digital media,” he says. “It’s present everywhere in their lives, except for in the learning environment.” A game-based approach like that used at Quest to Learn shows a lot of promise, he says, in part because it capitalizes on something kids already love. He is careful to note that there will be “huge challenges” in bringing the idea to schools nationally. Clearly, not every community is going to have the money for interactive whiteboards, laptops and PlayStation consoles. Someone will also need to figure out how to train teachers, develop curriculums, establish assessment measures and decide to what extent the focus on systems thinking and design skills used in game-based learning should be tied to common standards — and win over parents. “Odds are it will take a long time,” Levine says. “But I don’t know what the alternative is. My view of it is that we will never get to the holy land in terms of educational performance unless we do something about the engagement factor.”

Often, watching the students and teachers at Quest to Learn, I was struck by how enviably resource-rich the school was, with its game designers and curriculum specialists and a full-time technologist wheeling carts of netbooks up and down the hallway. Salen recently told me that she is hoping to find a corner of the school where she can set up Rock Band — a video game in which users play drums, guitar and bass — “for teachers to unwind around.” The school functioned with the intensity of a high-stakes start-up. It was clear the staff members worked long hours. Still, if Quest to Learn was a “possibility space” — a sort of laboratory for the future of learning — you could also see how those possibilities might feel entirely out of reach to an educator working in a more typically cash-strapped, understaffed school.

Yet with the federal government focusing more on innovation, and given the deep pockets of similarly focused corporate foundations, it may be feasible to implement game-based learning, even modestly, into more schools. But not before it has been proved to work. Quest to Learn students who took federally mandated standardized tests last spring scored on average no better and no worse than other sixth graders in their district, according to Elisa Aragon, the school’s executive director. Valerie Shute, an assessment specialist in the educational psychology and learning systems department at Florida State University, is working on a MacArthur-financed effort to develop and test new assessment measures for Quest to Learn, which are meant to look at progress in areas like systems thinking, teamwork and time management. The federal government is likewise sponsoring an overhaul of standardized tests to be introduced in the 2014-2015 school year, with added emphasis on “higher order” thinking and problem-solving skills.

Quest to Learn’s most innovative piece of technology was set up in a corner of one classroom, looking something like an extremely wired stage set. This was the school’s $18,000 Smallab, which stands for “situated multimedia art learning lab,” a system now being used in a handful of schools and museums around the country. Created by a team led by David Birchfield, a media artist at Arizona State University, it is a 3-D learning environment, or in designspeak, a “hybrid physical-digital space.”

In Smallab sessions, students hold wands and Sputnik-like orbs whose movements are picked up by 12 scaffold-mounted motion-capture cameras and have an immediate effect inside the game space, which is beamed from a nearby computer onto the floor via overhead projector. It is a little bit like playing a multiplayer Wii game while standing inside the game instead of in front of it. Students can thus learn chemical titration by pushing king-size molecules around the virtual space. They can study geology by building and shifting digital layers of sediment and fossils on the classroom floor or explore complementary and supplementary angles by racing the clock to move a giant virtual protractor around the floor.

As new as the Smallab concept is, it is already showing promise when it comes to improving learning results: Birchfield and his colleagues say that in a small 2009 study, they found that at-risk ninth graders in earth sciences scored consistently and significantly higher on content-area tests when they had also done Smallab exercises. A second study compared the Smallab approach with traditional hands-on lab experimentation, with the group that used mixed-reality again showing greater retention and mastery. As it is more generally with games, the cognitive elements at work are not entirely understood, but they are of great interest to a growing number of learning scientists. Did the students learn more using digital mixed-reality because the process was more physical than hearing a classroom lecture or performing a lab experiment? Because it was more collaborative or more visual? Or was it simply because it seemed novel and more fun?

HERE ARE SOME DIFFERENCES between Kai and me: Kai hates Justin Bieber whereas I only dislike him. Kai sends and receives about 50 text messages a day. My average is about 4. My idea of leisure involves wandering aimlessly and anonymously through the local bookstore whereas Kai — “not a fan of books” — can be found hanging around the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, where he is on a first-name basis with employees. When I am sick with a cold, I sit at home flipping through magazines and not really wanting to be seen by anyone. When Kai is sick with a cold, he sits at home and makes YouTube videos. (“If I sneeze during this video,” he tells the camera, “don’t yell at me.”) We also feel very differently, it turns out, about the game Halo. Kai sees it as having amazing graphics and a great story line and violence, “but only against aliens,” he says. I see it mostly as violent.

One night at Kai’s apartment, we turned on the Xbox and played Halo 3 as teammates. He played the role of Master Chief, the ultimate superwarrior, and I was a friendly alien who liked to fight. It started like this: I sat on the couch, and Kai sat on the floor in front of the TV. He said, “You get the machine gun, and I’ll drive the car.” I’m not really sure what happened after that. I would call it a nine-minute-long, jackhammering bloodbath, in which we (me poorly, Kai deftly) killed a lot of bad aliens until my lack of experience almost cost our team the game, and — a little sweaty and yes, totally excited — I handed my controller off to Kai’s 14-year-old brother, Sam.

It was, for me, a reminder of how confusing it can be to think about video games and schools in the same frame. Not only has excessive gaming — much like excessive TV watching — been associated with obesity and depression, but playing violent games has been linked in some studies to an increase in aggressive behavior. Advocates of game-based learning concede that these games can be spectacularly gory, amoral and loud, even when they are artful and complicated. They like to point out that the majority of games sold commercially are not particularly violent and are rated “E” — for “everyone.”

And then this: Brain researchers have found that playing first-person shooter games like Call of Duty does seem to have some neurological benefits, including improving peripheral vision and the ability to focus attention. The playing of shooter games has also been shown to enhance something called visual-spatial thinking — for example, the ability to rotate objects in one’s mind — which, it turns out, is a cognitive building block for understanding concepts in science and engineering. Women, who tend to score lower when tested for visual-spatial skills, apparently gain more from virtual machine-gun outings than men: a 2007 study done at the University of Toronto showed that women who played just 10 hours of an action-oriented video game (Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault) not only improved their spatial attention and mental-­rotation abilities more significantly than their male counterparts, but the game-play also appeared to substantially reduce any sex-related gaps in visual-spatial thinking abilities. Five months later, the effects still held. (Bad news for pacifists: a control group that played a stimulating but nonviolent 3-D video puzzle game showed no measurable improvement.)

Unsurprisingly, no one I spoke with who works in the field of games and learning says that first-person shooter games are the key to building future scientists and engineers. One topic under discussion is the broader question of “transfer,” whether a skill developed by playing a game actually translates to improved abilities in other areas. They also note that we are only just beginning to tease apart the mechanisms that make game play so powerful. And inside those mechanisms, there is at least potential to advance our country’s educational aims — if only we can sort out how we feel about games. Even the first family has sent mixed messages: President Obama has criticized video games for displacing family time and physical activity — urging parents, for example, to “turn off the TV, put away the video games and read to your child” — but he has also encouraged the development of new games to bolster the all-important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills in young Americans. In March, Michelle Obama helped introduce a government-sponsored design contest to reward those who create mobile-phone games and apps to combat obesity, lamenting at a national Parent Teacher Association conference that “we know our kids spend way too much time with these games,” but that at least the time could be spent more productively. The cognitive dissonance is likely familiar to any parent: she has also admitted, cheerfully, to owning a Wii.

WHEN IT COMES TO CAPTURING and keeping the attention of children, game designers appear to be getting something right that schools, in many cases, are getting wrong. James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University who grew interested in video games when his son began playing them years ago, has written several seminal books on the power of video games to inspire learning. He says that in working through the levels of a complex game, a person is decoding its “internal design grammar” and that this is a form of critical thinking. “A game is nothing but a set of problems to solve,” Gee says. Its design often pushes players to explore, take risks, role-play and strategize — in other words putting a game’s informational content to use. Gee has advocated for years that our definition of “literacy” needs to be widened to better suit the times. Where a book provides knowledge, Gee says, a good game can provide a learner with knowledge and also experience solving problems using that knowledge.

Slowly, this idea has won some unlikely converts. The retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently introduced a Web site called iCivics, which features a series of interactive games meant to animate and revive the lost art of learning civics. “She was relatively hostile toward games,” says Gee, who collaborated with her on the project, “and now she’s a fan.” E. O. Wilson, the renowned Harvard evolutionary biologist, has lauded digital games for their ability to immerse and challenge players in vivid, virtual environments. “I think games are the future in education,” Wilson said in an interview with the game designer Will Wright last year. “We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”

In a speech given the day before the start of the 2009 G-20 economic summit, Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, offered his own tacit approval, suggesting that playing video games, especially online multiplayer games, fosters collaboration, and that collaboration, in turn, fosters innovation — making it good training for a career in technology. “Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game,” Schmidt said. “If I were 15 years old, that’s what I’d be doing right now.”

All this goes back to the debate over what constitutes “21st-century skills.” How do schools manage to teach new media without letting go of old media? Is it possible to teach game design and still find time for “The Catcher in the Rye”? One afternoon at Quest to Learn, I sat with Al Doyle in an empty office. Doyle had been teaching Sports for the Mind for only a few months — and at the end of the school year, he would end up leaving Quest to Learn to teach game design at a private school elsewhere in Manhattan — but the experience was causing him to think differently about what schools should be teaching. His students were building 3-D computer games and had also just finished a unit on podcasting. “Ten years ago, it would have taken a week to get kids to learn the difference between ‘save’ and ‘save as,’ ” he said. “Now I show them GarageBand” — a digital audio sequencer produced by Apple — “and five minutes later they’re recording and editing sound.” Doyle made a point that others had also made: whatever digital fluidity his students possessed, it hadn’t been taught to them, at least not by adults.

Here, perhaps, was a paradigm shift. As Doyle saw it, his role was moving from teaching toward facilitating, building upon learning being done outside school. He talked about all the wasted energy that goes into teaching things that students don’t need so much anymore, thanks to the tools now available to them. Why memorize the 50 states and their capitals? Why, in the age of Google and pocket computers, memorize anything? “Handwriting?” Doyle said. “That’s a 20th-century skill.” Realizing this sounded radical, he amended his thought, saying that students should learn to write, but that keyboarding was far more important. He took aim at spelling, calling it “outmoded.” Then he went back to podcasting, saying that after a student has written, revised, scripted and recorded a podcast, “it’s just as valid as writing an essay.”

I must have been wearing the shocked expression of an old-guard English major, because Doyle tried to put a finer point on it. “We feel like we’re preparing these kids to be producers of media — whether they become graphic designers, video designers, journalists, publishers, communicators, bloggers, whatever,” he said. “The goal is that they’re comfortable expressing themselves in any media, whether it’s video, audio, podcast, the written word, the spoken word or the animated feature.” He added: “Game design is the platform that we can hook them into because this is where they live. Video games are more important to them than film, than broadcast television, than journalism. This is their medium. Games are this generation’s rock and roll.”

SPEND TIME AT a middle school — even a hyperinnovative one like Quest to Learn — and one thing becomes immediately apparent: Being a sixth grader is a timeless art. Kids chew gum when they’re not supposed to. They ask for hugs from teachers when they need them. They get rowdy in gym class, dip Oreos in their chocolate-milk cartons at lunch, pick bits of food out of their braces and shout things like, “Hey, your epidermis is showing!” There is little they like to do quietly.

“I am really sorry it is taking you so long to sit in your chairs today,” an aggrieved Doyle was calling over the din one morning at the start of class. In the brief quiet that followed, he announced that, connected to work they were doing on ancient architecture, each student was to design a game that took place inside either a labyrinth, a pyramid or a cave. This would happen using an online game-making platform called Gamestar Mechanic, which was developed by Katie Salen and a team and is soon to be sold commercially. The platform allows users to learn game-making skills without being versed in programming language.

A hand shot up. It was Ellisa, a diminutive girl who wore her hair in a giant ponytailed puff on one side of her head. “Al, can I do a game with a cave, a pyramid and a labyrinth?”

“Sorry, you may not.”

Another hand. “What about a pyramid with a labyrinth inside of it?”

Doyle shook his head. “Just one,” he said.

Sitting in front of laptops, the students started in on their game-building, each one beginning with a blank screen. They created borders, paths and obstacles by dragging and dropping small cubes from a menu. They chose an animated sprite to serve as a game’s protagonist. They picked enemy sprites and set them marching in various patterns around the screen. They wrote the text that introduced the game and the text that flashed when a player reaches a new level. (“If the entrance to your cave is being guarded by a bear or a woolly mammoth,” said Doyle, sounding teacherly, “you have to tell us it’s a bear or a woolly mammoth.”) They added a variety of rewards and punishments. If the game seemed too easy, they made it harder. If the game seemed too hard, they made it easier. Earlier that day, I watched a girl named Maya make a game. She created a labyrinth, changed all the colors, swapped enemies in and out, changed the background, changed the music and finally set the game’s timer to 90 seconds. Then she played her game and finished it in 75. She adjusted the timer to 75 seconds and played again, this time losing. Finally, she set the timer at 80 and beat the game, but only just barely, at which point she declared the whole thing perfect.

The work appeared simple, but the challenge was evident. Twenty minutes in, the Sports for the Mind classroom was hushed but for the sound of keyboards being pounded and a faint arcadelike cacophony of poinging and bleeping over the syncopated pulse of game music. That night for homework, they would play one another’s games and write up constructive critiques.

The gold standard in class, I was told by nearly every student I spoke with, was to create a game that was hard to beat but harder still to quit. Kai was sitting in one corner working on a game he named What the Cave. It was teeming with robot enemies. “The whole point,” Kai said, “is you want your game to be hard, but you want it to be good.” He studied his screen for a moment. Then using his mouse, he deftly deleted a row of enemies. “What you want,” he said finally, “is good-hard.”

The language of gamers is, when you begin to decipher it, the language of strivers. People who play video games speak enthusiastically about “leveling up” and are always shooting for the epic win. Getting to the end of even a supposedly simple video game can take 15 or more hours of play time, and it almost always involves failure — lots and lots of failure.

This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise and the 2008 evolution-related game Spore, refers to as “failure-based learning,” in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary. A well-built game is, in essence, a series of short-term feedback loops, delivering assessment in small, frequent doses. This in the end may be both more palatable and also more instructive to someone trying to learn. According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita, which designs computer games that are now being used in roughly 1,200 schools around the country, children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal. “They play for five minutes and they lose,” he says. “They play for 10 minutes and they lose. They’ll go back and do it a hundred times. They’ll fail until they win.” He adds: “Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It’s completely aspirational.”

It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today’s public schools. “If you think about kids in school — especially in our testing regime — both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,” he says. “That’s pretty much a guarantee that you’ll never get to truly deep learning.” Gee and others in the games-and-learning field have suggested that someday, if we choose to channel our resources into developing more and better games for use in classrooms, the games themselves could feasibly replace tests altogether. Students, by virtue of making it through the escalating levels of a game that teaches, say, the principles of quantum physics, will demonstrate their mastery simply by finishing the game. Or, as Gee says: “Think about it: if I make it through every level of Halo, do you really need to give me a test to see if I know everything it takes to get through every level of Halo?”

One day last spring, Jan Plass, a professor of educational communication and technology at New York University, and I were sitting in a classroom at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, a girls-only public middle school in Brooklyn, where he and several graduate students were conducting research. Plass works at an organization called the Games for Learning Institute, directed by Ken Perlin, an N.Y.U. computer-science professor, that is dedicated to exploring the granular details of what makes games so mesmerizing and effective for learning.

We were watching a small group of sixth-to-eighth-grade girls play a relatively low-tech math game on a series of laptops. The girls played in pairs, solving equations to score points. All the while, the laptops’ built-in cameras recorded their voices and faces, while an imbedded piece of software tracked their movements inside the game. What Plass and his research team were hoping to find inside this data — which was being collected at 12 New York schools — were answers about whether children learn more when playing individually or collaboratively. (In order to measure progress, researchers gave the students tests before and after the game playing.)

Two of the girls were talking and pointing at the screen. “They’re spending time discussing how to solve the problem,” Plass said in a low voice. “They might not solve as many problems. But the question for us is whether the conversation adds to the learning, versus if they spent their time on more practice. Does discourse result in deeper processing?”

A question like this is, of course, as old as Socrates and not at all limited to game-oriented learning. But given that digital games like those designed by Plass and his colleagues allow researchers to capture and examine a student’s second-by-second decision-making, they offer what seem to be uniquely refined opportunities to peer into the cognitive process. What they are studying, Plass said, is the science behind focused engagement — a psychological phenomenon known as “flow.”

Much of this work is still in its infancy. Neuroscientists have connected game play to the production of dopamine, a powerful neuro­transmitter central to the brain’s reward-seeking system and thought to drive motivation and memory processing (and more negatively, addictive behaviors) — all of which could have implications for how, when and what type of games should be used to advance children’s learning. But as it is with just about everything involving teaching and learning, there are no simple answers. Games, for example, appear to trigger greater dopamine releases in men than women, which could mean that game-based learning is more effective with boys than girls. Or, says Plass, it could be a matter of design: ideally, games can be built in such a way that they adapt to the individual learning styles of their players.

Paul Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist who teaches in the graduate school of education at the University of Bristol in Britain and coordinates the NeuroEducational Research Network, says that dopamine sends a “ready to learn” signal to the brain, essentially priming it to receive new information pleasurably. His research has shown that children’s engagement levels are higher when they are anticipating a reward but cannot predict whether they will get it — or, as Howard-Jones put it to me, “when you move from a conventional educational atmosphere to something that more resembles sport.” He is careful to add that games are not meant to supplant teachers nor undermine the value of more traditional learning. “Children need to learn how to read a book,” he says. “They need to learn how to ask questions.” But as our understanding of both cognitive science and game design continues to advance, he says that game play will find a central place inside schools. “I think in 30 years’ time,” he says, “we will marvel that we ever tried to deliver a curriculum without gaming.”

One day last winter, I watched students at Quest to Learn playing with a different sort of technological tool — a newly introduced online social network for the school that had been built by Salen and her team of designers and was open to students, staff members and parents. The network, called Being Me, looked like a starter Facebook. In the coming weeks, mostly through the school’s wellness class, students would work on learning things like how to tag photos, update their status, credit the work of others, comment meaningfully on blog posts and navigate the complex politics of “friending.” It was another effort on the school’s part to look at the things kids are already doing — social networking, playing video games, tinkering with digital media — and try to help them do it with more thought and purpose, to recognize both their role and their influence inside a larger system.

Being Me had been online for just one day, but it was already zinging with activity, as most of the students seemed to have logged on overnight. Isabel posted a video of herself riding a horse. Clyde put up a survey querying everyone on whether PlayStation 3 was better than Xbox 360. Charles blogged about a new restaurant he tried. (“I had the Caprese pizza. The tomato had a lot of flavor.”) Kai posted a video — now being watched by practically everyone in the class — of himself dressed in a pink wig and a red raincoat, pretending to be a girl he called “Heather.” Comments began to pile up. “Cool beans,” a girl sitting nearby wrote. Then another from a boy named Nuridin: “Dude, stop making me die over here. LOL.”

Seeing this as learning required a kind of leap — the same way it required a leap to watch students build digital mazes and load them with plinking cartoon sprites and imagine it might make them more successful as future adults — that it would possibly help them untangle and rebuild whatever broken systems we will have left for them. The electric pencil sharpener buzzed from a corner.

I watched a long-haired kid named Akahr pull up his profile on Being Me and spend a moment pondering what he would do for his first official status update. By design of the network, every status update began with the words “I am . . .” after which students could choose from an array of designated verbs and objects listed on drop-down menus. Most of the sixth graders were mixing and matching with a kind of frenzied abandon, playfully testing every last variation, posting their updates and waiting for a peal of laughter from somewhere in the classroom — a sign their status had been read. There was, “I am dancing Godzilla” and “I am hugging my bed.” Akhar clicked on his menu and pondered his options. Around the classroom, there were students respecting eggs and creating soy sauce and reading glitter and looking for Paris. Was this learning or a distraction from learning? Serious or not serious? Or was it possible, somehow, that it was both? Word by word, Akahr made his choices: “I am . . . imagining . . . the future.”

Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond
By DON VAN NATTA Jr., JO BECKER and GRAHAM BOWLEY

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.

The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet circle. They began to suspect that someone was eavesdropping on their private conversations.

By early January 2006, Scotland Yard had confirmed their suspicions. An unambiguous trail led to Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter who covered the royal family, and to a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who also worked for the paper. The two men had somehow obtained the PIN codes needed to access the voice mail of the royal aides.

Scotland Yard told the aides to continue operating as usual while it pursued the investigation, which included surveillance of the suspects’ phones. A few months later, the inquiry took a remarkable turn as the reporter and the private investigator chased a story about Prince William’s younger brother, Harry, visiting a strip club. Another tabloid, The Sun, had trumpeted its scoop on the episode with the immortal: “Harry Buried Face in Margo’s Mega-Boobs. Stripper Jiggled . . . Prince Giggled.”

As Scotland Yard tracked Goodman and Mulcaire, the two men hacked into Prince Harry’s mobile-phone messages. On April 9, 2006, Goodman produced a follow-up article in News of the World about the apparent distress of Prince Harry’s girlfriend over the matter. Headlined “Chelsy Tears Strip Off Harry!” the piece quoted, verbatim, a voice mail Prince Harry had received from his brother teasing him about his predicament.

The palace was in an uproar, especially when it suspected that the two men were also listening to the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne. The eavesdropping could not have gone higher inside the royal family, since Prince Charles and the queen were hardly regular mobile-phone users. But it seemingly went everywhere else in British society. Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out.

AS OF THIS SUMMER, five people have filed lawsuits accusing News Group Newspapers, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire that includes News of the World, of breaking into their voice mail. Additional cases are being prepared, including one seeking a judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the investigation. The litigation is beginning to expose just how far the hacking went, something that Scotland Yard did not do. In fact, an examination based on police records, court documents and interviews with investigators and reporters shows that Britain’s revered police agency failed to pursue leads suggesting that one of the country’s most powerful newspapers was routinely listening in on its citizens.

The police had seized files from Mulcaire’s home in 2006 that contained several thousand mobile phone numbers of potential hacking victims and 91 mobile phone PIN codes. Scotland Yard even had a recording of Mulcaire walking one journalist — who may have worked at yet another tabloid — step by step through the hacking of a soccer official’s voice mail, according to a copy of the tape. But Scotland Yard focused almost exclusively on the royals case, which culminated with the imprisonment of Mulcaire and Goodman. When police officials presented evidence to prosecutors, they didn’t discuss crucial clues that the two men may not have been alone in hacking the voice mail messages of story targets.

“There was simply no enthusiasm among Scotland Yard to go beyond the cases involving Mulcaire and Goodman,” said John Whittingdale, the chairman of a parliamentary committee that has twice investigated the phone hacking. “To start exposing widespread tawdry practices in that newsroom was a heavy stone that they didn’t want to try to lift.” Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with News of the World. Police officials have defended their investigation, noting that their duties did not extend to monitoring the media. In a statement, the police said they followed the lines of inquiry “likely to produce the best evidence” and that the charges that were brought “appropriately represented the criminality uncovered.” The statement added, “This was a complex inquiry and led to one of the first prosecutions of its kind.” Officials also have noted that the department had more pressing priorities at the time, including several terrorism cases.

Scotland Yard’s narrow focus has allowed News of the World and its parent company, News International, to continue to assert that the hacking was limited to one reporter. During testimony before the parliamentary committee in September 2009, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who now heads Dow Jones, said, “There was never any evidence delivered to me suggesting that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.”

But interviews with more than a dozen former reporters and editors at News of the World present a different picture of the newsroom. They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors. Andy Coulson, the top editor at the time, had imposed a hypercompetitive ethos, even by tabloid standards. One former reporter called it a “do whatever it takes” mentality. The reporter was one of two people who said Coulson was present during discussions about phone hacking. Coulson ultimately resigned but denied any knowledge of hacking.

News of the World was hardly alone in accessing messages to obtain salacious gossip. “It was an industrywide thing,” said Sharon Marshall, who witnessed hacking while working at News of the World and other tabloids. “Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom, and they can tell you each phone company’s four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.”

Bill Akass, the managing editor of News of the World, dismissed “unsubstantiated claims” that misconduct at the paper was widespread and said that rigorous safeguards had been adopted to prevent unethical reporting tactics. “We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a ‘culture’ of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at senior level in the newspaper,” Akass wrote in an e-mail.

He accused The New York Times of writing about the case because of a rivalry with a competing media company.

In February, the parliamentary committee issued a scathing report that accused News of the World executives of “deliberate obfuscation.” The report created a stir yet did not lead to a judicial inquiry. And Scotland Yard had chosen to notify only a fraction of the hundreds of people whose messages may have been illegally accessed — effectively shielding News of the World from a barrage of civil lawsuits. The scandal appeared to be over, especially for Coulson, who had been hired by the Conservative Party to help shape its message in the run-up to the general election. In May, when David Cameron became prime minister, he rewarded Coulson with the top communications post at 10 Downing Street.

But the hacking case wouldn’t go away. Two victims notified by Scotland Yard sued the paper and negotiated agreements, one for a million pounds. Emboldened, lawyers began rounding up clients and forcing the Metropolitan Police (known as Scotland Yard) to reveal whether their names were in Mulcaire’s files. Cases are being brought by a member of Parliament, a woman who was sexually assaulted when she was 19 and a prominent soccer commentator who happens to work for one of Murdoch’s companies. “Getting a letter from Scotland Yard that your phone has been hacked is rather like getting a Willy Wonka golden ticket,” declared Mark Lewis, a lawyer who won the first settlement. “Time to queue up at Murdoch Towers to get paid.”

FOR DECADES, London tabloids have merrily delivered stories about politicians having affairs, celebrities taking drugs and royals shaming themselves. Gossip could end careers, giving the tabloids enormous power. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between Britain’s strict privacy laws and the public’s desire to peer into every corner of other people’s lives. To feed this appetite, papers hired private investigators and others who helped obtain confidential information, whether by legal or illegal means. The illicit methods became known as “the dark arts.” One subspecialty involved “blagging” — getting information by conning phone companies, government agencies and hospitals, among others. “What was shocking to me was that they used these tactics for celebrity tittle-tattle,” said Brendan Montague, a freelance journalist. “It wasn’t finding out wrongdoing. It was finding out a bit of gossip.”

Steve Whittamore, a private investigator who worked for numerous tabloids, himself became the subject of headlines in 2005, after the authorities seized records from his home that revealed requests by hundreds of journalists for private information. “There was never an instance of me doing anything other than what I was asked,” said Whittamore, who now runs a Web site that tracks local crime. He eventually pleaded guilty, though no journalists were ever charged. Among Whittamore’s clients was News of the World, where he worked for 19 reporters and editors.

Rupert Murdoch purchased the once-sleepy Sunday tabloid in 1969. Although the paper was not immune to the industry’s decline — its circulation is now 2.9 million, down from 4 million a decade ago — it remains a powerful presence. Sex scandals aside, the paper has exposed wrongdoing resulting in dozens of criminal convictions.

Murdoch unabashedly uses his London papers — which also include The Sun, The Times of London and The Sunday Times — to advance a generally conservative, pro-business line. Beginning in the late 1970s, his papers supported Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party, attacking her Labour Party rivals in editorials and news articles. Years later, Labour’s Tony Blair assiduously courted and won Murdoch’s backing for his more-centrist politics. “You had huge influence as editor,” said Phil Hall, who ran News of the World from 1995 to 2000.

One standout at News International was Andy Coulson, who made his name as a young reporter in the early 1990s writing for The Sun’s showbiz column. A native of blue-collar Essex in southern England, Coulson had a sharp instinct for what readers wanted. He famously once asked Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, whether they were members of the mile-high club. In 2000, Coulson moved to News of the World as second in command under the editor, Rebekah Brooks. When she left three years later, Coulson, only 34 at the time, was the obvious choice to succeed her.

WHEN A BOTTLENOSE whale became stranded in the Thames River in January 2006, the London tabloids raced to put reporters and photographers on boats. One News of the World reporter watched in horror as a wet-suit-clad rival from The Sunday Mirror jumped into the freezing water while a colleague snapped pictures. Back at News of the World, editors were not happy.

“If he doesn’t get into that river and get a picture of us saving the whale by pushing it out to sea,” one journalist recalled Coulson saying of his reporter, “he doesn’t need to bother coming back.” Not to be outdone, Coulson dispatched another reporter to the North Sea to “find the whale’s family.”

The episode was vintage Coulson, who ruled the newsroom with single-minded imperiousness: get the story, no matter what. Reporters donned lingerie to infiltrate suburban swinger parties. Others were deployed within the paper’s headquarters, on the sprawling News International campus in East London, seemingly for the amusement of editors. One reporter was ordered to spend 24 hours inside a plastic box, in the newsroom, to emulate a stunt by the magician David Blaine.

Despite the earlier arrest of the private investigator Steve Whittamore, the dark arts were still widely in use. Former reporters said both the news and features desks employed their own investigators to uncover medical records, unlisted addresses, phone bills and so on. Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player’s private phone records. They showed Ferdinand had made numerous calls during the time his phone was supposedly off. Driscoll was disciplined for supposed inaccuracies and later dismissed; he proceeded to win 800,000 pounds in court, which found he had been bullied by Coulson and other editors.

Around the newsroom, some reporters were getting stories by surreptitiously accessing phone messages, according to former editors and reporters. Often, all it took was a standard four-digit security code, like 1111 or 4444, which many users did not bother to change after buying their mobile phones. If they did, the paper’s private investigators found ways to trick phone companies into revealing personal codes. Reporters called one method of hacking “double screwing” because it required two simultaneous calls to the same number. The first would engage the phone line, forcing the second call into voice mail. A reporter then punched in the code to hear messages, often deleting them to prevent access by rival papers. A dozen former reporters said in interviews that hacking was pervasive at News of the World. “Everyone knew,” one longtime reporter said. “The office cat knew.”

One former editor said Coulson talked freely with colleagues about the dark arts, including hacking. “I’ve been to dozens if not hundreds of meetings with Andy” when the subject came up, said the former editor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply, “We’ve pulled the phone records” or “I’ve listened to the phone messages.”

Sean Hoare, a former reporter and onetime close friend of Coulson’s, also recalled discussing hacking. The two men first worked together at The Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At News of the World, Hoare said he continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson “actively encouraged me to do it,” Hoare said.

Hoare said he was fired during a period when he was struggling with drugs and alcohol. He said he was now revealing his own use of the dark arts — which included breaking into the messages of celebrities like David and Victoria Beckham — because it was unfair for the paper to pin the blame solely on Goodman. Coulson declined to comment for this article but has maintained that he was unaware of the hacking.

Reporters knew they would be rewarded or ostracized based on their ability to beat the competition. It made for an unusual pecking order. On top was Neville Thurlbeck, whose fervor for scoops was legend. He was acquitted of bribing a police officer for information. But in another case, the paper was found to have violated the privacy of the subject of his front-page story headlined “Sick Nazi Orgy.” The paper’s parent company paid a 60,000 pound settlement, and Thurlbeck retained his title as chief reporter.

Clive Goodman, the veteran royals reporter, seemed to be on the opposite trajectory. In the 1990s, Goodman crushed competitors with exclusives on Princess Diana. Now, clad in a waistcoat and wearing a pocket watch, he cut the figure of an old-school Fleet Street character whose best stories were behind him. If Glenn Mulcaire, the paper’s top investigator, could help him break stories by hacking into the messages of the royal household, Goodman could revive his career.

ON THE MORNING of Aug. 8, 2006, Scotland Yard detectives arrived with a search warrant at News of the World. For six months, officials had tracked Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire as they hacked into the voice mail of the royal household, according to people with knowledge of the investigation. One royal aide’s voice mail was called 433 times, records show. In the newspaper’s lobby, detectives faced resistance from executives and lawyers for the paper over searching the newsroom, former police officials said. As word of the detectives’ arrival ricocheted around the office, two veteran reporters stuffed reams of documents into trash bags, one reporter recalled, and hauled them away. The precaution proved unnecessary. Detectives limited their search to Goodman’s desk. “We only had authority to do that desk,” a senior Metropolitan Police official said. “We were nervous about doing any extra search.”

At the same time, other detectives descended on Mulcaire’s modest home in Cheam, a southwestern suburb of London. Inside, the police found what one investigator called “a massive amount of evidence” — dozens of notebooks and two computers containing 2,978 complete or partial mobile phone numbers and 91 PIN codes; at least three names of other News of the World journalists; and 30 tape recordings made by Mulcaire. Both Mulcaire and Goodman were arrested that day, charged with conspiracy to intercept communications without lawful authority. News of the World editors said they were stunned by the arrests and vowed to conduct an internal investigation.

At Scotland Yard, the task of investigating the case fell to the counter­terrorism branch, which was responsible for the security of the royal family. It was an extraordinarily busy time for the unit, which was dealing with the aftermath of the 2005 London transit bombings and was now involved in a complex surveillance operation of two dozen men believed to be plotting to bomb transoceanic airliners. Several former senior investigators said the department was dubious about diverting resources. “We were distracted, obviously,” one former senior Scotland Yard investigator said. Scotland Yard also had a symbiotic relationship with News of the World. The police sometimes built high-profile cases out of the paper’s exclusives, and News of the World reciprocated with fawning stories of arrests.

Within days of the raids, several senior detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by Chris Webb, from the department’s press office, who was “waving his arms up in the air, saying, ‘Wait a minute — let’s talk about this.’ ” The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that Webb stressed the department’s “long-term relationship with News International.” The investigator recalled becoming furious at the suggestion, responding, “There’s illegality here, and we’ll pursue it like we do any other case.” In a statement, Webb said: ‘‘I cannot recall these events. Police officers make operational decisions, not press officers. That is the policy of the Metropolitan Police Service and the policy that I and all police press officers follow.’’

That fall, Andy Hayman, the head of the counterterrorism branch, was in his office when a senior investigator brought him 8 to 10 pages of a single-spaced “target list” of names and mobile phone numbers taken from Mulcaire’s home. It read like a British society directory. Scotland Yard officials consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service on how broadly to investigate. But the officials didn’t discuss certain evidence with senior prosecutors, including the notes suggesting the involvement of other reporters, according to a senior prosecutor on the case. The prosecutor was stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. “I would have said we need to see how far this goes” and “whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk,” said the former prosecutor, who declined to speak on the record.

Scotland Yard officials ultimately decided the inquiry would stop with Mulcaire and Goodman. “We were not going to set off on a cleanup of the British media,” a senior investigator said. In fact, investigators never questioned any other reporters or editors at News of the World about the hacking, interviews and records show. A police spokesman rejected assertions that officials failed to fully investigate. He said the department had worked closely with prosecutors, who had “full access to all the evidence.” A former senior Scotland Yard official also denied that the department was influenced by any alliance with News of the World. “I don’t think there was any love lost between people inside the investigation and people in the press,” the former official said.

In addition to the royal household, Scotland Yard alerted five other victims whose names would appear in the indictment of Mulcaire. Of the remaining hundreds who potentially had their phones broken into, the police said they notified only select individuals with national-security concerns: members of the government, the police and the military.

On Aug. 24, 2006, George Galloway, a member of Parliament, was alerted by a detective that his messages had been hacked. Galloway said the detective urged him to change his PIN code. But when Galloway asked who had accessed his phone, the man from Scotland Yard “refused to tell me anything.”

WITH THEIR HEADS bowed, the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and the reporter Clive Goodman stood in a London courtroom on Jan. 26, 2007, and apologized to the princes and their aides for the “gross invasion of privacy.” The men were awaiting sentencing after having each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to intercept communications of the royal aides. But there was no pretense that the abuse was confined to that single count. Mulcaire admitted to hacking the messages of the five other victims: Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association; Simon Hughes, a member of Parliament; the model Elle Macpherson; Max Clifford, a powerful public-relations agent; and Sky Andrew, who represented some of England’s biggest soccer stars.

The judge concluded from this that Mulcaire had not just worked with Goodman, who wrote exclusively about the royal family, but also with “others at News International.” In Mulcaire’s defense, his lawyer told the judge that his client thought others were hacking, “which for him was one of the reasons why he did not believe it was illegal.” Goodman’s lawyer noted that his client, too, “lived his life in a world where ethical lines are not always so clearly defined or at least observed.” Both men were sentenced to several months in prison and were dismissed by News of the World. Andy Coulson resigned, accepting “ultimate responsibility” for the hacking during his watch.

Not long after, the parliamentary committee opened hearings on the matter. On March 6, Les Hinton, then the executive chairman of News International, told members that as far as he was aware, Goodman was “the only person” at the paper who knew about the hacking. “I believe absolutely that Andy did not have knowledge of what was going on,” Hinton said. Goodman and Mulcaire proceeded to sue the paper for wrongful dismissal. Court records show that News International paid 80,000 pounds to Mulcaire. Goodman received an undisclosed amount. Both men, who signed confidentiality agreements, declined to be interviewed for this article.

That May, Coulson was hired to head the communications team of the Conservative Party. The position was colloquially known as chief spin doctor, and filling it with a tabloid editor was not without precedent. Years before, Tony Blair had chosen a former political editor at The Mirror to perform the job for the Labour Party. In Coulson, the Tories also got someone with inside connections to Rupert Murdoch’s influential media empire, whose support the Tories were trying to wrest from Labour and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

FOR NEWS OF THE WORLD, the events that summer seemed auspicious. Goodman and Mulcaire were no longer at the paper, evidence remained filed away at Scotland Yard and countless people had no idea their phone messages might have been hacked. But like the many secrets News of the World famously exposed, the paper’s own would not stay hidden. Less than six months later, in early 2008, trouble was reignited by a lawyer for Gordon Taylor, the soccer association executive whose phone Mulcaire had admitted to hacking. The lawyer, Mark Lewis, said he believed that he could explicitly link the eavesdropping to an article the paper had prepared a year earlier alleging an affair between Taylor and his assistant. Both Taylor and the woman had adamantly denied the affair, but News of the World claimed it obtained the story through “proper journalistic inquiry.” Lewis ultimately persuaded the paper to kill the story, but the phrase stuck with him. He now suspected “improper” was a more fitting description.

In the spring, Lewis met with Tom Crone, the chief legal counsel for News International, to try to settle the matter without going to court. “We thought it had all gone away,” Crone said, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting.

“I want 250,000 pounds,” Lewis told Crone.

Crone laughed and walked out. (Crone declined to discuss details of the meeting but disputed that Lewis asked for that amount.)

Lewis, who is 45, hardly fit the profile of a high-powered London lawyer with the resources and gumption to take on News International. He worked in the more proletarian city of Manchester, where he sometimes showed up at the office wearing black jeans and a punk T-shirt, his hair a spiky peroxide blond. Nonetheless, shortly after the meeting, he filed a lawsuit on Taylor’s behalf against News International and Mulcaire. Lewis’s suspicions on the eavesdropping were confirmed later that year, when Scotland Yard was compelled to produce the relevant evidence it had collected at Mulcaire’s home. A draft of the paper’s unpublished article about Taylor’s alleged affair indicated it was based on a voice mail message he had received from his assistant. Lewis said the message went: “Thank you for yesterday. You were great.” The paper assumed “she was talking about shagging,” Lewis explained. In reality, she was referring to a speech Taylor gave at her father’s funeral. “The story had been made up,” Lewis said.

Other items turned over by Scotland Yard pointed to additional journalists at News of the World. One was an e-mail containing the transcript of hacked messages that had been sent by a reporter at the paper. The e-mail opened, “This is the transcript for Neville.” There was only one Neville on staff: Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s chief reporter, who helped write the original story on Prince Harry’s strip-club escapades. (The paper has said Thurlbeck had no knowledge of the e-mail.) Another item was a contract signed by an editor for Mulcaire to work on a story about Taylor. Also turned over was the audiotape that Mulcaire made instructing a journalist on how to access Taylor’s voice mail. (It’s unclear whether investigators tried to figure out his identity. Dialing the phone number deduced by listening to the tape led The Times to a reporter, but one who may not have worked at News of the World.)

On June 27, 2008, the judge in the case ordered Mulcaire to identify the journalist and release other information. Within 24 hours, the paper’s lawyers called Lewis to settle. Taylor received a 700,000-pound settlement, which included legal expenses. Two of Taylor’s associates whose phones were also hacked received additional money. The package approached one million pounds. The settlement remained under wraps until July 9, 2009, when The Guardian broke the story. Within the week, Max Clifford, the public-relations chief who had also been named as a victim in the Mulcaire indictment, announced on the BBC that he was going to sue.

WHILE OCCASIONAL articles appeared about the various goings-on at News of the World, the scandal was somewhat of a nonscandal in the other tabloids. But The Guardian, a Labour-oriented paper with an undisguised disdain for Murdoch’s publications, aggressively pursued the hacking episode. Its exclusive on the Taylor settlement prompted the parliamentary committee to convene new hearings. John Whittingdale, the committee’s chairman and a Tory, said he felt misled by News International executives who testified two years before that Goodman and Mulcaire acted alone. At the new hearings that July, Coulson maintained he had been unaware of the illegal activities. “I have never condoned the use of phone hacking, and nor do I have any recollection of incidences where phone hacking took place,” he said.

As television cameras rolled, Adam Price, a committee member, pointed to the paper’s story about the lap-dancing message Prince William had left on his brother’s phone. As editor, Price asked Coulson, you “would not have checked the provenance of that story?”

“Not necessarily, no,” Coulson replied, “and I do not remember the story.”

Two months later, his former boss, Les Hinton, who was now running Dow Jones, testified by video-conference from New York. Hinton rejected suggestions by committee members that the payments made to Goodman and Mulcaire after their dismissals were intended to buy their silence. “I cannot actually see what silence there was left” after months of police investigation, said Hinton, who declined to comment for this article.

During a recent interview, the committee chairman reread portions of that testimony, pausing to laugh at Hinton’s repeated “I do not recall” or “I do not know” responses. “This was just a masterful performance by Les Hinton,” Whittingdale said. “We all sat in awe.”

When the committee released its findings this past February, it criticized the police, saying Scotland Yard officials had evidence that merited a wider investigation. The committee reserved its harshest words for News International executives, whom it assailed for “collective amnesia.” Tom Watson, a committee member, later said that the eavesdropping “went to the heart of the British establishment, in which police, military, royals and government ministers were hacked on a near industrial scale.”

THAT SAME MONTH, a judge hearing the lawsuit by the public-relations executive Max Clifford ordered Mulcaire to name any journalist for whom he hacked into Clifford’s phone. The names discovered in Mulcaire’s files had been redacted by the police. The lawsuit was something of a professional twist for Clifford, who often brokered stories between the tabloids and people looking to capitalize on their exploits with celebrities, earning him a reputation as the master of the “kiss and tell.” He had a particularly productive relationship with News of the World until 2005, he said, when he had a falling out with Coulson over a story about a client using cocaine. Not long after, Clifford’s phone was hacked by Mulcaire. “I was the source of many of their biggest stories, and suddenly that source was gone,” Clifford said. “So I was a prime candidate. It’s common sense. Night follows day.” But before Mulcaire could obey the order to testify, Clifford dropped his lawsuit. Clifford declined to comment on details of his decision, except to say that his feelings changed after a meeting with Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor who became chief executive of News International. “We sat down and we had lunch,” Clifford said, “and it took us no time to sort it all out.”

News International agreed to pay Clifford one million pounds in exchange for feeding the paper exclusive stories over the next several years.

The company had been able to prevent Mulcaire’s testimony. But when The Guardian published details of Clifford’s lucrative deal, the litigation floodgates opened. More than three years after Scotland Yard closed the official investigation, solicitors and barristers now scrambled to bring new cases against News International and the police. Charlotte Harris, who represented Clifford, said that because of the way Scotland Yard handled the cases, “it has fallen upon the potential victims to make their own inquiries.” As a first step, potential plaintiffs needed to get confirmation from Scotland Yard on whether their names or phone numbers were found among the evidence. Scotland Yard initially promised prosecutors it would alert everyone named in the files, but it didn’t. One of Harris’s other clients, the victim in a high-profile sexual-assault investigation seven years ago, wrote to the police in January to see if her name was in the files. The woman suspected her phone may have been hacked because details about her life appeared in News of the World and other tabloids during coverage of her ordeal. She had been convinced the police or her friends were selling the information. Two months after writing to the police, she received a letter confirming that her number had been found among Mulcaire’s records. The letter said the evidence did not necessarily mean her messages had been accessed and suggested she contact her phone-service provider, “who may be able to assist further.” The woman and other potential hacking victims said that by sitting on the evidence for so long, the police have made it impossible to get information from phone companies, which do not permanently keep records. “It was disingenuous, to say the least, for Scotland Yard to say that,” the woman said. The police recently confirmed that the phone numbers of two friends were also found in Mulcaire’s records, she added. “I think I could have been spared a lot of angst about who I could trust and who I couldn’t trust had they told me,” she said.

Three plaintiffs are jointly seeking a judicial inquiry into Scotland Yard’s handling of the hacking case. The plaintiffs, who include a former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, say their rights were violated when the police failed to inform them that their names were found in Mulcaire’s documents. The former official, Brian Paddick, scoffed at Scotland Yard’s explanation that the appearance of his name didn’t necessarily mean that he was hacked. “It’s a mealy-mouthed way of saying, ‘We’re not telling you any more, that maybe something happened but we can’t be bothered to investigate,’ ” he said. A police spokesman said the department has been “as open as possible whilst maintaining and protecting individuals’ personal information and respecting privacy.”Andy Hayman, who ran the case for Scotland Yard, has since retired. He declined to comment for this article. He is currently a columnist for The Times of London, where he has written in defense of the police investigation and maintained there were “perhaps a handful” of hacking victims. The paper is owned by News International.

BY THE SPRING of this year, News International’s papers had firmly switched their support from Labour to the Tories. An avalanche of unforgiving coverage culminated on April 8, one month before the general election, in a Sun story headlined “Brown’s a Clown.” Brown’s strategists assumed that Murdoch’s motives were not purely ideological. They drew up a campaign document conjuring Murdoch’s wish list should David Cameron become prime minister. Among the top items they identified was the weakening of the government-financed BBC, one of Murdoch’s biggest competitors and long a target of criticism from News International executives. On May 11, David Cameron officially assumed the position and elevated Coulson to the head of communications. Within the week, Rupert Murdoch arrived at 10 Downing Street for a private meeting with the new prime minister. Cameron’s administration criticized the BBC in July for “extraordinary and outrageous waste” during difficult financial times and proposed cutting its budget.

At News of the World, editors said they had imposed a policy of zero tolerance of hacking. Whittingdale, the head of the select committee, said he was also assured by News International executives that hacking would not be permitted. “We have seen no evidence to suggest that it is still continuing,” he said. But in recent months, News of the World executives were notified of another suspicious episode. A phone company had alerted a television personality that someone called her mobile phone in a possible unauthorized attempt to access her voice mail, according to two people with knowledge of the incident. A court order ensued, compelling the phone company to divulge the source of the call. The number was traced to a reporter at News of the World. The paper said the journalist “has been suspended from reporting duties” while it conducts an investigation.

Dr. Does-It-All
By FRANK BRUNI

As one of the most accomplished cardiothoracic surgeons of his generation, Mehmet Oz has transplanted lungs and repurposed hearts; implanted mechanical devices to provide the pump and pulse for patients that cannot manage that on their own; and otherwise pressed, pulled, cut and stitched inside bodies where a second’s lapse of attention or a millimeter of miscalculation could kill.

But on a morning not long ago, around a conference table high in the NBC building in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, the challenge before him and dozens of assistants was less obviously urgent. They talked of testicles. Specifically, they discussed what sorts of props might accurately (and tastefully) mimic said sexual organs in a television demonstration, on “The Dr. Oz Show,” of how men should examine theirs for tumors and cysts.

“What about Silly Putty?” someone asked, to smiles and contained laughter. “What about a pecan or walnut with some padding around it?” someone else asked.

Beanbags were mentioned; so was cotton. There wasn’t any quick resolution.

Diann Duthie, the show’s art director, shrugged her shoulders and assured Oz they were trying. Confronting aesthetic riddles like this one is the essence of Duthie’s job. So that Oz could talk television viewers through the correct manner of pimple popping, she once constructed a gargantuan zit. So that he could explain halitosis, she came up with a giant, germy tongue. But the surrogate testicles had to be life-size — and, she hoped, lifelike — and she needed not one pair but many, for all of the men in the studio audience who would be called on to participate. “It’s sort of labor-intensive,” she explained at the conference table. “We have to make 50 of them.”

Oz didn’t weigh in, but he leaned far forward in his chair, clearly engaged. True, this wasn’t a life-and-death operation. But heroic heart operations and lung transplants have become virtually routine for Oz, and they no longer stretch his abilities or satisfy his ambitions the way they once did. There are other frontiers to be conquered, television foremost among them. And if he wants to be “America’s doctor,” the tag bestowed on him by no less than Oprah Winfrey, he has to spice up his act for a daytime audience potentially distracted by the tantrums of a toddler or the yelping of a Labradoodle. Ultimately, Duthie rose to the challenge with wads of compressed plastic foam tucked into little panty-hose sacs.

“The Dr. Oz Show” made its debut last September to considerable curiosity, much excitement and impressive ratings, in large part because of his association with Winfrey, whose company, Harpo Productions, is a co-producer of the show with Sony Pictures Television. “Dr. Oz” is essentially a spinoff of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” on which he appeared more than 55 times over the last five years, invited back regularly for detailed and unblushing tutorials on even the most intimate bodily functions.

“When he made it O.K. to talk about the shape of a good poop, I knew he could talk about anything,” Winfrey says, referring to the time he told her audience that the bequest of a properly humming gastrointestinal system should be S-shaped and hit the water like an Olympic diver, without much splash. “He always found ways to make the human body endlessly fascinating.”

His show tackles topics as diverse — and diversely weighty — as skin cancer, kitchen burns, sleep eating and pubic-hair loss, returning constantly to the same television mother lode Winfrey profitably mined: weepy overweight guests who vow, and often fail, to get in shape. And it has taken its star far away from any sort of traditional medical practice.

He explains that transition as the product of frustration. Too often, he told me, he would sit in his office and be “telling you stuff too little, too late — that if you’d been able to lose a little weight or if your diabetes had been managed more aggressively, then it would have dramatically changed your destiny, which is now to go downstairs and have open heart surgery.” With his TV show, he can exhort Americans to tend to all aspects of their health, head to toe, before they reach a point of no return.

But the show does something else for him that is perhaps equally important, and equally motivating. It indulges his own personal obsession with how best to treat the body and wring optimal performance from it. If he has credibility as an evangelist for wellness, that is in no small measure because he is a model of wellness, too, practicing what he preaches and demanding as much of himself as of others. The show holds him up as the sort of finely tuned machine that you, on the couch at home, yearn to be. And that underscores his determination to be an omniscient and omnipresent commentator on health-related affairs, one-stop shopping for all your somatic curiosities and some of your spiritual and intellectual ones to boot. While “Dr. Oz” is the flashiest part of that effort, it is by no means the only one.

Oz is also on the radio every day — Winfrey’s channel on Sirius XM satellite radio, to be exact — where his topics stray well beyond the purely anatomical to “How God Changes Your Brain” and “The Happiest People in the World.” When I eavesdropped on a session in early March, during which he was recording five shows to be presented weeks later, he debriefed a branding expert about his work with Southwest Airlines, then quizzed David Shenk, the author of a book titled “The Genius in All of Us,” about the malleability of I.Q. and the reliability of tests that measure it.

Oz is in bookstores, where you can find half a dozen titles in the ongoing “You” series — including “You: The Smart Patient,” “You: On a Diet” and “You: Having a Baby” — that he has written with Dr. Michael F. Roizen, the unofficial co-chairman of what might be called Oz Industries. There are about nine million of their books in print so far.

Oz is in magazines and newspapers. In February, he wrote what will be the first of six Prescription columns a year for Time magazine, which in 2008 included him in its annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In the fall he will start writing one column every other month for the AARP magazine. He reaches out to men with a monthly column for Esquire, to women with regular contributions to Winfrey’s magazine. All of this comes on top of the newspaper writing that he and Roizen, under the “You Docs” banner, produce for King Features Syndicate. This includes a 250-word “daily tips” column, a weekly 650-word question-and-answer column and a separate weekly 650-word feature on a given health topic.

Oz manages to churn out so much in part because he has assistants help with brainstorming, background material and more, and because he is often recycling and repackaging information from one format in another, a paragraph here reading like an anagram of the paragraph over there, the same set of skin-moisturizing and metabolism-boosting tips farmed out in myriad directions. But it is still remarkable, especially given how much time he devotes to “Dr. Oz,” which will ultimately record a total of 175 original hourlong shows, with about a half-dozen segments each, for the current September-to-September cycle.

For at least three days most weeks, the show requires him to arrive at Rockefeller Center by 7 a.m. and stay until 6 p.m.; he often has a shorter, fourth day as well. On the days, or portions of days, when the show isn’t taping, he occupies himself with not only the radio and the writing but also with other television appearances; with speeches; with his stewardship of HealthCorps, a not-for-profit organization, modeled on the Peace Corps, that he founded in 2003 to place recent college graduates in high schools as health educators; and with his sustained commitments at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, where he sees patients — and performs one or more operations — every Thursday.

Oz’s energy is astounding, intimidating, ludicrous. I spent much of my time with him over the last few months staring at his back as he darted — much faster than I could — through the halls at the NBC building or up as many as a half-dozen flights of stairs at Columbia Presbyterian, where he is too impatient to wait for elevators. He talks and thinks as fast as he moves, and he treats his body like an engine to be fueled in particular ways, at particular intervals.

I never saw him without a portable larder of baggies, plastic containers and Thermoses of food and drink, and all of it — every crumb, every drop — was healthful: low-fat Greek yogurt mixed with brightly colored berries; spinach; slaw; raw almonds; raw walnuts, soaked in water to amplify their nutritional benefit; a dark green concoction of juices from vegetables including cucumber and parsley. Roughly every 45 to 60 minutes, as if on cue, he would ingest something from his movable buffet, but only a bit, his portions assiduously regulated, like an intravenous drip of nutrition. It was the most efficient, joyless eating I have ever seen.

His wife, Lisa, says, “He doesn’t have the relationship with food that a lot of people have.” While she has been a vegetarian since she was 15, and is credited by Oz’s friends for many of his healthful habits, he sometimes eats fish and, much less frequently, meat. But, she says, he is not as tempted by sweets or junk food as she or most anyone else is. “If you handed him a Cheeto,” she says, “he’d just throw it away.”

Oz confirms as much: “At an office birthday party, I’ll have a bite of something, and I won’t feel good.” Worse yet is the aftermath of a vacation during which he has not had as much control over his diet and exercise as usual. “I feel differently immediately when I start to put weight on,” he says. “I don’t like that sluggish, blunted disposition that I have when that happens.” He is six feet tall, and he usually weighs 178 pounds.

He says that a classic Mediterranean diet, light on animal protein and high in fiber, is best. He rarely drinks alcohol and never drinks coffee, which he learned to avoid because it is a diuretic and he has been involved in many long operations during which there was no possibility of a bathroom break. And he begins every day with a seven-minute mat workout that intersperses a succession of rapidly changing yoga poses with five sets of 10 push-ups, then tacks on 20 situps of a particularly grueling nature at the end. That is his base line, to which he adds more yoga, short runs and basketball games with friends near his home in Cliffside Park, N.J., when he can.

And every so often, when all four of his kids, who range in age from 10 to 24, are home, he rouses them from their television programs or iPods and summons them outside for the Oz Family Olympics, which can entail tennis, wind sprints, competitive stair climbing: anything to push back against the forces of, and tropism toward, sedentary living. “We all have fun with it,” says Daphne, the eldest Oz child, “but it is a little bit exhausting first thing Saturday morning.”

Oz, who is 49, notes that he was born in the Year of the Rat, referring to the Chinese zodiac, and says: “You run the maze. If you put cheese in that maze, I swear to God, I’ll get to it, and I’ll get to it really fast. But should I be running after that cheese? Am I in the right maze? All of these questions, which people much greater than I am think through, I put on the back burner as I’m running after that cheese.”

Part of what propels him is the voice and example of his father, who grew up poor in Turkey during the Depression and, according to Oz, could not afford to slack off for even a second on his path to his own career as a cardiothoracic surgeon. “I’d say I got a 93 on a test; he’d say, ‘Did anyone get better?’ ” Oz recalled. “That was always the question he asked.” Oz told me that when, much later in life, he informed his father that he had made the Time 100 list, his father wrongly assumed it was a ranking and asked, “What number are you?”

“He wants to know what number,” Oz emphasized. “Are you kidding me? There are six billion people on the planet. It’s a rounding error!” And it’s also the kind of thing that goads a son to climb mountain after mountain, seldom pausing to enjoy the view.

Reared in Wilmington, Del., he decided to become a doctor at age 7, in line in an ice-cream parlor. “I remember it like yesterday,” he said. “There was a kid in front of me who was 10. My dad, just to pass the time, said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The kid said, ‘I don’t know, I’m 10.’ My father waited until he was out of earshot and said: ‘I never want you to tell me that if I ask you that question. I never want you tell me you don’t know. It’s O.K. if you change your mind. But I never want you not to have a vision of what you want to be.’

“I told him that day that I wanted to be a doctor,” Oz added. “And I never changed my mind.”

For college he went to Harvard, where he played football and water polo and studied hard, not content merely to get by. “He was very competitive,” Billy Campbell, one of his roommates, told me. “There was never any question that he wasn’t just going to be a doctor. He wanted to be a fantastic surgeon.”

And at the University of Pennsylvania, he did double duty, earning an M.B.A. along with his M.D. The business degree foreshadowed his eventual evolution into a brand as much as a doctor. In 1985 he married Lisa Lemole, the daughter of a cardiothoracic surgeon with whom his father was friendly, and their relationship opened him up to the worlds of alternative medicine and Eastern mysticism, which he integrated into his thinking and career early on. Her mother believed fervently in New Age approaches like homeopathic remedies and meditation.

Mehmet and Lisa Oz’s union is part business partnership — she has pitched in on his books and TV projects and usually sits in on his radio show to interview the guests with him — and all mutual-admiration society. He says that she is the most sensible, linear thinker he knows; she considers him a major hunk. In a book of hers that the Free Press published this month, “US: Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships That Matter Most,” she writes: “I have never been unfaithful to my husband. (I know, I know, he’s totally hot, but every other night on call gets old fast.)”

Daphne Oz is the author of her own book, “The Dorm Room Diet,” which was published in 2006 by Newmarket Press and followed by “The Dorm Room Diet Planner” and “The Dorm Room Diet Workout” DVD. Mehmet Oz wrote the foreword to “The Dorm Room Diet” and did the same for “US.” (Both books advertise that on their covers.) It is as if the Oz family is founding a wellness conglomerate — a wellness dynasty — that will point all of America toward a physical utopia, high in fiber and low in belly fat.

He first started drawing widespread attention in the news media around 1995, when he helped found the Complementary Care Center at Columbia Presbyterian. It recognized a potential value in alternative therapies and, for example, put a hands-on healer who believed in so-called energy medicine in the operating room, if a patient wanted her there. In 1996, his profile grew bigger still when he assisted Dr. Eric Rose in the heart-transplant operation performed on Frank Torre, the brother of Joe Torre, the Yankees’ manager at the time. Oz appeared over the next few years as a medical expert on ABC, CNN and, in 2001, “Oprah.”

It was about that time that Lisa Oz, who had worked some as a movie producer, suggested he do a television show of his own, as a way of practicing preventive medicine on a grand scale. The concept that she developed became “Second Opinion With Dr. Oz,” 13 episodes of which ran on the Discovery Health Channel in 2003, when Oz’s former roommate Campbell was its president. Each episode tackled a particular health issue. The first was obesity. Winfrey agreed to appear on it to discuss her struggles with her weight.

“Have you ever seen the soul?” Oz asked me as he leaned over a rectangular cavity that had been opened in the chest of a 74-year-old woman so that he and Dr. Michael Argenziano could get at her heart and replace a badly calcified valve with a new one fashioned from cow parts. He motioned me closer to the cavity as he used a metal instrument to poke at the organ — a floppy, vaguely orange-colored thing — and show me what he was talking about, a whitish area that he described as the heart’s electrical center, where everything comes together. “To me this is the most majestic part of the body,” he said.

It was a Thursday in January, we were in an operating room at Columbia Presbyterian and he was midway through a procedure that would wind up lasting an hour and a half, during which he and Argenziano made minuscule stitches to fasten the new valve in place without otherwise puncturing or tearing anything, the soul very much included. It struck me as demanding, thrilling work — more than enough stimulation for any ordinary mortal.

“This is sort of like putting a hubcap on,” Oz said, playing down the art and the stakes of it.

“In the center line of the highway,” Argenziano added.

For Oz, these procedures serve as a reminder — to the world, and maybe most of all to himself — of his concrete medical skills. But his hospital work fits somewhat oddly with his celebrity, which intrudes on it. Just before her operation, the 74-year-old surgical patient mentioned to Oz that she had seen him hanging upside down in a chair on “Dr. Oz.” “And I thought, He’s going to break his neck and not be able to operate on me.”

“The Dr. Oz Show” has been an enormous success, roaring out of the gate with ratings higher than those for any new syndicated daytime talk show since “Dr. Phil,” another “Oprah” spinoff, in 2002. And its number of viewers has grown steadily since. In the February sweeps period, “Oprah” and “Dr. Phil” were the only syndicated daytime talk shows that beat it. It tied “Live With Regis and Kelly,” came in slightly ahead of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and handily outpaced “The Doctors,” a medical show spun off from “Dr. Phil” that began in 2008.

An average of about 3.5 million viewers tune in daily to watch Oz, and his show — an elaborately staged, densely staffed production — works frenetically for them, alternating prop-driven demonstrations like the testicular self-exam with conventional journalism, animation, re-enactments, segments on laboratory equipment and a great many cadaver organs, about which the team of three full-time medical researchers — all graduate students taking a break from medical school at Columbia University — are extremely finicky. In the middle of one of several “Dr. Oz” rehearsals I watched, a researcher sped uptown to the Columbia Presbyterian hospital morgue to fetch a substitute large intestine for one whose appendix was not quite telegenic enough. When the right human body part cannot be found, pig or cow parts have to do. Researchers have come to know some of New York City’s most proficient butchers.

Critics of the show say that its need for so much fresh content — for new tips and revelations every day — leads to a chaotic bazaar of advice, not all of it equally reliable and important. To illustrate that exercise can be fun, Oz has roller-danced on camera; he has done flamenco dancing — in fitted dark blue scrubs — as well. He has demonstrated pet C.P.R. and, in full Maury Povich mode, done a segment — replete with horror-movie visuals and a soap-operatic score — on children who asphyxiate themselves in pursuit of a brief high. “It’s a game your child could be playing under your roof right now,” Oz said gravely into the camera. “It goes by many exotic names: rush, purple dragon, space monkey, funky chicken, cloud nine. But it’s best known as the choking game.”

In his urgency to get the attention of all the Americans whose blood pressure and cholesterol levels he would like to lower, does Oz, despite his preternatural talent for tackling a hundred things at once, sometimes show inadequate vigilance? He came under fire last year for the way a longevity-related Web site that he and Roizen maintain was working with drug makers. The site, RealAge.com, invites visitors to take a “biological age” test and become site members, which then leads to their biographical and behavior information being shared with pharmaceutical companies for marketing purposes. Oz concedes that the site wasn’t making that clear enough and says that the language on it has since been changed. But he defends the basic arrangement, saying it is a way to finance the site without having to use too much advertising.

Advertising, though, is used on “The Doctor Oz Show” Web site. In its question-and-answer section, information about irritated skin is often accompanied by a plug for Dove soaps.

Oz’s multifarious endeavors have certainly made him rich. Beyond whatever money he and Roizen earned for the first five “You” books, they received a $7 million advance from the Free Press for the subsequent three, according to Crain’s New York Business. A television-industry expert told me that the bare minimum he is making for the first year of “Dr. Oz” is $3 million, which would rise significantly within a few years. Oz doesn’t dispute those figures. But he was plenty affluent without all his current media activities. He purchased his home in Cliffside Park — a sprawling manse — about a decade ago, and well before “Dr. Oz,” he plunked down $2.5 million to annex the lot beside it.

He has met famous people and made famous friends, though he measures and experiences glamour differently than many people do. Mindy Borman, an executive producer of “Dr. Oz,” says that she has seldom seen him more excited than on the day Bill Nye, the bow-tied “science guy,” came on the show. They donned his-and-his hazmat suits for a demonstration in which they created a cloud out of water and liquid nitrogen.

In the end, Oz’s exertions seem tied less to avarice or the ability to name-drop than to a desire to keep testing, surprising, exceeding and enlarging himself, along with his presence and influence. And in his drive and discipline there are elements of compulsion. Michelle Bouchard, the president of HealthCorps, remembers that during their first meeting, when Oz was in college, he was sitting on a piano bench, and he told her he would like to learn to play the instrument someday. And she says that as a present for his 40th birthday, “as busy as he was,” he got and took those promised piano lessons, diligently checking off an item on his to-do list.

Moderately active in the Republican Party in New Jersey, he says he has at times contemplated elective office, but then he has also contemplated taking “Dr. Oz” in a more general direction, along the lines of “Oprah.” “If it’s just a show about medicine, then it won’t have the legs to keep you engaged,” he says, adding that in the Marcus Welby, M.D., past: “Your doctor wasn’t just someone who gave you your Lipitor dosage. He gave you some advice about life.”

He does not want to become bored and does not want to lose steam. In his Rockefeller Center office late one afternoon, he took out a piece of paper so he could draw for me a graph of a normal person’s productivity over the span of a life. It was a broad inverted U, and the slopes to and from its summit — which represented the moment of peak professional performance, perhaps in the late 30s or early 40s — were gradual ones. His intention, he said, was to delay that summit by taking on new challenges at determined intervals, thus creating vertical spikes in his own productivity graph, which he also drew. It was jagged, impressive and confusing, not least because Oz, despite his preoccupations with youthfulness, looks every one of his 49 years when he is out of makeup and the bags beneath his eyes are unconcealed. He has to be reminded to get enough sleep.

Matters of longevity, posterity and even immortality pop up time and again in conversations with him.

On the staircase at Columbia Presbyterian, apropos of nothing, he began talking about certain Japanese, Sardinian and Costa Rican populations that live unusually long — and said that their shared trait was activity, activity, activity. His first column for Time magazine, “Living Long and Living Well,” ran in a section called “How to Live 100 Years.” At another point, in his Rockefeller Center office, he said that so many people thrill to being on television because “there’s an element of eternity to it: you are storing you; you are taking your life force for that brief moment when you’re on camera, and you’re storing that for all eternity — which makes you someone who will never truly die.” And he described his own investment in television by saying: “I’ve always felt that, when I looked at my tombstone, it shouldn’t say, ‘Mehmet Oz banged out 10,000 open-heart operations.’ I’ve probably done 5,000. Am I any better at it than 10,000?”

He shook his head. “It’s just a different number on the tombstone,” he said.

Is Marriage Good for Your Health?
By TARA PARKER-POPE

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced.

All of which suggests that while Farr’s exploration into the conjugal condition pointed us in the right direction, it exaggerated the importance of the institution of marriage and underestimated the quality and character of the marriage itself. The mere fact of being married, it seems, isn’t enough to protect your health. Even the Healthy Marriage Initiative makes the distinction between “healthy” and “unhealthy” relationships when discussing the benefits of marriage. “When we divide good marriages from bad ones,” says the marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, who is also the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, “we learn that it is the relationship, not the institution, that is key.”

Some of today’s most interesting research on the relationship between marriage and health is being led by a pair of researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine. The duo, Ronald Glaser and Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, are also, fittingly, married to each other.

Glaser and Kiecolt-Glaser’s scholarly collaboration has its roots in a chance encounter during a faculty picnic in October 1978 on the Ohio State campus. Glaser, who is a viral immunologist, spotted an attractive woman standing with members of the psychiatry faculty. Although their eyes met only briefly, he caught a glimpse of her name tag. Intrigued, he tried to track her down, calling the psychiatry department chairman to ask if he knew a petite blonde on staff with a name like “Pam Kiscoli.” The department chairman figured out that Glaser was talking about a new assistant professor named Jan Kiecolt. Glaser and Kiecolt eventually met for lunch at the university’s hospital cafeteria. They married a year later, in January 1980.

The coupling resulted in more than romance. The two scientists were fascinated by each other’s work, which they often discussed over meals or while jogging together. Glaser suggested that they collaborate professionally, but finding common ground was a challenge: he studied virology and immunology; she was a clinical psychologist who focused on assertiveness and other behavior. In the early 1980s, however, Kiecolt-Glaser came across a book on the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology, which concerns the interplay between behavior, the immune and endocrine systems and the brain and nervous system. The couple were intrigued by a science that lay at the intersection of their disciplines. Today, the two disagree on exactly how their professional collaboration began. “He says I started it,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. “But I say he started it.”

In their first research collaboration, they sought to measure the effect of psychological stress on the immune system. Although earlier studies had established that trauma and other major stress — like the death of a loved one or prolonged sleep deprivation — weakened the immune system, the Glasers wanted to know if lesser forms of stress, like those associated with the workplace or graduate school, had a similar effect.

The Glasers, who worked at Ohio’s State’s medical school, had ready access to an ample supply of stressed-out students, and so they decided to study the toll exacted by school pressure. They took blood samples from a set of students early in the semester and then did so again in the middle of final exams. The Glasers discovered that the stress of examination time seemed to cause a significant weakening of the students’ immune response: by examination time, the medical students showed a significant drop in so-called natural killer cells, a type of white blood cell that battles viruses and helps prevent cancer.

For their second collaboration, the Glasers turned their attention to domestic strife. They wondered about the role that relationships play in health and about the effects of marital stress, which, like school pressure, can be a source of nontraumatic but chronic strain. In what was to be the first of their many studies on marriage and health, the Glasers recruited 76 women, half of whom were married; the other half were separated or had divorced. The Glasers wanted to identify which married women were in troubled relationships as well as which of the women who were separated or divorced from their husbands were emotionally struggling the most. They did this by using marital-quality scales, types of questionnaires that ask couples to indicate agreement or disagreement with statements like “If I had to do it over again, I would marry the same person” or “We often do things together.” Next, using blood tests, the Glasers measured the women’s immune-system responses, tracking their levels of antibody production and other indicators of immunity strength. The results showed that the women in unhappy relationships and the women who remained emotionally hung up on their ex-husbands had decidedly weaker immune responses than the women who were in happier relationships (or were happily out of them).

Though pleased with this study, the Glasers knew that they had succeeded in taking the measure of marital happiness and health only at a single moment. The couple were also curious to study the effect of marital stress as it unfolded in real time. What happens to the body minute by minute, hour by hour, when couples engage in hostile marital disputes? To find this out, they recruited a study group of 90 seemingly happy newlywed couples. Each couple was hooked up to tubes so that blood samples could be drawn from the pair at regular intervals, and the husband and wife were seated face to face. Obscured by a curtain, the researchers watched the couples on video monitors; nurses took the blood samples. The participants, as they had been prompted to do, discussed their most volatile topics of marital conflict, like housework, sex or interference from a mother-in-law. “You wouldn’t think in a study situation that they would tear into each other,” Glaser, who is now the director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research, told me. “But they get into it.” As expected, the couples who exhibited the most negative and hostile behavior during the conflict discussion showed the largest declines in immune-system function during the 24-hour study period.

These data strongly suggested that marital stress could affect the body in striking ways, but the Glaser team had yet to prove that marital conflict had any truly meaningful or lasting effect on health. Kiecolt-Glaser had an idea for another study that would meet this higher standard. She had read about a strange tool used by her dermatology colleagues: a small plastic suction device designed to leave eight tiny blisters on the arm and allow monitoring of the immune-system response at the wound sites. Kiecolt-Glaser’s proposal was to use this blistering device to measure how quickly or slowly physical wounds healed among married couples who had undergone different levels of marital stress.

The experiment had two phases. Each married couple, after their forearms were subjected to the blistering procedure, were asked to talk together for a half-hour: on one occasion they discussed topics chosen to elicit the couples’ supportive behaviors; on another day, after undergoing the blistering procedures again, they discussed topics selected to evoke conflict and tension and tried to resolve them. Before subjecting others to the blistering regimen, each of the Glasers had the device secured to his or her respective forearm to have his or her skin blistered. The sensation is comparable to “someone gently pinching your arm,” Kiecolt-Glaser told me. Nonetheless, the Glasers knew it would be a tough sell to convince others couples to undergo the blistering procedure as well as two weeks of subsequent monitoring of the wounds as they healed. A study grant allowed them to offer $2,000 in total compensation to any couple willing to take part in the experiment. They managed to recruit 42 married couples for the study.

The results were remarkable. After the blistering sessions in which couples argued, their wounds took, on average, a full day longer to heal than after the sessions in which the couples discussed something pleasant. Among couples who exhibited especially high levels of hostility while bickering, the wounds took a full two days longer to heal than those of couples who had showed less animosity while fighting.

Published in 2005 in The Archives of General Psychiatry, the Glasers’ findings help explain epidemiological data showing that couples in troubled marriages appear to be more susceptible to illness than happier couples. The results may also have practical relevance for surgical patients, for instance, waiting for incisions to heal. But most important, the study offered compelling evidence that a hostile fight with your husband or wife isn’t just bad for your relationship. It can have a profound toll on your body.

Kiecolt-Glaser told me that the overall health lesson to take away from the new wave of marriage-and-health literature is that couples should first work to repair a troubled relationship and learn to fight without hostility and derision. But if staying married means living amid constant acrimony, from the point of view of your health, “you’re better off out of it,” she says.

Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60s. The study, which grew out of work by researchers at the University of Chicago, found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerned single people who had never married. For more than 100 years, scientists have speculated that single people, because they generally have fewer resources, lower income and perhaps less logistical and emotional support, have poorer health than the married. But in the Chicago study, people who had divorced or been widowed had worse health problems than men and women who had been single their entire lives. In formerly married individuals, it was as if the marriage advantage had never existed.

Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”

Other researchers have also studied how the “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. In 2000, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a three-year Swedish study of 300 women who had been hospitalized with severe chest pains or a heart attack; the study found that those who reported the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times as likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure. It is notable that these increased risks weren’t associated with other forms of stress. For instance, women who were stressed-out at work weren’t at any higher risk for a second episode of heart problems than women who were happy in their jobs.

Of course, all couples — happy or unhappy — are bound to experience some form of marital conflict. Surely this does not mean everyone is doomed to ill health; some conflicts are better than others. The University of Utah psychology professor Timothy W. Smith has addressed this question, studying how what he calls the “emotional tone” of conflict affects heart risk. In one study, he recruited 150 couples, most of whom were in their 60s and married for an average of 36 years. All were in general good health with no signs of heart disease. Smith collected video recordings of the couples discussing stressful topics like money management or housework. The arguments were then “coded” to indicate the number of warm, hostile and controlling statements and words that were used in the course of the dispute. In addition, the couples were put in heart-scanning machines to measure coronary calcium levels, which are a useful indicator of heart-disease risk. Smith then compared each person’s conflict style with their coronary calcium score.

Smith’s results suggest that there are important differences between men and women when it comes to health and the style of conflict that can jeopardize it. The women in his study who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger. “Most of the literature assumes that it’s how bad the arguments get that drives the effect, but it’s actually the lack of affection that does it,” Smith told me. “It wasn’t how much nasty talk there was. It was the lack of warmth that predicted risk.”

For men, on the other hand, hostile and negative marital battles seemed to have no effect on heart risk. Men were at risk for a higher coronary calcium score, however, when their marital spats turned into battles for control. It didn’t matter whether it was the husband or wife who was trying to gain control of the matter; it was merely any appearance of controlling language that put men on the path of heart disease.

In both cases, the emotional tone of a marital fight turned out to be just as predictive of poor heart health as whether the individual smoked or had high cholesterol. It is worth noting that the couples in Smith’s study were all relatively happy. These were husbands and wives who loved each other. Yet many of them had developed styles of conflict that took a physical toll on each other. The solution, Smith noted, isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to fight more thoughtfully. “Difficulties in marriage seem to be nearly universal,” he said. “Just try not to let fights be any nastier than they need to be.”

Researchers have also started to examine the salutary health effects of social relationships, including those of a good marriage. In one recent study, James A. Coan, an assistant professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, recruited 16 women who scored relatively high on a questionnaire assessing marital happiness. He placed each woman in three different situations while monitoring her brain with an f.M.R.I. machine, which offers a way to observe the brain’s response to almost any kind of emotional stimulation. In one situation, to simulate stress, he subjected the woman to a mild electric shock. In a second, the shock was administered, but the woman held the hand of a stranger; in a third, the hand of her husband.

Both instances of hand-holding reduced the neural activity in areas of the woman’s brain associated with stress. But when the woman was holding her husband’s hand, the effect was even greater, and it was particularly pronounced in women who had the highest marital-happiness scores. Holding a husband’s hand during the electric shock resulted in a calming of the brain regions associated with pain similar to the effect brought about by use of a pain-relieving drug.

Coan says the study simulates how a supportive marriage and partnership gives the brain the opportunity to outsource some of its most difficult neural work. “When someone holds your hand in a study or just shows that they are there for you by giving you a back rub, when you’re in their presence, that becomes a cue that you don’t have to regulate your negative emotion,” he told me. “The other person is essentially regulating your negative emotion but without your prefrontal cortex. It’s much less wear and tear on us if we have someone there to help regulate us.”

With so much evidence establishing a link between marital stress and health, a new generation of research is set to explore the ways in which couples can mitigate the damaging effects of relationship stress. The Glasers are now conducting studies testing whether regular supplements of fish oil, rich in omega-3 fatty acids, can mitigate some of the physical symptoms of stress on the immune system.

The couple are also embarking on a new study looking at the interplay between nutrition and marital stress. Earlier research at Ohio State showed that when study subjects were given intravenous fat injections during times of stress, it took longer for triglycerides, fats that are associated with heart disease, to leave the bloodstream. But Kiecolt-Glaser is more interested in the real-world equivalent of the study: What happens to the body’s ability to cope with fats when couples fight at dinnertime? To find out, she’s planning to feed married couples two types of meals — one relatively healthful meal and one high-fat meal equivalent to fast food. During the meal the couples will be asked to discuss topics of high stress, and a blood analysis will offer a glimpse of the effect that mealtime conflict has on the body’s ability to metabolize fats. “It’s an ideal way,” Kiecolt-Glaser says, “to look at what happens to couples in the real world, where so many family conflicts happen over a meal.”

For the Glasers, their nearly 30 years of professional collaboration have not only given them new insights into the role of stress and health but have also helped them in their own marriage. Like every married couple, they have their disagreements, Glaser told me. But years of watching married couples interact and measuring the subsequent physical toll that conflict takes on their bodies has taught the Glasers the importance of taking time off together and making sure their disagreements don’t degenerate into personal attacks. “Don’t fight dirty,” he advised. “You never go far enough down the road where you hurt each other. We know enough to avoid those kinds of arguments.”

Kiecolt-Glaser added that the couple’s research shows that some level of relationship stress is inevitable in even the happiest marriages. The important thing, she said, is to use those moments of stress as an opportunity to repair the relationship rather than to damage it. “It can be so uncomfortable, even in the best marriages, to have an ongoing disagreement,” she said. “It’s the pit-in-your-stomach kind of thing. But when your marital relationship is the key relationship in your life, a disagreement is really a signal to try to fix something.”

Where Scott Brown Is Coming From
By FRANK BRUNI

In just 48 hours, Scott Brown would be sworn in as the newest member of the United States Senate, stepping into the shoes (and office suite) of Edward M. Kennedy and the world of woe on Capitol Hill. But as he zipped down a Massachusetts highway on an early February night, he wasn’t focused on the issues he campaigned on and the problems he would soon confront: a gargantuan federal deficit; terrorism; health care reform, which his election may well have killed. He was fixated on “Saturday Night Live.” And how the actor Jon Hamm nailed him in a recent skit.

“A lot of his mannerisms — he actually did a pretty good job,” Brown said, bringing up the TV show for the second time in 90 minutes and sounding hugely amused. He lavished even more praise on the skit’s writers, who envisioned him as a Republican lamb lost in the U.S. Capitol and stumbling repeatedly into a Democratic leadership meeting where Senators Barbara Boxer and Representatives Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, among others, huddled. “That would be me,” he said, grinning. “I would actually walk into an office and say: ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, this place is big, I’m lost, I’m sorry.’ ”

The skit’s gist was in fact less innocent than that: as Brown apologized to Pelosi and company for his serial intrusions, he smiled coquettishly, batted his eyes and invaded their thought balloons, where he gyrated and jived, a hunky go-go dancer with loose hips and lewd quips. (“I’m about to filibust out of these jean shorts.”) The lawmakers were lust-struck. Sure, they wanted universal coverage, but right then and there, they had a more intense, urgent hankering for Scott Brown.

He chuckled about that part too, kidding that when he formally met these lawmakers in the weeks ahead, he wouldn’t be sure whether to “shake their hands or wink at them.” It’s a question that wouldn’t occur to most Senate newcomers, but then they also probably wouldn’t attract the attentions of “S.N.L.” in the first place. In the context of Congress, Brown is an unusually hot property. Interpret the “hot” as you will.

That high profile only partly reflects his shocking upset victory in the Jan. 19 special election in Massachusetts, where Democrats hold the upper hand and he entered the race to fill the remainder of Kennedy’s term with minimal name recognition statewide. And it only partly reflects the game-changing consequences of his win, which ended the Democrats’ supermajority in the Senate, pumped Republicans full of hope for the 2010 midterms and could put many of President Obama’s dreams on ice.

Brown’s exposure owes at least as much to, well, his exposure. Back in 1982, when he was 22, he posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine, which named him the sexiest man in America. The layout of the photograph skimped on some key information, but the accompanying interview made space for his fantasies, which he said turned to women who were “tall, athletic and have longish hair and beautiful legs . . . hmmm, I’m getting excited!”

Nearly three decades later, as he campaigned for the Senate, that article drew widespread notice, as did the fact that Brown, at 50, seemed as plausible a centerfold as ever. An obsessive exerciser, he competed in more than six triathlons, both abbreviated and full length, in the first half of 2009 alone. The trim, muscular results of all that swimming and sweating explained an atypical addition to the Washington press corps that shadowed him during a visit to the nation’s capital just after his victory. A reporter for the gossip site TMZ was on hand to ask him if he was “bringing sexy back to the Republican Party.”

He’s certainly bringing it a résumé and panache that aren’t the norm. And he’s transporting them — in the unlikely event that you haven’t yet heard — in a green GMC Canyon pickup truck. Seldom has a politician got more mileage out of a vehicle, and I don’t mean Brown’s crisscrossing of Massachusetts during the campaign. He constantly mentioned his truck in speeches, built an entire commercial around it and, during an appearance on Jay Leno’s show just two nights before “S.N.L.,” announced the availability of a toy version of it, packaged with the motto “Driving the establishment crazy.” The Boston Herald actually interviewed the mechanic who services it. It’s Brown’s most visible populist credential, shorthand for his kinship with the common man, an automotive analogue to Joe the Plumber. And it was the setting for the review he volunteered of the “S.N.L.” skit.

“We’re in the famous truck,” he pointed out, needlessly. “It’s a regular truck.” Yes and no. As Arianna, the younger of his two daughters, told me, he originally purchased it not so he could haul lumber but so he could attach it to a trailer bearing her horse.

He soon abandoned that plan. “It’s scary pulling a trailer,” he said, adding that he instead used the truck “for all of her horse stuff” and “it always smelled.” At that moment it didn’t, and there wasn’t any visible cargo in its bed, which often carried campaign signs. But on the dashboard I spotted the kind of plastic container used to hold a teeth-whitening mold. One of his daughters, he said, must have left it there.

Like so many politicians who have presented themselves as folk heroes, Scott Brown is a lot more complicated. He’s a real estate lawyer with a dozen years in the Massachusetts State Legislature — not exactly a career politician, but not an outsider either — and two spacious homes, one on a leafy cul-de-sac in the Boston suburb of Wrentham, Mass., the other about four blocks from the Atlantic in Rye, N.H. He’s indisputably self-made and indeed something of a he-man, but with a background that’s part Horatio Alger, part Zoolander. The Cosmo article came toward the start of a long, lucrative modeling career, and it was hardly his last voyage as a showboat.

Arianna told me that he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink leather shorts. It’s family lore.

The pinkish color drained from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. “I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,” he said. “And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.”

As he told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it. “If I wore these now,” he said, “I’d get shot. But it was the ’80s. Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y.” The shorts went with his tan at the time and a pair of white shoes that he owned, so he gave them a whirl. “Gail comes out and she’s like, ‘Those are pink shorts.’ I said: ‘Yeah, you like them? They’re great. Comfortable. Feel this leather.’ ” With this last phrase, he slowly stroked the side of one of his thighs, apparently miming the gesture he made in front of her.

He emphasized: “This isn’t cheap leather. This is, like, $750 shorts back then.” He shook his head at the memory. “Crazy stuff.”

IN THE BEGINNING, almost no one in the Republican Party believed that Brown could win, and state party leaders blessed his candidacy in large part because he had nothing to lose. For other, more prominent potential candidates like Kerry Healey, the former Massachusetts lieutenant governor, and Andy Card, the former White House chief of staff, defeat could have been an embarrassment. And defeat, most political analysts concurred, was almost certain. Massachusetts hadn’t elected a Republican to the Senate in nearly four decades. Would its voters really decide to put one in Kennedy’s storied place?

But Brown didn’t come swathed in expectations, great or otherwise. When several of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s key aides signed on to help him, they weren’t banking on victory but thinking that he could at least use the campaign to raise his political stature and position himself for a future run for state attorney general or some office of comparable altitude. A respectable showing would suffice. “If he got 40 percent,” says former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, “they would all have been covered in glory.”

Eric Fehrnstrom, one of the campaign’s principal architects, says that the budget for the entire race, from its September kickoff through the election, was originally $1.2 million. And until mid-December, there wasn’t much reason to re-evaluate that. But then voter skepticism toward Obama’s health care plan, which Brown opposed, grew more pronounced. The security lapses in the case of the so-called underwear bomber, along with the firestorm over a proposed civilian trial for one of the professed 9/11 masterminds, gave him a line of attack against Democrats that suited him well, given his 30 years in the Army National Guard. His Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, the state’s current attorney general, kept making mistakes. And Tea Party groups and other conservatives from outside Massachusetts, sensing her weakness and Brown’s strengths, joined his effort in a deliberately quiet, under-the-radar fashion. By the end of the year, Brown suddenly seemed to have a real shot.

Donors certainly thought so: in one week shortly before Election Day, about $10 million poured in. The campaign ultimately raised $14 million and, in the home stretch, found itself with more money than there was commercial time on local television to spend it on. Brown beat Coakley 52 to 47 percent.

Then he strode onto a national stage that wasn’t entirely prepared for him, or vice versa. His victory speech stood out primarily for an impromptu and incongruous pronouncement about Arianna, 19, and her sister, Ayla, 21. “They’re both available,” he blurted out. Arianna, in fact, isn’t: she has a boyfriend. But that was hardly the bizarre part.

Brown told me that the comment was a product of runaway adrenaline and raw nerves. “The pressure of the whole campaign came to a head,” he said. “I’m up there, and I’m looking around, and I’m like: I’m here. I made it. I actually won. And then I’m looking around and I just took a breath, and the pressure’s building and building.” He wanted to thank and acknowledge his daughters in some fashion, and out came “available.” “I can’t believe I said that,” he marveled.

There’s a sometimes rough and (apologies to Sarah Palin) roguish element to his character, a spontaneity that causes unintended flaps. In 2001, when he was serving in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and a lesbian legislator in the Massachusetts State Senate announced that she and her female partner had decided to have children, he said that such an arrangement was “not normal.” (He later apologized.) In 2007, during a talk with high-school students, he used what he now characterizes more delicately as “the F-bomb” as he read verbatim from nasty Internet postings about him and his family. (He told me he was making a point about vulgarity, anonymity and bullying on the Web.) The following year, he seemed to imply, during a cable-television appearance, that Barack Obama was born out of wedlock.

A few of his friends and political allies lack filters themselves. Robert Hedlund, a colleague in the State Senate, expressed regret that Brown is married and doesn’t go out to bars much, because, he joked, “he’d certainly make a pretty good wingman these days. You could follow him for just an hour and probably fill up several black books. No! No! I didn’t say that! My girlfriend will string me up for that!”

During the campaign, Brown was surrounded and supported by a high-testosterone tribe of professional athletes, local talk-radio celebrities and a comic named Steve Sweeney, who also showed up to introduce him at several post-election celebrations. At one Sweeney announced: “Any single women out there who want to approach me the way they throw themselves at Scott Brown, please, feel free, I’m not Barney Frank, I am a heterosexual.”

But the campaign also showed Brown to be diligent, patient and shrewd. He embraced all of the hand-shaking and barnstorming that Coakley seemed averse to. If he wasn’t particularly eloquent in explaining why he opposed federal health care legislation modeled largely on a Massachusetts measure he supported, he nonetheless made it through interviews and debates without any outsize flubs. And his campaign advisers and legislative colleagues in Massachusetts say that he had a keener grasp of what was going on in the Massachusetts electorate than they did — that he in particular recognized many voters’ qualms with Congress and their readiness, once again, for a fresh, unconventional face.

“He rode that wave like no one else could have,” Massachusetts State Senator Steven A. Baddour, a Democrat, told me. “He’s a smart guy.” Brown’s undergraduate and law degrees are from top-notch institutions: Tufts University and Boston College, respectively. And just making it to college was an accomplishment in itself. Many people with a childhood as turbulent as his don’t.

BROWN’S PARENTS DIVORCED when he was about a year old. After that Brown’s father wasn’t around much, and his mother remarried three times in little more than a dozen years — to men who didn’t always treat her well. Brown still remembers — “like it was yesterday,” he says — waking up one night to the sounds of her being pummeled by one of her husbands, then “running up to him and grabbing him — grabbing his leg — and biting his leg and I wouldn’t let go. And he was just pounding the crap out of me. Boom! Ba-boom! Ba-boom! Ba-boom!”

There was some bravado in his telling of this, but it was obviously a willed thing, because his eyes had a pained expression. Ayla told me that the saddest she has ever seen him was after a recent day of campaigning when he was asked about that aspect of his childhood, which reporters hadn’t fully plumbed before. He had tried to exile it from his memory, she said, and campaign coverage brought it rushing back.

In Wakefield, Mass., a middle-class suburb of Boston, Brown, his mother and a younger half-sister got by with the help of relatives and even welfare. When his mother did have work, she often left him alone, and that’s how Judy Patterson, a teacher supervising some summer-school students in a school visible from Brown’s backyard, came to know him.

“He asked me if he could attend the school during the day, because he had nothing to do,” she recalls. “So he wanted someplace, even if it was a remediation program. What 11-year-old kid that you know would want to do that?”

She introduced him to Brad Simpson, the junior-high-school basketball coach (whom she later married). Simpson recognized and nurtured Brown’s aptitude for the sport. By eighth grade Brown was a basketball standout. “I dribbled the basketball everywhere,” Brown says. “I’d take it on dates. I’d dribble it up and down town. I was the guy — you know, every town has one of those — just dribble, dribble. ‘Oh, there’s Scott: dribble, dribble, dribble.’ I’d wear them out. I’d actually wear the basketballs out.”

He was told he could be an even better player if he trimmed his long bangs. Judy Simpson remembers this because Brown bounded up to her classroom, asked if she had scissors and implored her to take a whack at the bangs herself. “I don’t think he had the money to go get his hair cut,” she says.

The Simpsons married when Brown was about to enter high school, and from then on, he was a frequent visitor to their home. “He would check in,” Judy Simpson recalls, adding that she got the sense that “he would come just to see if everything was the same as the last time he was here: were we still together? Were we arguing? Were we on the same track — happy? Because in his family, that was never the case.”

Brad Simpson and Ellis Lane, the Wakefield High School varsity basketball coach, acted as Brown’s surrogate fathers, making team membership contingent on punctuality, neatness and good grades. The two of them and the sport of basketball hammered discipline into Brown, who Lane says was fiercely competitive but also, as a teammate, mature and generous, taking instruction well and always volunteering for the toughest defensive assignments. During his senior year he was co-captain of the Wakefield Warriors, led the team in scoring and fielded entreaties from many college-basketball programs. Basketball, along with his popularity with girls, gave Brown a reason to feel special.

“Secret ambition is to play for the Jazz or the Celtics and be outrageously happy,” he wrote in his senior yearbook. That wasn’t a realistic dream, but he had other interests, backup plans. The squib by his yearbook photo also mentioned the Latin club and the senior play and noted that he “loves his stereo, raincoats and Mom.”

He chose Tufts, in Medford, Mass., which gave him substantial aid and kept him close to Wakefield and any domestic turbulence he might have to intervene in. “I’d get calls — ‘you’ve got to come home!’ — and I could be there in 20 minutes,” said Brown, who adds that his family role was “always being the responsible one, always being the one to solve problems. . . . Sometimes it’s overwhelming.” Everyone in the family seems to be in a better, more settled place now: both parents were with him on Election Night. But no one seems eager to excavate the past. When I showed up at his mother’s current home in a quiet New Hampshire town, she quickly closed the door, saying she was too busy to talk. And the half-sister whom Brown helped raise rushed off the phone the first time I called. When I called back, a man answered the phone and politely said that she didn’t want to be interviewed.

During college, Brown excelled on the basketball court, majored in history and graduated in four years. “He wasn’t a scholar,” says Michael Quinn, one of his best friends since junior high, adding that Brown was practical in his approach to school. “It was his ticket to a better life.” So was modeling, which helped him sock away money for law school and beyond. An acquaintance with whom he was painting houses­ one summer suggested it as a way to earn a quick buck, and the Cosmo spread gave him momentum. Without his knowledge, he said, his half-sister had sent his picture to the magazine for consideration in the “sexiest man” contest. He said he thought the subsequent call from someone identifying herself as Helen Gurley Brown was a prank — until he received a plane ticket to fly to New York.

“You know what?” she said after briefly meeting him, as he remembered it. “You’re our guy.”

“But you haven’t seen me, like, naked,” he recalled answering, because he’d been told that a nude photo session was part of the deal.

“This is Cosmo,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” They had him position one hand so that it covered up what a racier magazine wouldn’t. And they gave him $1,000, which he cites as the reason he went ahead with it — that and the doors it opened in New York, where he spent two years as a model, represented by the Wilhelmina agency, while taking classes at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

When he transferred to Boston College Law School, he was represented by one of Boston’s top modeling agents, Maggie Trichon, who says their partnership began unusually: Brown strode through her door, told her he was in a rush, dropped off his portfolio and announced, “I’m with you now, I’ll call you later.”

“Never happened to me in all the years I’ve been doing this,” Trichon says. “There was no question in Scott’s mind. He’s very sure of himself.” He spent the better part of a decade with her, to judge by the yearly picture books from the ’80s onward that she laid out for me, which show him in suits and slickers and T-shirts, always spelling out his measurements: 6-foot-1, 32-inch waist, 34-inch inseam, 15½-inch neck, size 40 suit jacket, size 10 shoes.

In print ads and department-store catalogs he was cast as construction workers, business executives and, in one instance, according to the stylist who put together the shot, a pampered hubby in plaid pajamas being fed popcorn by a wife in a matching flannel nightgown. His hourly rate was $150, he often earned $1,200 a day and he did, by his own estimate, “thousands and thousands of ads.” Photographers, stylists and others who worked with him say he was a no-nonsense professional, more interested in the paycheck than the parties. But he wasn’t exactly shy about posing and its potential.

“Are you kidding me?” Quinn says. “He had posters made of himself — not that Cosmo picture — but one of him in jeans with the top button undone, and he was shirtless.” Quinn says that Brown tried, without much success, to sell them for something like $5 a pop. “He was always very entrepreneurial,” he says.

THROUGH MODELING, BROWN got to know Gail Huff, who also did catalog work and starred in a 1980s music video — for a song called “The Girl With the Curious Hand” — that put her poolside in a bikini and showed her squeezing a tube of lotion in a curiously suggestive manner. The couple and their two daughters constitute a uniquely camera-ready, limelight-primed family. Ayla, a star basketball player herself at Boston College, was an “American Idol” semifinalist at 17, released a third collection of songs shortly after Brown’s victory, appeared on CBS’s “Early Show” to sing one of them and showed up at Brown’s post-election events to peddle her first CD. Arianna, a pre-med student at Syracuse University, has done some modeling of her own and is represented by Trichon’s agency.

By all accounts, Brown is prouder of his long marriage and strong-willed daughters than of anything else. “Honestly, he is the best father you could ask for,” Arianna says. “He’s always said, ‘When I was younger, I made a vow that I would never let my kids down.’ And he’s maintained that vow.” Of the scores of home basketball games that Ayla has played so far during her three-and-a-half-year college career, he has missed only three, she says. And Arianna says that to make sure that she isn’t shortchanged by his and Ayla’s special sports bond, he carves out movie nights just for her.

He has a particular vanity and sense of humor, though. “Say I had a friend’s birthday and didn’t know what to give her,” Ayla recalls, referring to her early teens. “He’d say, ‘Well, I have some old Cosmo posters in the basement.’ ” She adds that he was mostly joking, as he is when it’s his turn for grace at the dinner table. “He’ll say, ‘Dear God, thank you for letting me win my race today.’ We’ll be like, ‘Dad, you can’t thank God for that!’ And he’ll say: ‘What? God’s listening. God likes what I have to say.’ ”

He has won many political races during a government career that began in 1992, when he became the property assessor for Wrentham, and was motivated, according to him and his friends, more by the desire to have a voice in mundane local matters than by any grand cause or ideology. He spent three years on the Wrentham Board of Selectmen, more than five in the Massachusetts House and six — until his promotion to Washington — in the Massachusetts Senate, always maintaining his law practice on the side. Admirers say he was affable and informed, though by no means erudite. Detractors say he was aloof and disengaged. As a member of the Senate’s tiny Republican minority, he wasn’t a major force behind much vital legislation, though colleagues say he was a steadfast champion of military veterans. He started thinking about higher office in general, and the U.S. Senate in particular, as early as 2004, according to one Massachusetts Republican who knows him well.

Politically, it’s hard to draw a bead on him. He’s a self-proclaimed fiscal conservative who opposed a suggested state tax cut; a proponent of abortion rights who fought hard (and unsuccessfully) to allow Massachusetts doctors with religious objections to deny emergency contraception to rape victims; a hero to the Massachusetts Audubon Society who has voiced skepticism about global warming. He has said that the government is overstretched but applauds the increase of troops in Afghanistan and advocates a harsher approach to the war on terror, including waterboarding.

His Republican supporters say that makes him the kind of nuanced, independent-minded conservative who can have success in a state as blue as Massachusetts. His Democratic foes say that makes him what they disparagingly call a Romney Republican, inconstant and opportunistic.

“I’M GOING TO meet everybody, so step back so we can get some order here,” Brown pleaded to the hundreds swarming around him at the Hu Ke Lau, a gigantic Chinese restaurant in Chicopee, Mass., where he showed up on a Friday a week and a half after the election, the first of six stops in a cross-state thank-you tour that would last the weekend. “Everybody move back,” he repeated. “I’m just trying to meet everybody.”

“You’re gorgeous!” shouted one woman standing about a dozen feet behind him. “Turn around so we can see your face.” Two other women held up a large sign with a message for Brown, or rather his daughters. “Our Sons Are Available,” it read.

This mob scene repeated itself that night in Falmouth, a town on Cape Cod, and the next night in Worcester. To prevent people from rushing at and smothering him, Brown promised over and over again to stay as long as necessary to shake every hand. In Falmouth, where a long line stretched out the door and into the 15-degree cold, Nancy Sawyer, 40, told me she was reminded of a Kiss concert from her youth. Ruth Eldredge, 49, said she had decided on her dream ticket for 2012: Romney for president and Brown for vice president, with a promise that they’d make Palin secretary of state. “They’d be so good-looking that people would just love us,” she said, meaning Republicans. “They’re beautiful!”

But more striking than the crowd’s ardor was the way Brown handled it. Once near him, almost every person held up a digital camera and paused, perplexed by the challenge of simultaneously taking a picture and being in it. Brown, a lefty, used that hand to grab the camera and, without letting go of the Sharpie also in his clutch, extended his left arm, pulled the person close with his right arm, leaned back and snapped the shot of the two of them. He did this ad nauseam and never bobbled the camera, a feat that struck me as superhuman until Maggie Trichon explained that Brown worked extensively as a hand model. He had to become expert at using his flawlessly maintained fingers to hold an electronic device or other object for as long as an hour.

That sounds unbearably tedious, but no more so than mustering the perfect smile for the perfect interval for each new fawner at each new stop. Brown was also flawless at this, neatly weaving together two leitmotifs in his life: exhibitionism and an ability to hunker down and do what it takes, whether the arena is athletic or political. For a candidate, that’s a killer combination.

The thank-you tour was a cunning move, obviously designed to inoculate Brown against all the starry stuff, including the Leno appearance, the “S.N.L.” skit and a Barbara Walters interview that was broadcast the morning after “S.N.L.” By lingering for hours in working-class settings, he sent a message that he hadn’t gone all Washington or Hollywood on his constituents. He leavened the inevitable news that Brown endorsements and fund-raising help were now gold among Republicans and that he had landed a book deal. He also mitigated any appearance of mad ambition. Brown has some relatives in Iowa, and Eric Fehrnstrom joked that he has been told not to visit them, because that’s where presidential hopefuls sow their seeds.

He is proceeding with obvious caution, the road ahead a tricky one. He must not only hold on to a regular-guy image at odds with so much of his past and present but also find the sweet spot between what the more conservative Republicans in the capital will want from him and what the more moderate Republicans and independents in Massachusetts will tolerate. From now to 2012, when he’s up for re-election, “he’ll have no shortage of O’Hallorans sitting in the basements of union halls in Quincy, Mass., muttering dark promises of revenge by the Democratic Party,” noted Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant who has advised Romney.

In his public remarks since the election, Brown has been vague on hot-button issues like gays in the military, saying he needs to wait and study specific proposals. He was similarly fuzzy in our interview: “You know, I don’t even have a business card.” But he was already taking a stab at his own brand of outreach, describing President Obama as “a handsome, dynamic guy, great family, beautiful daughters — has a big heart.” He said he was eager to see the White House for the first time and curious in particular about whether “they really have these secret entrances,” like the ones he remembered from “First Kid,” a movie starring the comedian Sinbad that he recently rewatched.

I got the sense that he was sanding the edges of his reputation and answering complaints from opponents that he’s too macho, shallow and backward. He talked about how supportive he is of Huff’s journalistic career, which barred her from campaign appearances, lest she seem ideologically biased, and said that he irons her clothes as well as his own — and knows how to sew to boot. He pointed out that he had worked closely in the Massachusetts Legislature with an openly gay colleague. He mentioned his love of the musical theater and volunteered that at Tufts he found enough time away from basketball to play Hero in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” offering: “I love to sing.” He said he took a broad range of courses at Tufts and “enjoyed Yiddish literature.”

After that perplexing victory speech, he called Arianna’s boyfriend to apologize. He also apologized to her boyfriend’s parents — a smooth move, like another he told me about during his “S.N.L.” appraisal: “I’m writing, actually, all the cast members and the actors a nice note saying I really got a kick out of it.”

Proper notes? By hand?

“Absolutely,” he said.

At one point an 18-wheeler with a Budweiser logo pulled up beside us, and its driver, apparently recognizing the GMC Canyon, honked and waved.

“Happens all the time,” Brown said nonchalantly, and kept on trucking.


The New York Times
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February 28, 2010
Depression’s Upside
By JONAH LEHRER

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter, written to a specialist in “psychological medicine,” he confessed to “extreme spasmodic daily and nightly flatulence” and “hysterical crying” whenever Emma, his devoted wife, left him alone.

While there has been endless speculation about Darwin’s mysterious ailment — his symptoms have been attributed to everything from lactose intolerance to Chagas disease — Darwin himself was most troubled by his recurring mental problems. His depression left him “not able to do anything one day out of three,” choking on his “bitter mortification.” He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.”

Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding in science. Instead, the pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work. His letters are filled with references to the salvation of study, which allowed him to temporarily escape his gloomy moods. “Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me,” Darwin wrote and later remarked that it was his “sole enjoyment in life.”

For Darwin, depression was a clarifying force, focusing the mind on its most essential problems. In his autobiography, he speculated on the purpose of such misery; his evolutionary theory was shadowed by his own life story. “Pain or suffering of any kind,” he wrote, “if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action, yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.” And so sorrow was explained away, because pleasure was not enough. Sometimes, Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it “leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.” The darkness was a kind of light.

The mystery of depression is not that it exists — the mind, like the flesh, is prone to malfunction. Instead, the paradox of depression has long been its prevalence. While most mental illnesses are extremely rare — schizophrenia, for example, is seen in less than 1 percent of the population — depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” Obsessed with our pain, we will retreat from everything. We will stop eating, unless we start eating too much. Sex will lose its appeal; sleep will become a frustrating pursuit. We will always be tired, even though we will do less and less. We will think a lot about death.

The persistence of this affliction — and the fact that it seemed to be heritable — posed a serious challenge to Darwin’s new evolutionary theory. If depression was a disorder, then evolution had made a tragic mistake, allowing an illness that impedes reproduction — it leads people to stop having sex and consider suicide — to spread throughout the population. For some unknown reason, the modern human mind is tilted toward sadness and, as we’ve now come to think, needs drugs to rescue itself.

The alternative, of course, is that depression has a secret purpose and our medical interventions are making a bad situation even worse. Like a fever that helps the immune system fight off infection — increased body temperature sends white blood cells into overdrive — depression might be an unpleasant yet adaptive response to affliction. Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer — we suffer terribly — but we don’t suffer in vain.

ANDY THOMSON IS a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. He has a scruffy gray beard and steep cheekbones. When Thomson talks, he tends to close his eyes, as if he needs to concentrate on what he’s saying. But mostly what he does is listen: For the last 32 years, Thomson has been tending to his private practice in Charlottesville. “I tend to get the real hard cases,” Thomson told me recently. “A lot of the people I see have already tried multiple treatments. They arrive without much hope.” On one of the days I spent with Thomson earlier this winter, he checked his phone constantly for e-mail updates. A patient of his on “welfare watch” who was required to check in with him regularly had not done so, and Thomson was worried. “I’ve never gotten used to treating patients in mental pain,” he said. “Maybe it’s because every story is unique. You see one case of iron-deficiency anemia, you’ve seen them all. But the people who walk into my office are all hurting for a different reason.”

In the late 1990s, Thomson became interested in evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the features of the human mind in terms of natural selection. The starting premise of the field is that the brain has a vast evolutionary history, and that this history shapes human nature. We are not a blank slate but a byproduct of imperfect adaptations, stuck with a mind that was designed to meet the needs of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial — it’s never easy proving theories about the distant past — its underlying assumption is largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculptured the fleshy machine inside our head. Instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents.

In 2004, Thomson met Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who had long been interested in the depression paradox — why a disorder that’s so costly is also so common. Andrews has long dark brown hair and an aquiline nose. Before he begins to talk, he often writes down an outline of his answer on scratch paper. “This is a very delicate subject,” he says. “I don’t want to say something reckless.”

Andrews and Thomson struck up an extended conversation on the evolutionary roots of depression. They began by focusing on the thought process that defines the disorder, which is known as rumination. (The verb is derived from the Latin word for “chewed over,” which describes the act of digestion in cattle, in which they swallow, regurgitate and then rechew their food.) In recent decades, psychiatry has come to see rumination as a dangerous mental habit, because it leads people to fixate on their flaws and problems, thus extending their negative moods. Consider “The Depressed Person,” a short story by David Foster Wallace, which chronicles a consciousness in the grip of the ruminative cycle. (Wallace struggled with severe depression for years before committing suicide in 2008.) The story is a long lament, a portrait of a mind hating itself, filled with sentences like this: “What terms might be used to describe such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?” The dark thoughts of “The Depressed Person” soon grow tedious and trying, but that’s precisely Wallace’s point. There is nothing profound about depressive rumination. There is just a recursive loop of woe.

The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.

That, at least, was the scientific consensus when Andrews and Thomson began exploring the depression paradox. Their evolutionary perspective, however — they see the mind as a fine-tuned machine that is not prone to pointless programming bugs — led them to wonder if rumination had a purpose. They started with the observation that rumination was often a response to a specific psychological blow, like the death of a loved one or the loss of a job. (Darwin was plunged into a debilitating grief after his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, died following a bout of scarlet fever.) Although the D.S.M. manual, the diagnostic bible for psychiatrists, does not take such stressors into account when diagnosing depressive disorder — the exception is grief caused by bereavement, as long as the grief doesn’t last longer than two months — it’s clear that the problems of everyday life play a huge role in causing mental illness. “Of course, rumination is unpleasant,” Andrews says. “But it’s usually a response to something real, a real setback. It didn’t seem right that the brain would go haywire just when we need it most.”

Imagine, for instance, a depression triggered by a bitter divorce. The ruminations might take the form of regret (“I should have been a better spouse”), recurring counterfactuals (“What if I hadn’t had my affair?”) and anxiety about the future (“How will the kids deal with it? Can I afford my alimony payments?”). While such thoughts reinforce the depression — that’s why therapists try to stop the ruminative cycle — Andrews and Thomson wondered if they might also help people prepare for bachelorhood or allow people to learn from their mistakes. “I started thinking about how, even if you are depressed for a few months, the depression might be worth it if it helps you better understand social relationships,” Andrews says. “Maybe you realize you need to be less rigid or more loving. Those are insights that can come out of depression, and they can be very valuable.”

This radical idea — the scientists were suggesting that depressive disorder came with a net mental benefit — has a long intellectual history. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest Melancholy/Whose saintly visage is too bright/To hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

But Andrews and Thomson weren’t interested in ancient aphorisms or poetic apologias. Their daunting challenge was to show how rumination might lead to improved outcomes, especially when it comes to solving life’s most difficult dilemmas. Their first speculations focused on the core features of depression, like the inability of depressed subjects to experience pleasure or their lack of interest in food, sex and social interactions. According to Andrews and Thomson, these awful symptoms came with a productive side effect, because they reduced the possibility of becoming distracted from the pressing problem.

The capacity for intense focus, they note, relies in large part on a brain area called the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), which is located a few inches behind the forehead. While this area has been associated with a wide variety of mental talents, like conceptual knowledge and verb conjugation, it seems to be especially important for maintaining attention. Experiments show that neurons in the VLPFC must fire continuously to keep us on task so that we don’t become sidetracked by irrelevant information. Furthermore, deficits in the VLPFC have been associated with attention-deficit disorder.

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem. (Andrews and Thomson argue that this relentless fixation also explains the cognitive deficits of depressed subjects, as they are too busy thinking about their real-life problems to bother with an artificial lab exercise; their VLPFC can’t be bothered to care.) Human attention is a scarce resource — the neural effects of depression make sure the resource is efficiently allocated.

But the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

Consider a young professor on tenure track who was treated by Thomson. The patient was having difficulties with his academic department. “This guy was used to success coming easy, but now it wasn’t,” Thomson says. “I made it clear that I thought he’d need some time to figure out his next step. His problem was like a splinter, and the pain wouldn’t go away until the splinter was removed.” Should the patient leave the department? Should he leave academia? Or should he try to resolve the disagreement? Over the next several weeks, Thomson helped the patient analyze his situation and carefully think through the alternatives. “We took it one variable at a time,” Thomson says. “And it eventually became clear to him that the departmental issues couldn’t be fixed. He needed to leave. Once he came to that conclusion, he started feeling better.”

The publication of Andrews and Thomson’s 36,000-word paper in the July 2009 issue of Psychological Review had a polarizing effect on the field. While some researchers, like Jerome Wakefield, a professor at New York University who specializes in the conceptual foundations of clinical theory, greeted the paper as “an extremely important first step toward the re-evaluation of depression,” other psychiatrists regarded it as little more than irresponsible speculation, a justification for human suffering. Peter Kramer, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, describes the paper as “a ladder with a series of weak rungs.” Kramer has long defended the use of antidepressants — his landmark work, “Listening to Prozac,” chronicled the profound improvements of patients taking the drugs — and criticized those who romanticized depression, which he compares to the glamorization of tuberculosis in the late 19th century. In a series of e-mail messages to me, Kramer suggested that Andrews and Thomson neglect the variants of depression that don’t fit their evolutionary theory. “This study says nothing about chronic depression and the sort of self-hating, paralyzing, hopeless, circular rumination it inspires,” Kramer wrote. And what about post-stroke depression? Late-life depression? Extreme depressive condition? Kramer argues that there’s a clear category difference between a healthy response to social stressors and the response of people with depressive disorder. “Depression is not really like sadness,” Kramer has written. “It’s more an oppressive flattening of feeling.”

Even scientists who are sympathetic to what Andrews and Thomson call the “analytic-rumination hypothesis” remain critical of its details. Ed Hagen, an anthropologist at Washington State University who is working on a book with Andrews, says that while the analytic-rumination hypothesis has persuaded him that some depressive symptoms might improve problem-solving skills, he remains unconvinced that it is a sufficient explanation for depression. “Individuals with major depression often don’t groom, bathe and sometimes don’t even use the toilet,” Hagen says. They also significantly “reduce investment in child care,” which could have detrimental effects on the survival of offspring. The steep fitness costs of these behaviors, Hagen says, would not be offset by “more uninterrupted time to think.”

Other scientists, including Randolph Nesse at the University of Michigan, say that complex psychiatric disorders like depression rarely have simple evolutionary explanations. In fact, the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.

Although Nesse says he admires the analytic-rumination hypothesis, he adds that it fails to capture the heterogeneity of depressive disorder. Andrews and Thomson compare depression to a fever helping to fight off infection, but Nesse says a more accurate metaphor is chronic pain, which can arise for innumerable reasons. “Sometimes, the pain is going to have an organic source,” he says. “Maybe you’ve slipped a disc or pinched a nerve, in which case you’ve got to solve that underlying problem. But much of the time there is no origin for the pain. The pain itself is the dysfunction.”

Andrews and Thomson respond to such criticisms by acknowledging that depression is a vast continuum, a catch-all term for a spectrum of symptoms. While the analytic-rumination hypothesis might explain those patients reacting to an “acute stressor,” it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time. “To say that depression can be useful doesn’t mean it’s always going to be useful,” Thomson says. “Sometimes, the symptoms can spiral out of control. The problem, though, is that as a society, we’ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We’ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we’ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.”

For Thomson, this new theory of depression has directly affected his medical practice. “That’s the litmus test for me,” he says. “Do these ideas help me treat my patients better?” In recent years, Thomson has cut back on antidepressant prescriptions, because, he says, he now believes that the drugs can sometimes interfere with genuine recovery, making it harder for people to resolve their social dilemmas. “I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ”

The point is the woman was depressed for a reason; her pain was about something. While the drugs made her feel better, no real progress was ever made. Thomson’s skepticism about antidepressants is bolstered by recent studies questioning their benefits, at least for patients with moderate depression. Consider a 2005 paper led by Steven Hollon, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University: he found that people on antidepressants had a 76 percent chance of relapse within a year when the drugs were discontinued. In contrast, patients given a form of cognitive talk therapy had a relapse rate of 31 percent. And Hollon’s data aren’t unusual: several studies found that patients treated with medication were approximately twice as likely to relapse as patients treated with cognitive behavior therapy. “The high relapse rate suggests that the drugs aren’t really solving anything,” Thomson says. “In fact, they seem to be interfering with the solution, so that patients are discouraged from dealing with their problems. We end up having to keep people on the drugs forever. It was as if these people have a bodily infection, and modern psychiatry is just treating their fever.”

Thomson describes a college student who was referred to his practice. “It was clear that this patient was in a lot of pain,” Thomson says. “He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t study. He had some family issues” — his parents were recently divorced — “and his father was exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on him to go to graduate school. Because he’s got a family history of depression, the standard of care would be to put him on drugs right away. And a few years ago, that’s what I would have done.”

Instead, Thomson was determined to help the student solve his problem. “What you’re trying to do is speed along the rumination process,” Thomson says. “Once you show people the dilemma they need to solve, they almost always start feeling better.” He cites as evidence a recent study that found “expressive writing” — asking depressed subjects to write essays about their feelings — led to significantly shorter depressive episodes. The reason, Thomson suggests, is that writing is a form of thinking, which enhances our natural problem-solving abilities. “This doesn’t mean there’s some miracle cure,” he says. “In most cases, the recovery period is going to be long and difficult. And that’s what I told this young student. I said: ‘I know you’re hurting. I know these problems seem impossible. But they’re not. And I can help you solve them.’ ”

IT’S TOO SOON to judge the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Nobody knows if depression is an adaptation or if Andrews and Thomson have merely spun another “Just So” story, a clever evolutionary tale that lacks direct evidence. Nevertheless, their speculation is part of a larger scientific re-evaluation of negative moods, which have long been seen as emotional states to avoid. The dismissal of sadness and its synonyms is perhaps best exemplified by the rise of positive psychology, a scientific field devoted to the pursuit of happiness. In recent years, a number of positive psychologists have written popular self-help books, like “The How of Happiness” and “Authentic Happiness,” that try to outline the scientific principles behind “lasting fulfillment” and “getting the life we want.”

The new research on negative moods, however, suggests that sadness comes with its own set of benefits and that even our most unpleasant feelings serve an important purpose. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has repeatedly demonstrated in experiments that negative moods lead to better decisions in complex situations. The reason, Forgas suggests, is rooted in the intertwined nature of mood and cognition: sadness promotes “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more-demanding situations.” This helps explain why test subjects who are melancholy — Forgas induces the mood with a short film about death and cancer — are better at judging the accuracy of rumors and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers.

Last year Forgas ventured beyond the lab and began conducting studies in a small stationery store in suburban Sydney, Australia. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, like toy soldiers, plastic animals and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control for the effect of mood, Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days — he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s “Requiem” — and on sunny days, using a soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more aware and attentive.

The enhancement of these mental skills might also explain the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders. In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

And then there’s the virtue of self-loathing, which is one of the symptoms of depression. When people are stuck in the ruminative spiral, their achievements become invisible; the mind is only interested in what has gone wrong. While this condition is typically linked to withdrawal and silence — people become unwilling to communicate — there’s some suggestive evidence that states of unhappiness can actually improve our expressive abilities. Forgas said he has found that sadness correlates with clearer and more compelling sentences, and that negative moods “promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.” Because we’re more critical of what we’re writing, we produce more refined prose, the sentences polished by our angst. As Roland Barthes observed, “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

But is that closeness effective? Does the despondency help us solve anything? Andrews found a significant correlation between depressed affect and individual performance on the intelligence test, at least once the subjects were distracted from their pain: lower moods were associated with higher scores. “The results were clear,” Andrews says. “Depressed affect made people think better.” The challenge, of course, is persuading people to accept their misery, to embrace the tonic of despair. To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.


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March 19, 2010
No
By BEN ZIMMER

Two of the most basic words in the English language, yes and no, are locked in a constant struggle, embodying abstract forces of agreement and opposition, positivity and negativity, acceptance and denial. Just look at the recent Congressional wrangling over health care reform, where the words have come to stand for much more than simply the up or down votes that legislators may cast. Democrats seeking a final compromise over health care legislation have talked optimistically about getting to yes. “I just wish and hope some of my colleagues will be willing to help us get to yes on this,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said. And a House leadership aide told The Huffington Post, “We do have an environment where people can now get to yes.”

Getting to yes has become a creaky cliché in political and business circles thanks to a best-selling negotiation manual with that title first published in 1981. The authors of “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, outlined the best strategies for reaching a settlement by identifying “options for mutual gain.” Fisher had been experimenting with the word yes for quite a while. Back in 1969, he argued in the book “International Conflict for Beginners” that the key to getting the other side of the bargaining table to agree is to present them with a “yesable proposition.” It is no surprise that supporters of Barack (Yes We Can) Obama would draw on the conciliatory rhetoric of getting to yes.

Blocking the road to yes on health care and other initiatives, however, is the Republican Congressional minority, which has been painted by Democrats as “the party of no.” It’s been a common refrain since the early months of the Obama administration, when the Democratic National Committee introduced a “Party of No” clock on its Web site, tallying the time Republicans spent criticizing Obama’s budget plan without offering their own alternative.

Leading Republicans, for their part, have either disavowed the “party of no” label or have found canny ways to reclaim it. Mitt Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference to embrace no proudly, explaining, “it is right and praiseworthy to say no to bad things.” Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, meanwhile, has offered a punny twist: “We’re the party of know: k-n-o-w.”

When Democrats use “the party of no” to criticize Republican obstructionism, they are unwittingly echoing Ronald Reagan. The expression has historical resonances, like Truman’s election-year complaints in 1948 about “the do-nothing Congress” or Spiro Agnew’s memorable line (penned in 1970 by his speechwriter, William Safire) excoriating “the nattering nabobs of negativism.”

But Reagan was the first to paint the opposing party so forcefully with the brush of “no.” At the welcoming rally of the 1988 Republican National Convention, Reagan blasted the opposition as “the party of no,” while appealing to “rank-and-file Democrats” who had been alienated by the “strident liberalism and negativism” of party leaders. “The party of ‘yes’ has become the party of ‘no,’ ” Reagan, himself a former Democrat, said. “The liberal leadership of your party has been saying no to you, and now it’s time for you to start saying no to them.” The boisterous crowd reacted to Reagan by chanting the antidrug slogan his wife, Nancy, did so much to popularize: “Just say no!”

James Carville, who knew a powerful political catchphrase when he heard one, turned “the party of no” back on Republicans in the spring of 1993 when President Clinton was working to pass a stimulus bill. Clinton himself went further the following year, calling the Republicans the party of “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” in an angry speech at a Boston fund-raiser. Other leading Democrats like Al Gore and Dick Gephardt used the phrase to disparage Republicans in the Clinton era.

At the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, “the party of no” became a Republican talking point again, spearheaded by Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader. After Bush’s 2005 State of the Union address, DeLay said of the Democrats: “They’ve become the party of ‘no.’ No ideas, no solutions, no agenda. You know, ‘Just say no’ is not an agenda.” Now, five years later, the no wheel has turned yet again, proving that Reagan’s original phrase is endlessly adaptable to changing political circumstances.

Yes and no can accrue symbolic heft through what linguists call “zero nominalization,” whereby a noun is created from some other part of speech without adding a typical suffix like -ness or -ation. Nouny versions of yes and no have enjoyed quite a ride from the political class, but they also get plenty of play in pop culture. On the positive side of the ledger, Wendy Macleod’s play and subsequent movie adaptation “The House of Yes” tells the story of an entitled rich girl who will not be denied. Maria Dahvana Headley’s 2006 memoir of a year spent accepting dates from any man who asked her out is titled, naturally enough, “The Year of Yes.”

But the power of no is even more primal, perhaps because it is so often among the first words that English speakers learn as children. The poet James Tate imagines it as a territory of sorts, writing, “I went out of myself into no, into nowhere.” In slangy vernacular, no can turn into a material substance: the teenage title character in the 2007 movie “Juno” protests, “That’s a big, fat sack of no!” Bauer-Griffin Online, a paparazzi photo blog, critiques celebrities with snarky headlines like “Kelly Preston Is a Bucket of ‘No’ ” or “Phoebe Price, Pile of ‘No.’ ” In our culture of negativity, all too often the noes have it.

Reader Question
Barbara Orris asks: "The word avuncular means 'of, pertaining to, or characteristic of an uncle.' Is there a word that means pertaining to or characteristic of an aunt?"

A handful of adjectives related to aunts have been recorded in English, though none are as common as the male counterpart, avuncular. The most straightforward is auntly, modeled after motherly, fatherly, sisterly and brotherly, with scattered usage back to the 1830s. (Uncly is even rarer.) Auntish and auntlike are other alternatives that append aunt with familiar suffixes.

If we take the Latinate approach à la avuncular, then the Oxford English Dictionary provides materteral, attested since 1823 in humorous use, meaning "characteristic or typical of an aunt." Classics majors would be quick to point out that the Latin roots of these words only cover maternal siblings: avunculus means "mother's brother" and matertera means "mother's sister." On the paternal side, there's patruus for "father's brother" and amita for "father's sister."

In 1982, when William Safire asked his loyal Lexicographic Irregulars for "a word to fill this black hole in our vocabulary," creative suggestions included auntique, tantular, tantoid, and tantative. One of his correspondents, Arianna Stassinopoulos (now better known as Arianna Huffington), was drawn to the Latin root amita, noting that "so far no English word derived from it exists." She added, "There is, however, no reason why we cannot here and now invent it and proclaim that all aunts on the father's side must from now on end their letters 'Yours amitally.'" Safire declared amital the best of the lot, despite the "happily drugged" sound of it.

Amital has, in fact, cropped up in anthropological studies of kinship since the 1940s but, like materteral, it has never made any headway in general use. Avuncular, meanwhile, has proved a durable descriptor for older public figures with a kindly demeanor, like Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite. It would probably take a thesis in gender studies to explain this terminological imbalance. Notably, traditional stereotypes about aunts have often been less than flattering: a literature search for auntish turns up many examples of "maiden auntish," evoking images of forlorn spinsterhood.


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March 17, 2010
Who Needs Wall Street?
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

Mike Mayo is a veteran of six Wall Street banks. In the wake of the street’s disaster, he found refuge at a boutique brokerage and has lately taken to startling his peers with the question “What part of Goldman Sachs is good for the country?”

Regular people will be tempted to answer, “None of it,” but the question reminds us that, at least in theory, Wall Street serves society (not the other way around). And as opposed to Harrah’s, Trump Casino and their ilk, Wall Street is endorsed and regulated — with marked restraint — so as to let it perform an important task.

Because some people have savings and others need capital, some unifying force must bring the two together. Royalty once taxed its citizens and chartered corporations. Wall Street privatized this function, aggregating the savings of disparate individuals through the sale of stocks and bonds. Industry thus gained access to capital; what’s more, public markets performed a miracle of equivalence. Quotations on the stock exchange effectively calibrated, down to the penny, how many hours’ worth of wages would afford a share of General Motors.

Since the street stood at the intersection of capital and savings — or, if you will, of insiders and Main Street — the potential for conflict was rife. No firm better resisted the temptations than Goldman, which, from its founding in 1869 through recent decades, epitomized, with only rare slip-ups, the best of American finance. Serving the client was its lodestar, and its bankers were pillars of society, more conversant in literature than in the vagaries of, say, mortgage securities.

Wall Street’s emphasis began to change in the ’90s, as financiers devised new securities — the more incomprehensible, or so it seemed, the better. These instruments, in the main, did not involve selling bonds so that a DuPont could build new factories; they were rearrangements — new permutations, new alignments of risk — on flows of cash that already existed. Most famous was the trading that stemmed from complex derivatives (like mortgages) with only a remote connection to the underlying product. For all the trading in mortgage-backed securities, homeownership increased only a trivial amount.

The benefit to Wall Street was far more direct. The point of these and many other new financial instruments was to charge a hefty fee and to furiously trade them, and no one was in a better position to do that than their Wall Street creators.

If trading was, for society, a zero-sum game (someone wins, someone loses), it was, for the street, a gold mine. Greater emphasis on trading affected a subtle change in the culture, in particular at Goldman. In 1999, it sold shares to the public, diluting its long-term ethos. Its traders, formerly restrained by bankers, clamored for more of the firm’s capital.

In 2006, when Lloyd Blankfein, a onetime gold salesman, assumed command, the coup was complete. But it did not become so stingingly clear until this year, when Blankfein was induced to bare his soul before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

Asked about mortgage securities that Goldman both sold to clients and bet against, Blankfein, while expressing regret for what he admitted was improper behavior, added: “In our market-making function, we are a principal. We represent the other side of what people want to do.” He went on to say that when Goldman sells a security that subsequently goes up (i.e., on which the other party makes money), “we wish we hadn’t sold it.” So much for putting the customer first.

For much of Wall Street, capital-raising is now a sideshow. At Goldman, trading and investing for the firm’s account produced 76 percent of revenue last year. Investment banking, which raises capital for productive enterprise, accounted for a mere 11 percent. Other than that, it could have been a hedge fund.

Brokers recite, endlessly, that trading is vital because, without it, there wouldn’t be a way for shareholders to exit, thus investors would fear to commit capital in the first place. Within limits, this is true. Thus, at modest levels, the willingness of traders to buy and sell from the rest of us gooses confidence.

But the value of such “liquidity” has been vastly oversold. The notion that ever more trading makes for successively better markets is one of Wall Street’s great myths. People think liquidity will keep markets stable, but the crisis of 2008 says otherwise. In a crisis, liquidity disappears.

Modern markets are more likely afflicted with too much trading. Think of oil and its dizzying fluctuations. As the volume from speculators and momentum traders dwarfs that of long-term investors, prices gyrate further from fundamental value. Raising capital thus becomes, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, the byproduct of a casino.

The casino charge is most plausibly leveled at credit-default swaps, the bête noire of A.I.G., Greece and others. Such swaps let traders bet on the odds of default (of a corporate or, indeed, a sovereign bond). If swaps traded in Las Vegas — if bets against, say, Goldman’s bonds swamped the casino, causing Goldman’s lenders to refuse it credit — an uproar would ensue. This actually happened to banks in 2008.

The social utility of credit-default swaps is ostensibly the insurance function. (Fear that a bond will default? Buy a swap that pays out in the event.) But most traders do not own the bond, and they have nothing to “insure.” Like the fellow who takes a policy on his neighbor’s house, they are simply betting on disaster.

Swaps are used by banks as a hedge against risky loans, but the effect is problematic. The danger of hypertrading is that it affords an illusion of a continuously available exit; investors feel less need to scrutinize their assets. So it is with bankers. If every loan can be traded away, why worry about risk? Thanks to swaps, banks write more suspect loans and, over all, society is more exposed. At least in an actual casino, the damage is contained to gamblers. The street’s undertow is more serious. Following the debacle, the economy lost eight million jobs.

The question is whether the social balance would improve if Wall Street were less devoted to games of chance. In the 1970s, James Tobin, a future Nobel laureate, proposed a transfer tax to throw “sand in the gears” of currency markets. Tobin feared that too much trading could destabilize currencies (he has often been proved right).

The idea of a transfer tax, on financial trading generally, has resurfaced. European leaders, like Gordon Brown in England, are in favor. Timothy Geithner, the U.S. Treasury secretary, has resisted the idea. The ideal of a frictionless market is so instinctual that we have lost sight of the peril that comes with speed. Maybe it’s time to slow the markets down.


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March 24, 2010
The Tiger Bubble
By JONATHAN MAHLER

Not too long ago, 2010 was shaping up as a good year for Tiger Woods. After knee surgery in 2008, Woods returned to competitive golf in 2009 and logged six victories. He led the PGA Tour in prize winnings for the ninth time and was voted player of the year by his peers for the 10th time in his 14 years as a pro. Because of the fortuitous location of this year’s marquee tournaments, Woods seemed primed to approach and maybe even equal Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 major championships. In addition to the Masters at Augusta, Ga., where Woods has won four times, the 2010 United States Open will be played in June at Pebble Beach, in California; in 2000, the last time it was played there, Woods won by 15 strokes. The British Open will be held in July at the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, which has hosted the tournament twice in the last decade; Woods won both times, by a combined total of 13 strokes.

But then November and December happened. Woods crashed his car on Thanksgiving weekend, and the collateral damage just kept mounting. Rarely has an athlete tumbled as far and as fast as Tiger Woods. In an era in which stories about athletes behaving badly — gambling, using drugs, carrying weapons — barely stand out in the news, the revelations of Woods’s epic infidelities created a scandal of a whole different order, landing him day after day on the cover of The New York Post (“Tiger Admits: I’m a Cheetah”). In just a few weeks, an image that took more than a decade and untold millions to construct was destroyed. Like all great tabloid tales of falls from grace, this one was anchored in contradiction. The athlete who dominated a sport of discipline, focus and self-control — his father, an ex-military man, once compared him to Gandhi — was a sex junkie. Even as Woods’s sponsors quickly began to drop him, their advertisements lingered awkwardly throughout America: a life-size image of the world’s most famous philanderer greeted airport travelers over Accenture ad copy that read as if it had been written for the occasion: “Go on. Be a Tiger.” And “Opportunity isn’t always obvious.” The Great Undoing inevitably initiated a cottage industry of its own, including “Tail of the Tiger” golf balls with pictures of his supposed mistresses.

When he issued his public apology in February, Woods sounded as if he didn’t plan to return to golf anytime soon. But earlier this month there were reports that the former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer had been retained to help orchestrate Woods’s comeback. Soon after, Woods announced that he would be playing in the Masters, which begins April 8. (Fleischer and Woods have since parted ways, according to The Associated Press and the Golf Channel.)

As far as professional golf is concerned, Woods cannot come back fast enough. The PGA Tour is at a critical juncture. Next year it will begin negotiating new TV contracts with CBS and NBC. In the meantime, the tour is trying to secure sponsors for 10 events in 2011 while economic conditions are not exactly favorable. Two of the hardest-hit industries, financial services and car manufacturing, are responsible for underwriting a third of the PGA Tour’s sponsored events. More to the point, the entire economic model of a golf tournament is looking a bit suspect. At the moment, the value of a company’s flying clients and employees to a sunny locale to drink Grey Goose cocktails and get tips on their short games from professional golfers is most likely to be lost on many of its shareholders. In other words, drumming up new sponsors and increasing — or just maintaining, really — the worth of its TV deals would have been hard enough for the tour even if the world’s greatest golfer and most recognizable athlete had not become enmeshed in the biggest tabloid story in years.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but in the last couple of years the tour has been aware of the fact that the negotiations of TV contracts and sponsorships are coming up, and in advising us on what to do, the one thing they’ve said is that we need the superstars to play more and no scandals, no controversies,” Harrison Frazar, a veteran of the PGA Tour, told me a couple months ago. “Well, it’s unfortunate that what’s happened right now is the ultimate scandal in the history of professional golf, and it’s happened to the absolute wrong person.”

Woods’s return to competitive golf will, of course, be huge. The questions are endless and irresistible. Will his wife, Elin, be there? What about his mom? What will happen when Woods is standing over his first big putt? Will his legendary ability to focus, honed from an early age by his father’s Green Beret mind tricks, block out the knowledge that the tens of millions of people watching think he’s a cheater and a cad? Will we even want him to sink that putt?

The same scandal that has battered professional golf for the past several months will now drive new levels of interest in it. Even before Woods announced that he was coming back, Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, which holds the broadcast rights to the Masters and numerous other PGA Tour events, was quoted as saying, “I think the first tournament Tiger Woods plays again, wherever it is, will be the biggest media event other than the Obama inauguration in the past 10 or 15 years.” Woods will certainly remain a news story for the foreseeable future, but will he remain a golf story? For years, Woods fueled a frenzy of investment in the game — from corporate sponsors, advertisers, broadcasters, clothing and equipment manufacturers, even golf-course developers. It was, you could say, a classic economic bubble, the Tiger Bubble. The question now is whether Woods’s crash will end up being just a temporary correction for golf or if the bubble has truly burst. Even if he does manage to dominate his sport again, will investors return to an enterprise whose fortunes have seemed so inextricably linked to a single brand?

TO SEE WHAT PROFESSIONAL golf looks like without Tiger Woods, I attended the 2010 Farmers Insurance Open in January. The tournament is held at Torrey Pines Golf Course, whose 36 holes are perched spectacularly atop a set of 300-foot cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, Calif. The event marks the unofficial start of every PGA Tour season. Three tournaments precede it, but it’s the first one televised by a major network (CBS). Not coincidentally, it’s also where Woods traditionally opens his golf season.

Woods has a long history at Torrey Pines. Not only did he experience some memorable amateur victories there, but the course was also the site of his unforgettable 19-hole playoff win in the 2008 U.S. Open, which he played on a torn-up knee and a fractured leg. This year, as the tournament unfolded, Woods was reportedly being treated for sex addiction at a clinic in Hattiesburg, Miss., but reminders of him were everywhere. His photograph graced the gallery of past winners ringing the practice green over a long string of dates. (Only one other golfer has won the tournament as many as three times; Woods has done so six times.) One afternoon, an airplane hired by a local strip club flew overhead, trailing a banner that read, “WE MISS YOU TOO, TIGER! DREAMGIRLS.”

Without Woods, the tournament’s field was disappointing: only 3 of the world’s top 20 golfers were there. At least golf’s second-biggest star, Phil Mickelson, was on hand. The day before the first round, he came by the media tent for a Q. and A. with the press and began by saying that he wouldn’t be answering any questions about Woods. Nevertheless, the subject proved impossible to ignore. When asked by one reporter whether he felt as if he needed to fill the void left by Woods, Mickelson replied, “I haven’t thought about it like that.” Mickelson paused, then completed the thought: “Nobody will be able to fill the shoes that are voided right now.”

After the first round, I watched a golfer named Jay Williamson practice on the driving range in the fading sunlight. Williamson had just shot a 72 on the easier of the two Torrey Pines courses, which was going to make it nearly impossible for him to make the cut. He would probably walk away from the tournament with nothing — or rather, because golfers are independent contractors who have to cover their own travel expenses, several thousand dollars less than he started with. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to make it out here,” Williamson told me, as he sat on a plastic chair beside the now empty range.

Williamson is 43 years old, well shy of 6 feet tall and not particularly athletic looking. He first qualified for the PGA Tour in 1995. Since then, he has bounced back and forth between the tour and golf’s equivalent of the minor leagues, the Nationwide Tour. On six separate occasions, he has finished the season without a strong-enough record to keep his eligibility for the PGA Tour and been forced to earn it back at the tour’s grueling 108-hole qualifying tournament, known as Q-School. Williamson has never won a PGA Tour event. Nevertheless, thanks to golf’s soaring purses during the Woods era, he has managed to earn more than $5.5 million during his 15-year career. “I certainly don’t live like a king,” he said, “but I do have three kids in private school, and that’s probably a direct result of Tiger.”

Paradoxically, even as Woods drove up the earnings of journeymen like Jay Williamson, he was making it increasingly difficult for them to compete on the tour. He did this in the most basic sense, by attracting greater talent to the game. Before Woods, pro golfers weren’t easily distinguished — physically anyway — from weekend duffers. Woods made golf a sport for elite athletes. Golf tournaments began to look a lot like father-son events, with paunchy middle-aged veterans competing against tall, muscular rookies. “Every year the guys get bigger and stronger,” Williamson said. “You’ve now got a whole new generation of athletes out here who could be playing another sport but are playing golf, because you can make a lot of money on the tour.” The game’s culture changed along the way as well. Instead of going out for a beer after finishing a round, golfers are as likely to spend that time on the range, the practice green and in the gym.

Just as Michael Jordan inspired a flood of foreign players to seek their fortunes in the National Basketball Association, Woods helped globalize the PGA Tour. When he first went pro in 1996, 26 of the tour’s 200 active members were not Americans; today the PGA Tour has 77 foreign golfers from 21 countries. This is a sore subject among some American golfers who think the tour should do more to cultivate and promote its homegrown talent. “It’s the same thing that’s happening in our world right now,” Williamson told me. “So many jobs are going to people who aren’t Americans.”

A few weeks after Torrey Pines, I ran into Williamson again at another tournament. Woods had just resurfaced for the first time since Thanksgiving to deliver his carefully scripted mea culpa. “I kept waiting for him to say, ‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!’ ” Williamson told me one morning on the practice green.

After Williamson’s first round the next day, we talked for a few minutes while he waited outside the clubhouse for his family to pick him up. “Look, this is an incredible way to make a living,” he said. “But it’s not as glamorous as people think it is, and Tiger glamorized it. And now I think that has completely changed. I kind of liken it to a terrorist attack on our sport. I just don’t think golf will ever get back to where it was. I think we’ve worn some of our sponsors out, and I just don’t think in this kind of economic environment we’re going to attract the kind of money we did in the glory days. I hope I’m wrong, but I just feel it.”

ALL ECONOMIC BUBBLES begin with a fervent faith in the transformative potential of something. As the bubble inflates, demand grows and the optimism of the early evangelists becomes contagious, converting more believers and steamrollering scrutinizers and cynics. But at some point the momentum shifts. Economic reality quickly catches up with the pervasive overconfidence that first set the bubble aloft, and it bursts.

This was essentially the trajectory of the Tiger Bubble, only the boom was fueled not by a new technology or financial instrument but by an athlete who shattered almost every existing assumption about his sport. The expectation was that Woods would single-handedly alter the future of golf. Culturally, he would redeem the sport’s racist history, blot out its stuffy, country-club image and infuse it with Nike cool. Economically, he would give golf the stature of a major sport while raising the levels of fan participation in the game.

The financial prospectors were circling Woods long before his first win on the PGA Tour. The sports agency I.M.G. started courting his family in 1989, when Woods was only 13, and wound up putting his father, Earl, on its payroll as a “junior talent scout” to help ensure that Woods wouldn’t sign anywhere else. (He didn’t.) Nike closely tracked Woods’s amateur career and took approving note of his unusually demonstrative style of play. By the time Woods announced in 1996 that he was dropping out of Stanford to play professional golf, he already had a $40 million Nike endorsement deal. And Nike wasn’t just pursuing its usual strategy of locking up the biggest star in every sport; Woods inspired the company to open a brand-new golf division. The enthusiasm spread quickly, attracting additional investors in the Woods brand: Buick, Gillette, Tag Heuer, Accenture, NetJets and others.

It helped that Woods came along just after Jordan demonstrated that an entire sports-entertainment empire could be built on one man’s back. Woods was his natural heir, a fiery, telegenic athlete whose improbable dominance of his sport was easily grasped and appreciated by millions of people who had never much cared for golf. “Everybody has been looking for the next Michael Jordan, and they were looking on the basketball court,” Nike’s chairman, Phil Knight, said shortly after Woods turned pro in the mid-90s. “And he was walking down the fairway all the time.” The passing of the torch from one human sports conglomerate to the next was completed in 2000, when Woods’s final round at Torrey Pines drew a larger TV audience than the N.B.A. All-Star Game. That same year, a Gallup poll confirmed that Woods had surpassed Jordan as America’s most admired athlete.

Golf’s alluring demographics, which is to say the relative wealth of its fan base, gave Woods even more potential commercial value to his sponsors than his predecessor: Jordan could sell underwear and Big Macs; Woods could sell financial services and Swiss watches. And as a golfer, Woods offered extra marketing opportunities. He could affix corporate logos to his shirt, hat and bag and even wear a watch on the course. Between his endorsements, appearance fees, prize money and golf-course-design deals, Woods became the first athlete to earn $1 billion.

Professional golf was profiting, too. The PGA Tour’s peculiar economics made it particularly well suited to the sort of speculative investment that is characteristic of bubbles. The tour derives almost all of its revenues from two sources: TV networks and corporate sponsors. Factors that constrain growth in other sports, like stadium capacity, don’t affect golf. In the summer of 1997, just a few weeks after 44 million viewers watched Woods, then 21 years old, win his first Masters — far more than had ever tuned in to the tournament — the tour negotiated new contracts with the networks widely reported to be worth twice the value of its previous deals. (The PGA Tour says these reports were inaccurate but would not elaborate.)

Before Woods, professional golf was a niche sport watched largely by the same people who played it, its crossover potential limited by the parity among tour members. Sports are driven by stars, and it was impossible to predict who was going to be the big story at any given golf tournament. A leader one day could drop out of contention the next, replaced by someone you never heard of before — and might never hear about again. Woods changed all of this. He won roughly a third of the time he played, a rate that defied the sport’s conventional wisdom. Even when he lost, it didn’t much matter. Whether Woods was pumping his fist after an important putt, flinging his driver aside after a disappointing tee shot or just applying lip balm, he was the guy viewers wanted to see. The weekly Nielsen ratings underscored the point: the tournaments Woods played routinely drew twice the audience, including many younger fans, of the tournaments he skipped. To maximize his screen time, I.M.G. and ABC created Monday Night Golf, a series of prime-time, made-for-TV, match-play tournaments featuring Woods and his closest thing to a rival at that particular moment.

In turn, golf became more attractive to the corporate sponsors whose names were associated with the various tour events. Prices rose accordingly. Golf-tournament sponsorships are enormously complicated financial transactions. To oversimplify, corporate sponsors typically pay the tour about $8 million to $10 million for a title sponsorship. The tour acts almost like a broker, moving money between the various organizations that host its tournaments and the networks. (Title sponsors are obligated to buy ad space for PGA Tour events, and this guaranteed advertising explains why networks televise so much golf.) Roughly $6 million is spent on the purse of each tour event, with all of the players who make the cut — about half the field — being guaranteed some prize money. The winner takes home roughly 20 percent.

Over the course of Woods’s career, the tour aggressively raised the price of entry for corporate sponsors. In the process, purses grew by an average of 400 percent. A lot of money found its way into Woods’s pocket. Last year alone, he won $10.5 million, bringing his career total to about $93 million. But there was also a powerful trickle-down effect on his fellow golfers. In 1996, only nine players on the tour earned $1 million. In 2009, 91 golfers did. With so much money pouring in, tournaments became increasingly lavish affairs. In 2004, Joe Hardy, the eccentric lumber magnate who hosted the tour’s 84 Lumber Classic, flew participating players to their next event on a pair of private planes.

The Tiger Bubble was kept afloat by a surging economy and a carefully constructed, zealously protected image of Woods himself. We watched him grow up on the golf course, his maturation evident in the changing tableaux on Sunday afternoons: the victory hug from his father giving way to the kiss from his wife, followed by the addition of a daughter and then a son. Off the course, he was a composite character created by the various commercials in which he starred. They supplemented our limited picture of the man, giving him a sense of humor (he walks across water to rescue his ball from a lily pad); whimsy (he bounces a golf ball on the face of his club while passing it behind his back and between his legs before smacking the ball in midair like a baseball); and even a touch of moral bite (“There are still courses in the U.S. I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin”).

The more intimate glimpses of Woods’s life that were missing from his cursory pre- and post-tournament interviews came via TV commercials, too: his father’s death was memorialized with a Father’s Day ad featuring home-video footage of the two of them; his son’s birth with an ad that conjured the forging of the boy’s first set of golf clubs (complete with a personalized bag: “Baby Woods”). Woods was a turn-of-the-century media creation, and yet there was something old-fashioned about how we treated him; he was a modern-day DiMaggio in his mythic remoteness and athletic transcendence.

THE MAN WHO PRESIDED over professional golf’s boom during the Tiger Woods era is a University of Virginia-trained lawyer and ex-Carter administration official named Tim Finchem. He became commissioner of the PGA Tour two years before Woods turned pro, and like any good chief executive, he took full advantage of his revolutionary new product. Now Finchem finds himself facing a protracted economic downturn, shrinking marketing budgets, increasing competition from the European Tour — which, unlike the PGA Tour, pays top players appearance fees to participate in its events — and the equivalent of a massive product recall.

I spoke with Finchem, a small man with a Southern drawl and the easy yet guarded manner of a former political operative, last month in the clubhouse at a tournament in Arizona. He told me that the tour had been through recessions before on his watch, though he acknowledged that this one has been especially tough. While he cited Woods as a major factor behind the tour’s recent growth — “he started contributing value pretty doggone quick” — he ticked off a number of other factors as well.

Finchem and Woods have a complicated history. In 2000, Woods publicly criticized the tour for exploiting his image to market its events. Finchem quickly patched things up with Woods, but he’s now in an unenviable position. He certainly can’t suggest that Tiger Woods is the tour, and in a sense he’s right. Woods plays only about 16 of the tour’s nearly 50 tournaments each year, 10 or so fewer than most golfers. And for the time being, every one of the tour’s events that depends on sponsorship — the majors don’t — has it. “Tiger spikes things, but he’s spiking things off of a very respectable, very marketable base,” Finchem told me.

But Finchem also knows that the tour needs Woods more than Woods needs the tour. This was made clear by Finchem’s handling of Woods’s apology. Not only did he allow golf’s biggest star to make his statement on a Friday in the middle of a PGA Tour event, but he also let Woods use the tour’s flagship facility at T.P.C. Sawgrass, outside Jacksonville, Fla., for the occasion. He even left the ongoing tournament to be present himself. A number of the golfers with whom I spoke were less than thrilled with Finchem, but most also recognized that he didn’t have much of a choice. “Tim’s hands are tied,” one tour veteran, Steve Flesch, told me recently. “How do you tell the guy who is greatly responsible for building that new clubhouse, for generating the revenue that allowed it to be built, how do you tell him that he can’t hold a press conference there?”

With some of golf’s most reliable sponsors declaring bankruptcy or narrowly avoiding it with TARP subsidies from Washington, Finchem has been casting a much wider net. The tour is even considering a policy shift that would allow casino resorts and distillers to underwrite events — not exactly the sort of white-bread image professional golf likes to project. “It was a seller’s market a few years ago,” says Rick Dudley, the head of the sports-marketing firm Octagon Worldwide, which advises a number of PGA Tour sponsors. “It’s a buyer’s market now.”

When FBR Capital Markets, an investment bank based in Virginia that lost $200 million in 2008, pulled out of its sponsorship of this year’s PGA Tour event in Scottsdale, Ariz., Finchem signed up Waste Management to take its place. The tournament is now called the Waste Management Phoenix Open, a name that can’t help but telegraph that a new kind of partner is being welcomed to the tour.

The Phoenix event is not your average golf tournament. It’s basically a sprawling frat party, complete with beer gardens and busty women in tank tops handing out discount drink coupons. On the tournament’s 16th hole, a par 3 surrounded by a grandstand that seats 15,000, golfers who fail to clear the desert shrubbery fronting the green are lustily booed. Woods has played the tournament only a handful of times, but he is nevertheless responsible for one of its more memorable moments: in 1997, his first full year as a pro, he aced the 16th hole and was approvingly showered with beer cans. (The video is on YouTube.)

Waste Management flew in about 30 of its senior executives and 100 clients for the event. “Most of our customers aren’t golfers, but they’re looking for entertainment,” the company’s chief executive, David Steiner, told me at a pretournament party inside a hangar at the Scottsdale airport. Waste Management also used the tournament to help promote the company’s new, greener image: a number of the tee boxes were equipped with solar-powered trash compactors.

As part of its stepped-up effort to attract sponsors, the tour is enlisting golfers to help ensure that companies feel as if they’re getting their money’s worth. At tournaments, players are now required to make themselves available to sponsors. Posted on the bulletin board in the locker room in Scottsdale was a note reminding golfers to thank Steiner. (“Cards have been placed in your lockers for your convenience.”)

In the past, golfers have not always been eager to run putting clinics or play rounds with V.I.P. guests, but right now they seem willing to do whatever the tour asks to keep sponsors happy. Some are even going a step further. “My daughter had actually done a paper on this company, on Waste Management, and some of the neat things they’ve been doing with recycling and energy and powering a million homes with the trash that they have,” Mickelson volunteered in his pretournament interview.

The tour is also working to combat the image that golf tournaments are essentially just corporate boondoggles. Earlier this year, it rolled out a new marketing campaign to draw attention to golf’s charitable giving, which is considerable. All tournament profits are donated to charity; last year, the total came to $108 million, which dwarfs that given by other sports.

To hedge its investment in Woods, the tour has also been promoting some of its more promising younger players like Rickie Fowler and Anthony Kim. But golf is not like basketball, where highly regarded rookies arrive with public profiles and can have an impact almost right away. That was what was unique about Woods. Not only did he start winning tournaments weeks after turning pro, he brought drama to the sport with a conspicuous intensity that has been impossible to replicate — and that makes for great TV. “The TV people come to talk to us every once in a while, and they say that’s what we need. We need more emotion. We need the guy out there pumping his fist in the air, jumping up and down when he makes a putt,” the tour veteran Harrison Frazar told me. “But as golfers we’re taught to be gentlemen and to be respectful to the people we’re playing with. And also all of the psychologists and coaches teach us to try to stay level. Yeah, they want emotion, but it’s a tough thing to ask of people who are taught to be emotionless.”

WHEN A BUBBLE POPS, it instantly exposes the false assumptions that fueled its inflation. Tiger Woods didn’t suddenly create a new reality for golf when he drove his S.U.V. into a fire hydrant, but he did reveal some troubling indicators that had been easy to overlook while he was dominating the game.

It turns out, for example, that Woods didn’t democratize golf. After the one Nike commercial drawing attention to the game’s enduring racism, which aired at the start of Woods’s pro career, he avoided the issue altogether. Fourteen years after Woods turned pro, he remains the only African-American on the PGA Tour. (The decline in the numbers of caddies at country clubs, which provided a way into the game for minorities, has actually reduced golf’s diversity.) Nor did Woods increase the number of people playing golf. This has left a glut of underutilized courses, many of which were part of unfilled condominium developments built during the real estate boom. According to J. J. Keegan, who runs Golf Convergence, a golf-course consultancy, almost three times as many golf courses closed as opened in the United States last year. “When I look at the Tiger effect on what we do, I don’t see much,” says Mark King, the chief executive of TaylorMade, a maker of golf equipment. “There’s never been an athlete in any sport who’s had a bigger impact on the conversation of a game, but if you really look at the numbers, for most of us in the golf industry there hasn’t been any real impact.”

More people were watching golf, but really they were watching Woods. “I’ll be the first to admit I don’t watch golf on TV unless Tiger is playing, and this is what I do for a living, these are my peers,” is how Steve Flesch put it to me. As a result, two castes inevitably emerged on the PGA Tour: the tournaments Woods played in and the tournaments he didn’t. In 2007, the tour’s longtime Denver stop, which Woods always skipped, shut down because it was unable to find a title sponsor. It was replaced by a tournament in Washington hosted by the Tiger Woods Foundation, presumably guaranteeing Woods’s appearance.

The attack on corporate excess hit golf well before Woods’s image collapsed. Last year, Northern Trust, which received $1.6 billion in TARP funds, got a dressing down from congressmen for flying hundreds of guests to the Northern Trust Open in Los Angeles and treating them to several days of entertainment that included a concert by Earth, Wind and Fire. Sponsors were soon distancing themselves from their own tournaments — the Wachovia Championship was renamed the Quail Hollow Championship — and canceling giveaways like free cars to players who hit holes in one.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN to golf after the excitement over Woods’s return subsides? Purses may shrink, as may the number of tournaments, but there is no reason to believe that the tour won’t continue to find companies willing to underwrite its events. Indeed in the last year it has signed up five new title sponsors. “Companies have a right to do business with a client,” says Bruce Lucker, who runs the golf-marketing company Signature Golf. “If they do that in an environment where they can get a guy away from his computer and cellphone, get him out on the golf course, why is that a crime?”

While tournament fairways may no longer be lined with corporate tents filled with buzzed executives in golf shirts, the game’s ongoing globalization — 35 of the top 50 players in the world are not American — could provide new revenue streams to the tour. And professional golf has the potential to become more interesting than ever as Woods, who will turn 35 this year, tries to maintain his dominance against a new generation of big hitters whom he spawned and who claim not to fear him.

Once he’s back, new endorsement opportunities will no doubt emerge, if not from the same sorts of upscale companies that invested in him during the Tiger Bubble. For now anyway, Woods may not be inclined to raise his public profile any higher than it already is. He certainly doesn’t need the money. Even post-scandal, having retained only a fraction of the sponsors he had last year (Nike, Electronic Arts and Gillette), he remains the world’s highest-paid athlete, according to Forbes magazine, which recently put the value of Woods’s existing endorsement deals at $82 million.

Unlike Michael Jordan, Woods won’t have the option of retiring from his sport as a brand, his carefully manufactured image intact. But this could ultimately present new marketing opportunities for him and golf.

“If I were managing his career, I would advise him to keep the conversation focused on golf for the next few years,” says Matthew Pace, the former head of sports marketing for General Motors. “Maybe after that, he could become the fallen yet revived saint, the human Tiger Woods as opposed to the idealized one.”


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April 4, 2010
A Critic’s Place, Thumb and All
By A. O. SCOTT

TWO weeks ago I went to Atlanta to give a talk at a conference devoted, in part, to “The Future of Criticism.” The gist of my remarks was that there is one. This was a contrarian, and perhaps also somewhat self-serving, position to take. After all, the countervailing evidence is hard to avoid.

Variety, the leaky flagship of entertainment reporting, had recently let go of its senior film and theater reviewers, Todd McCarthy and David Rooney, further thinning the ranks of critics employed by daily and weekly newspapers and magazines of all kinds over the past few years. (Even so, it is at least possible to picture us forming ranks — the surviving full-time classical music, dance and even literary critics might have trouble filling out a bridge game.)

The loss of print jobs is only one aspect of a dire overall picture. A senior figure in the critical firmament — Richard Schickel, long of Time magazine — told a panel last month that the whole enterprise of film criticism was pretty much worthless and always had been.

Not everyone would go that far, but the film world is rife with lamentation and accusation, echoing from the filmmaker Kevin Smith’s Twitter piece to the pages of New York’s combative free newspapers. Maybe criticism mattered once, but the conventional wisdom insists that it doesn’t any more. There used to be James Agee, and now there is Rotten Tomatoes. Rotten movies routinely make huge sums of money in spite of the demurral of critics. Where once reasoned debate and knowledgeable evaluation flourished, there are now social networking and marketing algorithms and a nattering gaggle of bloggers.

Or — to turn the picture on its head — a remnant of over-entitled old-media graybeards are fighting a rear-guard action against the democratic forces of the Internet, clinging to threadbare cultural authority in the face of their own obsolescence. Everyone’s a critic! Or maybe no one is.

“The news is really very sad,” sings Abbey Lincoln in a song aptly called “The World Is Falling Down.” “The time is late. The fruit is bad.” That’s the general mood, but down in Atlanta, I was having none of it. Hold the eulogies! Stop the funeral! All appearances to the contrary, I insisted, criticism is alive and well.

That was before my own brush with the grim reaper.

Shortly after my visit to Atlanta, I was in Chicago, sitting in a small office at the local ABC affiliate station. Next to me was Michael Phillips, film critic at The Chicago Tribune and, since last September, my co-host on “At the Movies,” the long-running movie-review program started by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Chicago public television in the 1970s and syndicated by Disney for the past quarter-century. Across from us was the Disney executive who had hired us and who had flown in from Burbank to tell us that the show had been canceled. After the current season is over in mid-August, “At the Movies” will be a memory.

The news, which occasioned an outpouring of grief on the Internet — as well as some confusion among once-loyal viewers who had no idea that the program was still on the air —did not come as a great surprise. From almost the moment we signed on, Mr. Phillips and I were aware of the faint ticking of a doomsday clock. Along with the production staff in Chicago, we had spent most of the winter fretting about ratings and doing what we could to raise the show’s profile.

But in the current media ecosystem, a half-hour syndicated weekly broadcast looks like a freak of nature — or, as a Disney lawyer put it, indiscreetly but accurately, during my initial contract negotiations, a dinosaur. When the studio first picked up the show, syndication was a gold mine.

Nowadays specialized programming catering to the esoteric pursuits of enthusiasts survives on cable, or sometimes on public broadcasting, and the larger viewing public is fractured, fickle and increasingly likely to satisfy its tastes online. “At the Movies,” dwelling in odd time slots in some markets and moving around in others, had a hard time finding or holding onto a big enough audience. But even if it had done better in the ratings, a 30-minute chunk of non-prime-time air was never going to be a very lucrative proposition. Which was what the Disney corporate statement confirming the cancellation meant when it called the program “unsustainable,” a word more commonly used to describe destructive farming or fishing practices. We were a very small fish or maybe a cash crop planted in dry, degraded soil.

I’m sorry “At the Movies” is over. I had a good time doing it and wish it could have kept going, but I have no scores to settle, no blame to assign, no might-have-beens to explore. Maybe if Mr. Phillips and I had agreed less or fought more, we could have replicated the combative, thin-line-between-love-and-hate dynamic that had characterized the Siskel-Ebert partnership. Maybe if we had stuck closer to the old format, or discarded it entirely, or been better looking, or liked “The Blind Side” ...

Or maybe not. As the eulogies for “At the Movies” flow into the larger threnody lamenting the death of criticism, it is worth remembering that the program, now inscribed on the honor roll of the dead, was once implicated in the murder.

Movie criticism on television? Movie criticism with thumbs? You can’t be serious! That was more or less the message of an impassioned, anxious essay by Richard Corliss, published in Film Comment in 1990 (and reprinted, with characteristically impish generosity, by Roger Ebert in an anthology of his own work). The article was called “All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?,” and Mr. Corliss’s point was that sound bites, video clips and glib quantification threatened to dumb down the critical enterprise and to dilute the impact of thoughtful analysis and good writing.

Twenty years ago, the agent of that decline was a kind of television program — two guys trading opinions on the movies of the week — that now, in its twilight, looks exalted and heroic. The threat Mr. Corliss identified has migrated to the Internet, where self-credentialed commenters snark and snipe and where the simple binary code of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting that Mr. Siskel and Mr. Ebert trademarked has been supplanted by the crunched numbers of the Metacritic score.

So was “At the Movies” — which was also called “Sneak Previews,” “Siskel and Ebert,” “Ebert and Roeper” and other names during its long, storied run — the start of a slippery downward slope or the summit of the critical art? Neither, of course. The circumstances in which the art of criticism is practiced are always changing, but the state of the art is remarkably constant.

Which is to say that, from a certain angle, the future of criticism is always bleak and the present always a riot of ill-informed opinion and boisterous disputation. Some gloomy soul will always wish it otherwise and conjure an idealized picture of decorum and good sense. Early in the last century, T. S. Eliot wrote that “upon giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.”

A hundred years before Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge thundered that “till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment.”

Both Coleridge and Eliot, who were writing about print, sound uncannily like ranters against the Internet and television. And, like present-day old-media scourges of the blogosphere, they had a point. But they were also projecting an impossible and self-undermining wish, because it is only through the confusion and noise of the public sphere that criticism has advanced, discovering its principles and best practices, preserving tradition and embracing the new.

I don’t go back into the archive of Siskel and Ebert’s reviews to find out how they voted, or for consumer advice, but rather to hear the two of them argue. And in our own brief tenure in their chairs, Mr. Phillips and I found argument to be the biggest challenge and the greatest satisfaction.

“One minute for the cross-talk, guys,” the producer would say, using the show’s term of art for the back-and-forth that follows the scripted reviews. How can you do a movie justice in 60 seconds? You can’t, of course — or in 800 words of print or in a blog post — but you can start a conversation, advance or rebut an argument, and give people who share your interest something to talk about.

And that kind of provocation, that spur to further discourse, is all criticism has ever been. It is not a profession and does not stand or fall with any particular business model. Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them. As such, it is always apt to be misunderstood, undervalued and at odds with itself. Artists will complain, fans will tune out, but the arguments will never end.

So I’ve come full circle. The future of criticism is the same as it ever was. Miserable, and full of possibility. The world is always falling down. The news is always very sad. The time is always late.

But the fruit is always ripe.


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June 4, 2010
The Freegan Establishment
By JAKE HALPERN

I cruised through the West Side of Buffalo last summer with a young man named Kit who was looking to acquire a house. Kit was a 20-year-old Las Vegas native who had just arrived in Buffalo. He had the look of a mountain man fresh off the trail: his face was tanned, his brow was covered in sweat and his hair was pulled back haphazardly in a ponytail. He wore a bandanna around his neck, and his shorts and T-shirt looked as if they were his only set of clothes. He was also barefoot. Kit looked poor — destitute, even — but he was very excited about a grand, old house that he had his eye on.

“It has a beautiful backyard with a lot of blackberry bushes!” Kit told me. It was a three-story house, he explained, and the first floor alone had 1,224 square feet. Kit had researched the house online, and he knew that the place had four bedrooms, two full bathrooms and two kitchens. “It’s totally stunning,” he gushed.

The house had one other outstanding feature: It was just across the street from a convenience store, and behind the store was a Dumpster, which Kit said he hoped would provide an endless source of meals.

Kit is a freegan. He maintains that our society wastes far too much. Freeganism is a bubbling stew of various ideologies, drawing on elements of communism, radical environmentalism, a zealous do-it-yourself work ethic and an old-fashioned frugality of the sock-darning sort. Freegans are not revolutionaries. Rather, they aim to challenge the status quo by their lifestyle choices. Above all, freegans are dedicated to salvaging what others waste and — when possible — living without the use of currency. “I really dislike spending money,” Kit told me. “It doesn’t feel natural.”

Eventually, Kit and I arrived at the house that he’d picked out for himself. It was a tall, narrow structure, with boarded-up windows and a front lawn in desperate need of mowing. There was no “for sale” sign, but that hardly mattered, because Kit simply planned to move in. Buffalo is fertile ground for squatting. Kit’s house was one of 10,000 such abandoned structures in the city. As far as Kit was concerned, this rust-belt city, hit hard by foreclosures, was a veritable Eden for freegans.

“People throw away houses,” he told me. “It’s ridiculous.”

As it turns out, a group of Kit’s friends have enjoyed great success as squatters in this same neighborhood. In 2005, they took over a palatial old home, and this was where Kit was temporarily living when we met. The property is a sprawling turn-of-the-century mansion with six fireplaces, a cavernous dining room, a library, several enormous bedrooms, servants’ quarters and an in-ground swimming pool. The place, it must be said, is in serious disrepair. Shingles are peeling off the exterior, the front lawn is littered with bicycle parts and the swimming pool contains so much soil that it might more aptly be called a landfill. But it has electricity, running water and even a phone line. Those who live here often say they are living in “decadent poverty.”

The mansion is situated near the Niagara River, whose shores are lined with old warehouses and factories. This part of Buffalo was once home to working-class Italian-Americans, who worked in small factories, on the docks and in railroad yards. The homes, with notable exceptions, tend to be modest. In recent years, there has been an influx of new immigrants from Burma, Somalia and Sudan. Like the freegans, many of these immigrants came to take advantage of the city’s overlooked housing stock, though they acquired their homes in the more traditional way.

The freegans’ mansion is populated by a small number of residents who live there year-round. They ride out the winters in a single room equipped with a wood-burning stove, and when necessary, they use an auger to drill through the ice that forms in the toilets. In the summer, though, the mansion’s population swells, as drifters, backpackers from as far away as Europe and traveling musicians arrive almost daily. A few harder cases pass through, too. One visitor I met was a former drug addict who had tried to kill himself more than once; another was an anemic-looking young woman who had been living under a bridge for four months. The majority, however, seemed to be iconoclastic young people from middle-class backgrounds living some version of the freegan dream. They Dumpster-dive for food, mend their clothing with dental floss and brew dandelion wine. Postcards from former guests adorn the walls. One is signed by a visitor from Plymouth, England, who writes: “How’s the house and how’s the whole project working out? I hope a lot of guys are taking advantage of the situation you have.”

Most visitors are welcome to stay at the mansion for a day or two, but to stay longer, they have to help fix the place up. There is a “probationary period,” one longtime resident explained, in which newcomers must “bottom line” a project — that is, they must see it to completion. During my visit, the veterans were considering the candidacy of a young woman who’d bottom-lined a few projects. Her chances looked good. “She showed me a bunch of tricks on filling and masonry and how to best use Spackle so that you don’t waste it,” one veteran told me. He then added: “Who knows? Maybe there’ll be a bunch of drama with her, and she’ll wind up getting into some big fight, or there’s something that we didn’t know about.”

On my first visit, I found several groups of young people busy at work — painting the interior, mending a fence and building an outdoor stone patio. The house is, in some ways, a giant learning lab where residents teach one another the basics of carpentry, plumbing and electrical work. Many embrace this do-it-yourself mentality with an almost evangelical fervor. A young woman named Lee put it this way: “These are all a bunch of punk kids who got in trouble at school and just at life.” But once they arrived at the house, they set into a routine gathering food, gardening and working on the house. “Nobody has time to get in trouble anymore,” she said.

One neighbor observed that some residents live at the mansion for a year or two and then move on. I met one former resident, Natalia, who came to Buffalo as an acrobat with a traveling circus. She moved into the mansion and became the resident herbalist; eventually, however, she enrolled in nursing school, cut her dreadlocks and got a place of her own.

Outside the mansion, by a stone patio, I met Tim, a 22-year-old dressed in a black shorts and a T-shirt. He wore a buzz cut and had leather bands around his neck and wrists. He told me that he’d been living in the house for four years. Tim stood barefoot in the mud and was shoveling vigorously. He explained that he had already unearthed quite a few used condoms and hypodermic needles — vestiges of the days when the abandoned house was used by prostitutes and drug dealers. (Tim, concerned that the house would be overrun with passers-through this summer, asked that his last name and the exact location of the house be withheld.)

Tim grew up in a quiet neighborhood in North Buffalo. His father, Mark, is a financial planner, and his mother, Ruth, is a high-school English teacher. Tim was a rebel from a young age. He was always striving to “stick the fork in the electrical outlet,” Ruth recalls. Tim later attended a prestigious magnet school, City Honors, where his contrarian goal was to achieve a grade-point average just one point above failing.

Tim said that he struggled to “find a way out of what looked like a really cloned and synthetic world that people get plugged into.” And just before graduating from high school, in the spring of 2005, he found it. He met some young people who had found the boarded-up mansion on the West Side of Buffalo, which they hoped to take over and convert into a utopian safe haven for freegans and other dropouts. Mark and Ruth remember their son’s departure vividly. “That Friday night he came downstairs with a backpack, hugged, kissed us, got on his bike and moved,” Ruth says. “There was no stopping him.”

The property seemed like the perfect place to squat. One of the group’s founding members, a 25-year-old named Rich Majewski, had gathered as much information on the mansion as he could. The owner on record was deceased, and his heir, who lived in the suburbs, appeared to have no interest in the place.

Majewski’s strategy was to be as brazen as possible. “The facade of legitimacy was our main goal,” he told me. “We pried the boards off and did it all in broad daylight. That’s what ownership comes down to — everyone believing that you actually own it.” When he introduced himself to the neighbors, Majewski told them that he had the heir’s permission to move in. This wasn’t true, but the neighbors took Majewski at his word.

The mansion had clearly once been a place of great wealth. The original owner, J. E. Rebstock, built it in the early 1890s. Rebstock was the founder of Crystal Beach, which was once known as “Buffalo’s Coney Island.” But by 1960, the house had become a nursing home. The mansion’s current residents led me down to the basement, where, from boxes of dusty medical records, they had unearthed creepier aspects of the mansion’s past. One record noted that a patient was “awake all night tearing bed apart.” Another read: “Yelling loudly. Still scratching.”

When Majewski and his fellow squatters arrived, the house was still filled with the bedpans, walkers and knitting needles that had belonged to the nursing home’s residents. There were also rotting furniture, burned couches, dead birds and so much other garbage that some rooms had debris from the floor to the ceiling. Cleaning up took the better part of a year.

Eventually, one of the city’s “board-up crews,” which seal off abandoned homes, discovered the squatters and reported them to Judge Henry Nowak at the city’s housing court. At first, Nowak didn’t know what to make of the situation. Then, one evening, while the judge was attending his son’s Little League baseball game, he was approached by a group of neighbors who lived near the mansion. They said they wanted to discuss the squatters. To the judge’s astonishment, the neighbors praised the young people, saying that they had kept the thieves, drug dealers and arsonists away. What’s more, they attested, the squatters were fixing up the place, making it less of an eyesore. Their presence, and the fact that the mansion was now occupied, had made it easier for people on the block to get homeowners’ insurance. Odd as it seemed, the freegan kids helped stabilize the neighborhood, and the concerned neighbors wanted them to stay. “They said, ‘Don’t you dare kick those kids out of the house!’ ” Judge Nowak told me.

After this encounter, the judge found himself in a difficult situation. “I was left with two options essentially,” he told me. “One would be to put the house in receivership, where I would tell all of these children that if they want to stay, they have to now pay rent.” This option was problematic, Nowak said, because the squatters were “enamored with the fact that they moved into a house that wasn’t theirs,” and given their freegan sensibilities, they would not consent to paying rent. Or, Judge Nowak explained, “I could essentially let things stay as they are and trust that the children are going to make the repairs to the property.”

For the time being, the judge decided to let the squatters stay. “It was a close call,” he told me. “It was an awfully close call.”

When he was done working on the patio, Tim gave me a tour of the house. On the first floor, there was a spacious kitchen laden with food taken from various Dumpsters, a brew room stocked with homemade beer and dandelion wine, a dining room that had been converted into a performance space for bands and a computer room equipped with a PC that one of the mansion’s residents had built entirely from found parts. The computer even had Internet service thanks to a “cantenna” (an antenna made of cans) that picked up a wireless signal from a college nearby. There was also a library, furnished with old couches that looked as if they might be vestiges of a 1920s speakeasy, and a vast collection of books and periodicals organized by subject headings like “Sex and Sexuality,” “Prisoner and Crime” and “It’s Not Theft.” There were bedrooms on the second floor, and the third floor was a bunkroom for the many drifters who passed through. Several bunks were made up with dusty Thomas the Tank Engine bed sheets. On the wall above the bunks, travelers had scrawled messages like “Thanks a lot! — Fred from Belgium” and “Escape while you can.” The third floor also was home to the mansion’s Craft Room, which had supplies for stenciling, bookbinding, silk-screening and sewing. In the basement there was a wood shop loaded with carpenters’ tools and a repair shop where residents could fix their bikes. Perhaps the most interesting nook was a very large closet dubbed the Free Store. It was stocked with racks of secondhand clothing that visitors were welcome to take. One day I happened to witness the Free Store being restocked. Paul, one of the long-term residents, returned home with a huge bag of clothing that he obtained from the lost-and-found at a local laundromat. “I got a thousand dollars’ worth of designer jeans!” he boasted. A crowd soon formed.

“You got a washcloth?” someone asked.

Paul tossed a washcloth up into the air.

Soon everyone was rifling through the clothing. “I haven’t worn underwear in eight years,” declared Tim, as he clutched several pairs of boxers with a grin. “I am feeling fancy as hell!”

The line between this help-yourself mentality and a more freewheeling spirit of communal property isn’t always so clear. One resident, Brianna, remarked to me that her stuff often goes missing and that “everyone just thinks everything that’s here is up for grabs.”

One morning, after I had been hanging out at the mansion for a few days, we were about to have breakfast when someone noticed that all the forks and spoons were missing.

“What happened to all the silverware?” someone asked.

“They got turned into a wind chime,” someone replied nonchalantly. Sure enough, moments later, we could all hear the sound of forks clanging in the breeze.

Once a day or so, a foraging party visited the best local Dumpsters. I accompanied a man named Rick on a mission. At 53, Rick — who also goes by Uncle Rick — was the mansion’s oldest resident by two decades. Rick is a kindly, softspoken, white-haired man who often donned an old sport coat. He described himself as someone who had struggled with addiction. His stay at the mansion, he insisted, had been his unofficial rehab treatment. “I am kind of new to this food Dumpstering,” Rick told me. “I never did this in my life, until I moved in with these kids.” Nonetheless, he proved quite adept at it, and after crawling through just one Dumpster, we obtained almost two dozen cellophane-wrapped sandwiches that had not reached their expiration date. We returned home to a heroes’ welcome. “This is the modern hunter-gatherer society,” Rick told me with a smile.

When everyone had eaten enough, Rick placed the leftover sandwiches in the refrigerator alongside several cellophane-wrapped packages of vegetables that were salvaged from a grocery store’s Dumpster. Food in the house was surprisingly abundant. One longtime resident, Dan Zogrephos, told me that besides beer or occasional snacks, he had not bought any food in roughly eight years.

One evening, a foraging party visited a nearby bike path and gathered several hundred snails. They stuffed them into mushrooms and cooked them in butter. Occasionally the menu at the house also included roadkill like duck, deer or raccoon. Tim was fond of this cuisine. His father told me, “It just hurts his heart to see an animal lying on the road not being consumed if it’s already dead.”

Freeganism is often described as a recent phenomenon, but its premises date back at least to Gerrard Winstanley, a 17th-century English cloth seller. In the 1640s, Winstanley’s business failed, and he resettled in the Surrey countryside, where he herded cattle. These were tough times in England, marked by violence, famine and low wages. Winstanley decided that the solution was to form a community without money. The poor would till the soil and fill communal warehouses with their crops, which would be distributed to all. Winstanley, who abhorred waste, eventually took over some uncultivated public lands along with his followers and founded what was known as a Digger colony.

The colony didn’t last long, but Winstanley wrote extensively about his utopia. Centuries later, in the 1960s, a group of radicals in San Francisco were inspired by his writings and dedicated themselves to creating a society without money. They called themselves the Diggers, and they opened free stores, distributed free food, set up free housing in squats, offered free medical care and even organized free concerts featuring the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

The Diggers’ philosophy influenced the thinking of a young man named Keith McHenry, who would go on to become one of the most important figures in the freegan movement. McHenry, who is now 53, came from a family with a prestigious pedigree; his ancestor, James McHenry, was one of the signers of the Constitution. Keith McHenry, however, was a nonconformist almost from birth. Throughout his 20s, McHenry traveled the country, Dumpster-diving and crashing with artists and hippies. The pivotal moment in his life came in 1980, when he was working at an organic-food store in Cambridge, Mass. “At the end of each day, I was throwing away these crates of produce — apples, lettuce, cabbage — stuff that had been bruised or was slightly imperfect in shape,” McHenry told me. So he asked his boss if he could distribute this produce at shelters, churches and soup kitchens. McHenry’s efforts were a success, and he helped found Food Not Bombs, a nonprofit whose mission was to salvage discarded but edible food and feed the poor. Today, the organization has more than a thousand chapters around the world and has probably been the most active force for spreading the ethos of freeganism.

One main gripe that freegans have with American society is just how much food we waste. In his book “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal,” Tristram Stuart writes that American households, retailers and vendors waste about 40 million tons of food each year. Stuart, who is also an activist, does not identify himself as a freegan. “What I want to do is end the possibility of freeganism because I want the whole food business to stop the waste that makes freeganism possible in the first place,” he told me. Stuart says that freeganism serves a purpose, because it draws attention to a problem, but it does not offer the solution. And this observation reveals a quandary inherent in the freegan movement. Freegans maintain that by salvaging waste, they diminish their need for money, which allows them to live a more thoughtful, responsible and deliberate existence. But if they succeed in their overriding goal, and society ends up becoming less wasteful, the freegan lifestyle will no longer be possible.

As far as I could tell, the two driving philosophical forces at the Buffalo mansion were freeganism and hedonism. The freegans were making a statement and having a hell of a good time doing it. It was a social experiment worthy of Henry David Thoreau, a place buzzing with industry, self-reliance and eco-consciousness; but, at times, it was also a rollicking frat house. Mornings could be dead quiet when the freegans were sleeping off their hangovers.

One responsibility that the freegans carried out faithfully was showing up in court, which they had begun to do regularly by the spring of 2006. “When we would go to housing court,” Rich Majewski recalled, “it would be a bunch of landlords and 12 dirty kids dressed in three-piece suits from a secondhand store. It was always like, Maybe we’re getting evicted today.”

Judge Nowak remembered the unkempt appearance of the squatters. “They looked like they hadn’t bathed in a little while,” he said. “They would look at the ceiling as they were talking to me. Frankly, they all looked like they were high.” He was won over, however, by the squatters’ respectful attitude, both inside and outside the courtroom. When the judge ordered a housing inspector to visit the mansion and assess how much work the squatters had done, the squatters welcomed the inspector into the house and proudly showed him around. The squatters’ politeness, the judge concluded, “probably gave them an unfair advantage that they shouldn’t have had.” One of the judge’s community liaisons also reported back to him that the squatters picked up garbage around the neighborhood and cut the lawns of vacant properties and that one resident even became president of the local block association.

Starting in the spring of 2007, however, there were signs that the squatters were letting things go. In June of that year, a liaison for the judge inspected the property and reported that the place looked like “a flophouse” and that “I do not think the structure could survive another winter.” And despite support from most of the neighbors, there were complaints. One neighbor told me that the long-term residents were generally very “cordial and polite,” but the drifters who passed through could be loud, disrespectful and drunk. This neighbor once spotted someone urinating out of a window.

At one point, in the summer of 2007, Judge Nowak temporarily evicted everyone from the mansion because of bad behavior. The eviction was a turning point in the house, showing the residents how tenuous their arrangement was. Tim was forced to crash with friends and occasionally with his parents. He began discussing the matter with his father. Mark, ever the financial planner, told his son that if he wanted to do as he pleased within the mansion, then he had to get ownership of the place.

Tim was uncertain of what to do. The squatters had already paid off back taxes and were paying utility bills — not the most orthodox of freegan practices — but, as they saw it, they were still beating the system. Ownership would, arguably, catapult them into the ranks of propertied classes.

“Many of us in the house see the whole system of private property as being something that oppresses people,” Tim said. “And if we owned the place, suddenly we’d be the ones kicking people out or the ones calling the cops.” But, in the end, Tim said, ownership was “a necessary step to keep the project alive.”

The problem was figuring out who actually owned the place. The heir to the last owner named on the deed had taken no responsibility for the property and appeared not to want it. Tim eventually tracked him down and persuaded him to sign a quitclaim deed, which transferred ownership of the property.

Right away, Tim had to deal with a $52,000 outstanding bank lien against the house. For help, he turned to Harvey Garrett, one of Judge Nowak’s liaisons. Garrett says that Tim and the other squatters were more responsible than they let on. While the freegans eschew currency, they recognize they can’t entirely live without it, and Tim and others take occasional handyman jobs for wages. The long-term residents now contribute a small sum to a house fund. “They make it sound like they are big bohemians living off the house for free, but that’s just not true,” Garrett says. “They worked their butts off and paid the back taxes and the utilities. They are more conformist than they want you to think they are.”

Tim worked with Garrett and a local community organizer named Aaron Bartley (who is a friend of mine), and they appealed to the bank to forgive the lien. They argued that, given the condition of the mansion and the neighborhood that it was in, the bank’s ownership stake in the property was more of a liability than an asset. In the end, the bank transferred ownership to Tim.

Tim’s parents were impressed by their son’s determination and the coup he pulled off. “We’re damn proud of him,” his mother told me. Even the judge seemed proud, praising the squatters for “an awfully impressive effort on their part.”

Tim seemed less excited about his new status as a property owner. After all, he is the one liable if someone gets hurts at the mansion or if the city assesses fines on the property. “If bills go unpaid, it comes back to bite me,” he lamented. I asked Tim if his newfound responsibilities stressed him out. “Without a doubt,” he replied. Tim spent some time last fall doing farm labor. “I was in California — 3,000 miles away — and I was having the power company calling me about the electricity.”

Tim got into some legal trouble on his way home from that trip. According to his lawyer, Tim and several friends were working for a farmer who compensated them with marijuana. It was a quintessential freegan arrangement — no money was exchanged. While driving back to Buffalo with his friends, Tim’s car was stopped in Illinois and searched by the police. There were two pounds of marijuana in the vehicle, and Tim was charged with two felony counts. He is pleading not guilty.

Back in the house, Tim has to play the enforcer. Ruth, Tim’s mother, says that it irks her son that he has to be the one to tell visitors, for example, that their pets need to be walked. “He was really beside himself that he had to sit people down and say, ‘The rule is pets go outside to poop.’ He suddenly saw himself as the father figure, and that just turned his head inside out.”

Rich Majewski had a similar experience. After he had been living in the house for less than a year, he took an extended trip to New Orleans with his girlfriend. Upon their return they found the place trashed — beer cans on the floor, cigarette butts everywhere, piles of unwashed dishes, rotting food on the kitchen counters. Majewski and his girlfriend, who was also living at the mansion, suggested that the place needed to be cleaned up. “People started calling us Mom and Dad,” Majewski recalls glumly. “That wasn’t the dynamic I was looking for.” Shortly after that, they moved out.

During my time at the mansion, I heard more than a few guests and visitors marveling at how the squatters had managed to get themselves a mansion for free. Kit, the Las Vegas native, was one of them. He had become increasingly excited about the abandoned house that he had found, and one day, he asked me if I’d like a tour. He assured me that he’d already befriended the neighbors and that they wouldn’t mind us poking around.

“The neighbor to the left of the house is a sweet older lady with a fat, chubby dog, and she’s invited me over for tea,” Kit explained. “And you have a Filipino gentleman that’s across the street that’s so nice.”

We slipped around back and sneaked in through one of the few windows that wasn’t boarded up. Technically, we were breaking and entering, but this didn’t seem to worry Kit. As I strained to see through the murky darkness, he pointed down at the filthy wall-to-wall carpeting and said cheerfully, “We would probably pull everything up and have wood floors.” I nodded appreciatively. Kit explained he wouldn’t be living here alone. His plan was simply to get the house started, and then he’d hand it over to a group of female friends who were hoping to start an all-girls squat.

Kit and I walked through the house all the way up to the third floor. The rooms were strewn with junk — empty peanut-butter jars, a discarded sink, old underpants, even a trashed payphone. Kit pointed toward a broken window. “I don’t mind a breeze here and there,” he observed.

After leaving the house, Kit spotted two young women across the street who appeared to be his future neighbors. He sauntered over them. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” he asked. “We’re looking into this house; do you know who the owner is?”

The women shook their heads.

“Can I ask you a question?” asked one of the women.

“Sure,” Kit replied.

“Why are you walking around barefoot? Are you crazy? With all the crack vials and needles here?”

Kit glanced down at his bare feet and then explained with a smile that he always watched his footing.

Afterward, I asked Kit what he usually told the neighbors about his plans for the house. “I keep it vague,” he replied with an air of confidence. “Just be nice to people. Just make connections. It’s all about connections.”


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June 2, 2010
How a Soccer Star Is Made
By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE

The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst — The Future. Set down beside a highway in an unprepossessing district of Amsterdam, it consists of eight well-kept playing fields and a two-story building that houses locker rooms, classrooms, workout facilities and offices for coaches and sports scientists. In an airy cafe and bar, players are served meals and visitors can have a glass of beer or a cappuccino while looking out over the training grounds. Everything about the academy, from the amenities to the pedigree of the coaches — several of them former players for the powerful Dutch national team — signifies quality. Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market. “All modern ideas on how to develop youngsters begin with Ajax,” Huw Jennings, an architect of the English youth-development system, told me. “They are the founding fathers.”

In America, with its wide-open spaces and wide-open possibilities, we celebrate the “self-made athlete,” honor effort and luck and let children seek their own course for as long as they can — even when that means living with dreams that are unattainable and always were. The Dutch live in a cramped, soggy nation made possible only because they mastered the art of redirecting water. They are engineers with creative souls, experts at systems, infrastructure and putting scant resources to their best use. The construction of soccer players is another problem to be solved, and it’s one they undertake with a characteristic lack of sentiment or illusion.

The first time I visited De Toekomst happened to coincide with the arrival of 21 new players — 7- and 8-year-olds, mainly, all from Amsterdam and its vicinity — who were spotted by scouts and identified as possible future professionals. As I came upon them, they were competing in a series of four-on-four games on a small, artificial-turf field with a wall around it, like a hockey rink, so that balls heading out of bounds bounced right back into play. It was late November and cold, with a biting wind howling off the North Sea, but the boys skittered about in only their lightweight jerseys and baggy shorts. Their shots on goal were taken with surprising force, which kept the coaches who were serving as goalkeepers flinching and shielding themselves in self-defense. The whole scene had a speeded-up, almost cartoonish feel to it, but I certainly didn’t see anyone laughing.

After a series of these auditions, some players would be formally enrolled in the Ajax (pronounced EYE-ox) academy. A group of men standing near me looked on intently, clutching rosters that matched the players with their numbers. One man, Ronald de Jong, said: “I am never looking for a result — for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is older.”

Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates something similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood. De Jong, a solidly built former amateur player, is one of some 60 volunteer scouts who fan out on weekends to watch games involving local amateur clubs. (He works during the week as a prison warden.) His territory includes the area between The Hague and Haarlem — “the flower district, which is also a very good hunting ground for players” is how he described it. He’ll observe a prospect for months or even years, and players he recommends will also be watched by one of the club’s paid scouts, a coach and sometimes the director of the Ajax youth academy. But for some families, the first time they realize their boys are under serious consideration is when a letter arrives from Ajax requesting that they bring their sons in for a closer look, an invitation that is almost never declined. To comprehend the impact of a summons from Ajax, imagine a baseball-crazed kid from, say, North Jersey arriving home from school one day to learn that he has been asked to come to Yankee Stadium to perform for the team brass.

One player there was de Jong’s discovery, an 8-year-old who, he said, had “talent that is off the charts.” But if this boy were to be accepted into the academy, it would mean he had completed just the first of a succession of relentless challenges. Ajax puts young players into a competitive caldron, a culture of constant improvement in which they either survive and advance or are discarded. It is not what most would regard as a child-friendly environment, but it is one that sorts out the real prodigies — those capable of playing at an elite international level — from the merely gifted.

About 200 players train at De Toekomst at any given time, from ages 7 to 19. (All are male; Ajax has no girls’ program.) Every year, some in each age group are told they cannot return the following year — they are said to have been “sent away” — and new prospects are enrolled in their place. And it is not just the children whose performances are assessed. Just before my second trip to Amsterdam in March, several longtime coaches were informed that they had not measured up and would be let go. One of them was the coach of a boy I had been following, Dylan Donaten Nieuwenhuys, a slightly built, soft-featured 15-year-old who began at Ajax when he was 7.

Dylan’s father, Urvin Rooi, served as a sort of guide for me. Gregarious and opinionated, he introduced me to other parents, made sure I came inside for hot drinks at the cafe and even gave me lifts on his scooter from the training grounds back to the transit station. He was particularly useful in translating a culture that was nothing like I had ever seen in many years of reporting on American sports. When I observed that for all the seriousness of purpose at De Toekomst, I was surprised that the players did not practice more hours or play more games, Rooi said: “Of course, because they do not want to do anything to injure them or wear them out. They’re capital. And what is the first thing a businessman does? He protects his capital.”

When the boys start at the youth academy, Rooi said, they are attached to the ideal of Ajax, whose senior team packs in 50,000-plus fans for its home games and still occupies a mythic place in world soccer because of the innovative style it established in the 1960s — a quick-passing, position-shifting offensive attack that became known as Total Football. “The little boys drink their tea out of Ajax cups,” he said. “They sleep in Ajax pajamas under Ajax blankets.” As spring approaches, he continued, they get nervous about whether they will be permitted to stay for another year. “This is when they sometimes start to get bad school grades. They don’t sleep. They wet their pants.”

Over time, though, the academy hardens them mentally as well as physically. I asked Dylan how he felt about his coach’s being fired. He shrugged. “The football world is a hard world,” he replied. “He has made the decision to send boys away. Now he knows how it feels.”

LATE ONE AFTERNOON in the cafe at De Toekomst, I was talking with a coach, Patrick Landru, who works with the academy’s youngest age groups, when he asked if he could take my writing pad for a moment. I handed it over, and he put down five names, then drew a bracket to their right. Outside the bracket, he wrote, “80 million euros.” The names represented five active “Ajax educated” players, as he called them, all of whom entered the academy as children, made it through without being sent away and emerged as world-class players. Eighty million euros (or even more) is what Ajax got in return for selling the rights to the players to other professional clubs. Once a team pays this one-time transfer fee, it then negotiates a new, often very large, contract with the player.

Wesley Sneijder, the first name on the list and probably the most accomplished young Dutch player at the moment, started at the academy when he was 7. At 23, Real Madrid acquired him for 27 million euros. (He now stars for Inter Milan, the current Italian champion and the winner of this year’s Champion’s League tournament, Europe’s highest club competition.) The other four players named on my pad were, like Sneijder, highly paid pros for clubs outside the Netherlands and prominent members of the Dutch national team that will compete in the World Cup beginning this week in South Africa.

An emerging national-team star, Gregory van der Wiel, was not among the names on the list, because he still plays for Ajax, but it is widely assumed that he will be the next big sale. A heavily tattooed rap aficionado who likes to spend his downtime in Miami’s South Beach, van der Wiel, now 22, was sent away from Ajax at 14 because of a poor attitude — “I was an angry little boy who had not yet learned to listen,” he told me — then was invited back after spending three years in the academy of another Dutch pro club, now defunct, which he recalls as having had inferior facilities, coaching and even uniforms. I asked Martin Jol, the coach of Ajax’s first team, if it was difficult for him to nurture young players knowing he would lose them just as their talent blossomed. “I think that is the purpose of Ajax, to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as possible,” he answered. “And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a lot of money.”

In the U.S., we think of money as corrupting sport, especially youth sport. At Ajax, it is clarifying. With the stakes so high — so much invested and the potential for so much in return — De Toekomst is a laboratory for turning young boys into high-impact performers in the world’s most popular game.

The Ajax youth academy is not a boarding school. The players all live within a 35-mile radius of Amsterdam (some of them have moved into the area to attend the academy). Ajax operates a fleet of 20 buses to pick up the boys halfway through their school day and employs 15 teachers to tutor them when they arrive. Parents pay nothing except a nominal insurance fee of 12 euros a year, and the club covers the rest — salaries for 24 coaches, travel to tournaments, uniforms and gear for the players and all other costs associated with running a vast facility. Promising young players outside the Ajax catchment area usually attend academies run by other Dutch professional clubs, where the training is also free, as it is in much of the rest of the soccer-playing world for youths with pro potential. (The U.S., where the dominant model is “pay to play” — the better an athlete, the more money a parent shells out — is the outlier.)

Ajax makes mistakes, plenty of them. It sends the wrong boys away, and some of them become stars elsewhere with no compensation returning to the club. As a production line, it is grossly inefficient; only a small percentage of its youngsters become elite players. But the club does not throw money after pure fantasy, encouraging visions of pro careers that never have a chance of materializing for children who do not have the foundational talent to reach such goals. The club decides which boys have potential — “Please note,” its Web site advises, “Ajax’s youth academy cannot accept individual external applications” — and then exposes them to scientific training and constant pressure.

The director of the Ajax youth academy is Jan Olde Riekerink, an intense man with piercing blue eyes who spends much of his day walking from field to field, observing. He usually stands in the background, out of sight, before coming forward to urge better effort or correct some fine point of technique. “He is always watching, like a spy,” Urvin Rooi told me.

One Sunday in March, I was on the sideline of a game — Ajax’s 15-year-olds matched up against the youth academy of another Dutch professional club — when I noticed Riekerink behind me. He was by himself, bundled into his parka and writing in a small notebook. With the Ajax boys up two goals and dominating the action, I told him I was impressed by their skill. (I was always impressed by the quality of play at De Toekomst.) “Really?” he responded. “To me this is a disaster. They are playing with the wrong tempo, too slow.”

During training sessions at Ajax, I rarely heard the boys’ loud voices or laughter or much of anything besides the thump of the ball and the instruction of coaches. It could seem grim, more like the grinding atmosphere of training for an individual sport — tennis, golf, gymnastics — than what you would expect in a typically boisterous team setting. But one element of the academy’s success is that the boys are not overplayed, so the hours at De Toekomst are all business. Through age 12, they train only three times a week and play one game on the weekend. “For the young ones, we think that’s enough,” Riekerink said when we talked in his office one day. “They have a private life, a family life. We don’t want to take that from them. When they are not with us, they play on the streets. They play with their friends. Sometimes that’s more important. They have the ball at their feet without anyone telling them what to do.”

By age 15, the boys are practicing five times a week. In all age groups, training largely consists of small-sided games and drills in which players line up in various configurations, move quickly and kick the ball very hard to each other at close range. In many practice settings in the U.S., this kind of activity would be a warm-up, just to get loose, with the coach paying scant attention and maybe talking on a cellphone or chatting with parents. At the Ajax academy, these exercises — designed to maximize touches, or contact with the ball — are the main event. “You see this a lot of places,” a coach from a pro club in Norway, who was observing at Ajax, said to me. “Every program wants to maximize touches. But here it is no-nonsense, and everything is done very hard and fast. It’s the Dutch style. To the point and aggressive.”

Gregory van der Wiel’s description of the detail-oriented routine at De Toekomst struck me as dead on: “You do things again and again and again, then you repeat it some more times.”

I HEARD A LOT OF misconceptions about American soccer in the course of reporting this story. Many people seemed to believe that the sport is still a novelty in the United States, a game that we took up only in the last couple of decades and that is not yet popular or perhaps is even disdained by our best male athletes — an understandable view given the much greater international success of the U.S. women’s teams. I had lunch one day with Auke Kok, a historian and Dutch soccer journalist, who offered up his own hypothesis. He talked of the “brute force” of American football as opposed to the elegance and flair of great international soccer. “I’ve always wondered if our football is too stylish, too feminine,” he said. “Am I right that it’s too girlish for Americans?”

I told him that I was pretty sure that that is not the case. But it is no surprise that the rest of the world might be flummoxed — and come up with some offbeat theories — trying to explain why a nation as populous, prosperous and sports-loving as the United States still does not play at the level of the true superpowers of soccer.

More than three million boys under age 18 play organized soccer in the U.S., but we have never produced a critical mass of elite performers to compete on equal terms with the world’s best. The American men are certainly improving. After finishing a surprising second to Brazil in last summer’s Confederations Cup, the U.S. qualified with relative ease to be among the 32 teams competing in the World Cup finals in South Africa, starting June 12 against England. Few would be surprised if the U.S. emerged from group play into the second round. But it would be a shocking, seismic upset if the Americans somehow leapt past traditional powers like Germany, Italy or Argentina — to say nothing of the favorites Brazil and Spain — to capture the championship.

The other nation that shows up on any list of World Cup favorites is the Netherlands, a perennial contender widely considered to be the best team never to win the championship. Drawn from a nation of fewer than 17 million, with a core of stars who trained at Ajax, the Dutch national team plays in the Total Football tradition that relies on players who know what they want to do with the ball before it reaches them and can move it on without stopping it. The British author David Winner, in his book “Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer,” calls this approach “physical chess,” and the Dutch can be quite haughty about it. They abhor the cloying defensive tactics associated with the Italians and the boot-and-chase way the English played for years, and it has been observed that they sometimes appear more intensely interested in the artfulness of a match than in the result.

The Dutch style (indistinguishable from the Ajax style) even has its own philosopher-king — Johan Cruyff, an Ajax star in the 1970s, considered just one step down from Pelé in the pantheon of playing greats, who can sound like a more erudite Yogi Berra. “Don’t run so much,” he once said, meaning that players often cover lots of ground but to no effect. “You have to be in the right place at the right moment, not too early, not too late.”

In March, I had a seat at the Amsterdam Arena, just across the highway from De Toekomst, to watch the U.S. national team play the Dutch in a “friendly,” a pre-World Cup tuneup and test. Thanks to a late goal by the U.S., the final score was only 2-1, in favor of the Dutch, but the match was a version of that old playground game: it’s our ball, and you can’t play with it. The Dutch zipped it from player to player and from one side of the field to the other while the Americans ran and ran, chasing the ball but rarely gaining control. When the Americans did get the ball, their passes too often flew beyond reach or directly out of bounds.

Other nations and professional clubs around the world play in a manner similar to the Dutch — including, not coincidentally, Barcelona, one of the most consistently successful clubs in Europe, and where Cruyff played after leaving Ajax and then coached for eight seasons. What this type of play demands is the highest order of individual skill: players with a wizardlike ability to control the ball with either foot, any part of the foot, and work it toward the goal through cramped spaces and barely perceptible lanes.

After the U.S.-Netherlands friendly, the Dutch coach praised the Americans for having a “well-organized” defense — which was true but seemed to be a case, unintentional perhaps, of damning with faint praise. But what else could he say? The Americans did a good job of backing up and closing ranks, a survival tactic that, along with several heroic saves by the goalkeeper Tim Howard, kept the Dutch from running up six goals or so.

That was only one game, of course, but it seemed to bring into focus what I had been observing at the Ajax youth academy, as well as learning about American soccer. How the U.S. develops its most promising young players is not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.

Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the U.S. struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.

The American approach is the more democratic view of sport. The aspirations of each member of the team are equally valid. Elsewhere, there is more comfort with singling out players for attention and individualized instruction, even at the expense of the group. David Endt, a former Ajax player and a longtime executive of the club, told me, “Here, we would rather polish one or two jewels than win games at the youth levels.”

Americans place a higher value on competition than on practice, so the balance between games and practice in the U.S. is skewed when compared with the rest of the world. It’s not unusual for a teenager in the U.S. to play 100 or more games in a season, for two or three different teams, leaving little time for training and little energy for it in the infrequent moments it occurs. A result is that the development of our best players is stunted. They tend to be fast and passionate but underskilled and lacking in savvy compared with players elsewhere. “As soon as a kid here starts playing, he’s got referees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs,” John Hackworth, the former coach of the U.S. under-17 national team and now the youth-development coordinator for the Philadelphia franchise in Major League Soccer, told me. “As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing. It’s counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do.”

The U.S. diverges all the way to the last stages of a player’s development. In other places around the world, the late teenage years are a kind of finishing school, a period when elite players grow into their bodies, sharpen their technical ability and gain a more sophisticated understanding of game tactics. At the same time, they are engaged in a fierce competition to rise through the ranks of their clubs and reach the first team (the equivalent of being promoted from a minor-league baseball team to the big-league club).

An elite American player of that age is still likely to be playing in college, which the rest of the soccer-playing world finds bizarre. He plays a short competitive season of three or four months. If he possesses anything approaching international-level talent, he probably has no peer on his team and rarely one on an opposing squad. He may not realize it at the time, but the game, in essence, is too easy for him.

Of the 23 players chosen for the U.S. team going to the World Cup, 15 of them played at least some college soccer. Among the 8 who went straight into the professional ranks are several of the team’s most accomplished performers, including Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley and Tim Howard, and promising players like Jozy Altidore and Michael Bradley (son of the head coach, Bob Bradley). Did they rise to the top of the American talent pool because they bypassed college? Or did they skip it because they were the rare Americans good enough as teenagers to attract legitimate professional opportunities? The answer is probably a little bit of both. But you will find no one in the soccer world who says they would have enhanced their careers by staying in school.

No other nation has as comprehensive a college-sports system as exists here, and none assume that an elite athlete will seek (or benefit from) higher education. “You have a major problem in the ages of 17 to 21,” Huw Jennings, now the director of the youth academy at Fulham, in the English Premier League, told me when I visited him in London. “The N.C.A.A. system is the fault line. I understand that it is good for a person’s development to go to university, but it’s not the way the world develops players.”

ONE DAY AT AJAX, I stood beside an otherwise empty playing field and watched for 30 minutes as a coach tutored Florian Josefzoon, a lithe, dreadlocked 18-year-old who is being groomed for stardom. Bryan Roy, a former member of the Dutch national team, demonstrated a series of stutter-steps and pirouettes, then kicked the ball to Josefzoon, on the right wing, who trapped it and tried to match Roy’s moves as he turned and headed up the right side. It was as if Roy were teaching him a dance. When Josefzoon mastered one set of steps, Roy showed him something new. “He is one of the talents,” Roy told me. “He’s a winger; I was a winger. He has been put into a special program in order to bridge the gap between the under-18s and the first team, so it is natural for me to be the one to help him.”

On an adjacent field, Ruben Jongkind, a consultant who mainly works with Dutch track athletes, was altering the posture and gait of a 15-year-old recently acquired from another Dutch club. Jongkind told me that while the boy was actually quite fast, he did not have enough range of motion in his vertical plane. “He was running like a duck, shuffling,” Jongkind said. “That takes more energy, which is why we have to change his motor patterns, so he can be as fast at the end of a game as the beginning.”

Jongkind had been working with this player for several weeks and said he had progressed to “consciously able but not subconsciously able” to run with the desired form, meaning that in the heat of competition, he reverted to his old form. I pointed out that a fast but flawed runner in the United States would likely be left alone. “Everything can be trained,” Jongkind said. “You should always try to make an improvement if it’s possible.”

Ajax keeps a detailed dossier on each player from the moment he enters the youth academy. I was in the office of Olav Versloot, the club’s chief exercise physiologist, when a 14-year-old knocked on his door, eager for the results of his latest body-fat measurement, which was too high the last time. Boys in their midteens are permitted to have up to 13 percent body fat; by 17, the measure is supposed to be down to 12 percent. (The younger players, who are almost always lean enough, are monitored more loosely.) “The first time limits are exceeded we are quite liberal,” Versloot told me. “Diet suggestions are made. But after that, we start a program with a dietitian. Parents are called in, and special exercise programs are started.”

Versloot, with his spiky hair, longish sideburns and black-framed glasses, has a sort of hipster-geek look. In November, I observed him putting boys through some of their regular fitness tests. In one, a training group of 16-year-olds ran 30-meter sprints as sensors registered their times in five-meter increments. Versloot was most interested in their performances in the first 5 and 10 meters. “That’s football distance,” he said. “It’s an acceleration that occurs multiple times a game.”

When I came back in March, I watched several groups participate in a grueling shuttle run, similar to what basketball players refer to as “suicides” — a series of back-and-forth sprints, with short rest, in which participants dropped out in exhaustion until only one was left. They wore monitors to measure their heart rates. Versloot explained why: “If they say, ‘I’m tired, I’m done,’ we can look later and say to them: ‘That’s not what the heart monitor showed. It said you were only at 75 percent of maximum. So you have to do it again in a week.’ They understand that it’s not a punishment; it’s an opportunity to do better.”

De Toekomst is not where you come to hear a romantic view of sport. No one pretends that its business is other than what it is. “We sold Wesley Sneijder for a ridiculous amount of money,” Versloot said. “We can go on for years based on what he was sold for.”

David Endt, who as manager of the first team is in charge of travel and logistics, occupies a sort of unofficial role as the club’s conscience and historian. His cubbyhole of an office atop the Amsterdam Arena is a mini-museum, its walls plastered with all manner of memorabilia. He proudly showed me a pair of scissors displayed above his desk, explaining that they were brandished by an Ajax player as he tried to attack a teammate in a famous locker-room incident a couple of decades ago. “Now I have them,” he said with an impish grin. The youth academy, Endt said, is where the heart of the club beats. “You can feel the atmosphere of what is Ajax. People from clubs around the world come to visit, and they always want to know, ‘What is the secret?’ But it is a matter of earth and air. We are in Amsterdam, so we are a little bit adventurous, a little bit artistic, maybe a little bit arrogant. You can observe what we do, but it is something you cannot copy.”

Ajax won the European club championship as recently as 1995, the same year that a decision in the European Court of Justice (the Bosman transfer ruling, named after the Belgian player who brought the case) gave players the power of free agency when their contracts end. It priced Ajax out of the top tier of competition and left the continental championships to be fought over by the big clubs in the English Premier League, Spain’s Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A, which get vastly greater fees for television rights. Endt told me that the need to sell players — just to keep the club going and to bring money in to help pay the salaries of players on the first team — is well understood but regretted. “We’re realistic about it,” he said, “but the real Ajax man is crying inside.”

Ajax is listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, but 73 percent of the shares remain in private hands and are not publicly traded. Just as no one sugarcoats the mission at Ajax, the demands placed on children are not minimized. “One of the things we say is we are never satisfied,” Endt said. “That is both good and bad. It can be difficult to be in a situation where whatever you do, you are told you should do better.”

Versloot said that, on average, one and a half products of De Toekomst per season will rise to the first team and go on to a significant, well-compensated pro career. Some of the others will gravitate to second- or third-tier pro circuits or the high amateur ranks in the Netherlands, where the best players make “black money,” under-the-table payments. The pressure to emerge from the academy as one of its top products — and to produce them — is immense. “It is always a very tense atmosphere here, for everyone,” Versloot said. “You have to just get used to it.”

EARLY IN EACH NEW calendar year, youngsters in the Ajax academy are given preliminary notice of their status. Some are told they are secure, others that they are in danger of being sent away in the spring. A current 16-year-old at Ajax said he still recalled this conversation from when he was 8. (Ajax discourages players who have not yet signed pro contracts from talking to reporters, so he agreed to talk only if his name was not used.) “It was my second year, and they said: ‘You are in doubt. We don’t yet know if you’ll be one of the boys who get to stay,’ ” he recounted. “They said I was a good technical player, but I was too passive and had to become more aggressive.”

This player is now considered among the best in his age group, but like all boys who stay at Ajax for many years, he has seen many classmates leave. “My best friend left two years ago,” he said. “I don’t speak to him anymore. He thought I was not in touch enough, that I was not supporting him. He was furious. I realized he was just a football friend and that you can’t have real friends at Ajax.”

Ricardo van Rhijn, who just signed a pro contract and is captain of the Dutch under-19 national team, described the annual leave-taking in somewhat more benign terms. “At a certain moment, we have to say goodbye,” he told me. “It’s hard, but every boy knows the reality of the situation. They know they have to leave and close the chapter of Ajax.”

Urvin Rooi’s son, Dylan, said that in his current training group of 15-year-olds, several new boys had been brought in for tryouts, and one had already been told he was accepted. It sounded like being in a workplace in which your possible replacement had already been installed at the next desk and given your identical tasks, to see if he could do them better.

Dylan’s father is involved in a business that builds homes on the Dutch island Curaçao. His mother is a psychotherapist. It is not unusual for players at De Toekomst to come from middle- or even upper-middle-class backgrounds, and virtually none come from poverty in a nation where the standard of living is high and literacy is 99 percent. The demographics are not much different from the soccer-playing population in the United States, where most players still come from suburban comfort. In the Netherlands, though, youth players may end up with less education than their parents in order to pursue professional soccer careers, starting with a less-demanding high-school curriculum than they otherwise might take.

Dylan at first spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name but then insisted that it be included, reasoning that he had related his “personal thoughts, and people should know the name behind the thoughts.” We spoke at a delicatessen in his neighborhood in central Amsterdam, where a picture of him in his uniform hung on the wall. (The contrast between his introspection and the unrevealing interviews given by most American athletes was striking.) He said he guessed that probably only two or three of the boys he began with when he was 7 would have pro careers in their sport. “I would feel very bad if I’m not one of them,” he said. “I have tried everything I can do to make it. I haven’t done as much in school as I could. I would feel like I’ve been wasting my time all these years. I would get very depressed.”

I asked if some of what he learned at Ajax — focus, perseverance, the ability to perform under pressure — might benefit him no matter what he ends up doing. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re training for football, not for anything else.”

The Ajax development system has its critics. Some assume that because the first team is no longer a competitive force in Europe and does not even consistently finish first in the Eredivisie, the top Dutch professional league, it is no longer turning out top talent. But if all those who trained at De Toekomst now playing elsewhere were to come home — Wesley Sneijder from Italy; Rafael van der Vaart from Spain; Ryan Babel, Johnny Heitinga and Nigel de Jong from their teams in England — Ajax could compete with any club in the world. The more substantial criticism is that Ajax has become too mercantile and coldblooded. “I feel like they’ve lost some of the spirit of the place,” John Hackworth, the former U.S. youth coach, told me. “What made them great, these heroes they create, now go on to stardom so quickly somewhere else.”

I talked with Huw Jennings at the youth academy of Fulham, in London, as we watched a group of 10-year-olds train. They were louder and more physically animated than the boys I saw in Amsterdam. “What they do at Ajax is a little rote for my taste,” Jennings said. “We are more apt to let the game be the teacher.” He added that he believed Ajax “had become a caricature of itself.” The last time he visited, he sensed that the dealmaking had breached the complex itself. “That dining area was crawling with agents,” he said, “right among the players and their parents.” (I did not see this during my visits.)

Jennings acknowledged that, based on the methods pioneered by Ajax, top clubs all over Europe were scouting very young kids and enrolling them in their academies. A book published in 2009 by the British journalist Chris Green, “Every Boy’s Dream,” estimated that 10,000 were being trained by clubs in England. They are cheap investments for clubs wanting to scoop up every boy with even a remote chance of one day becoming a top footballer.

Jennings said that his scouts, in response to the “unsuitability of the indigenous population of Britain” — children who are too sedentary and spend their time with video games — were increasingly focused “on the inner city of London, among Africans, Eastern Europeans and Caribbeans.”

Fulham, like Ajax, is often a seller of talent. It recently sold a 20-year-old to Manchester United for seven million pounds, or more than $10 million. “It’s a little ugly talking about the financial terms,” Jennings said. “I don’t like to do it. It feels not too far off from the slave trade.”

Everyone draws the line somewhere. Jennings told me that he recently received a call from a rival club asking if it could schedule a game against his “elite 5s” — 5-year-olds. He replied, “We don’t have elite 5s, but we’ll play your expectant mothers.”

There are two ways to become a world-class soccer player. One is to spend hours and hours in pickup games — in parks, streets, alleyways — on imperfect surfaces that, if mastered, can give a competitor an advantage when he finally graduates to groomed fields. This is the Brazilian way and also the model in much of the rest of South America, Central America and the soccer hotbeds of Africa. It is like baseball in the Dominican Republic. Children play all the time and on their own.

The other way is the Ajax method. Scientific training. Attention to detail. Time spent touching the ball rather than playing a mindless number of organized games.

The more thoughtful people involved in developing U.S. soccer talent know that we conform to neither model. We are a much larger nation, obviously, than the Netherlands. Our youth sports leagues, for the most part, are community-based and run by volunteers rather than professionals. They have grown organically, sending out tendrils that run deep and are difficult to uproot. Change at the elite levels is more possible than at the stubborn grass roots.

Efforts to change American soccer culture are largely occurring in the older age groups. Some of the most talented players are being extracted from a deeply flawed system, but only after they’ve been immersed in it for many years.

I was at the youth academy of D.C. United — one worn artificial-turf field, no locker rooms, a world away from De Toekomst — on what turned out to be a moment of triumph for one of the bedrock franchises of Major League Soccer, the top U.S. professional league. Just the day before, the team announced that it signed its best youth player to a pro contract. Andy Najar, who was 17 and immigrated with his parents from Honduras as a teenager, was inserted straight into D.C. United’s starting lineup right after dropping out of high school during his junior year. The signing drew only modest press coverage, probably a good thing for the team and an instance of pro soccer’s still-under-the-radar status in the U.S. being of benefit to the league. (The parade of players graduating from high school and jumping straight to the N.B.A. proved controversial enough that it’s no longer allowed.)

Najar, considered an exceptional talent, will very likely be the rare player to go from high school right onto an M.L.S. roster. But the decoupling of soccer education from higher education is an avowed goal of executives at the top levels of the American game. M.L.S. has been signing about a dozen young players a year — some from its teams’ academies, others who have already played a year or two in college — and putting them either on pro rosters or into development programs. (Under this setup, called Generation Adidas, money is put aside for players’ future college tuitions.) The academies of M.L.S. teams have begun to abandon the pay-for-play model and are bearing nearly all costs, including travel, for their players.

Also, dozens of top amateur soccer clubs around the country have been designated by the U.S. Soccer Federation as academies, with the intent that they will offer training on a European-based model — more practices, fewer games, greater emphasis on technical skill. They have, however, already drawn criticism that their coaches can’t break an old habit: trying, first and foremost, to win rather than focusing on the stated goal of developing elite individual talent.

The way we approach youth soccer in the U.S. is no more thoughtless than how we groom talent in baseball or basketball. All the same syndromes apply. Overplay. Too little practice. The courting of injuries — for example, the spate of elbow operations for pitchers in their midteens brought on by coaches who leave them on the mound for too many innings. The difference is that because these are, largely, our sports, we have a head start on the rest of the world and therefore a bigger margin for error.

Ajax is a fulcrum of the worldwide soccer market, exporting top players to the world’s best clubs, because they take very young players and shape them. The U.S., by comparison, is still a peripheral participant. In the past decade, increasing numbers of Americans have gone overseas to play for European clubs, many of them signing contracts as teenagers. But with just a couple of exceptions, they are complementary players, not the star-quality performers who make up the rosters of the World Cup favorites.

How much does it matter for the U.S. to ascend to the top rung of worldwide soccer and become a serious threat to win a World Cup? The effort itself would bring some welcome changes. Players whose training was paid for by professional clubs, rather than by their parents, would likely be treated as investments and therefore developed with more intelligence and care for their physical well-being.

But club-financed training is the entry level to a rough-and-tumble, often merciless worldwide soccer economy. Elements of it clash with American sensibilities. What Ajax pioneered, and still executes at a high level, can look uncomfortably like the trafficking of child athletes.

Ronald de Jong invited me to go scouting with him one Saturday. He had his eye on a specific target — “a 2004,” he said, referring to a birth year. A 5-year-old whom he had seen and was checking in with every month or so. This boy might not even be in school yet, I pointed out. “I don’t think he is,” de Jong said with a slight smile, as if he recognized the absurdity. “I believe he’s in day care.”

Ajax’s success would not be possible if it did not draw from a well-organized, well-financed soccer culture. Any town of any size in the Netherlands has an amateur club, with highly trained coaches and an academy for its own top-level players. (It is said that Johan Cruyff was the only Dutchman ever granted his coaching license without having to go through a rigorous, yearlong course.)

I met de Jong at the train station in Leiden, and we drove to a particularly well-heeled club called Quick Boys, in Katwijk. A spacious locker-room complex with a private club on top had been built with funds from benefactors connected with the tulip industry and local fishing interests. The bar in the private club was an elaborate wooden sculpture shaped like a herring boat.

De Jong, whose only material benefit from his association with Ajax is free admission to the first team’s games, showed a card that identified him as a scout and checked a schedule of games on a computer screen. As we approached the field where our 5-year-old was to play, he spotted him right away and said, “There’s the guy!”

I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed to me that the guy, Délano van der Heyden, born in September 2004, might actually be small even for a 5-year-old. The ball at his feet came up almost to his knees. He was “playing up,” competing against boys as old as 9. When the game started, he was exactly as advertised: remarkable. Délano kept up with the other boys, a few of whom fell on contact and had to be attended by coaches, which he never did. He showed the ability to kick with either foot. He could receive the ball with his back to his offensive end and turn, with the ball still in his control, and head toward the goal.

De Jong kept up a running commentary as we watched, becoming increasingly excited. As Délano cleverly dribbled around a bigger boy who came charging at him: “You see, they will try to physically dominate him, but he will always seek a football solution. He always has a plan.” As the concentration of other boys drifted: “He is not looking at planes in the sky; he is looking at the ball.” At halftime, as Délano conferred with his father, who was coaching his team: “You see how nicely they are talking? You can tell he comes from a good nest.” Later, after Délano weaved through three boys and blistered a shot just wide of the goal: “This is unbelievable! At this age, I’ve never seen a player like this!”

Délano’s team was visiting at Quick Boys; his own club was smaller, a concern for de Jong, who feared it might not fill his needs. He had already asked Délano’s father to put him in a bigger club for the following season. But what if the family did not want to? “Then I’ll ask Jan Olde Riekerink to call his father,” he said, referring to the stern director of De Toekomst. “Usually people will listen to Jan Olde.”

Even if Délano turned out to be a world-class prodigy, it would be at least a dozen years before he could play for Ajax’s first team. He could not even enter De Toekomst for another two years. But I understood de Jong’s interest. Délano was well worth this investment of time and attention, because one day he might be sold to Chelsea or Real Madrid or Juventus for millions.


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June 11, 2010
The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome
By CHARLES SIEBERT

On a late May afternoon last year in southwest Baltimore, a 2-year-old female pit bull terrier was doused in gasoline and set alight. A young city policewoman on her regular patrol of the neighborhood of boarded-up row houses and redbrick housing developments turned her squad car onto the 1600 block of Presbury Street and saw a cloud of black smoke rising from the burning dog. She hopped out, ran past idle onlookers and managed to put out the flames with her sweater. The dog, subsequently named Phoenix, survived for four days with burns over 95 percent of her body, but soon began to succumb to kidney failure and had to be euthanized.

It was only a matter of hours before the story, made vivid by harrowing video footage of the wounded dog, was disseminated nationwide in newspapers, TV and radio newscasts and countless Web sites. An initial $1,000 reward for the capture of the culprits would soon climb to $26,000 as people around the country followed Phoenix’s struggle for life. A gathering of people in Venice Beach, Calif., held a candlelight vigil for her. A month later, the mayor of Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, announced the creation of the Anti-Animal-Abuse Task Force to work in concert with city officials, local law enforcement and animal rights and animal-control groups to find ways to better prevent, investigate and prosecute such crimes.

The scale, speed and intensity of the response were striking. The subject of animal abuse, especially the abuse of pit bulls in dog-fighting activities, has achieved a higher profile after the 2007 arrest of the N.F.L. star Michael Vick for operating an illegal interstate dog-fighting operation in Surry County, Va. But the beleaguered pit bull is merely the most publicized victim of a phenomenon that a growing number of professionals — including police officers, prosecutors, psychologists, social workers, animal-control officers, veterinarians and dogcatchers — are now addressing with a newfound vigor: wanton cruelty toward animals. Before 1990, only six states had felony provisions in their animal-­cruelty laws; now 46 do. Two years ago, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals formed the nation’s first Mobile Animal Crime Scene Investigation Unit, a rolling veterinary hospital and forensic lab that travels around the country helping traditional law-enforcement agencies follow the evidentiary trails of wounded or dead animals back to their abusers.

In addition to a growing sensitivity to the rights of animals, another significant reason for the increased attention to animal cruelty is a mounting body of evidence about the link between such acts and serious crimes of more narrowly human concern, including illegal firearms possession, drug trafficking, gambling, spousal and child abuse, rape and homicide. In the world of law enforcement — and in the larger world that our laws were designed to shape — animal-cruelty issues were long considered a peripheral concern and the province of local A.S.P.C.A. and Humane Society organizations; offenses as removed and distinct from the work of enforcing the human penal code as we humans have deemed ourselves to be from animals. But that illusory distinction is rapidly fading.

“With traditional law enforcement,” Sgt. David Hunt, a dog-fighting expert with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office in Columbus, Ohio, told me, “the attitude has been that we have enough stuff on our plate, let the others worry about Fluffy and Muffy. But I’m starting to see a shift in that mentality now.” Hunt has traveled to 24 states around the country in order to teach law-enforcement personnel about the dog-fighting underworld, often stressing the link between activities like dog fighting and domestic violence. “You have to sell it to them in such a way that it’s not a Fluffy-Muffy issue,” he said of teaching police officers about animal-abuse issues. “It’s part of a larger nexus of crimes and the psyche behind them.”

The connection between animal abuse and other criminal behaviors was recognized, of course, long before the evolution of the social sciences and institutions with which we now address such behaviors. In his famous series of 1751 engravings, “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” William Hogarth traced the life path of the fictional Tom Nero: Stage 1 depicts Tom as a boy, torturing a dog; Stage 4 shows Tom’s body, fresh from the gallows where he was hanged for murder, being dissected in an anatomical theater. And animal cruelty has long been recognized as a signature pathology of the most serious violent offenders. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer impaled the heads of cats and dogs on sticks; Theodore Bundy, implicated in the murders of some three dozen people, told of watching his grandfather torture animals; David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” poisoned his mother’s parakeet.

But the intuitions that informed the narrative arc of Tom Nero are now being borne out by empirical research. A paper published in a psychiatry journal in 2004, “A Study of Firesetting and Animal Cruelty in Children: Family Influences and Adolescent Outcomes,” found that over a 10-year period, 6-to-12-year-old children who were described as being cruel to animals were more than twice as likely as other children in the study to be reported to juvenile authorities for a violent offense. In an October 2005 paper published in Journal of Community Health, a team of researchers conducting a study over seven years in 11 metropolitan areas determined that pet abuse was one of five factors that predicted who would begin other abusive behaviors. In a 1995 study, nearly a third of pet-owning victims of domestic abuse, meanwhile, reported that one or more of their children had killed or harmed a pet.

The link between animal abuse and interpersonal violence is becoming so well established that many U.S. communities now cross-train social-service and animal-control agencies in how to recognize signs of animal abuse as possible indicators of other abusive behaviors. In Illinois and several other states, new laws mandate that veterinarians notify the police if their suspicions are aroused by the condition of the animals they treat. The state of California recently added Humane Society and animal-control officers to the list of professionals bound by law to report suspected child abuse and is now considering a bill in the State Legislature that would list animal abusers on the same type of online registry as sex offenders and arsonists.

When I spoke recently with Stacy Wolf, vice president and chief legal counsel of the A.S.P.C.A.’s Humane Law Enforcement department, which focuses on the criminal investigation of animal-cruelty cases in New York City, she drew a comparison between the emerging mindfulness about animal cruelty and the changing attitudes toward domestic abuse in the 1980s. “It really has only been in recent years that there’s been more free and accurate reporting with respect to animal cruelty, just like 30 years ago domestic violence was not something that was commonly reported,” she said. “Clearly every act of violence committed against an animal is not a sign that somebody is going to hurt a person. But when there’s a pattern of abusive behavior in a family scenario, then everyone from animal-control to family advocates to the court system needs to consider all vulnerable victims, including animals, and understand that violence is violence.”

It isn’t clear whether Phoenix was used for dog fighting. Subsequent examinations of her body did find — along with evidence that gasoline had been poured down her throat — a number of bite wounds. Veterinarians, however, said that those could have been self-inflicted in the course of Phoenix’s frenzied attempts to fight off the flames. But prosecutors also later claimed that Phoenix’s accused assailants, 17-year-old twin brothers named Tremayne and Travers Johnson, of a nearby block of Pulaski Street, were using a vacant neighborhood home for the keeping of pit bulls and other ganglike activities.

The Johnson twins have pleaded not guilty. According to court documents, both suspects, said to be members of the 1600 Boys gang, were identified by a witness as running out of the alley where the dog was set alight. “There was some gang-style graffiti found in that abandoned building,” Randall Lockwood, the A.S.P.C.A.’s senior vice president for forensic sciences and anticruelty projects, and a member of the new Anti-Animal-Abuse Task Force in Baltimore, told me at the A.S.P.C.A.’s Midtown Manhattan offices in December. “There was also dog feces on the premises. Unfortunately, nobody bothered collecting the feces to see if it was from Phoenix.”

Along with the need to track the physical evidence of animal cruelty there is the deeper and more complex challenge of trying to parse its underlying causes and ultimate ramifications. As a graduate student in psychology, Lockwood had an interest in human-animal interactions and the role of animals and education in the development of empathy in children. This inevitably led him to consider the flip side of the equation: the origins of cruelty to animals and what such behavior might indicate about an individual’s capacity for empathy and his or her possible future behavior.

Back in the early 1980s, Lockwood was asked to work on behalf of New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services with a team of investigators looking into the treatment of animals in middle-class American households that had been identified as having issues of child abuse. They interviewed all the members of each family as well as the social workers who were assigned to them. The researchers’ expectation going in was that such families would have relatively few pets given their unstable and volatile environments. They found, however, not only that these families owned far more pets than other households in the same community but also that few of the animals were older than 2.

“There was a very high turnover of pets in these families,” Lockwood told me. “Pets dying or being discarded or running away. We discovered that in homes where there was domestic violence or physical abuse of children, the incidence of animal cruelty was close to 90 percent. The most common pattern was that the abusive parent had used animal cruelty as a way of controlling the behaviors of others in the home. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what links things like animal cruelty and child abuse and domestic violence. And one of the things is the need for power and control. Animal abuse is basically a power-and-control crime.”

The dynamic of animal abuse in the context of domestic violence is a particularly insidious one. As a pet becomes an increasingly vital member of the family, the threat of violence to that pet becomes a strikingly powerful intimidating force for the abuser: an effective way for a petty potentate to keep the subjects of his perceived realm in his thrall. In 2005, Lockwood wrote a paper, “Cruelty Toward Cats: Changing Perspectives,” which underscores this dynamic of animal cruelty as a means to overcome powerlessness and gain control over others. Cats, Lockwood found, are more commonly victims of abuse than dogs because dogs are, by their very nature, more obedient and eager to please, whereas cats are nearly impossible to control. “You can get a dog to obey you even if you’re not particularly nice to it,” Lockwood told me. “With a cat you can be very nice, and it’s probably going to ignore you, and if you’re mean to it, it may retaliate.”

Whatever the particular intimidation tactics used, their effectiveness is indisputable. In an often-cited 1997 survey of 48 of the largest shelters in the United States for victims of domestic violence and child abuse, more than 85 percent of the shelters said that women who came in reported incidents of animal abuse; 63 percent of the shelters said that children who came in reported the same. In a separate study, a quarter of battered women reported that they had delayed leaving abusive relationships for the shelter out of fear for the well-being of the family pet. In response, a number of shelters across the country have developed “safe haven” programs that offer refuges for abused pets as well as people, in order that both can be freed from the cycle of intimidation and violence.

What cannot be so easily monitored or ameliorated, however, is the corrosive effect that witnessing such acts has on children and their development. More than 70 percent of U.S. households with young children have pets. In a study from the 1980s, 7-to-10-year-old children named on average two pets when listing the 10 most important individuals in their lives. When asked to “whom do you turn to when you are feeling sad, angry, happy or wanting to share a secret,” nearly half of 5-year-old children in another study mentioned their pets. One way to think of what animal abuse does to a child might simply be to consider all the positive associations and life lessons that come from a child’s closeness to a pet — right down to eventually receiving their first and perhaps most gentle experiences of death as a natural part of life — and then flipping them so that all those lessons and associations turn negative.

In a 2000 article for AV Magazine, a publication of the American Anti-Vivisection Society, titled, “Wounded Hearts: Animal Abuse and Child Abuse,” Lockwood recounts an interview he conducted for the New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services in the early 1980s. He describes showing to “a perky 7-year-old boy” a simple drawing of a boy and a dog, playing ball inside a house and a broken lamp on the floor beside them. Lockwood asked the 7-year-old — a child who had witnessed his brother being beaten by their father, who was “reportedly responsible for the ‘disappearance’ of several family pets” — to describe what would happen next in the story of the boy in the picture. “He grew still and sullen,” Lockwood writes, “and shook his head slowly. ‘That’s it,’ he said in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘They’re all going to die.’ ”

Children who have witnessed such abuse or been victimized themselves frequently engage in what are known as “abuse reactive” behaviors, Lockwood said, re-enacting what has been done to them either with younger siblings or with pets. Such children are also often driven to suppress their own feelings of kindness and tenderness toward a pet because they can’t bear the pain caused by their own empathy for the abused animal. In an even further perversion of an individual’s healthy empathic development, children who witness the family pet being abused have been known to kill the pet themselves in order to at least have some control over what they see as the animal’s inevitable fate. Those caught in such a vicious abuse-reactive cycle will not only continue to expose the animals they love to suffering merely to prove that they themselves can no longer be hurt, but they are also given to testing the boundaries of their own desensitization through various acts of self-mutilation. In short, such children can only achieve a sense of safety and empowerment by inflicting pain and suffering on themselves and others.

In March I paid a visit to the newly established Veterinary Forensics Medicine Sciences program at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Directed by Melinda Merck, a veterinarian who serves as the A.S.P.C.A.’s senior director of veterinary forensics and as the “captain” of its new mobile C.S.I. unit, the program is the first of its kind at a major U.S. university. As animal abuse has become an increasingly recognized fixture in the context of other crimes and their prosecution, it is also starting to require the same kinds of sophisticated investigative techniques brought to bear on those other crimes.

Veterinary forensic students at the University of Florida are being trained in the same way that traditional crime-scene investigators are, taking courses in a wide range of topics: crime-scene processing; forensic entomology (determining the time of an animal’s injury or death by the types of insects around them); bloodstain-pattern and bite-mark analysis; buried-remains excavation; and forensic osteology (the study of bones and bone fragments).

“I love being around bones,” Merck proclaimed as she led me into the university’s C. A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory, a sprawling, brashly lighted array of human skeletal remains arranged in meticulous piecemeal patterns on rows of shiny metal tables. “I find bones fascinating. There is a lot of information in them.” Merck, who testifies at animal-cruelty trials across the country, conducted the forensic osteology on the dog remains recovered from the mass graves on Michael Vick’s Virginia property in 2007.

The lab is one of the busiest of its kind in the world, enlisted for countless crime-scene investigations and archaeological digs and to help identify the victims of disasters, including those of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina. The fact that one of the examining tables and adjacent bone-boiling and cleansing units have now been assigned to Merck for her own animal-forensic work and course instruction speaks volumes about the shifting perspective toward animal-cruelty crimes. “We have a really cool thing going on here,” Merck told me. “We have the collaborative effort of a lot of big-wig forensic specialists down here with years of experience.”

She led me over to her examining table. Set at one end was what she called “my box of evidence,” a picnic-cooler-size plastic container that held the excavated remains from a mass grave, part of an investigation she is conducting into a suspected dog-fighting operation in Georgia. “In most of our cases of animal cruelty, the bodies are not fresh,” she said. “They’re decomposed. They’re discarded. They’re hidden. And so the advanced post-mortem stage is where we really need to be experts.”

Merck’s 2006 book, “Forensic Investigation of Animal Cruelty: A Guide for Veterinary and Law Enforcement Professionals,” which she wrote with Randall Lockwood and Leslie Sinclair of Shelter Veterinary Services in Columbia, Md., contains a daunting list of the grisly things human beings do to animals: thermal injuries (immolation, baking, microwaving); blunt-force trauma; sharp-force and projectile injuries; asphyxiation; drowning; poisoning; ritual murders; and sexual assault. Merck spared no details in discussing such horrors over the course of a veterinary-forensics lecture I attended earlier that day, held in a conference room at a hotel near the university as part of a four-day seminar. Even Merck’s seasoned audience of out-of-town vets, A.S.P.C.A. disaster-response and investigative-team workers, community-outreach personnel and the chief legal counsel for New York City’s Humane Law Enforcement department could be heard gasping into their coffee mugs as Merck annotated, one after the next, screen-projected slides of stark brutality: blood-drenched dog-fighting pits; bludgeoned, internally hemorrhaging pets; bruised and mutilated canine sexual organs; a heavily duct-taped, paint-coated puppy and the fur-lined, nail-scraped oven walls from which the puppy struggled vainly to escape.

Those whose compassion compels them to confront and combat daily its utter absence are, of necessity, often forced to affect a passionless pose. Merck proceeded through her seminar with clinical speed and precision through a series of signature forensic cases. One of the first pivoted around the mystery of a missing Pomeranian whose owners were convinced had been stolen from their backyard. Merck called up the slide of a tiny skeleton she had rendered in her corner of the lab from remains found in a vacant lot not far from the Pomeranian owners’ home. It looked like a wingless bat, the delicate brace of ribs bearing tiny symmetrical snaps on each side.

“What could have caused these,” Merck asked, pointing her red laser at the breaks. “What could make a dog disappear so fast?”

“Man!” someone called out to bursts of laughter.

“What else,” Merck said, smiling.

“A bird of prey!”

“Yep,” Merck nodded. “Most likely a hawk. These two breaks are where the bird’s talons grabbed hold of the dog. This is why forensic osteology is so important, and yet there’s nothing in our standard veterinary training that teaches us how to look at bones properly.”

Merck soon proceeded to the case of the puppy found four years ago in the oven of a ransacked community center in Atlanta. An outraged local prosecutor called Merck about the case and then showed up at her vet clinic one day with the dog’s remains. “She brings me the puppy, and this . . . ,” Merck said, the slide behind her now sapping the room’s air, “is what she brings me.”

Step by step, from the outer paint to the unraveled layers of duct tape to the dog’s abraded nails and paws to the hem of an old T-shirt that was used as a leash, Merck’s detailed forensic analysis of the victim and of the crime scene would be used to assemble a timeline of events. Ultimately, her analysis would help seal the conviction of two teenage brothers on multiple charges, including burglary, animal cruelty and — because the brothers had shown a number of children at the community center what they had done and then threatened them with their lives if they told anyone — additional charges of child abuse and terroristic threats.

The most common dynamic behind the cases cited that morning was that of a man abusing a family pet to gain control over, or exact revenge against, other family members. Merck told of one puppy found buried in the backyard of a house. As Merck tells it, the dog belonged to the female friend of a woman who had recently left the man with whom she and her two children from a previous marriage were living. She and her children had moved in with the friend, someone who the man decided was keeping him and his estranged partner from reuniting. The girlfriend’s pet, therefore, became for him the optimum vehicle for expressing his rage against both women.

“He tortured the puppy when the two women weren’t home,” Merck told me after her lecture that day. “He also tried to make two of the kids participate just to make it more heinous. So along with the animal cruelty, of course, we had child abuse.”

Merck has made it her mission to urge other vets to report and investigate suspected cases of animal abuse, incorporating a few cautionary tales of her own into her lectures to point up the often dire consequences of failing to do so. One involved a man from Hillsborough County in Florida who was arrested for murdering his girlfriend, her daughter and son and their German shepherd. He had previously been arrested (but not convicted) for killing cats. In another story Merck tells, one related to her by a New York City prosecutor, a woman reported coming home to find her boyfriend sexually molesting her Labrador retriever, but the case never went to trial.

“My point on that one,” Merck told me, “is that no one took precautions to preserve the evidence on the dog. And once it comes down to a he-said-she-said type of situation, you’re lost. These types of cases are difficult enough even when we have all the evidence, in part because it’s very hard for investigators and prosecutors to even consider that someone would do things like this. It’s so disturbing and offensive, they don’t know what to do about it. A lot of the work I do involves not just talking to vets but reaching out to law enforcement to make them more knowledgeable on these matters, to make them understand, for example, that things like sexual assault of children and animals are linked. They are similar victims.”

On our way back to the hotel for an afternoon lecture on forensic entomology, Merck made a little detour to show me the A.S.P.C.A.’s new mobile C.S.I. unit, parked in a side lot of the vet school’s farm-animal compound. Twenty-six-feet long, with its own climate-control, generator, examination room and surgical suite, digital microscope, X-ray machine, sexual-assault kit and anesthesia-oxygen machine, it is essentially a giant emergency room on wheels, allowing Merck and her crew to examine and care for animals at suspected crime scenes and to efficiently analyze and process evidence to ensure its integrity.

The van was an important part of the largest dog-fighting raid in American history last year, in which more than 400 dogs were rescued and 26 people from six states arrested. “We had two forensic teams on board for that,” Merck said. “We had to hit 25 different crime scenes in one day. We hit the first one at 7 a.m., and we finished up at around 6 a.m. the following morning.”

When I asked Merck if she thought incidents of animal cruelty were on the rise or if it was that we are now being more vigilant about them, she said that it is probably more the latter. “We’re more aware now,” she said, “but there is also more of a support system for responding to these incidents. When I started out as a vet 20 years ago, I was one of the few who would call if I got a suspicious case, and that was when such things were still a misdemeanor and it wasn’t law enforcement involved. It was animal control taking care of nuisance animals. Now with veterinarians I tell them you cannot not report, because you don’t know if what you’re seeing on the animal isn’t the proverbial tip of the iceberg.”

Merck then recalled for me a personal experience she most likes to relate in classes and seminars, what she’s dubbed “the tale of the good Samaritan and the savvy vet.” An Atlanta contractor pulled up to a house one morning where he was to perform some work. As he got out of his truck, he heard a dog screaming from the house next door, went over to investigate and saw through an open garage door a dog dragging its back legs and a woman standing beside it. The woman instantly began pleading to the contractor that the dog needed to be euthanized, but she said she couldn’t afford the vet bills. The contractor offered to take the dog to his vet, who, upon examining the dog, agreed that it was too debilitated to be saved. He then told the contractor that there was something suspicious about the case and that he was going to report it to animal services for whom Merck worked at the time as a consultant outside of her daily vet practice.

“They asked me to perform a necropsy,” Merck told me. “It turns out the dog was paralyzed from having been beaten so often. I reported what I found. Police went to the woman’s house to make an arrest. They found a badly bruised boy. And just like that both parents are being hauled off for child abuse. So there was a classic case of the system working like it should.”

Last November, Lockwoodwas asked to testify at the pretrial hearing in which a judge ruled that Tremayne and Travers Johnson would be tried as adults for the burning of Phoenix in Baltimore last year. Lockwood looked at dozens of pictures of Phoenix in order to select which images to present to A.S.P.C.A. staff members. “I could only find one that wasn’t overwhelmingly disturbing,” he told me. “It’s where she’s so bundled up in gauze and bandages you can’t really see anything. It’s easy to empathize with burns because we’ve all been burned, and even if it’s only minor, you realize how painful that is.”

The matter of empathy, of course, goes to the heart of most of our inquiries into the nature of cruel acts and their possible causes. There seems to be little doubt anymore about the notion that a person’s capacity for empathy can be eroded; that someone can have, as Lockwood put it to me, “their empathy beaten or starved out of them.” To date, little is known about the Johnson twins’ background beyond the fact that they both reportedly have chronic truancy issues and previous probation violations and were recently involved with a gang. Along with possible early abuse or genetic and biological components, Lockwood also spoke of the frequent association between environment and acts of violence, how poverty often creates the sense of persecution and injustice that makes some people feel justified in striking back in order to gain the sense of power and control they otherwise lack.

“What I have the most trouble relating to,” Lockwood told me, “and the Phoenix kids might be indicative of this sort of thing, is the kind of cruelty that happens just out of boredom. I’ve had quite a few cases where I ask a kid, Why did you blow up that frog or set fire to that cat? and they don’t respond with answers like ‘I hate cats’ or ‘I didn’t see that as a living thing.’ Their answer is ‘We were bored.’ And then you have to ask yourself, Well, what about alternative pathways to alleviating this boredom? I have difficulty grasping what would be the payoff for setting fire to a dog.”

Neuroscientists are now beginning to get a fix on the physical underpinnings of empathy. A research team at the University of Chicago headed by Jean Decety, a neuroscientist who specializes in the mechanisms behind empathy and emotional self-regulation, has performed fMRI scans on 16-to-18-year-old boys with aggressive-conduct disorder and on another group of similarly aged boys who exhibited no unusual signs of aggression.

Each group was shown videos of people enduring both accidental pain, like stubbing a toe, and intentionally inflicted pain, like being punched in the arm. In the scans, both groups displayed a similar activation of their empathic neural circuitry, and in some cases, the boys with conduct disorder exhibited considerably more activity than those in the control group. But what really caught the attention of the researchers was the fact that when viewing the videos of intentionally inflicted pain, the aggressive-disorder teenagers displayed extremely heightened activity in the part of our brain known as the reward center, which is activated when we feel sensations of pleasure. They also displayed, unlike the control group, no activity at all in those neuronal regions involved in moral reasoning and self-regulation.

“We’re really just beginning to have an inkling of the neurophysiology of empathy,” Lockwood told me. “I think empathy is essentially innate, but I also think empathy can be learned, and I know it can be destroyed. That’s why having a better understanding of the neurophysiology will really help us. Just doing a social intervention on a person doesn’t do any good if you’re not aware of certain physiological deficits. As I heard someone put it at a recent lecture I attended, that would be like an orthopedist telling someone with a broken arm to lift weights. It won’t do anything until the arm is set, and it actually might make things worse. I try to understand who the kids are who seem beyond reach, who seem to have truly impaired systems of empathy. And then I ask, Can that be restored?”

It turns out that just as recent brain-imaging studies have begun to reveal the physical evidence of empathy’s erosion, they are now also beginning to show definitive signs of its cultivation as well. A group of researchers led by Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published a study in a March 2008 edition of the Public Library of Science One, showing that the mere act of thinking compassionate thoughts caused significant activity and physical changes in the brain’s empathic pathways. “People are not just stuck at their respective set points,” Davidson has said of the study’s results. “We can take advantage of our brain’s plasticity and train it to enhance these qualities. . . . I think this can be one of the tools we use to teach emotional regulation to kids who are at an age where they’re vulnerable to going seriously off track.”

To date, one of the most promising methods for healing those whose empathic pathways have been stunted by things like repeated exposure to animal cruelty is, poetically enough, having such victims work with animals. Kids who tend to be completely unresponsive to human counselors and who generally shun physical and emotional closeness with people often find themselves talking openly to, often crying in front of, a horse — a creature that can often be just as strong-willed and unpredictable as they are and yet in no way judgmental, except, of course, for a natural aversion to loud, aggressive human behaviors.

Equine-therapy programs, for example, are now helping an increasing number of teenagers who have severe emotional and behavioral issues, as well as children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome. At Aspen Ranch in Loa, Utah, troubled teenagers are being paired off with wild mustangs that have been adopted from the Bureau of Land Management, each species ultimately managing to temper the other, a dynamic that has also proved very effective in teaching patience and empathy to prisoners in correctional facilities. In the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, there is a youth equestrian program called the Compton Junior Posse. Teenagers clean stables, groom horses and then ride them in amateur equestrian events across Southern California. There are now bovine- and elephant-assisted therapy programs as well.

For Lockwood, animal-therapy programs draw on the same issues of power and control that can give rise to animal cruelty, but elegantly reverse them to more enlightened ends. “When you get an 80-pound kid controlling a 1,000-pound horse,” he said, “or a kid teaching a dog to obey you and to do tricks, that’s getting a sense of power and control in a positive way. We all have within us the agents of entropy, especially as kids. It’s easier to delight in knocking things down and blowing stuff up. Watch kids in a park and you see them throw rocks at birds to get a whole cloud of them to scatter. But to lure animals in and teach them to take food from your hand or to obey commands, that’s a slower process. Part of the whole enculturation and socialization process is learning that it’s also cool and empowering to build something. To do something constructive.”


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June 8, 2010
Democrat in Chief?
By MATT BAI

A year and a half after they sat, shivering and awestruck, on a January morning and listened to the sounds of a million cheers careering off the marble walls of the Capitol, the Democrats who work under the dome can feel those same walls closing in fast. Throughout the dismal spring, it seemed as if every visiting delegation that drove up in a coach bus — Main Street merchants, family farmers, Rotarians and Elks — arrived with tales of angst and unrest back home. Every well-paid pollster who came through the door brought with him a stack of surveys and focus-group memos, each more dispiriting than the last, numbers portending an emphatic rejection of the majority in this fall’s elections. Every new thickly bound jobs report landed with a sickening thud on the desks of committee chairmen — a reminder that, despite modest improvements, time was running out to change people’s minds about the direction of the economy.

And then there was the president — their president — who for 17 months had cajoled them into taking tough votes on stimulus spending, on the trading of carbon emissions, on health care. Barack Obama, the postpartisan president. He continued to go out and shake his head disbelievingly at “the culture of Washington,” which to the Democrats in the House sounded as if he were saying that his own party was the problem, as if somehow the Democratic majorities in Congress hadn’t managed to navigate the bulk of his ambitious agenda past a blockade of Republican vessels, their ship shredded by cannon fire. And all this while the president’s own approval ratings fell below 50 percent — an ominous sign, historically speaking, for a majority party.

This frustration among Democrats was bound to find an outlet, and that’s what happened at a meeting in Nancy Pelosi’s conference room at the end of April to discuss the party’s election-year message. Around three sides of the table were close to a dozen Democratic leaders in the House. On the remaining side sat David Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser and message-molder, along with two other White House operatives: Jim Messina, the deputy chief of staff, and Stephanie Cutter, a senior aide to the president.

Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland congressman in charge of House campaigns this fall, and James Clyburn, the Democratic whip and an Obama ally, complained to Axelrod about the president’s unrelenting assault on Washington rather than on Republicans specifically, according to three people who were in the room. “A ‘Washington is broken’ message doesn’t help incumbents running for Congress,” Van Hollen pleaded with the aides.

Axelrod said the House leaders needed to listen to what the president was actually saying out there — Obama was, in fact, drawing sharp contrasts between his party and the Republicans. But Axelrod also informed them that the president would continue to acknowledge the general discontent with Washington in his public comments, in the hope that he might help lessen what White House aides sometimes call the “toxicity” in the air. He would make the case for Democrats by reminding voters of all that he and his party had been able to accomplish legislatively, even without Republican help. Washington was broken, and if you told people what you were doing to fix it, then they would side with you. “You’re not going to will it away — the discontent,” Axelrod said. “The most important message is that we took on difficult problems, and they sat on the sidelines and rooted for failure.”

This didn’t satisfy the Congressional leaders, who thought the message had to be more about their “fighting for the middle class” versus the indifference of Republicans. They wanted Obama to go out there and tell the public that installing a Republican Congress would be like climbing into a time machine and teleporting right back to the Bush era. Privatizing Social Security, ending Medicare, repealing the health care law and reinstating tax cuts for the wealthy — that’s what the Republicans were proposing, and the lawmakers said they needed Obama to drive that point home with the electorate.

Voices rose and drowned out other voices as the meeting grew tense. “The fact is,” Pelosi said, addressing herself to Axelrod, “that the longer you say Washington is broken, and you’ve been saying that for 18 months, the more that becomes the story.”

When the other lawmakers departed for a vote, Pelosi remained with the White House aides and some staff members. The speaker strolled down to Axelrod’s end of the table and delivered the message bluntly. Obama, she insisted, needed to be cutting and clear about the choice between parties that he was asking voters to make. Did the president really think he could enhance his own standing with the public by criticizing his Democratic allies?

“Look, if the president could take 10 points off his numbers to give you 10 seats — ” Axelrod began, referring to Obama’s approval ratings.

“That’s not what we want,” Pelosi said, cutting him off. “That doesn’t do any of us any good.” In the end, Axelrod pointedly declined to say that the president would stop acknowledging the failures of both parties in Washington, but the message was received. In the weeks that followed, Obama intensified his rhetoric about Republicans, playing to his constituencies on the Hill as well as to the audiences he was addressing.

This was not only a conversation about the fall elections but also an airing of grievances that have been building slowly since the opening days of the administration, when Obama sided with Republicans by condemning some of the more easily caricatured provisions of the stimulus bill, like money for family planning and to restore the National Mall. Perhaps the most significant moment in Obama’s State of the Union address came when, after chastising Congress for its extreme partisanship, he cut off applause from the Democratic side of the aisle. “I’m speaking to both parties now,” Obama scolded.

For Democrats in Congress, what Obama does over the next several months — and how passionately he does it — will answer some unresolved questions about the kind of party leader he aspires to be. For most of George W. Bush’s presidency, he and his resident Machiavelli, Karl Rove, made little secret of their grand plan to sculpture a partisan majority that would endure for decades, enabling Republicans to reshape American society. After Democrats took a sledgehammer to those ambitions in 2006 and 2008, expanding their own sphere of dominance from coastal cities into the suburbs of the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states and even into the South, many of the party’s leaders in Congress talked openly of their own lasting, Rooseveltian realignment.

Unlike his predecessor and some of his own political allies, however, Obama has never betrayed much interest in building political empires. Obama ran on the notion of transcending partisan distinctions, rather than making them permanent, and the political identity that enabled him to draw millions of new voters into the process two years ago is both intensely personal and self-contained. It’s not clear that Obama can translate his appeal among disaffected voters into support for a party and its aging Washington establishment. Nor is it clear, as he looks ahead to 2012, how hard he’s going to try.

It is difficult to overstate the role that 1994 plays in the tormented psyche of the Democratic Party. For those who went through them, those midterms were less a bunch of elections than a single, sudden event that they never saw coming until it was on them, like something out of “War of the Worlds.” Most of the Democrats who woke up firmly in control of American government on Nov. 8, 1994, had no memory of a time when they didn’t make all the laws, and they couldn’t really conceive of it; by nightfall, 40 years of near-total Democratic dominance in both houses of Congress had been washed away. The costs, for years afterward, were too painful to fully contemplate. Without the voter uprising of 1994, there would have been no Speaker Gingrich, no impeachment and almost certainly no George W. Bush, who, by winning election as the governor of Texas, found himself swept into office that year along with a lot of other political neophytes who might otherwise have disappeared into political obscurity.

Republicans in 1994 gained a net total of 54 House seats and 8 Senate seats and emerged with a majority of governors for the first time in more than 20 years, and state legislatures for the first time in a half century. This year, they need to gain 40 House seats and 8 Senate seats to regain control. Taking back the House is eminently doable; taking the Senate is remote but hardly unthinkable. Contempt for Washington — personified by incumbent candidates in both parties — is everywhere, as evidenced by this year’s early primaries in May, in which two sitting senators (Robert Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania) were knocked off and a Republican senatorial candidate in Kentucky who had the blessing of the national party was sunk. The glimmer of hope here for Democrats is that the antiestablishment fervor in a wide number of Republican primaries is likely to yield more than a few nominees who are on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum (Rand Paul in Kentucky, say), making the Republican alternative a harder sell for a lot of moderate and unaffiliated voters.

Meanwhile, Democratic governors are bracing for their own losses. The effect of a drubbing at the state level, while likely to garner less attention than what happens in Washington, could be devastating for Democrats, just as it proved to be 16 years ago. Governors have generally proved to be the intellectual catalysts for both parties, and it’s not incidental that four of the five presidents immediately preceding Obama sprang from their ranks. Parties that fail to hold governors’ mansions also fail to develop compelling candidates for national office.

No matter how similar conditions throughout the country now may seem, 2010 really isn’t all that comparable to 1994, if only because the underlying forces that are endangering Democrats this year — that is, the structural trends in the electorate — are quite different. The 1994 elections marked the culmination of a decades-long transformation. For 30 years before then, since the triumph of the civil rights agenda, Democratic strongholds in the South and in the working-class Midwest had been teetering toward the Republicans. Bill Clinton’s missteps no doubt hastened this process, but so did redistricting based on the 1990 Census, after which Democrats were assured safe, urban seats in minority districts while whiter, more conservative districts were created in the suburbs. The 1994 campaigns were the first waged on this map in a nonpresidential election year, and it all but guaranteed that many longtime Democrats would lose.

This year’s challenge for Democrats has more to do with the normal cycles of what you might call tidal politics. (And not the kind created by oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.) Think of presidential years as the high tide coming in. That is, a successful presidential candidate usually, though not always, carries with him a wave of Congressional seats, depending on the scale of the victory. During the off years, the tide generally goes out again, and the president’s party is bound to lose some of those marginal seats. Only two presidents since 1862 have seen their parties gain House seats in their first midterm election. One was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose Republican opponents were still reeling from that whole Great Depression thing. The other was George W. Bush, in part because of fears of terrorism, but also because he had been elected without a plurality of the popular vote in 2000, meaning he hadn’t carried a wave of marginal congressmen into office to begin with. If the tide doesn’t come in, then it doesn’t go out, either.

In 2006 and 2008, Democrats did something that had not been done in American politics since the Great Depression, which is to string together two consecutive “wave” elections — roughly defined as a gain of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives. They gained a total of 55 House seats and 12 seats in the Senate; the tide came in twice and with unusual strength. That means that some significant number of the Democrats elected in the last two cycles, to put it bluntly, really don’t have much business holding their seats in the first place. Either their districts normally trend Republican — 49 Democratic House members were elected from districts that voted for John McCain — or they themselves probably wouldn’t have cleared the threshold for a successful candidacy in a more conventional election year. (Eric Massa, the former Democratic representative from New York who admitted to the intense tickling of a staff member at a birthday party, comes to mind.)

Neither Obama nor any other Democratic president was ever going to keep the tide from leaving the beach in 2010, and certainly not with the economy lurching slowly from awful to just plain bad. The only question is whether the Democrats will lose control in at least one chamber of Congress, an outcome that might paralyze Obama’s presidency and thrust his party into a prolonged depression of its own.

Of the five living Americans who have served as president, Obama is the only one who never worked as some kind of party strategist. George H. W. Bush oversaw the Republican National Committee for a time, and his son, George W. Bush, played a pivotal role in the headquarters of his father’s failed re-election bid in 1992. Bill Clinton got his start in politics helping to run George McGovern’s campaign in Texas. Even Jimmy Carter, who was thought to disdain tactical politics, was the chairman of the Democratic Party’s national midterm campaign in 1974. These men rose through their party organizations (in Bush’s case, this was more about a famous name than it was about holding a series of jobs), and they were intimate with the relatively cozy world of organizers, donors and local power brokers, the few thousand activists who control the workings of a political party.

Obama did his door-to-door campaigning as a community organizer, but he never worked in party politics until he ran for office, and as a presidential aspirant he never bothered with trying to remake his party or modernize its message in the same way that Reagan (a spokesman for the conservative movement) or Clinton (a leader of the centrist New Democrats) did. Other than to assert (dubiously, perhaps) that he wasn’t a “triangulator” like the Clintons, Obama did not run against the party establishment, as other candidates had before, but with indifference toward it.

In this way, as in many others, Obama is emblematic of the generation that found its political consciousness in the years after Vietnam and Watergate, when the ruling classes of both parties lost their credibility. Carter, Clinton and George W. Bush were presidents rooted in their parties who went out of their way to cultivate outsider pedigrees. Obama, a good 15 years younger than our last two boomer presidents, is the opposite; he is a genuine outsider who spends a fair amount of energy reassuring Democrats that he really does care about the organization.

“Fundamentally, I just think he wants to be bigger than that,” says Cornell Belcher, who was one of Obama’s pollsters during the 2008 campaign. “It gets back to being a transformational leader. A party leader isn’t about transformation.”

Obama’s advisers have spoken of his brand, which is a stand-in for the party identity that defined other presidencies. Obama’s brand is about inclusivity, transcendence, a generational break from stale dogmas. Inevitably, Obama’s brand management runs up against the culture of his party. State activists are sometimes told their requests for the president to appear at a typical political event, in some ballroom with room dividers or at the local labor hall, aren’t going to fly. Aides know that if they bring that kind of thing to Obama, he’ll ask, “Can’t we do any better than that?” As a rule, Obama no longer speaks at the traditional Jefferson-Jackson dinners where state Democratic parties gather to raise money from the faithful. “For what?” a senior aide responded when I asked why. “To talk to the same people he already has?” Obama prefers venues, preferably outdoors or in large theaters, where he can reach voters who aren’t party regulars. He generally refuses to do “robo-calls,” those ubiquitous, recorded messages in which a politician asks you to go out and vote for the party. “He’s got a practical objection to them, which is that they’re irritating,” Axelrod explained to me.

While Obama attended four times the number of fund-raising events that Bill Clinton did during his first year in office, he garnered a fraction of the contributions. “He is the worst Washington fund-raiser in the history of presidents,” a White House aide proudly admitted to me a few months back. All of this exasperates operatives on the Hill who are obsessed with keeping other Democrats in office, and who think maybe Obama should be a little more obsessed with it too. “When you go to the D.N.C., his picture is on that wall,” a longtime strategist who is working for a Congressional campaign told me. “There’s a reason.”

Unlike other modern presidents, Obama, who was elected largely on the strength of an unprecedented outpouring of small-dollar contributions, has no Terry McAuliffe, someone whose unspoken job it is to make sure the party’s donors are kept happy and engaged. David Plouffe is his strategist, Axelrod a message guy, Valerie Jarrett a kind of ambassador and protector — but none of them have raised huge sums of cash from big contributors, and none of them are nearly as devoted to the party’s prospects as they are to the president. In fact, Obama seems to have outsourced much of the traditional party-leadership role to Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden, the two principal Washington insiders in his administration, both of whom seem better suited to the role.

Unlike Clinton, who loved the game of politics almost as much as the governance, Obama doesn’t pore over polling data or study the shaded zones on electoral maps. For that he has Emanuel, his chief of staff, who was the chief strategist behind the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006 and who knows as much about the individual Congressional districts in play as any operative in town. Because of this history, Emanuel occupies a unique position in the West Wing and one that places him apart from the close circle of loyalists who have been alongside Obama from the first day of his presidential campaign. Emanuel, too, is devoted to the president, but he also maintains close relationships with dozens of the House members he recruited, and friends say he anguishes, more than Obama or other White House advisers, about the possibility of losing their seats.

He’s also not above getting involved in party primaries; it was Emanuel, according to the White House’s own report last month, who initiated the effort to try to nudge Joe Sestak, the Pennsylvania congressman, out of the race for the Democratic Senate nomination in that state so that Arlen Specter could run unopposed. Sestak, of course, stayed in the race and won. Stories about potential job offers to Sestak and another primary challenger, Colorado’s Andrew Romanoff, have attracted attention from the news media and from Republicans, which speaks to the importance of the Obama brand in this election year. Such informal overtures are a standard and predictable part of politics in both parties (Karl Rove was relentless in trying to clear certain primary fields during the midterm elections of 2002). But Obama has cast himself above such things, which is why stories of tawdry favor-swapping have a resonance in Washington that they would not otherwise have.

Meanwhile, although Obama has to this point headlined only a handful of fund-raising events dedicated to House members, Biden has happily attended more than 15 of them, with more on the calendar. This is partly because the loquacious vice president has yet to meet the podium he doesn’t want to fling himself upon, but also because, in a lot of the more conservative, working-class districts in the South and Midwest, Obama’s approval ratings are considerably lower than they are in national surveys. In these parts of the country, Biden — plain-talking, profane and nobody’s idea of a closet Muslim — may not only be a more enthusiastic partisan than the president but a more persuasive one as well.

If the president isn’t going to be his party’s chief strategist or its most prolific fund-raiser, then aides say there are two things he will do for his party that are, ultimately, more important — and that are, not coincidentally, in keeping with the brand. The first is to remind voters that Democrats didn’t create the current economic morass. As Rahm Emanuel told me when we sat down in April, “The American people know overwhelmingly that he inherited a” — and here Emanuel used a word I can’t repeat — “sandwich.” (Suffice it to say the sandwich wasn’t pastrami.) “They know that. They don’t need to be educated. I believe it’s worth reminding them of the scale, size and scope of the” — that word again — “sandwich we got.

“Ultimately,” Emanuel went on, “everything about politics — everything, everything — is about choice. The choice is not about what we did versus the ideal. The choice is about what we did versus what we inherited. We inherited George Bush’s Great Recession, and we broke its back.” Emanuel is fond of talking about breaking the body parts of things — backs, necks, etc. “We inherited the financial ruins of Wall Street, and we fixed them. We inherited a country in the worst fiscal condition it has ever been in, and we are in the beginning stages of finding a consensus to turn that around. But the option of going back is not an option, and we’re in the early stages of digging out of the ditch we got handed.”

Emanuel said that Obama would continue to spend a block of every month on the road, as he has since January, when voters in Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, a Republican, to what had been Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate. “We’re getting him out of here, out of Washington,” he said. “I want him less here and more in the country, and when he’s out in the country, more in touch with people.”

The second thing Obama can do for Democrats, in the view of the White House, is to change the way they run their campaigns. Democrats running for the House and the Senate, like the party’s presidential candidates, have generally relied almost exclusively on the unions and other constituency groups to get out the vote, using paid phone banks and door-knockers. Starting out, Obama didn’t have that option. His party’s existing organizational structure was largely beholden to Hillary Clinton through the 2008 primaries, so Obama recruited an army of volunteers, many of them previously uninvolved in any kind of party politics, who ended up organizing blocks and precincts in their towns, lobbying neighbors door to door on Obama’s behalf and squeezing out the vote on Election Day. It was, in effect, much like the volunteer-driven network employed by Bush’s campaign in 2004, although less centralized and more Internet-focused.

Obama emerged from the campaign having assembled what was essentially an alternative apparatus to the party itself — a closely guarded, state-by-state list of more than 10 million names, many of them door-knockers, phone-bankers, letter-writers and small-dollar donors. This network, loyal to the president but not necessarily to his party, helped Obama amass upward of $300 million for the general election and registered millions of new voters for him. The shorthand for all this, in Obama’s orbit, is “the new politics,” meaning that what Obama created is the replacement for the special-interest politics of the last century. The new politics are tactical, encompassing no specific ideological agenda, although most of the more ardent adherents tend to consider themselves more liberal than the party establishment. Obama’s advisers say they believe they can, at least in some measure, bequeath the new politics to the party itself. And their message to Congressional Democrats running this year is that if they don’t adopt the tactics of the Obama campaign, they’re probably going to lose.

To understand why this might just be true, it helps to revisit the tactics that made Obama only the fourth Democratic president in history — Jackson, Roosevelt, Johnson and Obama — to claim more than 51 percent of the vote. There were, roughly speaking, two ways in which Obama managed to change the electoral calculus for Democrats. First, if exit polls can be believed, he carried 52 percent of independent voters, outpacing John McCain by eight points. The other major component was to simply create more voters — and this is where the new politics were especially important. Obama’s campaign team maintains that its volunteers had a lot to do with getting some 15 million to 20 million first-time voters out to the polls, and about 7 in 10 of those voters cast their ballots for Obama. The campaign pulled more black voters, Hispanic voters and white college-age voters into the process than most analysts previously thought possible, which made a crucial difference in more conservative states like Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia.

Twenty months later, if independents haven’t deserted the party altogether, then they certainly seem to be gathering their things and saying their goodbyes. The progressive policy group Third Way, analyzing exit-poll data from last year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey and the special Senate election in Massachusetts in January, found that only about a third of independents in all three states voted Democratic, compared with about 54 percent who voted for Obama in 2008. According to the latest polling from the Pew Research Center, Obama’s standing among independents has dropped from a high of 63 percent early in his presidency to about 47 percent now.

That would seem to leave only one way for Democrats to avoid being swept away on the receding tide, and that’s to turn out some sizable portion of those first time-voters from 2008 — the “surge voters,” as his aides like to refer to them. This was hard enough to do in a presidential year, but in a midterm cycle, when generally only the most reliable voters bother to participate, it feels almost wishful. The disappointing turnout among these younger, more educated and minority voters in New Jersey and Virginia in 2009 jolted a lot of Democrats who assumed, after 2008, that Obama’s victory somehow permanently changed the electoral math.

“What we’ve seen over the course of Obama’s time in office so far is that his constituencies have been relatively sleepy compared to his opposition,” Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Voting is a habit. The problem with these people” — meaning the surge voters — “is that they came out for the first time, and so they’re nonhabitual voters. Not only does Obama have to do what he did back in ’08 in terms of getting them to come out in greater numbers, but he has to get them to shake off their drowsiness.”

The chief architect and spiritual leader of the new politics is David Plouffe, who retains a kind of mystical aura among Obama’s campaign confidants, probably because he was the only member of the inner circle to decline a role in the administration. His record remains unsullied by the inevitable failures of governance. This is why, days after Scott Brown’s victory, the White House let it be known that Plouffe would be coming back as an “outside adviser” for the midterms. The announcement of Plouffe’s return was meant to head off a panic among jittery congressmen and senators who worried that the president had lost control of the political environment. Plouffe personified the notion (true or not) that Obama really did have a plan for 2010, and absent that, it might have been much harder to get a lot of vulnerable Democrats to cast difficult votes for health care reform.

At 43, Plouffe is a boyish-looking, somewhat-reclusive operative who makes little secret of his disdain for Washington. When I visited him in April at the K Street building where he rents a one-room office but rarely actually visits, he seemed intent on dispelling the impression that the White House itself wanted to create last January. “I think my role was described in a way that was sort of overheated after Massachusetts,” Plouffe told me. “You know how Washington is. It’s always, what kind of change is going to happen in the aftermath of a setback? That’s just kind of a ritual in Washington. And so in this case, me spending a little more time on things became part of that.

“We’re not running these campaigns,” Plouffe declared, lightly pounding a conference table, surrounded by signed posters of Obama. “It’s the candidates, most important, the consultants and the staff — they’re running the campaigns. They’re allocating the resources. They’re executing their strategy every day. And the notion that the White House was going to come in and take over the running of these campaigns is just asinine. It’s just not grounded in reality.”

Even so, Plouffe says he has been thinking about how to hold the surge voters since the day Obama was elected. Within weeks after the campaign ended, Plouffe took the grass-roots campaign organization known as Obama for America and renamed it Organizing for America, moving the entire operation into the first floor of the renovated Democratic National Committee building, in the space set aside for the party’s nominee during presidential campaign years. The idea was to transform Obama’s list of activists and small-dollar contributors into a neighborhood-by-neighborhood organization that could be mobilized to support his policy agenda, starting with energy and health care.

The job of integrating O.F.A., as it is known, into the Democratic National Committee fell to Tim Kaine, then the governor of Virginia, whom Obama named party chairman in January 2009. Kaine was an early endorser of Obama’s and is a devotee of the new politics, and anyone who spends much time in the national headquarters today will quickly realize that, under his direction, O.F.A. has virtually supplanted the party structure. O.F.A. is sending some 300 paid organizers to the states — several times the number the national party hired for the 2006 midterms under Kaine’s predecessor, Howard Dean. When Democratic officials inside the headquarters say “we,” they are more often than not talking about O.F.A. rather than the party organization that existed before.

The transition from being an outside-the-establishment campaign organization to being an inside-the-establishment policy promoter has not been an easy one for O.F.A. The first year was marked by widespread frustration, as volunteers tried to get their heads around the arcane changes in, say, the health care bill as it meandered its way through Congress, while simultaneously being urged not to attack members of their own party who wavered on the agenda. “Sometimes the lack of tangibility can be distressing for people,” Plouffe told me. “Because they’ll go out there and say: ‘I worked hard. I had a press conference. I had all these people write letters to the editor. And my member of Congress voted against health care. It didn’t seem to matter.’ That’s reality, unfortunately.

“That’s what’s good about elections,” Plouffe added — that volunteers know how they can affect the outcome. “If they go out there and talk to 10 new voters, and 4 of them say yes, they’re inclined to vote, then you can take that to the bank, because you know that’s important, and you understand how that fits into the whole thing.” The mission for O.F.A. in this election year, Plouffe told me, is to re-energize enough of Obama’s base to subtly shift the math in enough competitive districts to minimize Democratic losses. Volunteers will do this one phone call and one door-knock at a time, armed with voter files containing the names of those first-time registrants who might be compelled to vote again. Kaine announced in April that the party was making a $50 million commitment to its Congressional, Senate and gubernatorial candidates, but only about $20 million of that money will come in cash, to be divided among the various campaign committees. The rest will be transferred in kind, through on-the-ground organization — and, in that way, Plouffe and his team may end up directing more of the midterm campaigns than he’d like to admit.

“I’m not going to suggest we’re going to change the electorate like we did in 2008,” Plouffe said, tamping down expectations again. “But I think we can have some impact on the electorate in November. So perhaps it’s a shade younger, or perhaps it’s a little more African-American than it’s been in past off years.”

For Plouffe, the unstated goal is to lay the groundwork for Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. By trying to build up volunteer networks in states like Indiana and Virginia and Colorado, all states where Democrats have crucial Congressional and Senate races this fall, Plouffe and his operatives are looking not just to protect their Congressional majorities but also to reconnect with the surge voters whom Obama brought into the process, in hopes that they won’t just get bored with politics and wander away in the years between presidential campaigns, never to return.

This time, however, O.F.A. volunteers won’t be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for a young, electric, racially transcendent presidential candidate. Instead, in a lot of districts, they’ll be asking their friends and neighbors to vote for some aging member of Congress who has been on the ballot 10 times already, which is a considerably harder sell. “Let’s be clear — these are not Democratic voters,” Cornell Belcher, the Obama campaign pollster, cautioned me. “They’re Obama voters.” The lesson that Plouffe and his operation took away from the dismal 2009 elections is that Obama can act like a matchmaker of sorts, introducing the party’s candidates to new voters and vouching for their intentions, but it’s only going to matter if the candidates themselves embrace the so-called new politics. What that means, practically speaking, is that the White House is urging candidates to divert a fair amount of their time and money — traditionally used for buying TV ads and rallying core constituencies — to courting volunteers and voters who haven’t generally been reliable Democrats.

This is not what members of Congress or their campaign managers are trained to do, and it has created something of a cultural chasm between the White House and the party apparatus. There is a strong generational component here. With some exceptions, Obama’s passion for organizing finds more enthusiasm among candidates closer to the president’s age and newer to politics (candidates like Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado), while older Democrats have a harder time imagining that a bunch of volunteers and a dozen virtual town-hall meetings are going to matter more than labor endorsements and some killer 30-second spots. Longtime party strategists also point out, fairly, that Obama raised such an absurd amount of money during his presidential campaign that he never had to choose between, say, TV ads and door-to-door canvassers in any given state; he had both, and in record numbers. Few, if any, House or Senate candidates will have that kind of good fortune, which means, for most Democrats, that embracing the new politics also means cutting back on other bedrock campaign tactics.

One respected Democratic Senate aide who is skeptical of the Plouffe strategy suggested to me that Obama’s emphasis on O.F.A., like the controversial “50-state strategy” that Howard Dean pursued as party chairman, was just the latest fad to distract the party headquarters from its more fundamental mission of raising cash and airing ads. “The D.N.C. has allowed itself to become a Rorschach test of whatever politics is at the time,” the aide told me. “ ‘We are whatever you want us to be’ is the new politics. What we’ve gotten away from is being there for the campaigns.”

By Democratic Party standards, this is a relatively muted internal disagreement. But it nonetheless points to the emergence of rival schools of thought within the party when it comes to Obama’s importance as a party leader. Some see him as having transformed both the electorate and the nature of campaigning in what could be a lasting and fundamental way, meaning that things are possible now — both in terms of liberal governance and winning elections — that did not seem possible before. Others view 2008 mostly as a cathartic election that had more to do with conditions in the country than with Obama’s peculiar magic, and they don’t think the party should assume that there are millions of new voters out there who can be tapped if you just knock on the right doors. These two worldviews coexist uneasily among the party’s elected officials and candidates, young and old, in every part of the country — sometimes just hours apart.

Virginia’s second Congressional district winds around the state’s easternmost shore and leaps across the Chesapeake Bay to Virginia Beach and Norfolk, home to the largest Naval basein the world. In 2008, Obama carried the district by a mere two points on his way to an impressive victory in the state. If you get on the road and drive about 100 miles due west, you’ll hit the fifth Congressional district, which encompasses the fading manufacturing cities of Martinsville and Danville, along with a lot of old tobacco towns and some of the highest unemployment rates in the state. Here the election tilted the other way, but again it was close, with McCain winning by about the same two-point margin. In both districts, however, the surge vote in 2008 was strong enough to unseat Republican representatives and replace them with a pair of novice Democrats whom no one had given much of a chance until the final weeks: Glenn Nye in the second district and Tom Perriello in the fifth.

On paper, Nye and Perriello were remarkably similar candidates. Both men were just 34 when they ran, their birthdays exactly one month apart. Nye is a Georgetown graduate who worked for the federal government in the Balkans and Iraq. Perriello is a product of Yale’s law school and a former human rights lawyer in West Africa. Both won in mostly white, historically conservative districts with sizable African-American voting blocs and similar per-capita incomes. Both Nye and Perriello will tell you that the voters who elected them are tired of ideological barriers and voted for a new kind of pragmatism.

“They wanted to get away from the model of just voting the party line and doing what the party leadership says,” Nye told me during a recent conversation in his Washington office. “When I talked to people back home, what I heard consistently is that we’d really like someone who uses their own conscience and their own mind to make decisions that they think are best for the district.” Perriello told me much the same thing when I visited him in his district, as we slogged through a mix of mud and manure at a dairy farm to show how stimulus money was being used to make energy out of dung. “There was a decidedly anti-ideological component to the vote,” Perriello said. “It was a reaction to the ideological extremism of the Bush administration, replacing it with someone who didn’t fit a traditionally liberal space but who represented a more pragmatic approach.”

And yet, Nye and Perriello have very different ideas about what pragmatism means. Nye, who practices moderation in the mold of a Southern blue-dog Democrat, voted for the stimulus package early on, but since then he has broken with Obama on some of the administration’s most pressing domestic initiatives, including the energy plan and health care reform. Perriello, whose 727-vote margin of victory in 2008 was the tightest in the country, has instead been one of the more tireless advocates for Obama’s agenda. When he has criticized the president and his advisers, it has been because Perriello sees the White House as insufficiently courageous in taking on Wall Street and unemployment.

The distance between Nye and Perriello on the Obama agenda can be explained, in part, by some of the mundane realities of politics. Obviously the two congressmen harbor some different ideological convictions. And their districts are shaded a bit more differently than they appear on paper; Nye’s district is stamped with a military kind of conservatism that stresses national security and self-reliance, while Perriello’s leans more toward the populist variety. But there’s something deeper going on here, too, a localized version of the greater confusion that surrounds the party two years after Obama’s election. When all those Obama surge voters flooded the polling places and voted for change, what exactly were they voting for? Did postpartisanship and pragmatism mean the less ideological, more fiscally responsible vision of government that Nye thought it meant? Or was it about the progressive, ambitious approach that Perriello represents?

It’s no accident that even those who surfed in on the Obama wave should have such different notions of what it signified. Obama himself never really settled the point. During the campaign, he alternated seamlessly between two sides of his political persona: the postpartisan reformer and the progressive revivalist. On one hand, reaching out to disaffected and independent voters, he vowed to dispense with the culture wars and leave behind the 20th-century orthodoxies of both parties. At the same time, he inspired a hopeful frenzy among liberals who assumed that he was, at heart, one of them. Propelled through the fall campaign by a cratering economy and his opponent’s weak campaign, Obama was never really compelled to reconcile these two ideals. The vague notion of “change,” whatever kind of change that meant, seemed good enough for an anxious electorate.

Throughout his first year in office — perhaps out of necessity, given the near depression he inherited, but also under pressure from older leaders in his own party who spoke openly of another New Deal — Obama tilted toward progressive revival. Since the Massachusetts vote, however, Obama seems to be pushing back in the other direction, moving to reclaim his reformist appeal. In recent months, he has renewed his overtures to Republican lawmakers, thrown his support behind nuclear power and, most significant, established a commission on fiscal reform — all of which probably amounts to an acknowledgment that he can’t continue to hemorrhage confidence among the independent voters who were an integral part of his election.

In a sense, the 2010 elections, like pretty much all midterm elections, represent the coda to the presidential vote that preceded them. What happens in closely contested Congressional districts this fall — whether the Obama voters of 2008 will come out again to show their support for a Tom Perriello, whether they will re-elect a Glenn Nye, whether they will punish either man for his decisions — will go a long way toward clarifying which of the two Obamas, the reformer or the revivalist, most voters really thought they were getting. And that, in turn, will give Plouffe and the rest of the president’s inner circle a clearer sense of where the country is heading toward 2012, as they prepare to break out the maps and fire up the e-mail lists for what they expect to be the final campaign of Obama’s brief and improbable career.

Even given the strong possibility that Democrats could lose control of at least one chamber of Congress this fall, Obama’s aides seem confident about his re-election, in part because they are drawing some inspiration from another midterm election year that isn’t quite yet ancient history — not 1994, but 1982. According to Gallup, Ronald Reagan’s average approval rating during the fifth quarter of his first term — the period between January and April 1982 — was 46.3 percent, just south of Obama’s average mark of 48.8 percent over the same period in 2010. Reagan’s ratings, too, fell in close relation to the nation’s rising unemployment rate during his second year in office, as the economic recovery he had promised took hold sluggishly. The voters punished Reagan’s party in the 1982 midterm elections, but in a far less catastrophic way than they did during Clinton’s first term.

Obama’s advisers say it is only a matter of months before voters begin to feel in their daily lives the steady, if unspectacular, improvement that has been showing up in recent economic reports — and by which time, presumably, the leak off the Louisiana coast should be plugged. The question no one can answer is whether a lift in public optimism might come in time for Democrats to reap any benefit in November. Just about every strategist of either party in Washington will tell you that the best indicator of whether the voters are growing less skeptical — and, thus, of whether Democrats can survive the November elections intact — can be found in the president’s approval rating. There is a political theorem that illustrates this, supported by data from past elections and often repeated by Democrats now, and it goes like this: If the president’s approval rating is over 50 percent in the fall, then his party will suffer only moderately. If his rating is under 50 percent, however, then the pounding at the polls is likely to be a memorable one.

There is a corollary to this theorem, which Rahm Emanuel explained to me when we talked in April. For every point that Obama’s approval rating dips below 50 percent, Emanuel said, there are probably four or five more House districts that will swing into the Republican column, and vice versa. Emanuel reeled off a series of polls from that week — some that had the president just under 50 percent but one, from The Washington Post and ABC News, that put the number at 54 — in a way that made it clear that he was, if not obsessed with these numbers, then clearly transfixed by them. “It does matter where he is,” Emanuel told me. “For the midterms, if you’re at 50, that’s a different scenario for the president then if you’re at 47.”

The thing about political theorems, unlike mathematical theorems, is that they are predictive until the moment they aren’t. There are cultural and social departure points in the life of a country, markers between one period and the next, that can be fully appreciated only in hindsight, and that render old formulas suddenly obsolete. And Obama represents nothing if not a cultural departure point. As is often the case with Obama, then, the old formulas may not apply. After all, while it’s certainly not unusual for presidents to register much higher approval ratings than Congress, that divide has been particularly pronounced during Obama’s presidency; in April, while approval for the Democratic Congress was registering in the Pew poll at 25 percent, its lowest point in the 24-year history of the survey, Obama’s own approval rating remained close to 50 percent. What this disconnect means, perhaps, is that, while higher approval ratings for the president might still mean more votes for Democrats in the midterm elections, every point up or down could have less of an impact than it has in the past.

Obama seems to exist on a separate plane from his party’s other elected leaders, somehow deflecting much of the anti-Washington fervor that threatens to dispatch the rest of them. This is probably not only because voters see him as a more inspiring leader than Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, but also because they don’t see him as a party leader at all, at least in the traditional sense. It’s not simply how Obama came to govern that creates this impression. It’s also a simple matter of who he is. Whatever you may think of Obama’s policies or his politics, after all, his brand represents — by the very nature of his age, his life story and the color of his skin — a subversive force inside the governing establishment, and that’s his advantage in this tea-party moment. Washington is, in fact, broken — or at least most people believe it is, even if Obama stops saying so in his speeches. Voters may yet see Obama, in the years ahead, as disappointing or transformative or neither. But the one thing he will never really embody is the status quo.


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August 4, 2010
My Life in Therapy
By DAPHNE MERKIN

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be a one-person boon to the therapeutic establishment — and was initiated into the curious and slippery business of self-disclosure. I learned, that is, to construct an ongoing narrative of the self, composed of what the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller calls “microdots” (“the consciously experienced moments selected from the whole and arranged to present a point of view”), one that might have been more or less cohesive than my actual self but that at any rate was supposed to illuminate puzzling behavior and onerous symptoms — my behavior and my symptoms.

To this day, I’m not sure that I am in possession of substantially greater self-knowledge than someone who has never been inside a therapist’s office. What I do know, aside from the fact that the unconscious plays strange tricks and that the past stalks the present in ways we can’t begin to imagine, is a certain language, a certain style of thinking that, in its capacity for reframing your life story, becomes — how should I put this? — addictive. Projection. Repression. Acting out. Defenses. Secondary compensation. Transference. Even in these quick-fix, medicated times, when people are more likely to look to Wellbutrin and life coaches than to the mystique-surrounded, intangible promise of psychoanalysis, these words speak to me with all the charged power of poetry, scattering light into opaque depths, interpreting that which lies beneath awareness. Whether they do so rightly or wrongly is almost beside the point.

IT WAS A SNOWY Tuesday afternoon in February, and I was inching along Fifth Avenue in a taxi, my mood as gray as the sky, on my way to a consultation with a therapist in the Village who was recommended to me by Dr. O., another therapist I had seen in consultation, who in turn was referred to me by a friend’s therapist. Once again — how many times have I done this? — I was on a quest for a better therapist, a more intuitive therapist, a therapist I could genuinely call my own, a therapist who could make me happy. I liked Dr. O., a man in his 80s who struck me as having a quick grasp of the essential details, the issues that dragged along with me year after year like a ball and chain. He seemed to get to the heart of the matter — had I ever felt loved? Had I ever loved? — with disarming ease. But then, after several visits, during which I envisioned myself finally and conclusively grappling with things, toppling over the impediments that stood in my way and coming out a winner, Dr. O. suddenly announced that he couldn’t take on any new patients. He said he had given the prospect of working with me a great deal of thought but in the end didn’t think he was prepared to commit himself.

I resisted the impulse to plead on my behalf, which was my impulse around all elusive men, be they shrinks or lovers, and accepted his verdict. (I later found out that he had been very ill and was in the process of bringing his practice to a close.) I wasn’t, after all, therapistless; I had been seeing Dr. L. for the past year and a half, an older woman with a practical manner and a radically limited wardrobe (she wore only black and brown pantsuits) that I had begun to view as a symptom of her tunnel vision, so different from my own scattered and unfiltered way of being. Of late, I had been feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the tenor of our sessions; they seemed more like the sort of conversations you would have with a good friend in a coffee shop than the intense, closely-examined, hesitation-filled discourse I had come to expect from the therapeutic encounter. The subject of “transference” (the patient’s projection of feelings and situations from the past onto the therapist), which is usually at the heart of psychoanalysis, didn’t even come up for discussion, much less any examination of possible signs of “countertransference” (the analyst’s emotional reactions to the patient stemming from his or her unconscious needs and conflicts). There was the day she used the word “cute” to describe a complicated, even twisted man I was telling her about, and I found myself wondering about her own personal evolution, how much she really understood about relations between men and women. Who was to say whether she had the kind of varied real-world experience that I might benefit from, one that could yield the sort of rich understanding of social texture that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as “thick description”?

My dissatisfaction led me to wonder whether it was time for a change — or whether, at long last, it might be time to strike out on my own and weather my internal and external vicissitudes alone, perilous as that prospect might appear to a person who hadn’t been without a therapist’s support in 40-odd years. On the other hand, I couldn’t actually picture myself going without a listening ear, someone who attended to my story along with me several days a week, who was ready and waiting to receive news of my life, undramatic and unimportant in the larger scheme of things as it might be. It was one thing to mock therapy and its practitioners, as I regularly did, or to fume at the expense; it was another thing entirely to walk away from the cushioning it offered. Much as I might disparage it, I was convinced it had helped keep me alive, bounded to the earth; there were also my antidepressants, of course, steadily elevating my dopamine levels and moderating my moods, but without the benefit of talk therapy, I felt unduly fragile, like a tightrope walker absent a net. Which is why, when Dr. O. conveyed his unavailability, I did what any addict does and asked where else I could get my fix. He said he would think about who might be suitable, and about 10 days later I received a short note from him with the name of Dr. D.

This is how I came to seek out the psychiatrist in the Village, who turned out to be a man in what I guessed to be his early 60s, with saucer eyes that were given to an exaggerated registering of emotion like the eyes of a comic-book character. I arrived at his office magisterially late after the endless cab ride, wet from the snow. I felt immediately on edge, furious at myself for not having taken the subway, silently calculating how much money had evaporated along with the first 20 minutes of the session. I always resented the implacability of the therapeutic “hour” (which translated into a mingy 50, or increasingly these days, 45 minutes at most), the way it commenced at some tediously calibrated moment, like 11:10 or 5:25, instead of satisfyingly on the hour or half-hour. Not to mention the way the end of a session was visible from the start, getting ready to wave goodbye to you and your problems just as you were settling in to reflect more fully upon them. Now, having abbreviated the session even before it began, I felt full of righteous if illogical outrage: who mandated all these carefully preserved professional rituals in the first place — the couch with its flimsy little napkin covering the place where you were to lay your head, the de rigueur box of tissues, the chair (for those who preferred to sit up, like me) placed at a careful distance from the therapist’s own? What was the point of these rules? Did they serve the patient in any way or were they just a means of securing the analyst enough patients to bring in the money to pay for a weekend house?

Needless to say, I didn’t air any of these thoughts and instead went into my skittish, slightly apologetic, pre-emptively self-deprecating patient mode — intent on sounding like someone who was aware of the pathological currents that ran beneath a life that might be viewed as functional, even successful, if looked at from afar. Dr. D. spoke very little, in the manner of a true-blue analyst — the more silent the therapist, it’s safe to say, the more likely he is to favor a strict analytic approach — in a voice that was low and grave, with an almost total absence of inflection. I had to suppress the urge to ask him to speak up for fear of offending him. Still, I was struck by the way he managed to convey a spirit of deep thoughtfulness whenever he did utter a few words. “You have trouble negotiating distance, don’t you?” he asked, after I wandered into my hyperkinetic version of free association, saying what came to my mind without exercising too much editorial control, babbling on about the chilly caretaker from my childhood who never answered me when I tried to engage her, moving on to my father’s obliviousness to my youthful presence even when I was sitting next to him in a car and then to my fear of being overattached to the people in my life that I felt closest to. “It’s a problem for you either way,” he added. “Isn’t it? Too close. Too far. Neither feel entirely comfortable.” I wasn’t completely sure what he meant, but I answered that I saw his point.

I went to Dr. D. to discuss the metaphysics of therapy rather than the logistics — whether, that is, I should be in therapy at all, and if so, what for and what kind. I talked about past therapists and their different styles of treatment, most of them Freudian-derived to a greater or lesser extent, all of which had turned me off in one way or another. In therapy that was more psychoanalytically oriented, I told him, I tended to get trapped in long-ago traumas, identifying with myself as a terrified little girl at the mercy of cruel adult forces. This imaginative position would eventually destabilize me, kicking off feelings of rage and despair that would in turn spiral down into a debilitating depression, in which I couldn’t seem to retrieve the pieces of my contemporary life. I don’t know whether this was because of the therapist’s lack of skill, some essential flaw in the psychoanalytic method or some irreparable injury done to me long ago, but the last time I engaged in this style of therapy for an extended period of time with an analyst who kept coaxing me to dredge up more and more painful, ever earlier memories, I ended up in a hospital. When I got out two summers ago, I reacted to the trauma of hospitalization by seeking out the aforementioned Dr. L., who took a more contained, present-oriented approach, with far less time and energy spent trying to excavate distant hurts and grievances. While she may have had the convictions of a Freudian, she also had the manner of a strategic adviser, cheering me on in my daily life. And yet, after seeing her for 18 months, I felt that I was doing myself an injustice by merely skimming the surface, leaving myself vulnerable to the kind of massive subterranean conflict I feared would sooner or later come out of nowhere and hit me hard once again. Would I ever, I wondered, manage to find the right mix, the style of therapy that fit my particular mold? Did it even exist?

As I mulled it over for Dr. D., I noticed that I was speaking with greater detachment and less gusto than I usually brought to the occasion. Perhaps this was a response to Dr. D.’s own removed demeanor, which made me in turn wonder if patients eventually began to sound like their therapists, much in the way husbands and wives of long standing are said to resemble each other. And then there was my feeling that I better not get in too deep. I was wary by this point of the alacrity with which I attached to shrinks, each and every one of them, as if I suspended my usual vigilant powers of critical judgment in their presence merely because they wore the badge of their profession. The truth of the matter was that in more than 40 years of therapy (the only person I knew who may have been at it longer than me was Woody Allen, who once offered me his own analyst), I never developed a set of criteria by which to assess the skill of a given therapist, the way you would assess a dentist or a plumber. Other than a presentable degree of intelligence and an office that didn’t set off aesthetic alarms — I tended to prefer genteelly shabby interiors to overly well-appointed ones, although I was wary of therapists who exhibited a Collyer Brothers-like inability to throw anything away — I wasn’t sure what made for a good one. I never felt entitled to look at them as members of a service profession, which is what, underneath all the crisscrossing of need and wishfulness, they essentially were. The sense of urgency that generally took me into a new shrink’s office was more conducive to seeing myself as the one being evaluated rather than the evaluator. Was I a good-enough patient? Would this latest psychiatrist (I saw mostly M.D.’s) like me and want to take me on? Or would he/she write me off as impossibly disturbed under my cloak of normalcy?

I knew I wasn’t the most promising candidate — I was, in fact, a prime example of what is referred to within the profession as a “difficult” patient, what with my clamorous ways, disregard for boundaries and serial treatments — but perhaps this time, after so many disappointments, I would get lucky. Somewhere out there, sitting in a smaller or larger office on Central Park West or the Upper East Side, tucked behind a waiting area furnished with a suitably arty poster or two, a couple of chairs and old copies of The New Yorker and National Geographic Traveler, was a practitioner who would not only understand my lifelong sorrow and anger in an empathic (but not unduly soppy) fashion but also be able to relieve me of them. Just as some people believe in the idea of soul mates, I held fast to the conviction that my perfect therapeutic match was out there. If only I looked hard enough I would find this person, and then the demons that haunted me — my love/hate relationship with my difficult mother (who has been dead now for four years), my self-torturing and intransigently avoidant attitude toward my work, my abiding sense of aloneness and seeming inability to sustain a romantic relationship and, above all, my lapses into severe depression — would become, with my therapist’s help, easier to manage.

Therapy, as Freud himself made clear, is never about finding a cure for what ails you. Its aim, despite the lyrical moniker it is known by (“the talking cure” was not actually Freud’s phrase but rather that of Dr. Josef Breuer’s patient Bertha Pappenheim, whom Freud wrote about as Anna O.), was always more modest. Freud described it as an effort to convert “hysterical misery” into “common unhappiness,” which suggests a rather minimalist framework against which to judge progress. There is no absolute goal, no lifetime guarantee, no telling how much therapy is enough therapy, no foolproof way of knowing when you’ve gotten everything out of it that you can and would be better off spending your valuable time and hard-earned money on other pursuits.

All of which raises the question: What exactly is the point? How can you be expected to know when being in therapy is the right choice, to know which treatments are actually helpful and which serve merely to give the false sense of reassurance that comes with being proactive, with doing all that we can? Does anyone, for example, really know what “character change” looks like? That, after all, is what contemporary therapy that is more than chitchat for the so-called worried well aims to promote. More pressing, who can be trusted to answer these questions? Looked at a certain way, the entire enterprise seems geared toward the needs of the therapist rather than the patient to a degree that can feel, after a certain amount of time, undemocratic, if not outright exploitative. With no endpoint in sight, it’s possible to stay in therapy forever without much real progress; at the same time, the weight of responsibility is borne almost entirely by the patient, whose “resistance” or lack of effort-making is often blamed for any stagnancy in treatment before the possibility of a therapist’s shortcomings is even acknowledged. As the psychiatrist Robert Michels observed in his aptly titled essay “Psychoanalysis and Its Discontents,” for patients, “it often seems as if psychoanalysis isn’t even designed to help them. Patients want answers, whereas psychoanalysts ask questions. Patients want advice, but psychoanalysts are trained not to give advice. Patients want support and love. Psychoanalysts offer interpretations and insight. Patients want to feel better; analysts talk about character change.”

My abiding faith in the possibility of self-transformation propelled me from one therapist to the next, ever on the lookout for something that seemed tormentingly out of reach, some scenario that would allow me to live more comfortably in my own skin. For all my doubts about specific tenets and individual psychoanalysts, I believed in the surpassing value of insight and the curative potential of treatment — and that may have been the problem to begin with. I failed to grasp that there was no magic to be had, that a therapist’s insights weren’t worth anything unless you made them your own and that nothing that had happened to me already could be undone, no matter how many times I went over it.

And yet it seems to me that the process itself, in its very commitment to interiority — its attempt to ferret out prime causes and pivotal events from the psychic rubble of the past and the unwieldy conflicts of the present — can be intriguing enough to stand in as its own reward. In the course of growing up, we all learn to repress our unruly fantasies and to keep our more anarchic thoughts mostly to ourselves. As for our dreams and what they might signify — their “latent content,” that is, as opposed to their “manifest content” — who can be expected to be interested in them except a close friend or tolerant spouse, both of whom are assuredly only half listening? Therapy offers us a particular kind of chaste intimacy, one that in its ideal (if not always actual) form is free of the burden of desirous expectations. Or as Adam Phillips, the writer and psychoanalyst, puts it with characteristic brio: “Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.” It is a place to say out loud all that we have grown accustomed to keeping silent, in the hope that we might better understand ourselves and our missteps, come to terms with disowned desires and perhaps even find a more direct route to an effectively examined life. It provides an opportunity unlike any other to sort through the contents of your own mind — an often painfully circuitous operation — in the presence of someone who is trained to make order out of mental chaos. Although it is possible to view the whole exercise as an expensive self-indulgence — or, as its many detractors insist in one way or another, as the disease for which it purports to be the cure — psychoanalysis is the only game in town in which you are free to look and sound your worst the better to live up to your full potential.

FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS reached its high-water mark in the 1950s, having become something of a secular religion; it offered, as Dan Wakefield observes in his book “New York in the Fifties,” a “dream of wholeness” — and, no less important, “the cure for what ailed you sexually.” All of the so-called New York Intellectuals, like Delmore Schwartz and Mary McCarthy, dipped into analytic treatment at one time or another; and James Baldwin, in a 1959 essay, noted of “the citizens of this time and place” that “when they talk, they talk to the psychiatrist; on the theory, presumably, that the truth about them is ultimately unspeakable.” In the mid-60s, psychoanalysis was still very much in vogue, having not yet become the reviled and increasingly discredited discipline it came to be in the 1980s and 1990s, when anti-Freudians like Frederick Crews and Peter Swales did their dismantling work and the psychopharmaceutical industry flourished. (My favorite line from Donald Barthelme’s 1972 short story “The Sandman” is, to my mind, more predictive than descriptive: “The prestige of analysis,” the protagonist writes to his girlfriend’s shrink, in defense of her decision to give up analysis and use the money saved to buy a grand piano, “is now at a nadir.”) Popular magazines like Redbook and McCall’s familiarized Middle America with basic Freudian concepts, the better to understand phenomena like marital discord and sibling rivalry, and references to therapy abounded in theater and film. In their book “Psychiatry and the Cinema,” Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard refer to the period from the late 1950s to the early 1960s as the “Golden Age” of psychiatry in the movies: “For a half-dozen years . . . films reflected — however imperfectly — a growing conviction in American culture that psychiatrists were authoritative voices of reason, adjustment and well-being.” In 1969, Alexander Portnoy unburdened the content of his carnal character on the silent Dr. Spielvogel and made his creator, Philip Roth, a household name.

Still, while seeing a shrink was often considered something to be proud of back in the 1960s, lending you an aura of intellectual gravitas, it was at that time largely an adults-only activity. I began seeing my first therapist, Dr. Welsh, at the age of 10, but I didn’t know of any other kids my age who availed themselves of a psychiatrist, and the entire venture filled me with shame. I’m not sure how much I told her — children at that age tend to be loyal to their backgrounds, however dysfunctional — but I do recall busily beating up dolls in her office. Welsh was kindly and gray-haired, a renowned child psychiatrist, but to me she was little more than a stranger whose courteous style confused me. For one thing, she wasn’t Jewish, which, given my Orthodox upbringing, immediately opened up a chasm of nonfamiliarity between us. For another, I kept wondering why she was so nice to me; I wasn’t used to such treatment, which was surely one reason I needed to see a psychiatrist in the first place. I couldn’t figure out a connection between the world inside her office and the world outside it; they seemed like separate universes with different rules of conduct. In one, I was listened to, when I did choose to speak, with a great deal of attentiveness; in the other I was more often than not pushed aside, my anxieties discounted or ridiculed.

At some point I stopped seeing Dr. Welsh, and in junior high I started seeing a female psychiatric social worker with a mop of gray curls whose eyes crinkled up when she smiled and whose lack of an advanced degree wasn’t lost on me. It was my first inkling that shrinks were just other people in disguise, that they didn’t belong to some special class of being. I liked this therapist, who was a warmhearted Jewish woman of a type that I associated with the Eastern European mothers of many of my classmates, but she was no match for my mother’s Germanic coldness or her unbreakable grip on me. In any event, I’m not sure how versed she was in the nether reaches of pathological enmeshment, which she would have had to be for us to get anywhere. Short of that, what I wanted was for her to be my mother, just as early on I longed for my male therapists to be my father. Substitute parenting, or “reparenting,” as it is referred to, may have been what was on offer in the therapeutic realm, but what I wanted in my overly concrete way was the real thing. I wanted, that is, to be adopted — actually adopted — just as I would later wish for one or the other of my therapists to leave his wife for me. (My model was Elaine May, who married her shrink.)

In my late teens I started seeing Dr. S., a white-haired but vigorous psychiatrist. Like most of the shrinks I would see, he was a deracinated Jew who kept regular hours on Yom Kippur, as if to prove a point. He was an old-school analyst in the American mode, meaning that he hewed to the Freudian party line but in a casual, “we’re all only human” sort of fashion, and his office was all the way over on Riverside Drive in the 80s. I remember the address well because in winter, when the wind howled along the side streets in the evenings and I had to make my way to the bus stop at the end of a session, I felt like a character out of “Dr. Zhivago.” Although he regularly doodled with his fountain pen on a prescription pad, Dr. S. never took notes, claiming that it was a matter of principle. He sometimes closed his eyes during the session, either to allow himself to relate more profoundly to what I was talking about or to take a quick nap, I was never sure which.

Dr. S.’s office, which was reachable by a spiral staircase from his apartment, was one of the most beautiful — most dignified — I would ever find myself in. It had an air of serene comprehension, of truths having been sought after, suffered through and finally arrived at right within its confines. Spacious and thickly carpeted, with whitewashed walls on which hung a series of sepia-toned prints, it was also filled with the anthropological artifacts — somber clay heads and stone figures lined his bookshelves — that many psychoanalysts feel obliged to possess in homage to Freud’s own cherished collection of tchotchkes. There was a mechanical clock that made a faint whirring sound as it flipped over from one minute to the next, making me acutely aware of stray silences and unspoken thoughts. What made Dr. S.’s setting unique, however, was the constant presence of his dog, a golden-colored beagle with soft, flappy ears. The dog would pad over to my chair when I came in and look at me with her moist sympathetic eyes, waiting to be scratched behind the ears. There were times I refused to oblige her, ignoring her mute appeal until she tucked her tail between her legs and slunk over to Dr. S.’s chair to be petted. I felt, or maybe I was only imagining, the doctor looking at me intently at those moments, taking in my unresponsiveness and making a mental note: patient inhibited and cold; resists giving affection to loving animals.

It was with Dr. S. that I began developing a style custom-made to the therapeutic encounter, especially as it played out with male shrinks. Suspicious as I was of men to begin with, based on my experience of a remote father and a passel of brothers who remained alien, sports-obsessed creatures to me, it was hard for me to believe in their interest, much less their kindly intentions. As a result, I would use up a lot of the hour making apposite, witty remarks in an effort to entertain Dr. S. (a shrink I saw a few years back found me so knee-slappingly funny that he asked whether I had ever considered becoming a stand-up comedian) and spent the rest of the time pelting him with accusatory questions as to the quality of his attention and his reasons for seeing me: Was he really listening to me? Or was he preoccupied with his dog, especially after she had been injured in a car accident on Riverside Drive? Did he ever think about me when I wasn’t sitting in front of him? Would he see me if I couldn’t afford to pay his fee? If he was only doing this for the money, I blithely continued, why hadn’t he gone into a more remunerative profession, like law or business? Why the veneer of caring?

Despite my repeated threats to leave, I continued to see Dr. S. through my college years. When I look back on it, it seems to me that he was a gem of a man, really, to put up with my hot-and-cold attitude toward the work he was trying to do with me, but it did me little good at the time. Part of the problem was that Dr. S. tended to speak in broad generalities, which I found anything but reassuring. When I would say, for instance, as I often did, that nobody cared about me (by which I mainly meant my parents), he would answer, “First you must care about yourself.” This struck me as a sleight-of-hand solution, one that only fueled my anxiety that this feeling of universal indifference was not a neurotic misperception but the truth, the horrible truth lying in wait for me to come upon it. Could it be that the essence of my treatment consisted of Dr. S.’s gently leading me up to the dismal reality that was my life — that I would be “cured” only when I faced up to my darkest fears and accepted them as legitimate rather than exaggerated?

The goal of successful psychoanalysis, I knew, especially when it came to more severe problems, was not just to modify neurotic suffering so it took on the aspect of “ordinary unhappiness,” but to effect a real difference in the patient’s way of functioning. My character, sadly enough, seemed the same as it had always been, given to angry outbursts that alienated the very people I wanted around me, followed by regretful nostalgia for that which might have been. I had succeeded in driving away my first serious boyfriend, a bearded medical student, with precisely such maneuverings. And all Dr. S. managed to come up with in response to my acute grief over Mark was the suggestion that I think of him as dead. When I came in with what I saw as a telltale dream, in which I walked up and down the hallway outside Mark’s apartment until he opened the door and saw me, thereby vindicating me in my wistful belief that he hadn’t forgotten me, that the force between us was so strong that it could lead him to intuit that I was outside his apartment door, Dr. S. insisted on pointing out the flaws in my reasoning: “You realize, don’t you, that in your dream Mark only opened the door because he heard a disturbance outside. You were walking back and forth and making noise, so naturally he wanted to find out what was going on. It had nothing to do with the feelings he once had for you. You were intruding. You could have been anyone.” I scornfully replied that the hallway was carpeted, that I wasn’t making any noise and that Mark just felt me out there. The doctor puffed sagely on his pipe and disagreed with me once again, taking the sort of gentle tone you would use with a hopelessly crazy person.

Dr. S. was fond of telling me that the past didn’t interest him “except in terms of the present,” which was all fine and well except for the fact that it left me marooned, by myself, in ghostly rooms. I felt more rather than less alone in therapy, stuck with myself and my self-destructive patterns, which I saw as direct products of the very past that Dr. S. didn’t care to explore. Weren’t analysts supposed to be expert guides through the minefields of the past? Wasn’t going back into the interior where early humiliations festered their proclaimed specialty? If not, then whence was this ever-elusive “character change” supposed to emerge? Even to this day, I’m not sure I know anyone whose character has been genuinely transformed because of therapy. If anything, most people seem to emerge as more backed-up versions of themselves.

THESE ARE SOME of the things that never happened in therapy: No one ever stopped me from doing something I was intent on doing, even if it was clear that the issue was a symbolically loaded one and worthy of further exploration before I took any action. No one ever offered to adopt me or to take me home for so much as a single night, like the British child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott (my ideal shrink) did with one of his patients. No one ever suggested that I move away from home or stand up to my parents. No one ever offered to see me free of charge. No one ever took me on his or her lap, as the Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi was known to have done, in keeping with his belief that the clinical interaction should be a reciprocally empathic, mutual encounter. (Ferenczi and Freud would eventually break over their different therapeutic stances but not before Ferenczi noted in his clinical diary that Freud shared with him the harsh sentiment “that neurotics are a rabble, good only to support us financially and to allow us to learn from their cases: psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless.”) And for all the emphasis on therapy’s being a place of intimate disclosure — for all the times, in between shows of hostility, that I haltingly stated my feelings of great affection or even love for my therapists — none of them ever opened up about their feelings for me other than to convey a vague liking or appreciation for some facet of my personality.

Here are some of the things that did happen in therapy: My mother once came to a session with a hipster shrink and his trippy wife-partner whom I saw briefly in my late 20s, and their opening move was to ask about the state of her sex life. She inquired stonily what this had to do with helping me, while I squirmed in my seat, wondering what I was doing with this harebrained pair. Some years later, when I was in my mid-30s, my mother came to another session, this time with Dr. E., a young and pretty psychiatrist whose last name indicated a hefty WASP lineage. During this session the three of us decided that I would marry the man I had been dating on and off for the past six years, despite the fact that I had broken off my engagement to him months earlier. We discussed the matter of my newly pending marriage as if it were simply the practical solution to a neurotic issue, having little to do with the man in question and much to do with my abiding inability to make a decision. I remember distinctly that Dr. E. and my mother agreed that I was a very loyal person and that the chances of my getting divorced, no matter how tentative I might have felt about going ahead, were minuscule. (As it turned out, I divorced less than five years later.) They also agreed that I should proceed rapidly so that I would have less time to mull things over: my nuptials were accordingly scheduled for three weeks from the day of our meeting. Needless to say, everything was hastily arranged, from the invitations to the flowers, and the whole affair had the quality of a shotgun wedding, albeit one whose urgency came not from an incipient baby but from the fear of my thorough­going ambivalence that was shared by my mother and my shrink. Dr. E. came to the ceremony, looking lovely and blond in a black velvet dress, but she left before the dinner, as if to draw a line between being a witness to the event and being a friend. She has gone on to achieve spectacular success in her career, and to this day I wonder whether she thinks of her intervention as courageous or a mistake of her youth.

Two of my therapists died on me, one quite suddenly only months after I started seeing her and the other after suffering a recurrence of leukemia during my treatment with him. A third committed suicide, jumping off the roof of the very building where I had gone to see him. He had struck me as slightly forlorn, verging on seedy, when I was his patient, like a character out of a W. Somerset Maugham novel. He moved his jaw a lot when he spoke, and I thought I heard his teeth click, suggesting ill-fitting dentures. After I arrived uncharacteristically early one day and overheard him asking out a woman on a date on his living-room phone, I decided I could not live with his desolation — my own was hard enough — and brought my visits to an end. He killed himself about a year later, and although I was not egotistical enough to imagine that his dire act had anything to do with me, I felt guilty all the same for having rejected him.

The analyst who died shortly after I began going to her was an energetic European of about 70. She went into the hospital for what was supposed to have been a routine matter and never came out. Even though this happened nearly three decades ago, to this day I think of Dr. Edrita Fried as the one who got away — the one who might have worked miracles, because she reminded me of a more benign version of my mother and thus would be uniquely capable of understanding the kind of damage that had been done. She was also, up to that point, the only therapist I chose on my own, without benefit of one of the two consultants my parents turned to for referrals. I discovered Dr. Fried by chance, stumbling across a book she wrote on the shelf of a local bookstore. It was called “The Courage to Change,” and I read it cover to cover almost on the spot; when I finished, I called her blind and, much to my surprise, she readily agreed to see me. (I thought of analysts as existing in a closed circle to which you could gain access only by mentioning the name of a colleague they approved of.) Although I must have seen Dr. Fried for just a month or two before she was hospitalized, I had already formed a strong attachment to her when I received the call that she died. I remember sitting on my bed in my dark little apartment on 79th Street, holding the phone in my hand even after the person on the other end hung up, feeling doomed.

Nothing, however, compared with the overwhelming loss I felt at the death of Dr. A., whom I saw in my mid-20s and whose re-emerged cancer I failed to pick up on even after he started to display the telltale signs of radiation treatment: skin that was reddened and raw and a toupee that covered up his thinning hair, which I didn’t at the time recognize as a toupee at all but thought of as a strange new Prince Valiant-like hairstyle he just happened to be trying out. I even questioned him about it. How did you suddenly sprout bangs? You’ve always parted your hair to the side before. That made me cringe later on when I realized the truth of the matter. Even if I could forgive myself for misreading the physical clues, I should have known something was up when he suddenly announced that he was taking an impromptu vacation during the following spring instead of waiting for the proverbial shrinkless August. (The majority of therapists take August off, as if it were a religious obligation, leaving their patients to stew in their own juices.) He was suspiciously specific about the details, almost as if he were trying to avoid any probing questions by giving me more information than I could ever need up front. First, he told me, he was planning to visit a sick uncle, then to join his family on one of their athletic trips — the kind that featured canoes and tents instead of hotel rooms — across some carefully selected part of the American wilderness. I should have smelled a rat right there and then, but the truth was that I had never been informed of Dr. A.’s illness in the first place and probably would have disavowed the evidence of its return even if I had, so focused was I on my life with him inside his office.

The trouble, you see, was that I loved Dr. A., even though this often took the form of my fighting with him. Because he happened to have a small red rug under his chair, for instance, I saw fit to tell him that red was my least favorite color. In the same vein, after I began to suspect that the carefully framed photos of mountains and forest scenes that hung on his walls were in fact taken by him — I could just imagine him trudging up a perilously narrow footpath with an up-to-the-minute camera slung across his chest — I made sure to tell him that I found them numbingly bland. In some way, I’m sure, I was trying to catch him out and prove him unworthy of my attachment, but for the most part these fights were just a ruse, a way of throwing him off the scent. Dr. A., whom I took to be in his 40s, was the only person in my life who paid close attention to my innermost being: I felt fully recognized by him, felt that he saw me as I was and that I could thus trust him with the bad as well as the good about myself. Who else besides a therapist, when it comes down to it, can you trust to accept all parts of you? Your parents, if you are lucky. So I loved Dr. A. and relied on him and fought with him, fought about the money I had to pay him, fought about the rug and the photos and his skin and his hairstyle until it was too late to straighten anything out.

Talk about a lack of proper “termination” of the psychoanalytic experience. That last week before he left, we scheduled an extra session. I felt worried about his departure, despite his elaborate explanations, and wondered out loud if Dr. A. was trying to punish me in some way for being so contentious a patient. “Of course not,” he said, laughing. “I like our fights, at least most of the time. No, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

But, as it turned out, I hadn’t been stuck with him, nor he with me. A day before he was due back I received a phone call from a woman with a curt voice who introduced herself as a colleague of Dr. A.’s and told me that he wouldn’t be returning from his “vacation,” a vacation he had obviously invented to cover a hideous final absence. No niceties, no anything. When I asked what was wrong, the woman became evasive and suggested I come in to talk. I made an appointment for the next day, which wasn’t soon enough, so filled was I with panic. The woman proved to be a psychiatrist herself, with the diplomas and seating arrangement to prove it, and she seemed intent on keeping Dr. A.’s whereabouts a secret. It was the most hideous of possible scenarios, Kafkaesque really: I found myself sitting in a strange doctor’s office asking the same questions over and over again, as though persistence would yield up answers. No, he wasn’t dead, it seemed, but he was sick, too sick to plan on seeing me again even if he did get well. What about his other patients, I wanted to know. And what was wrong with him exactly? Nothing, it appeared, could be divulged. All I was entitled to know was that Dr. A. wouldn’t be coming back and that it was important I find myself another doctor. “I can give you names,” she told me. “There are other good people who can help you.” Names! I didn’t want names. “I want Dr. A. back,” I said and started to cry.

I went home and wrote Dr. A. a long letter as he lay dying, for that clearly was what he was doing. In it I expressed all the gratitude and love I had failed — not wanted — to tell him about while he was irritatingly alive. I wrote him: “I am so sad my tears could fill your swimming pool.” I was alluding to a longstanding joke between us, about his needing the money I so reluctantly paid him so he could regrout the bottom of his pool. I started paying attention to the death notices, and I came upon what I was dreading one morning in early May. It was a couple of lines, rather anonymous sounding if you weren’t familiar with the subject. Dr. A. was dead, his last bill to me still unpaid.

This past April, while I was trying to decide on whether to stay with Dr. L., in spite of her failings, or to embark on a new treatment or to take a break from therapy altogether, I went for yet another consultation. Dr. F. was famous for his tough way with patients and his theoretical contributions to the field. Although he was short and slight, there was a palpable aura of power around him, a sense that here was a man who was used to whipping patients into shape. He spent three sessions on an intake of my history, jotting down notes. I listened to my self-accounting with a tired and critical ear, wondering why I was still so out to sea, still so mired in conflict. I had decided to spare Dr. F. none of my myriad doubts, fears, fantasies and unfulfilled wishes, even though articulating some of them made me inwardly wince. I wondered whether I had become too used to seeing myself through a pathological prism, one that didn’t leave room for small pleasures — for the fleeting nature of satisfaction. If there were many things I wished I had done, there were also things I was proud of, but there seemed to be no room for them here, in this cloistered space devoted to unearthing the clouds behind the silver linings. Happiness, as we all know, can’t be pursued directly, but what was the gain in tracking down every nuance of unhappiness, meticulously uncovering origins that left a lot to be desired but that could never be changed, no matter how skillfully you tried to reconstruct them?

Dr. F. and I made a fourth appointment for him to give me his impressions as well as his suggestions on what I should do next. Knowing his reputation for being confrontational with his patients, I braced myself for the worst. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for his ruthlessly pragmatic line of thinking, which had less to do with any inner torment I alluded to and more to do with the face I presented to the world, as if I were applying for a position as a flight attendant or a sales rep. He wondered, for instance, whether I thought of losing weight. Dumbstruck, I momentarily lost my footing, and then I answered that I had. He nodded and then coldly observed, “But you lack the motivation.” No, I said, I didn’t lack the motivation forever, I just lacked it for right now. Dr. F. looked entirely unconvinced and went on to ask me if I didn’t long to be part of a couple, to have someone to visit art galleries with. I said I did but that it hadn’t worked out thus far. “You are alone,” he repeated, as if I were in a state of denial. “I know,” I answered. “Many women are alone.” He then noted that I hadn’t written as much as I might have, that I procrastinated and was often late on coming through with assignments. His tone was smug and self-congratulatory, as if he had adduced these aspects of my character on his own when in reality he was simply throwing back at me the bits of incriminating information that I had willingly offered up. I found myself growing ever more defensive, ready to rise up and fight for the rights of unsvelte, unattached and underachieving women everywhere. Who was he to cast me in his patriarchal, bourgeois mold? Sure, I could lose some weight, but how had this come to be the main diagnostic issue? And I wasn’t completely alone: I had a daughter, I had friends, I had had my share of passion, ex-boyfriends and an ex-husband, there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in Dr. F.’s philosophy.

Dr. F. concluded with the recommendation that I see him or someone like him, who was trained in his methodology, which involved focusing on the transference between patient and analyst. I thanked him for his time and, a bit dazed from the encounter, went off to get a cup of coffee and think things over. At one point in my life I would have been thrilled to be offered the chance to see Dr. F. in all his brutal confidence, hoping that he could rearrange the shape of my character where no one had succeeded before. Now, however, in my 50s, I only felt persuaded that the last thing I wanted was to put myself into Dr. F.’s hands. I realized that I had been carrying a “Wizard of Oz”-like fantasy with me all these years, hoping to find someone who would not turn out to be just another little man behind a velvet curtain. It was not that I found all my shrinks to be impostors, exactly, but it dawned on me that I no longer had the requi­site belief in the process — perhaps had never had it in sufficient quantity. After 40-odd years of trying to find my perfect therapist, I didn’t want to explore my transferential relationship with Dr. F. or anyone. I didn’t want to pay high fees for 45 minutes of conversation with someone sitting opposite me whom I knew little about but who knew shameful facts about me. I didn’t want another one-way attachment, which would come to an end when I stopped paying for it. My skeptical 20-year-old daughter once referred to therapy as “emotional prostitution,” and although I thought the term a bit reductive, there was a piece of unpleasant truth to it.

I WENT BACK a week later to Dr. L., the woman I had been seeing for the past year and a half, and told her I wanted to stop therapy — for a while or for good, I wasn’t sure. To her credit, she didn’t try to persuade me that I was making a terrible mistake or suggest that we needed to discuss my wish to leave for the next 20 sessions. She simply let me go, with warm assurances that I could return whenever I felt the urge to. I left her office feeling liberated and scared at the same time. I started walking down the block, placing my feet deliberately one after the other, as if to confirm the reality of my un-propped-up existence. The world, it was good to see, was still standing, even as I detached myself from the ur-figure of the therapist.

All those years, I thought, all that money, all that unrequited love. Where had the experience taken me and was it worth the long, expensive ride? I couldn’t help wondering whether it kept me too cocooned in the past to the detriment of the present, too fixated on an unhappy childhood to make use of the opportunities of adulthood. Still, I recognized that therapy served me well in some ways, providing me with a habit of mind that enabled me to look at myself with a third eye and take some distance on my own repetitive patterns and compulsions. In the offices of countless therapists — some gifted, some less so — I sharpened my perceptions about myself and came to a deeper understanding of the persistent claim of early, unmet desires in all of us.

Therapy, you might say, became a kind of release valve for my life; it gave me a place to say the things I could say nowhere else, express the feelings that would be laughed at or frowned upon in the outside world — and in so doing helped to alleviate the insistent pressure of my darker thoughts. It buffered me as well as prodded me forward; above all, it provided a space for interior examination, an education in disillusioned realism that existed nowhere else on this cacophonous, frantic planet. If after many years of an almost-addictive attachment, I decided it was time to come up for air, I also knew it is in the nature of addicts never to be cured, but always to be in recovery. Good as it felt to strike out on my own, I was sure that one day in the not too distant future I would be making my way to a new therapist’s office, ready to pick up the story where I left off.


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August 19, 2010
Inside the Knockoff-Tennis-Shoe Factory
By NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE

A shopkeeper in Italy placed an order with a Chinese sneaker factory in Putian for 3,000 pairs of white Nike Tiempo indoor soccer shoes. It was early February, and the shopkeeper wanted the Tiempos pronto. Neither he nor Lin, the factory manager, were authorized to make Nikes. They would have no blueprints or instructions to follow. But Lin didn’t mind. He was used to working from scratch. A week later, Lin, who asked that I only use his first name, received a pair of authentic Tiempos, took them apart, studied their stitching and molding, drew up his own design and oversaw the production of 3,000 Nike clones. A month later, he shipped the shoes to Italy. “He’ll order more when there’s none left,” Lin told me recently, with confidence.

Lin has spent most of his adult life making sneakers, though he only entered the counterfeit business about five years ago. “What we make depends on the order,” Lin said. “But if someone wants Nikes, we’ll make them Nikes.” Putian, a “nest” for counterfeit-sneaker manufacturing, as one China-based intellectual-property lawyer put it, is in the south­eastern Chinese province of Fujian, just across the strait from Taiwan. In the late 1980s, multinational companies from all industries started outsourcing production to factories in the coastal provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Zhejiang. Industries tended to cluster in specific cities and sub­regions. For Putian, it was sneakers. By the mid-1990s, a new brand of factory, specializing in fakes, began copying authentic Nike, Adidas, Puma and Reebok shoes. Counterfeiters played a low-budget game of industrial espionage, bribing employees at the licensed factories to lift samples or copy blueprints. Shoes were even chucked over a factory wall, according to a worker at one of Nike’s Putian factories. It wasn’t unusual for counterfeit models to show up in stores before the real ones did.

“There’s no way to get inside anymore,” Lin told me, describing the enhanced security measures at the licensed factories: guards, cameras and secondary outer walls. “Now we just go to a shop that sells the real shoes, buy a pair from the store and duplicate them.” Counterfeits come in varying levels of quality depending on their intended market. Shoes from Putian are designed primarily for export, and in corporate-footwear and intellectual-property-rights circles, Putian has become synonymous with high-end fakes, shoes so sophisticated that it is difficult to distinguish the real ones from the counterfeits.

In the last fiscal year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than $260 million worth of counterfeit goods. The goods included counterfeit Snuggies, DVDs, brake pads, computer parts and baby formula. But for four years, counterfeit footwear has topped the seizure list of the customs service; in the last fiscal year it accounted for nearly 40 percent of total seizures. (Electronics made up the second-largest share in that year, with about 12 percent of the total.) The customs service doesn’t break down seizures by brand, but demand for the fake reflects demand for the real, and Nike is widely considered to be the most counterfeited brand. One Nike employee estimated that there was one fake Nike item for every two authentic ones. But Peter Koehler, Nike’s global counsel for brand and litigation, told me that “counting the number of counterfeits is frankly impossible.”

The factory is off-white, five stories tall and fronted by a brown metal gate. It was a seasonable summer afternoon when I visited. Lin is 32, with a wispy mustache and a disarming smirk. He met me outside the factory and took me through the gate. We scaled two flights of aluminum stairs and entered a production floor echoing with the grinding and hissing noises of industrial labor. A few dozen workers stuffed shoe tongues with padding, brushed glue onto foot molds and ran laces through nearly finished sneakers. Nike and Adidas boxes were stacked in one corner, a pile of Asics uppers in another. On this particular day, the factory was churning out hundreds of trail runners.

A help-wanted notice on the wall beside the gated entrance sought individuals with stitching skills for all shifts; the bulletin made no mention that the work was illegal. Such things are often just assumed in Putian. Managing a fake-shoe factory puts Lin in the middle of a multibillion-dollar transnational enterprise that produces, distributes and sells counterfeits. Of course, like coca farmers in Bolivia and opium croppers in Afghanistan, Lin doesn’t make the big money; that’s for the networks running importation and distribution. Last year, for example, the F.B.I. arrested several people of Balkan origin in New York and New Jersey for their suspected roles in “the importation of large amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, oxycodone, anabolic steroids, over a million pills of Ecstasy and counterfeit sneakers.” Dean Phillips, the chief of the F.B.I.’s Asian/African Criminal Enterprise Unit, describes counterfeiting as a “smart play” for criminals. The profits are high while the penalties are low. An Interpol analyst added: “If they get caught with a container of counterfeit sneakers, they lose their goods and get a mark on their customs records. But if they get caught with three kilos of coke, they’re going down for four to six years. That’s why you diversify.”

In September 2007, police officers in New York City seized 291,699 pairs of fake Nikes from two warehouses in Brooklyn. The early-­morning raids were part of a simultaneous crackdown on a counterfeiting ring with tentacles in China, New York and at least six other American states. Employing undercover agents and wiretapping, the joint operation — run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York State Police, the Niagara Falls Police Department and the New York Police Department — exposed a scheme in which counterfeit Nikes arrived from China, were stored in Brooklyn and then shipped, often via UPS, to stores in Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Milwaukee, Chicago, Newark, Pawtucket, R.I., and Indian­apolis. Lev J. Kubiak, an immigration agent involved in the case, said the total street value of the seized goods (had they been legitimately trademarked) “turned out to be just over $31 million.” Establishing provenance on the sneakers proved difficult. “Naturally the importation docs were not truthful,” an immigration spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail message, when I asked her where the shoes originated. “But probably in or near Putian.”

After touring the assembly line, Lin and I walked up another flight of stairs to the roof of the factory. A mild breeze blew off the creek that snaked behind the building. Half-constructed high-rise apartments, ensconced in scaffolding and green mesh, stood beside towering cranes. The pace of development in Putian, a secondary provincial city with a population of about three million, was dizzying. A cluster of unfinished apartment buildings visible from my hotel window seemed to be a floor higher every morning.

We sat in Lin’s rooftop office around a small table topped with a chessboard-size tea-making contraption. Lin proceeded to sweep the excess water off the tea table with a paint brush and then make a pot of green tea while recounting the transaction with the Italian shopkeeper earlier this year. After pouring cups for my translator and me, Lin excused himself and ran downstairs. He returned with three samples, including a single fake Nike Tiempo, the first of the batch, which was sent to the Italian buyer to make sure it met his standards. Scribbled on the side of the shoe in navy blue pen was a date and the man’s signature. While looking the shoes over myself, I noticed the label on the inside of the tongue read “Made in Vietnam.” That was all part of the subterfuge, Lin said, adding that there are “different levels of counterfeit. Some are low quality and don’t look anything like the originals. But some are high quality and look just like the real ones. The only way to tell the difference between the real ones and ours is by the smell of the glue.” He took back the shoe, buried his nose in the footbed and inhaled.

National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center is the anticounterfeiting headquarters in the United States. Situated among short stacks of concrete office buildings in Arlington, Va., the center brings together representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Food and Drug Administration, the F.B.I., the Patent and Trademark Office, the United States Postal Service, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and other government agencies. J. Scott Ballman, an immigration agent with short, sandy hair and a Tennessee accent, is the center’s deputy director. Since joining customs in the early 1980s, Ballman has tracked the evolution of law enforcement’s response to intellectual-property violators as closely as anyone. (Customs split after 9/11 into Customs and Border Protection, which handles interdiction, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which deals with investigations.) He worked on what he says was the first undercover intellectual-property case for the customs service when he and a team of agents investigated and ultimately arrested a group in Miami for assembling counterfeit watches in 1985. “Most production of this stuff has since been pushed out of the United States,” he told me.

In 1998, the National Security Council studied the impact of intellectual-­property crimes and concluded that federal law-enforcement efforts lacked coordination. An executive order soon followed, sketching out the role of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. Two years later a makeshift office opened in Washington, but after 9/11, chasing counterfeit goods lost priority. Ballman said: “Resources and focus changed overnight. Agents were detailed elsewhere and moved away from thinking about I.P. to counterterrorism and weapons of mass destruction.”

The Obama administration has made intellectual property more of a focus. “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people,” President Obama said in a speech in March. “But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.” To implement his intellectual-property strategy, Obama appointed an intellectual-property-enforcement coordinator, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement invigorated the property-rights coordination center.

Can such efforts make a difference? “You’re not going to arrest your way out of this,” Bob Barchiesi, president of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, told me in a despairing tone this past spring. As long as there is a demand, he insisted, there will be supply. He had just returned from a trip to China, the point of origin for nearly 80 percent of all goods seized by Customs and Border Protection in the previous fiscal year. One day, Barchiesi observed a factory raid where counterfeit jeans were seized by the Chinese authorities. The factory, its employees and all its equipment remained in place. Barchiesi called the raid a “propaganda show.”

Efforts to have intellectual-property rights honored in China are not new. Soon after Gilbert Stuart completed his Athenaeum portrait of George Washington in 1796, the one that’s reproduced today on the front of every $1 bill, a Philadelphia ship captain named John Swords set sail for southeast China. Once in Canton, in modern-day Guangdong province, Swords ordered 100 unauthorized replicas of the Washington portrait, which were painted on glass. (Two replicas had somehow already made their way to China and served as the template.) Stuart was furious when he learned of Swords’s activities and, in 1801, he sued Swords in a Pennsylvania court and won. The damage was probably done, however. Even more than a century later, Antiques Magazine observed, “a good many portraits of George Washington painted on glass are knocking about the country.”

But China’s counterfeiting dynamic is more complicated than foreign goods being copied in places like Putian. Chinese sneaker brands, for instance, are also counterfeited. And the domestic debate about ensuring intellectual-property rights dates to at least the middle of the 19th century, said Mark Cohen, who moved to Beijing in 2004 to be the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s first permanent intellectual-property representative at the American Embassy. (He has since become co-chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce’s intellectual-property committee.) One initiative of the Taiping Rebellion during the 1850s, Cohen told me, was to “draft a patent law to encourage Chinese innovation.” Over a cappuccino one morning at an upscale cafe in Beijing, Cohen criticized the notion of Chinese government negligence, which he called overly simplistic. “People come to this environment with certain assumptions that all this counterfeiting must mean that there’s no one enforcing,” he said. “But there’s loads of people enforcing! There’s enough I.P. officials” — at least several hundred thousand by his estimate — “to make a small European country.”

Numbers don’t necessarily spell efficiency, of course. Joe Simone, an intellectual-property lawyer with Baker & McKenzie in China, said: “This is police work, but [the Chinese government] isn’t putting enough police on it. Ninety-nine percent of the enforcement work is nothing but bureaucrats.” He questioned whether the current enforcement system was effective. Lin, the counterfeiter from Putian, told me about instances in which local authorities had searched his factory or even forced him to close in daytime, leaving him to run the factory at night. But production always goes on.

Beijing’s top intellectual-property officials, meanwhile, seem to disagree over what even constitutes counterfeiting. Last year, a debate occurred between the heads of the State Intellectual Property Office and the National Copyright Administration. The dispute revolved around shanzhai, a term that translates literally into “mountain fortress”; in contemporary usage, it connotes counterfeiting that you should take pride in. There are shanzhai iPhones and shanzhai Porsches.

In February 2009, a reporter asked Tian Lipu, the commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office, whether shanzhai was something to be esteemed. “I am an intellectual-property-rights worker,” Tian curtly replied. “Using other people’s intellectual property without authorization is against the law.” Chinese culture, he added, was not about imitating and plagiarizing others. But one month later, Liu Binjie, from the National Copyright Administration, drew a distinction between shanzhai and counterfeiting. “Shanzhai shows the cultural creativity of the common people,” Liu said. “It fits a market need, and people like it. We have to guide shanzhai culture and regulate it.” Soon after that, the mayor of Shenzhen, an industrial city near Hong Kong, reportedly urged local businessmen to ignore lofty debates about what is and isn’t defined as counterfeiting and to “not worry about the problem of fighting against plagiarism” and “just focus on doing business.”

This contradictory political environment parallels — or perhaps fosters — a seemingly confused corporate response. There is no doubt that, as with Washington’s Athenaeum portrait, there are today a “good many” fake sneakers “knocking about” China, the United States, Italy and the rest of the world. But none of the major footwear companies I contacted ventured an estimate of the scale of their counterfeiting problems. For them, it’s something better not discussed. Peter Humphrey, the founder of a risk consultancy firm in Beijing called ChinaWhys, suggested this could be for one of two reasons: a wariness of “upsetting the Chinese authorities” or being “afraid to admit publicly too loud” that they have a counterfeiting problem. “Because when word gets around the consumer market,” Humphrey said, “then everyone starts wondering if their shoes are real or not.”

How do counterfeit products translate to the bottom line of the legitimate company? Is each fake Nike or Adidas tennis shoe a lost sale? A senior employee at a major athletic-footwear company, speaking on condition of anonymity, reflected on counterfeiting as a simple fact of industrial life: “Does it cut into our business? Probably not. Is it frustrating? . . . Of course. But we put it as a form of flattery, I guess.”

It could also be a form of industrial training. In Putian, Lin told me of his real ambitions. “Making counterfeit shoes is a transitional choice,” he said. “We are developing our own brand now. In the longer term we want to make all our own brands, to make our own reputation.” Lin’s goals seemed in line with China’s de facto counterfeiting policy: to discourage it as a matter of law, but also to hope, as a matter of laissez-faire industrial-development policy, that the skills being acquired will eventually result in strong legitimate businesses.

Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker industry operates in the open. Just type “Putian Nike” into any Internet search engine, and hundreds of results immediately turn up, directing you to Putian-based Web sites selling fake shoes. (Putian’s counterfeit-sneaker business has become so renowned that Alibaba.com, an online marketplace, offers a page warning buyers to exercise caution when dealing with suppliers from Putian.) “People who make the product and sell the product are no longer secret,” says Harley Lewin, an intellectual-property lawyer at the firm McCarter & English. “Where sellers in the past were unwilling to disclose who they were, these days it’s a piece of cake” to find them.

Student Street in downtown Putian is a leafy, two-lane road lined with stores stocked with nothing but fake tennis shoes. I spent an afternoon browsing their wares. Like the products inside, the stores varied in quality. One resembled an Urban Outfitters — exposed brick and ductwork, sunlight beaming through a windowed facade, down-tempo electronica playing in the background — but the majority of the stores appeared to value enterprise over aesthetics, with storefronts made of metal shutters left ajar to indicate they were open for business. I ducked into one and discovered a single room with two opposing walls covered in sneakers shrink-wrapped in clear plastic: Air Jordans, the latest LeBron James models, Vibram FiveFingers and more. It was like a Foot Locker for fakes.

I pulled a pair of black Nike Frees from the rack, spun them in my hands, folded the sole back and forth, tugged at the stitching and sniffed the glue; every budding aficionado has their tasting routine. (I never could detect the smell of “bad” glue.) The shoes, which cost about $12 at the Student Street shops, seemed indistinguishable from the pair my wife bought for $85 in the United States. “I don’t know if I could tell a [fake] shoe right off the bat,” Ballman, the deputy director of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, told me. If someone who specialized in intellectual-property-rights enforcement most of his career wasn’t sure he could tell the difference, how could I? (Ballman said the key was that fake shoes have a “heavy” glue smell.) As one Chinese salesman selling counterfeits in Beijing told me: “The shoes are original. It’s just the brands that are fake.”

“Are you looking to buy or sell?” a tall, 30-something woman with bangs asked as I examined the Nike Frees. Her husband sat behind her, facing a large desktop-computer monitor. Their young daughter sat at another computer, wearing a headset and playing video games. The shop doubled as a wholesaler. The woman later confided that she and her husband ran a small factory as well as the store. They were on the lookout for ways to get their sneakers to market and for sales agents who could sell their shoes in the West. “We can give a discount if you order in bulk,” she said.

I asked how long it would take to make 2,000 pairs. “Once you send us the model, about a month,” she said. Her husband spoke up and assured me that the shoes “would be the highest quality,” adding, “we’ll use all the same materials. All the best materials are available in Putian.” (Lin, however, disputed that and said that using the same materials would quickly drive the price up.)

“How would I get 2,000 pairs of counterfeits past customs agents in the United States?” I asked.

“They won’t come from Putian,” he said. Or at least the documents wouldn’t indicate that. “We usually ship through Hong Kong on our way to America. Don’t worry. We do this all the time.”

A week later, I flew to Hong Kong to meet with a private detective named Ted Kavowras. Kavowras runs Panoramic Consulting, an investigative firm employing 30 people in China and Hong Kong. (He is also the China and Hong Kong ambassador for the World Association of Detectives.) His forte is investigating counterfeit factories and distribution networks. “Until seven years ago, to export from China was much more complex, because you didn’t have the Internet and didn’t have that window into the world,” he told me one evening over Diet Cokes and skewers of grilled octopus at a small Japanese restaurant near his office. “So most of the exports that came out of China had to go through these state-owned shipping companies. It was all pretty centralized. Now it’s pretty much a free-for-all.”

Kavowras is a pear-shaped 48-year-old with pasty skin and a brash demeanor. The night after we met for Japanese food, he showed up at a fancy steakhouse wearing a black velour Fila tracksuit. (“What? I’m from Brooklyn,” he said with a shoulder shrug and pursed lips.) Kavowras grew up in New York City and joined the New York Police Department soon after graduating from high school. Three years later he retired on disability. He ended up working “a lot of law-enforcement stuff,” including security-­guard duties, but he found it unrewarding. “When you’re not the real thing, you’re not the real thing,” he said. Kavowras then worked in production with The New York Times but quit after five years and moved to Asia. In 1994, Pinkerton offered him a job in Guangzhou, China. “I was at the right place at the right time with the right skill set,” he said. Five years later, Kavowras formed Panoramic.

Kavowras estimates that he works about 800 cases a year, encompassing everything from sneakers to watches to industrial mining pumps. In 2002, New Balance hired him to nose around a factory run by one of its former licensees in China, a Taiwanese businessman named Horace Chang. According to press reports, Chang had more or less gone rogue. Though he had been previously contracted by New Balance to make and distribute sneakers, relations turned bad, and New Balance canceled the contract. But Chang continued making shoes that bore the New Balance trademark without permission. New Balance asked Kavowras to get inside Chang’s operation and report back. “I use a wonderful investigative methodology that works like a dream,” Kavowras said when I asked him how a former street cop from Brooklyn goes undercover in China. “Drug dealers have to deal drugs, and counterfeiters have to sell their goods. When I show up at a counterfeit factory, I look like a pretty girl on prom night. I look like a big buyer who they can export a lot of goods to.” Chang eventually quit making counterfeit New Balance shoes.

If there’s one commonality throughout the counterfeit world, it’s deception. Along the top of a file cabinet in Kavowras’s office, located at the end of a hallway on an upper floor of a quiet building, was a row of putty heads that a Hollywood makeup artist had designed so that Kavowras and his staff could experiment with disguises: hats, sunglasses, beards and mustaches, fake teeth. “I’m the only working actor who’s not waiting tables on the weekend,” Kavowras joked. A half-dozen fax machines were programmed to display the country codes and phone numbers of the overseas companies that Kavowras and his colleagues pretended to represent. Each employee kept a tray stacked with various business cards to corroborate their multiple identities. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” said Kavowras, who also rents four shell offices around Hong Kong where he meets “targets.”

Kavowras crossed the office to a shelf piled with purses and backpacks embedded with hidden cameras. I asked him how the recession had affected the detective business. “Business definitely slowed down last year,” he said. Corporate brand-protection budgets were slashed, and Kavowras’s caseload dropped. “But we’ve been twice as busy this year. Whatever companies avoided last year came back to haunt them this year. You can’t run away from these issues. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just China, we don’t really have a market in China.’ But if it’s in China, it’s going to get out. It’s going to wash up on beaches all over the world.”

Where did he see the counterfeit industry going next?

“It’s a constant battle,” he said.

“Like ‘the War on Drugs’-kind of constant battle?” I asked.

“That’s different,” he said. Kavowras popped in a set of fake teeth and smiled. “I see the battle staying the same, just the battleground changing. More and more industrial work is shifting to Vietnam. Cambodia too, though it’s still a bit messy there. It’s going to become more international.” And that, in all likelihood, will mean more agents, more detectives and more money spent to pursue fake sneakers that no one is quite sure they can identify.


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July 21, 2010
The Yoga Mogul
By MIMI SWARTZ

There is so much going on in John Friend’s life right now that an assistant once teased him about waking just before dawn and calling to ask for coffee, only to be reminded that he, Friend, was in Quito, Munich or Seoul, while the assistant was back at home base in the Woodlands, a cushy suburb north of Houston. That Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles of yoga, has an assistant is itself significant; many people still picture yogis as serene guys who live in respectable deprivation in places like Mysore or Pune, India, and wait for disciples to find them. Not Friend.

Consider one afternoon in early June when he had just left a meeting with potential investors in Seattle, having flown to the West Coast after several months of giving Anusara workshops in Tokyo, Taipei, Bali and Morrisville, N.C., and was making a brief stopover in the Woodlands on his way to teach more workshops in Copenhagen, Munich, Paris and Park City, Utah — stops on his “Melt Your Heart, Blow Your Mind Tour.” Friend’s modest, two-story faux Tudor home (filled with statues of Hindu gods, prayer flags and other souvenirs of his myriad travels) was a semimaelstrom of recently washed clothes, piled-up mail and stacks of unread publications with headlines like “Nine Life-Altering Lessons” — a reflection of the semimaelstrom that is his life.

When Friend wasn’t off leading workshops, he was helping plan the yoga-and-music Wanderlust festival to be held this week in Squaw Valley and the Anusara Grand Gathering in Estes Park, Colo., in September, the lead-in to Yoga Journal’s annual weeklong conference featuring major American yoga teachers. “John brings in huge numbers,” says Elana Maggal, conference director for Yoga Journal, the bible for practitioners. “In 2008, his was the largest yoga class ever held at our conference. We had 800 people all in one room. We had a waiting list of 200. Needless to say, we want to replicate that.”

On the road and at home, Friend also keeps tabs on all the ancillary businesses he has created in the last 13 years, since Anusara was born: his global Anusara expansion (Studio Yoggy, one of the biggest yoga-school chains in Japan, will be offering Anusara yoga classes); his Anusara publishing ventures (he has commissioned a history of yoga and continues to work on his own book, albeit sporadically); and his Anusara yoga-wear business (Friend has his own line, but also works with Adidas, which is using Anusara yoga trainers in its worldwide yoga push). He is also financing historical yoga research in Nepal and Kashmir.

Simultaneously, Friend is trying to raise money for his most ambitious project to date, the Center, which he is planning to locate in meta-crunchy Encinitas, Calif. Friend expects the Center, with art, music and theater, in addition to yoga, to expand the Anusara “community” — his word — which currently includes 200,000 students in 70 countries and about 1,200 licensed-by-John-Friend teachers. In his downtime, Friend regularly sends Twitter messages to his 5,000 followers and to his 8,000 Facebook fans. But there is always more to do: during the 36 hours he spent at home, he taped his portion of a DVD titled “Titans of Yoga,” in which he will appear with other American yogis like Shiva Rea and David Swenson. (“Namaste,” he said, relaxed before the camera in a white linen shirt and khakis. “I’m John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga. I’ve been practicing for 40 years. . . . Yoga is my life. It’s not just something I practice on a sticky mat.”)

Friend, buoyantly serene, settled himself into an overstuffed leather chair in his living room, while his assistant du jour, a willowy woman named Margaret, padded in and out, dispensing water and taking notes. “We were up till 3 a.m. last night,” he said, capping a recitation of all his on-the-fly planning. Friend rubbed his eyes and abandoned attempts to stifle yawns. It’s tiring being one of the most famous — and one of the most entrepreneurial — yogis on the planet. Friend, who is 51, has close-cropped curls that are snowy white; there is a significant crease between his slate blue eyes; and he is just a little doughy. Though he is frequently described as charismatic, he is a bit distracted in repose. But once he starts talking about Anusara, his boyish energy returns. You almost expect him to levitate.

Friend is not so much a conversationalist as a monologuist, an occupational hazard of someone who urges hundreds of people at a time to bend, stretch and connect with “the extremely intelligent spirit within that is mind-blowingly revealing.” As he tried to sum up his creation, his eyes slipped out of focus as he zigged into tantric philosophy and zagged into Anusara’s metaphysical underpinnings — but that didn’t really get him where he wanted to go. He cited the “top scholars” who have helped him refine Anusara’s message. Then he talked about the freedom of Anusara; it’s nothing like the more rigid schools that demand students repeat the same poses in the same way at every single class, nor is it the kind of practice in which teachers withhold praise, lest students become too egocentric. “Anusara is positive,” Friend said, resting his head on the back of his chair and absently caressing one of many highly polished orbs on an adjacent table. “It’s accessible. Easily applicable. And yet it has depth and sophistication.”

Consider those religions that focus on sin and damnation, on discipline instead of joy. “Fundamentally they say no,” he told me. “While Anusara is a yes.”

Friend’s world was coming back into focus. His eyes became brighter, and his jet lag fell away, dissolved by this insight.

“We are,” Friend said, beaming, “the Yoga of Yes.”

The first time I encountered John Friend was at a workshop at a Woodlands community college nearly 10 years ago. At the time I was practicing a stricter form of yoga, and Friend’s joke-cracking and mind-boggling acrobatics — he is famous for his handstands — were something of a revelation. Yoga could be . . . fun? Friend’s assistants then were mostly middle-aged suburban women who had once been his students, and if the yoga was no easier than what I had been practicing, their touch and encouragement was both comforting and inspiring. Failing to execute a pose meant nothing more than that you might succeed next time. As Friend led us through the poses, he spoke in a soft voice, insisting that we contain divinity within ourselves and must discover and express our inner goodness to fulfill our obligation to better our world. How to do so was never expressly stated — except for practicing yoga, of course — but I left the workshop feeling better physically, mentally and emotionally.

I didn’t know at the time that this was my introduction to what others call “the cult of John.” If Friend could be compared with anyone outside the yoga world — and I am not sure he would like this comparison — it would be Joel Osteen, the magnetic evangelical megachurch minister with the feel-good message and a book-and-television empire. Osteen’s God is loving and forgiving. Osteen doesn’t get hung up on dogma, and thus everybody is welcome.

Similarly, Friend’s yoga is based on classic hatha-yoga postures — he has refined them using what he calls “universal principles of alignment” — but it can be as challenging as a student wants it to be. His classes are less about toned abs than about self-expression and enjoyment. (Adjustments don’t make the poses “right,” for instance, they make them “more beautiful.”) You don’t have to be a vegan to become an Anusaran, and unless you want to be an Anusara teacher, you don’t have to master complex texts. He uses just enough Sanskrit to be exotic without being incomprehensible. Friend’s “dharma talks” — short sermons — are based largely on simplified tantric principles (not, he stresses, the ones relating to tantric sex): students learn that they are divine beings, that goodness always lies within, that by opening to God’s will — opening to grace, Friend calls it — “you actually become vastly more powerful than the limited person that you usually identify with.” Instead of joining a megachurch, you join the Anusara kula, Sanskrit for family. Like Osteen, Friend has found a way to attract large numbers of people by softening the hard edges of a rigid ideal and by applying the full force of his personality to achieving that goal.

“He has created his own community very self-consciously,” says Stefanie Syman, the author of “The Subtle Body,” a new history of American yoga. “Most charismatic teachers do that. What happens is if you are successful deliberately or inadvertently, a lot of students evangelize on your behalf and spread the word.” Friend’s success also speaks to the dissolution of traditional communities. “People used to find community at their church or synagogue or club or league,” Syman notes. For some, yoga now serves that function. “Especially if you have an intense physical practice and are interested in transformation, you feel like you’ve lived through something with someone. You have an intimacy with them that you don’t have with anyone else.”

Certainly the fan letters I asked to see bore that idea out: “My experience at your conference altered my being,” wrote one student. “I drove through the mountains and stopped every few minutes to write about the dancing rivers and the aspen paving my way with liquid gold.” Another wrote, “This was the first time in a room of 200 people that I did not feel overwhelmed, out of place or somehow in the wrong room.”

Friend’s timing could not be better. Some 16 million Americans now practice yoga, a 5,000-year-old mental, physical and spiritual discipline brought to us by Indian gurus. Nowadays there aren’t just hourly classes in major American cities but also in places like Deephaven, Minn., and Hattiesburg, Miss. “Namaste,” the traditional end-of-class blessing, has become a punch line. A school in Houston even offers “jello shots” after class. If yoga began as a meditation technique for people all too familiar with physical as well as mental suffering — with poses, or asanas, devised to assist in reaching a transcendentally blissful state — it has taken on a distinctly American cast. It has become much more about doing than being. More about happiness than meaning. It’s a weight-loss technique and a stress-management tool, a gateway to an exploding market for workout clothes and equipment. Spending on yoga classes, books, clothes, Om amulets, mats and more has increased 87 percent since 2004, to $5.7 billion a year. As yoga has developed a vigorous capitalistic side, traditionalists have expressed their dismay. “We need introspection, and this yoga” — commercialized yoga — “is not about introspection,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, an author of eight yoga books and a founder of Yoga Journal. “We have a whole country full of restive people who are not contemplative. The idea of the asana is to calm you to prepare you to move at a human pace, not the pace of electrons on the computer.”

Like many other small-stakes subcultures — the world of poetry, or academia, say — yoga has become embroiled in head-of-a-pin type arguments. In yoga’s case it centers on authenticity. The fight over whether it is a spiritual or a physical practice has raged virtually since its inception, but now in the United States this question has been tinted with issues of competition, status and sweat. People who favor the demanding flow of Ashtanga yoga, for instance, might scoff at those who practice Iyengar yoga, which is slow-moving but stresses proper placement of the body in the poses. (Think of boot camp versus a classical ballet lesson.) Then again, serious meditators — those who revel in stillness and make pilgrimages to ashrams in India in search of yoga masters — disdain the spandex-clad 20-somethings who dash to hot-yoga class to burn off yesterday’s cheeseburgers. For a yoga teacher, these debates spell opportunity: anyone whose technique takes off — or promises some sort of transformation, spiritual, physical or both — can become a star, supplementing the average yoga teacher’s meager $35,000 annual income with cash generated from workshops, lectures, books, clothing, DVDs.

Friend set out to build his brand by straddling yoga’s two poles: he is trying to enhance yoga’s spiritual aspects by training teachers to speak inspirationally as they teach their students to master the postures. In his teacher-training manual, Friend spends a great deal of time on philosophy and writes that the spiritual effects of yoga are more important than the physical ones. He expresses this aim in language that draws as much from Dale Carnegie and the American idiom of self-improvement as from Hindu philosophy. Teachers, he writes, should “lead the students to that magical place where everyone’s heart opens naturally and where everyone feels empowered and filled with self love.”

Friend, who has a degree in finance and accounting, has also corporatized the practice. Like all yoga stars, he’s a road warrior, giving workshops as a way to drum up business. But Friend’s niche is to be less exotic than some yogis while being more spiritual than the most commercial ones. He calls himself Anusara’s general manager, as opposed to its guru. He doesn’t wear a turban like some Kundalini yoga teachers, or his hair exceedingly long, like David Life, a founder of Jivamukti yoga. Nor does he define the spiritual aspects of yoga the way some schools do — he doesn’t press students to embrace animal rights or to chant for extended periods. And he doesn’t stick to the same sequence each time in class. On the other hand, Friend brings in enough spirituality and gentleness to differentiate himself from the hot and heavy yoga types, like the bandanna-wearing power-yoga creator, Baron Baptiste. Friend also would not be confused with the Indian master Bikram Choudhury, who created and franchised a kind of hot yoga, which stresses transformation through a rigid workout in a 100-plus-degree room, not through happy sermonettes. Friend’s persona is that of an easygoing guy with an easygoing yoga — except when it comes to business. Friend is not above a little intrayoga competitive trash talk to make his point: People know about physically oriented yoga, he said, “but as we grow they are going to learn about Anusara. Then people can choose — either they are going to go to a fast-food joint or a fine restaurant.”

Not surprisingly, Friend’s detractors — and there are at least as many as admirers — claim that he has watered down and commercialized a hallowed tradition for his own gain. Anusara Inc. currently has about $2 million a year in revenue, though Friend says, “We spend as much as we bring in, so we have little profit.” An Anusara prospectus from the spring predicted that revenue could double by 2012. Friend is the sole stockholder in the company and pays himself a salary that is just under $100,000 — a fortune in the yoga world. Friend, of course, is not ashamed to sell this new American cocktail of spirituality and exercise. How can people get the word unless he spreads it? “There’s no differentiation between yoga philosophy and business philosophy,” he said of Anusara. “We honor spirit, based on our vision that life is good.”

He was in fine form last spring at a Melt Your Heart, Blow Your Mind workshop in Hollywood, where about 500 people, mostly young, mostly women and most of them spectacularly fit, paid around $150 for three days of nonstop Anusara. The event was held in the ballroom of an Armenian cultural center on Vine Street, complete with a 5,000-square-foot stained-glass ceiling, which the hyperbolic Friend could not resist calling “the biggest, most beautiful stained-glass window in the world.” The stage featured pots of multicolored zinnias, along with statues of the Hindu gods Americans tend to favor: the elephant-trunked Ganesh, remover of obstacles; and Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and beauty. In an adjacent hallway, yoga books, Anusara T-shirts and DVDS, Hindu statuettes and Om refrigerator magnets were on sale.

Friend entered the room almost imperceptibly but was soon surrounded by his students, who giggled at his responses and were eager for his touch. (One sign that Friend, who is divorced, has reached rock-star yogi status: men and women press hotel-room keys into his hands at workshops.) Unlike many, more severe yoga masters, Friend worked the crowd like a contestant on “Last Comic Standing”: “Cool color!” he said, inspecting a student’s polished toenails, or “Pray for him,” when he guided a student into a difficult pose. And for hours on end, he never stopped talking, seemingly without drawing breath, about the light that always follows the darkness, about being a better person than you were a year ago and about always, always, giving your all, on the mat and elsewhere. “Whatever you’ve got, you’ve got to rock it out fully,” he said in Los Angeles. “You’ve got to work the edge. The edge is so cool.”

No one could ever accuse Friend of holding back. The final event of the Hollywood workshop was a laser light show. Everyone locked eyes on a far wall, oohing and ahhing to undulating beams of bright green, yellow, red, orange and blue that supposedly reflected the flow of energy, or chakras, in our bodies. “Hey, John,” someone finally cracked. “Are you gonna put some Pink Floyd on?”

As much as Friend preaches the gospel of openness, he’s relatively guarded about the story of his own life. Like a lot of celebrities, he tells a version of his history from which he never deviates: his father, a former sportscaster and marketing executive, had economic troubles and so moved the family from the Rust Belt to Texas; his mother was an intellectually gifted Southern belle and a Juilliard graduate with a theatrical flair. Colleagues told me, and Friend concurred, that when his mother was ill — she died of cancer in 2002 — Friend, the older of two boys, strived to cheer her up with his wisecracks. It was she who introduced Friend to yoga. He wore braces as a child to correct his pigeon toes; after the braces came off, his mother started him on the practice, and he never stopped. His mother gave him books about yogis too, and soon Superman and Batman had little allure. “I wanted to be a yogi because they knew the mysteries of life,” he told me. “They could dematerialize.” He was obsessed with magic (the word is on the vanity plate of his silver BMW, which he inherited from his mother) — and followed raptly the tales of miraculous transformations he heard in the different churches his mother insisted they visit every Sunday. As he grew older, Friend played drums in a rock band, a portal to another kind of transformation to be sure, but one that still spoke to a desire for a very public life.

Friend may not have known it at the time, but he connected with yoga at a critical point in its history in America. As Syman notes in “The Subtle Body,” yoga in the United States dates to the late 19th century, when it was first propagated by Indian yogis like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote “Autobiography of a Yogi.” But the yoga that ultimately prevailed here was not the stringent, meditative practice supposedly leading to spiritual bliss that was more common in India; its health and beauty benefits were always a better sell. (A nice yoga-fan through line runs from Gloria Swanson to Ali MacGraw to Christy Turlington.) By 1976, five million Americans had signed on.

Friend was never content to be just another yoga enthusiast. Horatio Alger could have been one of his swamis. He bought himself a car when he turned 16 with money he made working after school. In 1983, he graduated from Texas A&M University — no bastion of any counterculture — and paid his dues as a financial analyst until he took the leap and began teaching yoga full time. By 1987 he was teaching Houston housewives and, he likes to joke, the occasional farmer in overalls. He also began traveling to workshops all over the country, including one with Judith Hanson Lasater, who introduced him to Iyengar yoga. Within a few years, Friend had taken workshop with B.K.S. Iyengar himself and with Pattabhi Jois, the creator of Ashtanga.

In other words, Friend was aligning himself with the greats of contemporary yoga, Indians whose teachings were then shaping the yoga world. (Lineage is as important in yoga as it is to Boston bluebloods.) By 1989 he was in Pune, for a month of study with Iyengar. That year, at age 30, he gave a confounding performance on a rickety wooden platform at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India (the same one Elizabeth Gilbert described in “Eat, Pray, Love”). In videos taken that day, Friend looks barely beyond his teens: his brown hair and beard were scraggly, and he was so slight from a bad intestinal virus that he seemed incapable of moving, much less contorting into a lotus position while balancing in handstand. But that is what he did. Friend’s skill was impressive — he was then practicing for a minimum of three hours every day — but what really set him apart was his style, which conveyed both bravado and vulnerability. The hundreds of Indians and Americans present that day gave him a standing ovation, and from then on, the story goes, John Friend was not just the Iyengar teacher for the ashram but a bona fide yoga star, with invitations to teach around the world. “There was a lot of grace involved,” he told me.

As Friend rose to higher positions in the Iyengar organization — he spent four years on the board in the 1990s — he also observed and absorbed Iyengar’s exacting standards of teacher certification, which require the study of anatomy, physiology, philosophy and ethics, as well as teaching a demonstration class and passing a written exam. From the leader of the Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — no stranger herself to American celebrity — Friend learned how to give intimate, inspirational talks to crowds of thousands. He also befriended American scholars of Eastern spirituality studying in India. In each of these encounters, Friend was the yogic equivalent of a sponge, or as one associate recalled, “He was a man with a mission.” The mission then was to reclaim yoga from the many U.S .teachers who were so consumed with the physical practice — it was all about the workout — that they sweated out any trace of spirituality.

Equally important, Friend wanted to create a new yoga school that wasn’t just accessible but commercially sustainable. In the ensuing years, Friend, restless, eager and supremely confident, broke with Iyengar and distanced himself from Chidvilasananda as he began to refine what he saw as his own yoga technique. As he wrote in 1995, “Finally I realized that I was not fully aligned with Mr. Iyengar’s philosophy and method, so it was not dharmic of me to continue to use his name to describe my teaching style.” Their philosophical differences — the kind of intrayogic argument best left to the professionals — were compounded by mentor-disciple issues. In essence, Friend wanted a kinder, gentler yoga school — though his critics say he simply wanted to build his own empire, and grafted a touchy-feely teaching method onto what remains, essentially, Iyengar yoga. (Whether you believe Friend felt constricted or Iyengar felt betrayed, a residue of bad feeling remains.) By 1997 Friend had come up with a name, Anusara, and a mission statement. “Anusara yoga is a hatha-yoga system that unites universal principles of alignment with a philosophy that is epitomized by what I call ‘celebration of the heart,’ ” he wrote.

He merged his entrepreneurial nature with his yogic one. Friend wrote his own teacher-training manual, which is about as detailed as an oil-refinery operations handbook. Like Iyengar, he created a teacher-certification program; his students must complete a minimum of 200 hours of training at workshops — an expense that can require extensive travel — buy his training manual ($30) and pass his 30-hour take-home test. A $195 training DVD is also recommended. There are licensing fees of around $100 that must be renewed annually. In this way, Friend maintains quality control and an income stream, but this standardization has cost him the loyalty of older teachers who find the new rules somewhat unyogic. Friend also discourages Anusara studio owners from including other forms of yoga at their schools, lest they dilute his brand. As one former associate, Douglas Keller, put it, “If a particular McDonald’s store chooses to start serving spaghetti, McDonald’s can decide to revoke its franchise.”

On a brilliant day last April, Friend was in a celebratory mood. He took his small, young staff to an especially nice Woodlands restaurant, where they sat in a private room with fresh flowers, white tablecloths and Champagne. The occasion was Anusara’s 13th birthday and a promising meeting with some investors about the Center, the latest plan to extend Anusaraworld. “Our little company is expanding,” Friend told the group, in between checking texts and e-mail. Friend was, then as always, between tours — he’d been in Detroit and was heading for Japan but already seemed in three places at once.

“What is the company? Anusara!” he declared. “We do yoga lifestyle, helping people to be happy. How do you like that?” The staff looked happy but slightly wary, like kids taken to a nice restaurant by a demanding parent.

Before anyone ordered food, Friend started in on another dharma talk/monologue about the Center, or as he put it, “the home of the kula.” There would be a soundstage and theater for yoga events, along with editing facilities for live streaming video, the better to teach in India as well as Peoria. There would be a 1,000-square-foot retail boutique too. In his prospectus, Friend described the Center as the main artistic training venue for Anusara yoga globally, which would also serve as a place to “make living art, to turn every day into an art project. Shri is the lustrous beauty which turns your mind to the Divine.” Along with Anusara students, there would be filmmakers, musicians, poets, acrobats, dancers and rock climbers.

It sounded like an awful lot, and it was a little hard to tell how Friend was going to make so many activities yogic, life-expanding and restorative all at once. I had a similar feeling when Friend invited me to a private “happening” one night after the Hollywood workshop. The party was held at a loft in a warehouse district near downtown Los Angeles. The music was loud, and the lights were bright and pulsating, and some of the people were in costume. There may have been a smoke machine.

At a certain point, Friend, in black jeans and a spangled black shirt, called for quiet and introduced the entertainment. A young woman danced with flaming torches, and another danced with flaming hula hoops. A pair did a Cirque du Soleil tribute by performing acrobatics while hanging from the 30-foot ceiling on muslin swags. Friend’s contribution was an ode to creativity he recited, while a young woman with flowing curls and a face painted to match her tiger costume danced and writhed on the floor.

We ride the tiger. . . .

I taste her hunger

In the burning of my desire

There is no hotter fire.

The event resembled Ringling Brothers crossed with an Allen Ginsberg reading, what the yogi Judith Hanson Lasater might call “yoga and . . .” — yoga and Pilates, yoga and shopping. Eventually you wind up a long way from sitting in a quiet room, focused on the breath as it flows in and out.

Friend, of course, wouldn’t see it that way. “For me, any artistic expression that is performed and expressed with an intention of awakening to the essential nature of one’s Being (Spirit) and with the intention of glorifying the intrinsic Goodness and Shri (Divine Beauty) of that spirit is considered Yoga,” he wrote me in an e-mail message from South Korea. “Therefore, yoga can be expanded to include dance, music and other forms of Art.”

In other words, it’s all good. Back at the Woodlands restaurant, Friend called for a toast. “To the next level,” he said, raising his glass. “Keep dreaming, keep dreaming. Never stop dreaming.”


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July 21, 2010
The Web Means the End of Forgetting
By JEFFREY ROSEN

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, “I’m so totally bored!!”; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border — and barred permanently from visiting the country — after a border guard’s Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants — including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new technology — like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press — “gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade.” But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008 as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100 million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

In Brandeis’s day — and until recently, in ours — you had to be a celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,” she said, “and you’re just a person.”

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

THE CRISIS — AND THE SOLUTION?
All this has created something of a collective identity crisis. For most of human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your identity — of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home, at work, at play) — was hard to fathom, because people’s identities were fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village, your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the significance of the frontier,” in which the possibility of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing themselves.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of reinvention associated with the phrase “G.T.T.,” or “Gone to Texas.” But the dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the “protean self.” If you couldn’t flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded, it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles that had previously been private — including every user’s friends, relationship status and family relations — would become public and accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends with the Facebook partner sites you visit.

What followed was an avalanche of criticism from users, privacy regulators and advocates around the world. Four Democratic senators — Charles Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al Franken of Minnesota — wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, expressing concern about the “instant personalization” feature and the new privacy settings. The reaction to Facebook’s changes was such that when four N.Y.U. students announced plans in April to build a free social-networking site called Diaspora, which wouldn’t compel users to compromise their privacy, they raised more than $20,000 from more than 700 backers in a matter of weeks. In May, Facebook responded to all the criticism by introducing a new set of privacy controls that the company said would make it easier for users to understand what kind of information they were sharing in various contexts.

Facebook’s partial retreat has not quieted the desire to do something about an urgent problem. All around the world, political leaders, scholars and citizens are searching for responses to the challenge of preserving control of our identities in a digital world that never forgets. Are the most promising solutions going to be technological? Legislative? Judicial? Ethical? A result of shifting social norms and cultural expectations? Or some mix of the above? Alex Türk, the French data-protection commissioner, has called for a “constitutional right to oblivion” that would allow citizens to maintain a greater degree of anonymity online and in public places. In Argentina, the writers Alejandro Tortolini and Enrique Quagliano have started a campaign to “reinvent forgetting on the Internet,” exploring a range of political and technological ways of making data disappear. In February, the European Union helped finance a campaign called “Think B4 U post!” that urges young people to consider the “potential consequences” of publishing photos of themselves or their friends without “thinking carefully” and asking permission. And in the United States, a group of technologists, legal scholars and cyberthinkers are exploring ways of recreating the possibility of digital forgetting. These approaches share the common goal of reconstructing a form of control over our identities: the ability to reinvent ourselves, to escape our pasts and to improve the selves that we present to the world.

REPUTATION BANKRUPTCY AND TWITTERGATION
A few years ago, at the giddy dawn of the Web 2.0 era — so called to mark the rise of user-generated online content — many technological theorists assumed that self-governing communities could ensure, through the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd, that all participants enjoyed the online identities they deserved. Wikipedia is one embodiment of the faith that the wisdom of the crowd can correct most mistakes — that a Wikipedia entry for a small-town mayor, for example, will reflect the reputation he deserves. And if the crowd fails — perhaps by turning into a digital mob — Wikipedia offers other forms of redress. Those who think their Wikipedia entries lack context, because they overemphasize a single personal or professional mistake, can petition a group of select editors that decides whether a particular event in someone’s past has been given “undue weight.” For example, if the small-town mayor had an exemplary career but then was arrested for drunken driving, which came to dominate his Wikipedia entry, he can petition to have the event put in context or made less prominent.

In practice, however, self-governing communities like Wikipedia — or algorithmically self-correcting systems like Google — often leave people feeling misrepresented and burned. Those who think that their online reputations have been unfairly tarnished by an isolated incident or two now have a practical option: consulting a firm like ReputationDefender, which promises to clean up your online image. ReputationDefender was founded by Michael Fertik, a Harvard Law School graduate who was troubled by the idea of young people being forever tainted online by their youthful indiscretions. “I was seeing articles about the ‘Lord of the Flies’ behavior that all of us engage in at that age,” he told me, “and it felt un-American that when the conduct was online, it could have permanent effects on the speaker and the victim. The right to new beginnings and the right to self-definition have always been among the most beautiful American ideals.”

ReputationDefender, which has customers in more than 100 countries, is the most successful of the handful of reputation-related start-ups that have been growing rapidly after the privacy concerns raised by Facebook and Google. (ReputationDefender recently raised $15 million in new venture capital.) For a fee, the company will monitor your online reputation, contacting Web sites individually and asking them to take down offending items. In addition, with the help of the kind of search-optimization technology that businesses use to raise their Google profiles, ReputationDefender can bombard the Web with positive or neutral information about its customers, either creating new Web pages or by multiplying links to existing ones to ensure they show up at the top of any Google search. (Services begin from $10 a month to $1,000 a year; for challenging cases, the price can rise into the tens of thousands.) By automatically raising the Google ranks of the positive links, ReputationDefender pushes the negative links to the back pages of a Google search, where they’re harder to find. “We’re hearing stories of employers increasingly asking candidates to open up Facebook pages in front of them during job interviews,” Fertik told me. “Our customers include parents whose kids have talked about them on the Internet — ‘Mom didn’t get the raise’; ‘Dad got fired’; ‘Mom and Dad are fighting a lot, and I’m worried they’ll get a divorce.’ ”

Companies like ReputationDefender offer a promising short-term solution for those who can afford it; but tweaking your Google profile may not be enough for reputation management in the near future, as Web 2.0 swiftly gives way to Web. 3.0 — a world in which user-generated content is combined with a new layer of data aggregation and analysis and live video. For example, the Facebook application Photo Finder, by Face.com, uses facial-recognition and social-connections software to allow you to locate any photo of yourself or a friend on Facebook, regardless of whether the photo was “tagged” — that is, the individual in the photo was identified by name. At the moment, Photo Finder allows you to identify only people on your contact list, but as facial-recognition technology becomes more widespread and sophisticated, it will almost certainly challenge our expectation of anonymity in public. People will be able to snap a cellphone picture (or video) of a stranger, plug the images into Google and pull up all tagged and untagged photos of that person that exist on the Web.

In the nearer future, Internet searches for images are likely to be combined with social-network aggregator search engines, like today’s Spokeo and Pipl, which combine data from online sources — including political contributions, blog posts, YouTube videos, Web comments, real estate listings and photo albums. Increasingly these aggregator sites will rank people’s public and private reputations, like the new Web site Unvarnished, a reputation marketplace where people can write anonymous reviews about anyone. In the Web 3.0 world, Fertik predicts, people will be rated, assessed and scored based not on their creditworthiness but on their trustworthiness as good parents, good dates, good employees, good baby sitters or good insurance risks.

Anticipating these challenges, some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a “sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.

To allow people to escape from negative scores generated by these services, Zittrain says that people should be allowed to declare “reputation bankruptcy” every 10 years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings or sensitive information. His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit report a year — so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information — and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than 10 years. “Like personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ‘fresh start’ as an adult,” Zittrain writes in his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” “we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third chance into our digital spaces.”

Another proposal, offered by Paul Ohm, a law professor at the University of Colorado, would make it illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire anyone on the basis of legal off-duty conduct revealed in Facebook postings or Google profiles. “Is it really fair for employers to know what you’ve put in your Facebook status updates?” Ohm asks. “We could say that Facebook status updates have taken the place of water-cooler chat, which employers were never supposed to overhear, and we could pass a prohibition on the sorts of information employers can and can’t consider when they hire someone.”

Ohm became interested in this problem in the course of researching the ease with which we can learn the identities of people from supposedly anonymous personal data like movie preferences and health information. When Netflix, for example, released 100 million purportedly anonymous records revealing how almost 500,000 users had rated movies from 1999 to 2005, researchers were able to identify people in the database by name with a high degree of accuracy if they knew even only a little bit about their movie-watching preferences, obtained from public data posted on other ratings sites.

Ohm says he worries that employers would be able to use social-network-aggregator services to identify people’s book and movie preferences and even Internet-search terms, and then fire or refuse to hire them on that basis. A handful of states — including New York, California, Colorado and North Dakota — broadly prohibit employers from discriminating against employees for legal off-duty conduct like smoking. Ohm suggests that these laws could be extended to prevent certain categories of employers from refusing to hire people based on Facebook pictures, status updates and other legal but embarrassing personal information. (In practice, these laws might be hard to enforce, since employers might not disclose the real reason for their hiring decisions, so employers, like credit-reporting agents, might also be required by law to disclose to job candidates the negative information in their digital files.)

Another legal option for responding to online setbacks to your reputation is to sue under current law. There’s already a sharp rise in lawsuits known as Twittergation — that is, suits to force Web sites to remove slanderous or false posts. Last year, Courtney Love was sued for libel by the fashion designer Boudoir Queen for supposedly slanderous comments posted on Twitter, on Love’s MySpace page and on the designer’s online marketplace-feedback page. But even if you win a U.S. libel lawsuit, the Web site doesn’t have to take the offending material down any more than a newspaper that has lost a libel suit has to remove the offending content from its archive.

Some scholars, therefore, have proposed creating new legal rights to force Web sites to remove false or slanderous statements. Cass Sunstein, the Obama administration’s regulatory czar, suggests in his new book, “On Rumors,” that there might be “a general right to demand retraction after a clear demonstration that a statement is both false and damaging.” (If a newspaper or blogger refuses to post a retraction, they might be liable for damages.) Sunstein adds that Web sites might be required to take down false postings after receiving notice that they are false — an approach modeled on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires Web sites to remove content that supposedly infringes intellectual property rights after receiving a complaint.

As Stacy Snyder’s “Drunken Pirate” photo suggests, however, many people aren’t worried about false information posted by others — they’re worried about true information they’ve posted about themselves when it is taken out of context or given undue weight. And defamation law doesn’t apply to true information or statements of opinion. Some legal scholars want to expand the ability to sue over true but embarrassing violations of privacy — although it appears to be a quixotic goal.

Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of the book “The Future of Reputation,” says that laws forbidding people to breach confidences could be expanded to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they share your embarrassing photos or posts in violation of your privacy settings. Expanding legal rights in this way, however, would run up against the First Amendment rights of others. Invoking the right to free speech, the U.S. Supreme Court has already held that the media can’t be prohibited from publishing the name of a rape victim that they obtained from public records. Generally, American judges hold that if you disclose something to a few people, you can’t stop them from sharing the information with the rest of the world.

That’s one reason that the most promising solutions to the problem of embarrassing but true information online may be not legal but technological ones. Instead of suing after the damage is done (or hiring a firm to clean up our messes), we need to explore ways of pre-emptively making the offending words or pictures disappear.

EXPIRATION DATES
Jorge Luis Borges, in his short story “Funes, the Memorious,” describes a young man who, as a result of a riding accident, has lost his ability to forget. Funes has a tremendous memory, but he is so lost in the details of everything he knows that he is unable to convert the information into knowledge and unable, as a result, to grow in wisdom. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, in “Delete,” uses the Borges story as an emblem for the personal and social costs of being so shackled by our digital past that we are unable to evolve and learn from our mistakes. After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

This is not an entirely fanciful vision. Google not long ago decided to render all search queries anonymous after nine months (by deleting part of each Internet protocol address), and the upstart search engine Cuil has announced that it won’t keep any personally identifiable information at all, a privacy feature that distinguishes it from Google. And there are already small-scale privacy apps that offer disappearing data. An app called TigerText allows text-message senders to set a time limit from one minute to 30 days after which the text disappears from the company’s servers on which it is stored and therefore from the senders’ and recipients’ phones. (The founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans, has said he chose the name before the scandal involving Tiger Woods’s supposed texts to a mistress.)

Expiration dates could be implemented more broadly in various ways. Researchers at the University of Washington, for example, are developing a technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self-destruct” after a specified period of time. Instead of relying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud” — in other words, on their distributed servers — Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters” the encryption key. To read the data, your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they “erode” or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can no longer be read. Tadayoshi Kohno, a designer of Vanish, told me that the system could provide expiration dates not only for e-mail but also for any data stored in the cloud, including photos or text or anything posted on Facebook, Google or blogs. The technology doesn’t promise perfect control — you can’t stop someone from copying your photos or Facebook chats during the period in which they are not encrypted. But as Vanish improves, it could bring us much closer to a world where our data didn’t linger forever.

Kohno told me that Facebook, if it wanted to, could implement expiration dates on its own platform, making our data disappear after, say, three days or three months unless a user specified that he wanted it to linger forever. It might be a more welcome option for Facebook to encourage the development of Vanish-style apps that would allow individual users who are concerned about privacy to make their own data disappear without imposing the default on all Facebook users.

So far, however, Zuckerberg, Facebook’s C.E.O., has been moving in the opposite direction — toward transparency rather than privacy. In defending Facebook’s recent decision to make the default for profile information about friends and relationship status public rather than private, Zuckerberg said in January to the founder of the publication TechCrunch that Facebook had an obligation to reflect “current social norms” that favored exposure over privacy. “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds but more openly and with more people, and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time,” he said.

PRIVACY’S NEW NORMAL
But not all Facebook users agree with Zuckerberg. Plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that young people, having been burned by Facebook (and frustrated by its privacy policy, which at more than 5,000 words is longer than the U.S. Constitution), are savvier than older users about cleaning up their tagged photos and being careful about what they post. And two recent studies challenge the conventional wisdom that young people have no qualms about having their entire lives shared and preserved online forever. A University of California, Berkeley, study released in April found that large majorities of people between 18 and 22 said there should be laws that require Web sites to delete all stored information about individuals (88 percent) and that give people the right to know all the information Web sites know about them (62 percent) — percentages that mirrored the privacy views of older adults. A recent Pew study found that 18-to-29-year-olds are actually more concerned about their online profiles than older people are, vigilantly deleting unwanted posts, removing their names from tagged photos and censoring themselves as they share personal information, because they are coming to understand the dangers of oversharing.

Still, Zuckerberg is on to something when he recognizes that the future of our online identities and reputations will ultimately be shaped not just by laws and technologies but also by changing social norms. And norms are already developing to recreate off-the-record spaces in public, with no photos, Twitter posts or blogging allowed. Milk and Honey, an exclusive bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, requires potential members to sign an agreement promising not to blog about the bar’s goings on or to post photos on social-networking sites, and other bars and nightclubs are adopting similar policies. I’ve been at dinners recently where someone has requested, in all seriousness, “Please don’t tweet this” — a custom that is likely to spread.

But what happens when people transgress those norms, using Twitter or tagging photos in ways that cause us serious embarrassment? Can we imagine a world in which new norms develop that make it easier for people to forgive and forget one another’s digital sins?

That kind of social norm may be harder to develop. Alessandro Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral economics of privacy — that is, the conscious and unconscious mental trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure. He is conducting experiments about the “decay time” and the relative weight of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did 10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an error in our youth.”

On the assumption that strangers may not make it easy for us to escape our pasts, Acquisti is also studying technologies and strategies of “privacy nudges” that might prompt people to think twice before sharing sensitive photos or information in the first place. Gmail, for example, has introduced a feature that forces you to think twice before sending drunken e-mail messages. When you enable the feature, called Mail Goggles, it prompts you to solve simple math problems before sending e-mail messages at times you’re likely to regret. (By default, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights.) Acquisti is investigating similar strategies of “soft paternalism” that might nudge people to hesitate before posting, say, drunken photos from Cancún. “We could easily think about a system, when you are uploading certain photos, that immediately detects how sensitive the photo will be.”

A silly but surprisingly effective alternative might be to have an anthropomorphic icon — a stern version of Microsoft’s Clippy — that could give you a reproachful look before you hit the send button. According to M. Ryan Calo, who runs the consumer-privacy project at Stanford Law School, experimenters studying strategies of “visceral notice” have found that when people navigate a Web site in the presence of a human-looking online character who seems to be actively following the cursor, they disclose less personal information than people who browse with no character or one who appears not to be paying attention. As people continue to experience the drawbacks of living in a world that never forgets, they may well learn to hesitate before posting information, with or without humanoid Clippys.

FORGIVENESS
In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. In an interview with Charlie Rose on PBS, Eric Schmidt, the C.E.O. of Google, said that “the next generation is infinitely more social online” — and less private — “as evidenced by their Facebook pictures,” which “will be around when they’re running for president years from now.” Schmidt added: “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. The issue is when somebody else does it.” If people chose to expose themselves for 15 minutes of fame, Schmidt says, “that’s their choice, and they have to live with it.”

Schmidt added that the “notion of control is fundamental to the evolution of these privacy-based solutions,” pointing to Google Latitude, which allows people to broadcast their locations in real time.

This idea of privacy as a form of control is echoed by many privacy scholars, but it seems too harsh to say that if people like Stacy Snyder don’t use their privacy settings responsibly, they have to live forever with the consequences. Privacy protects us from being unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of private information that have been exposed against our will; but we can be just as unfairly judged out of context on the basis of snippets of public information that we have unwisely chosen to reveal to the wrong audience.

Moreover, the narrow focus on privacy as a form of control misses what really worries people on the Internet today. What people seem to want is not simply control over their privacy settings; they want control over their online reputations. But the idea that any of us can control our reputations is, of course, an unrealistic fantasy. The truth is we can’t possibly control what others say or know or think about us in a world of Facebook and Google, nor can we realistically demand that others give us the deference and respect to which we think we’re entitled. On the Internet, it turns out, we’re not entitled to demand any particular respect at all, and if others don’t have the empathy necessary to forgive our missteps, or the attention spans necessary to judge us in context, there’s nothing we can do about it.

But if we can’t control what others think or say or view about us, we can control our own reaction to photos, videos, blogs and Twitter posts that we feel unfairly represent us. A recent study suggests that people on Facebook and other social-networking sites express their real personalities, despite the widely held assumption that people try online to express an enhanced or idealized impression of themselves. Samuel Gosling, the University of Texas, Austin, psychology professor who conducted the study, told the Facebook blog, “We found that judgments of people based on nothing but their Facebook profiles correlate pretty strongly with our measure of what that person is really like, and that measure consists of both how the profile owner sees him or herself and how that profile owner’s friends see the profile owner.”

By comparing the online profiles of college-aged people in the United States and Germany with their actual personalities and their idealized personalities, or how they wanted to see themselves, Gosling found that the online profiles conveyed “rather accurate images of the profile owners, either because people aren’t trying to look good or because they are trying and failing to pull it off.” (Personality impressions based on the online profiles were most accurate for extroverted people and least accurate for neurotic people, who cling tenaciously to an idealized self-image.)

Gosling is optimistic about the implications of his study for the possibility of digital forgiveness. He acknowledged that social technologies are forcing us to merge identities that used to be separate — we can no longer have segmented selves like “a home or family self, a friend self, a leisure self, a work self.” But although he told Facebook, “I have to find a way to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self,” he also suggested that as all of us have to merge our public and private identities, photos showing us having a few drinks on Facebook will no longer seem so scandalous. “You see your accountant going out on weekends and attending clown conventions, that no longer makes you think that he’s not a good accountant. We’re coming to terms and reconciling with that merging of identities.”

Perhaps society will become more forgiving of drunken Facebook pictures in the way Gosling says he expects it might. And some may welcome the end of the segmented self, on the grounds that it will discourage bad behavior and hypocrisy: it’s harder to have clandestine affairs when you’re broadcasting your every move on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. But a humane society values privacy, because it allows people to cultivate different aspects of their personalities in different contexts; and at the moment, the enforced merging of identities that used to be separate is leaving many casualties in its wake. Stacy Snyder couldn’t reconcile her “aspiring-teacher self” with her “having-a-few-drinks self”: even the impression, correct or not, that she had a drink in a pirate hat at an off-campus party was enough to derail her teaching career.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it had to derail her life. After taking down her MySpace profile, Snyder is understandably trying to maintain her privacy: her lawyer told me in a recent interview that she is now working in human resources; she did not respond to a request for comment. But her success as a human being who can change and evolve, learning from her mistakes and growing in wisdom, has nothing to do with the digital file she can never entirely escape. Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.


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August 25, 2010
Can Preschoolers Be Depressed?
By PAMELA PAUL

Kiran didn’t seem like the type of kid parents should worry about. “He was the easy one,” his father, Raghu, a physician, says. “He always wanted to please.” Unlike other children in his suburban St. Louis preschool, Kiran (a nickname his parents asked me to use to protect his identity) rarely disobeyed or acted out. If he dawdled or didn’t listen, Raghu (also a nickname) had only to count to five before Kiran hastened to tie his shoes or put the toys away. He was kind to other children; if a classmate cried, Kiran immediately approached. “Our little empath!” his parents proudly called him.

But there were worrisome signs. For one thing, unlike your typical joyful and carefree 4-year-old, Kiran didn’t have a lot of fun. “He wasn’t running around, bouncing about, battling to get to the top of the slide like other kids,” Raghu notes. Kiran’s mother, Elizabeth (her middle name), an engineer, recalls constant refrains of “Nothing is fun; I’m bored.” When Raghu and Elizabeth reminded a downbeat Kiran of their coming trip to Disney World, Kiran responded: “Mickey lies. Dreams don’t come true.”

Over time, especially in comparison with Kiran’s even-keeled younger sister, it became apparent that guilt and worry infused Kiran’s thoughts. “We had to be really careful when we told him he did something wrong, because he internalized it quickly,” Raghu says. He was also easily frustrated. He wouldn’t dare count aloud until he had perfected getting to 10. Puzzles drove him nuts. After toying with a new set of Legos, he told his father, “I can’t do Legos.” He then roundly declared: “I will never do them. I am not a Legos person. You should take them away.”

One weekend when he was 4, Kiran carried his blanket around as his mother ferried him from one child-friendly place to the next, trying to divert him. But even at St. Louis’s children’s museum, he was listless and leaned against the wall. When they got home, he lay down and said he couldn’t remember anything fun about the whole day. He was “draggy and superwhiny and seeming like he was in pain.” Elizabeth remembers thinking, Something is wrong with this kid.

After talks with the director of Kiran’s preschool, who was similarly troubled by his behavior, and a round of medical Googling, Kiran’s parents took him to see a child psychiatrist. In the winter of 2009, when Kiran was 5, his parents were told that he had preschool depression, sometimes referred to as “early-onset depression.” He was entered into a research study at the Early Emotional Development Program at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, which tracks the diagnosis of preschool depression and the treatment of children like Kiran. “It was painful,” Elizabeth says, “but also a relief to have professionals confirm that, yes, he has had a depressive episode. It’s real.”

Is it really possible to diagnose such a grown-up affliction in such a young child? And is diagnosing clinical depression in a preschooler a good idea, or are children that young too immature, too changeable, too temperamental to be laden with such a momentous label? Preschool depression may be a legitimate ailment, one that could gain traction with parents in the way that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) and oppositional defiant disorder (O.D.D.) — afflictions few people heard of 30 years ago — have entered the what-to-worry-about lexicon. But when the rate of development among children varies so widely and burgeoning personalities are still in flux, how can we know at what point a child crosses the line from altogether unremarkable to somewhat different to clinically disordered? Just how early can depression begin?

The answer, according to recent research, seems to be earlier than expected. Today a number of child psychiatrists and developmental psychologists say depression can surface in children as young as 2 or 3. “The idea is very threatening,” says Joan Luby, a professor of child psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine, who gave Kiran his diagnosis and whose research on preschool depression has often met with resistance. “In my 20 years of research, it’s been slowly eroding,” Luby says of that resistance. “But some hard-core scientists still brush the idea off as mushy or psychobabble, and laypeople think the idea is ridiculous.”

For adults who have known depression, however, the prospect of early diagnosis makes sense. Kiran’s mother had what she now recognizes was childhood depression. “There were definite signs throughout my grade-school years,” she says. Had therapy been available to her then, she imagines that she would have leapt at the chance. “My parents knew my behavior wasn’t right, but they really didn’t know what to do.”

LIKE MANY WHO treat depression, Daniel Klein, a professor of clinical psychology at State University of New York at Stony Brook, repeatedly heard from adult patients that they had depression their whole lives. “I’ve had this as long as I can remember,” Klein told me they said. “I became convinced that the roots of these conditions start very early.”

So Klein turned to the study of temperament and depressive tendencies in young children. About a decade later, he is one of several academics focusing on preschool depression.

The history of mental illness has been, in many ways, an ongoing lowering of the bar to entry. Depression was originally seen as an adult problem with origins in childhood, rather than something that existed in children. The psychoanalytic view was that children didn’t have the mental capacity for depression; their superegos were not sufficiently developed. “One of the most important mental-health discoveries of the past 10 to 20 years has been that chronic mental illnesses are predominantly illnesses of the young,” says Daniel Pine, chief of the emotion-and-development branch in the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program of the National Institute of Mental Health. They begin when we are young and affect us, often profoundly, during the childhood years, shaping the adults we become.

Controversy over whether major depression could occur in teenagers, something we now take as a given, persisted until the 1980s. First adolescents, then grade-school children were considered too psychologically immature to be depressed. Stigma was a major fear. “There was this big worry that once you labeled it, you actually had it,” explains Neal Ryan, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. By the early 1990s psychiatrists had come to recognize that depression occurs in children of 8, 9 and 10.

Still, in 1990, when Luby first broached the subject of whether children could be depressed even before they entered school, her colleagues’ reactions ranged from disinterest to hostility. Then in the late ’90s, the study of early childhood entered a kind of vogue among academics and policy makers. This was the era of President Clinton’s White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning, and there was a wave of interest in the importance of what was termed “0 to 3.” Researchers took a closer look at how sophisticated feelings like guilt and shame emerge before a child’s third birthday. In 1998, Luby got her first grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to begin a study of preschool depression.

“We realized, Gee, maybe we better look more carefully at preschool, too,” Pine says. “And that’s where we are today. The issue of diagnosis of depression in preschoolers is being looked at very carefully right now.”

Diagnosis of any mental disorder at this young age is subject to debate. No one wants to pathologize a typical preschooler’s tantrums, mood swings and torrent of developmental stages. Grandparents are highly suspicious; parents often don’t want to know. “How many times have you heard, ‘They’ll grow out of it’ or ‘That’s just how he is’?” says Melissa Nishawala, a child psychiatrist at the New York University Child Study Center.

And some in the field have reservations, too. Classifying preschool depression as a medical disorder carries a risk of disease-mongering. “Given the influence of Big Pharma, we have to be sure that every time a child’s ice cream falls off the cone and he cries, we don’t label him depressed,” cautions Rahil Briggs, an infant-toddler psychologist at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York. Though research does not support the use of antidepressants in children this young, medication of preschoolers, often off label, is on the rise. One child psychologist told me about a conference he attended where he met frustrated drug-industry representatives. “They want to give these kids medicines, but we can’t figure out the diagnoses.” As Daniel Klein warns, “Right now the problem may be underdiagnosis, but these things can flip completely.”

Depression, with its recurrent, long-lasting symptoms and complex of medications, is a particularly brutal diagnosis for a young child. “Mood disorders are scary to acknowledge, and depression is especially scary,” says Mary J. O’Connor, a child psychologist, professor and founder of the infant and preschool clinic at U.C.L.A. “When we sit down with a parent and give them a diagnosis of depression, they have this fatalistic idea of something devastating and terrifying and permanent.”

And parents tend to feel responsible. Children of depressed parents are two to three times as likely to have major depression. Maternal depression in particular has been shown to have serious effects on development, primarily through an absence of responsiveness — the parent’s conscious and consistent mirroring and reciprocity of an infant’s gaze, babble and actions. “Depressed mothers often respond to their babies from the beginning in ways that dampen their enthusiasm and joy,” says Alicia Lieberman, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. This is problematic, as 10 to 20 percent of mothers go through depression at some point, and 1 in 11 infants experiences his mother’s depression in the first year.

But it’s easy to overstate the role of maternal depression. “Most kids of depressed parents don’t get depressed,” says Arnold Sameroff, a developmental psychologist at University of Michigan’s Center for Human Growth and Development, who has studied children of parents with mental problems. Conversely, parents need not be depressed to heighten depression in their children. “There are definitely situations where the family interaction is creating the negativity in the child’s life, and that is one pathway to depression,” says Tamar Chansky, founder of the Children’s Center for O.C.D. and Anxiety in suburban Philadelphia. “But what I see more often is the no-fault situation, where parents are baffled to hear such negative thoughts coming from their children.” Despite the assumption that these kids must have experienced severe psychosocial deprivation, abuse or neglect, Luby says: “I’ve seen many depressed kids with nurturing, caring parents. We know that psychosocial stress is an important ingredient, but it’s not the only issue. And it’s not a necessary condition either.”

Kiran’s parents have advanced degrees and stable jobs and were invested in being good parents. Both participated in a Missouri’s Parents as Teachers program, receiving instruction during Kiran’s first three years. But Elizabeth says she does wonder if her behavior exacerbated some of Kiran’s negative tendencies. “Sometimes I worry that we were too critical of Kiran,” Elizabeth told me over the phone in January. “I was exasperated with him all the time. I wasn’t intentionally trying to make him feel guilty, but the way I was interacting with him was providing a guilt trip.” Elizabeth’s own moods sometimes played a role. “If my mood was low, his got even lower.”

IN A SMALL LAB slightly off the main campus of Washington University in St. Louis’s School of Medicine, Joan Luby is trying to figure out exactly what constitutes preschool depression. For a new clinical diagnosis to gain sanction with psychologists, schools, doctors and insurance companies, it requires entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the field guide to psychiatric illness. Though the manual, last thoroughly revised in 1994, purports to describe and classify the full range of mental disorders, it was not designed to capture preschool conditions. To help practitioners recognize problems earlier, the research organization Zero to Three published its own manual, the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood, most recently in 2005. But its methods of review aren’t as rigorous as those in the D.S.M., and many await the imprimatur of the updated D.S.M., due in 2013, which is expected to account for developmental stages of disorder across the lifespan.

Luby is one of the first researchers to systematically investigate the criteria for preschool depression, primarily through a longitudinal study that initially evaluated children between ages 3 and 5 for depression and was financed by the N.I.M.H. These children, who are now between 9 and 12, come into a lab every year for assessments. Offshoot studies have looked at everything from the role of tantrums in depressed children to how depressed preschoolers perform on cognitive tasks. Luby’s file cabinets teem with DVDs of each of her study participants’ periodic assessments. I watched one recording in which a 5-year-old squirmed in her chair while her parents answered questions. “She cries at the drop of a hat.” “She realizes that something’s different about her, and she’s bothered by her irritability and sadness.” “At times she’ll accept comfort; other times, nothing will console her.”

Through interviews like this, Luby is trying to identify preschool depression’s characteristics; according to her research, they look a lot like those in older people. In adults, for instance, anhedonia, the inability to derive pleasure in normally enjoyable activities, can be signaled by the absence of libido; in preschoolers, it means finding little joy in toys. Other symptoms, including restlessness and irritability, are similarly downsized. These kids whine and cry. They don’t want to play. Rather than voice suicidal ideation, they may orchestrate scenarios around violence or death.

The most obvious and pervasive symptom, not surprisingly, is sadness. But it’s not “I didn’t get the toy I wanted at Target; now I’m really sad,” cautions Helen Egger, a Duke University child psychiatrist and epidemiologist. The misery needs to persist across time, in different settings, with different people. Nor is it enough just to be sad; after all, sadness in the face of unachieved goals or a loss of well-being is normal. But the depressed child apparently has such difficulty resolving the sadness that it becomes pervasive and inhibits his functioning. “You can watch two kids try to put on shoes, and as soon as something gets stuck, one child pulls it off and throws it across the room,” says Tamar Chansky, who treats preschoolers who are depressed or are at risk for depression in her clinic. “He hits himself, throws objects and says things like ‘I did this wrong; I’m stupid.’ ”

Unfortunately there is little that young children can tell us directly about what they are going through. Preschoolers not only lack the linguistic sophistication to describe the experience, but they’re also still learning what emotions are. To get a sense of what a young child is feeling, Luby’s team uses a technique called the Berkeley Puppet Interview, which was developed to help children articulate how they perceive themselves and process their emotions. I watched as a wiry, blond 5-year-old boy responded to a therapist’s dog-faced puppets.

“My parents care a lot about me,” the first puppet said in an upbeat tone.
“My parents don’t care a lot about me,” the second said in an equally cheerful voice. “How about you?”

“Sometimes they care about me,” the boy replied, and then paused. “They don’t care a lot about me,” he added with emphasis.

“When I do something wrong, I feel bad,” the first puppet said.

“When I do something wrong, I don’t feel bad,” the second said. “How about you?”

“When I do something wrong, I do feel bad,” the boy responded.

Later he told the puppets that he didn’t like to be alone. He worried that other kids didn’t like him, and he wished he had more friends. His insecurity, low self-image and, in particular, his sense of guilt and shame mark him as a possible depressive: it’s not only that I did this thing wrong, it’s I’m a bad boy.

But generally speaking, preschool depression, unlike autism, O.D.D. and A.D.H.D., which have clear symptoms, is not a disorder that is readily apparent to the casual observer or even to the concerned parent. Depressed preschoolers are usually not morbidly, vegetatively depressed. Though they are frequently viewed as not doing particularly well socially or emotionally, teachers rarely grasp the depth of the problem. Sometimes the kids zone out in circle time, and it’s mistaken for A.D.H.D., “because they’re just staring,” explains Melissa Nishawala, the child psychiatrist at N.Y.U. “But inside, they’re worrying or thinking negative thoughts.” More often, they are simply overlooked. “These are often the good kids who tend to be timid and withdrawn,” says Sylvana Côté, a researcher at the University of Montreal who studies childhood mood and behavioral disorders. “It’s because they’re not the oppositional, aggressive children who disrupt everyone in class that their problems go undernoticed.”

Many researchers, particularly those with medical training, are eager to identify some kind of a “biologic marker” to make diagnosis scientifically conclusive. Recent studies have looked at the activity of cortisol, a hormone the body produces in response to stress. In preschoolers who have had a diagnosis of depression, as in depressed adults, cortisol levels escalate under stressful circumstances and then fail to recover with the same buoyancy as in typical children.

But in adults, cortisol reactivity can be an indication of anxiety. Other research has found that in young children, anxiety and depression are likewise intertwined. At Duke, Egger found that children who were depressed as preschoolers were more than four times as likely to have an anxiety disorder at school age. “Are these two distinct but strongly related syndromes?” asks Daniel Pine of the N.I.M.H. “Are they just slightly different-appearing clinical manifestations of the same underlying problem? Do the relationships vary at different ages? There are no definitive answers.”

Further complicating the picture is the extent to which depressed children have other ailments. In Egger’s epidemiological sample, three-fourths of depressed children had some additional disorder. In Luby’s study, about 40 percent also had A.D.H.D. or O.D.D., disruptive problems that tend to drown out signs of depression. Though it looks as if only the children with depression experience anhedonia, other symptoms like irritability and sadness are shared across several disorders.

Classifying symptoms into discrete diagnostic categories may not always be possible at this age, which leads to a reluctance among clinicians to pinpoint disorders. “There is a tension in child psychiatry about the degree to which disorders that are fairly clear in older individuals, adolescents and even school-age kids are apparent in young children, and if they are, whether they manifest in different ways,” warns Charles Zeanah, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Tulane and part of the work group charged with updating the D.S.M. to reflect developmental stages. Post-traumatic stress syndrome, for example, can manifest itself differently in 4-year-olds than it does in 40-year-olds. Certain disorders like separation anxiety and selective mutism are exclusively the province of children but either disappear or evolve into anxiety or depression by adulthood. Thus far, however, depression, like obsessive-compulsive disorder, seems to be consistent across the lifespan.

But, in part to avoid stigmatizing young children, two catch-all diagnoses — adjustment disorder with depressed mood, as well as depressive disorder not otherwise specified (N.O.S.) — are frequently applied. There are benefits to such diffuse diagnoses: they spare parents the crushing word “depression” and avoid the prospect of prematurely labeling a child. They also allow for the possibility that a child may grow out of it. “We don’t like to diagnose depression in a preschooler,” says Mary O’Connor, from U.C.L.A. “These kids are still forming, so we’re more likely to call it a mood disorder N.O.S. That’s just the way we think of it here.”

But this way of thinking frustrates Luby and Egger, who say they fear that if a depressed child isn’t given the proper diagnosis, he can’t get appropriate treatment. You wouldn’t use the vague term “heart condition,” they argue, to describe a specific form of cardiac arrhythmia. “Why do we call depression in older children a ‘disorder,’ but with young children we just call it a ‘risk factor’ or ‘phase’?” Egger asks. Is it right that rather than treat children for depression, clinicians wait and see what might happen three or four years down the road?

THEIR TENDERNESS OF age may render preschoolers especially vulnerable to depression’s consequences. Young children are acutely sensitive but lack the skill, experience and self-sufficiency to deal with strong feelings. In general, early exposure to negative experiences — separation from a caregiver, abuse, casual neglect — can have intense and long-term effects on development, even on the neural, cardiovascular and endocrine processes that underlie and support emotional functioning. Preliminary brain scans of Luby’s depressed preschoolers show changes in the shape and size of the hippocampus, an important emotion center in the brain, and in the functional connectivity between different brain regions, similar to changes found in the brains of depressed adults. In a longitudinal study of risk factors for depression, Daniel Klein and his team found that children who were categorized as “temperamentally low in exuberance and enthusiasm” at age 3 had trouble at age 7 summoning positive words that described themselves. By 10, they were more likely to exhibit depressive symptoms. And multiple studies have already linked depression in school-age children to adult depression.

Studies of children with other disorders that began in preschool and continued into adolescence have shown that early-onset issues don’t disappear on their own; current research suggests the same is true for depression. Among the preschoolers in Luby’s longitudinal study, those diagnosed with depression at the beginning of the study were four times as likely to be found depressed two years later than those in the control group. Egger found that children who met her depression criteria as preschoolers were seven times as likely to experience depression four years down the road.

But recent successes in treating autism have also shown that in many cases, the earlier the detection and intervention of a disorder, the greater chance for significant results. One principal argument for diagnosing depression early is that even with a genetic predisposition, depression isn’t cemented into the psyche; the very fluidity of preschoolers’ mental states seems to make them more treatable. This window is especially tantalizing because of the brain’s neuroplasticity during the early years. The brain literally changes course when you prod it in a given direction. “Nobody knows exactly why, but treatment seems to affect children’s brains more powerfully,” Luby says, pointing out that language acquisition, for example, is easier at younger ages. Ballet, violin, swim lessons — we begin all kinds of training at age 4.

For a diagnosis of preschool depression to have any meaningful impact, an appropriate treatment must be found. Talk therapy isn’t practical for children who don’t have the verbal or intellectual sophistication to express and untangle their emotions. Play therapy, a favorite of preschool counselors, has yet to be proved effective.

But there may be treatments, Luby says, that could help prevent depression from interfering with a child’s development, ensuring that she functions socially, cognitively and emotionally, alongside her peers. According to epidemiological studies conducted by Egger, from 1 to 3 percent of children between 2 and 5 have depression, a rate that seems to increase over the preschool years. Altogether, she and other researchers say, 84,000 of America’s 6 million preschoolers may be clinically depressed. Intervention could potentially forestall, minimize or even prevent depression from becoming a lifelong condition. At a minimum, it could teach them ways to better manage future bouts. If we wait, their only options may be medication and ongoing talk therapy, forever rehashing the hurts Mom and Dad inflicted 20 years earlier.

And while practitioners quibble over what to label depression, most agree that for any mood disorder, children this age should not be treated in isolation. “Psychotherapy for depressed preschoolers should always involve the caregiver,” Luby says. “Not because the caregiver is necessarily bad or doing anything wrong, but because the caregiver is an essential part of the child’s psychological apparatus. The child is not an independent entity at this age.”

One established method is called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, or P.C.I.T. Originally developed in the 1970s to treat disruptive disorders — which typically include violent or aggressive behavior in preschoolers — P.C.I.T. is generally a short-term program, usually 10 to 16 weeks under the supervision of a trained therapist, with ongoing follow-up in the home. Luby adapted the program for depression and began using it in 2007 in an ongoing study on a potential treatment. During each weekly hourlong session, parents are taught to encourage their children to acquire emotion regulation, stress management, guilt reparation and other coping skills. The hope is that children will learn to handle depressive symptoms and parents will reinforce those lessons.

I observed one session in which a therapist deliberately invoked feelings of guilt in the same blond 5-year-old who told the puppets “When bad things happen, I do feel bad.” Seated at a table with his mother, he turned to greet a therapist carrying a tray with two teacups, one elaborately painted. She told him that they were to have a tea party, pointing out her favorite teacup and describing the time it took to decorate it. “I’ll let you use my favorite today,” she beamed. As he gingerly took the rigged cup, its handle snapped off. His face darkened. The therapist lamented the break, ostensibly distraught, and excused herself from the room. The boy’s mother, guided via earset by a therapist watching through a two-way mirror, helped her child work through and resolve his feelings.

“Do you feel like you’re a bad boy?” his mother asked. Most parents want to distract their kids from negative emotions rather than let them process the feelings. “They want to wipe it away and move on,” Luby says. In this session, the mother was instead encouraged to draw the child out.

The boy nodded tearfully. “I feel like I’m going to go into the trash can,” he said.

“Who would put you in the trash can?” his mother asked.

“You would,” he replied in an accusatory voice.

“I would never do that,” she said. “I love you. Accidents happen.” The boy seemed to recover, and they chatted about her earrings, which he flicked playfully with a forefinger. Then his face drooped again.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked, and then added, almost angrily, “I never want to do this activity again.”

“You’re not a bad boy,” she consoled him. Often, parents don’t realize that their children experience guilt or shame, Luby says. “In response to transgression, they tend to punish rather than reassure.”

“I am a bad boy,” the boy said, ducking under the table. “I don’t think you love me now.” He started to moan from the floor, whimpering: “I’m so sad. I’m so sad.”

SUCCESS WITH P.C.I.T. rests heavily on parents, who are essentially tasked with reprogramming their child’s brain to form new, more adaptive habits. Not all parents are equipped to handle the vigilance, the consistency, the sensitivity. But early results look promising. Though her data is preliminary, Luby and her team have documented considerable decreases in depression severity and impairment following treatment.

Could we somehow nip adult depression in the bud? We may never get a definitive answer, even if we do begin to systematically diagnose and treat preschool depression. “The promise of early-childhood mental health is that if you intervene early enough to change negative conditions, rather than perpetuate negative behaviors, you really are preventing the development of a full-fledged diagnosis,” says Alicia Lieberman at U.C.S.F. “Of course, you would never then know if the child would have become a depressed adult.”

This doesn’t leave parents with a very clear road map. “We don’t know if Kiran will be at risk of depression as an adult,” Raghu told me when I spoke to him by phone in January. In the study that Kiran participated in, because he was part of the control group, he did not get to go through P.C.I.T. Nevertheless, Raghu and Elizabeth found the general parent training they received as part of the control helpful. And in the months following the study, Kiran’s mood seemed to improve. A trip to his grandparents’ farm last summer was particularly beneficial. But by this past winter, he seemed to be slipping and prone to bouts of anger and frustration; depression, it was explained to them at Luby’s lab, tends to be episodic. “We worry that it’s a lifelong thing,” Elizabeth told me.

Recently, Elizabeth asked Kiran what the happiest time in his life had been. He told her about the trip they took to Spain when he was 8 months old. Elizabeth asked if he remembered going. “No,” he said. “But I looked really happy in the picture.” She pressed him for another answer, a time that he could actually remember. He thought hard. “I haven’t had my happiest time yet,” he said.


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September 8, 2010
War Games
By CHRIS SUELLENTROP

Unless you regard something like “Iron Man” as a film about Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America’s contemporary wars have consistently been box-office flops. Even “The Hurt Locker” grossed only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters — during the past three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars. Last year’s best-selling game was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which opens in Afghanistan; it was a sequel to a multimillion-selling 2007 game that features an American invasion of a nameless Middle Eastern country. Modern Warfare 2 has made “Avatar”-like profits for its studio, Activision. On the day the game was published in November, it sold nearly five million copies in North America and Britain, racking up $310 million in sales in 24 hours. By January of this year, the game’s worldwide sales added up to $1 billion.

For years, earlier installments of the Call of Duty franchise and other military shooters — the video-game industry’s term for these games about warfare — were, like cable-TV miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, always about World War II. But the Modern Warfare series has demonstrated that players have an appetite for games that purport to connect them to the wars their college roommates, or their sons, might be fighting in. Both Modern Warfare games are set in a mythical near-future, but the weapons — Predator drones, AC-130 gunships, nukes — clearly conjure Afghanistan and Iraq, as do the games’ good guys (Americans, British) and bad guys (terrorists). The appeal of this quasi-fictional setting is one reason that Modern Warfare 2 now sits alongside titles from more-famous franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario on the lists of the top-selling video games ever made.

No doubt as a result, in June, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video-game industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles, it sometimes seemed as if every studio was introducing a game about a war against an enemy who might conceivably be regarded as part of the Axis of Evil. In one game scheduled for release next year, the North Koreans will mount a land invasion of the United States. In another, American troops are sent into an improbably menacing Dubai.

Beyond their settings, what these future-war games have in common with the Modern Warfare series is a refusal to forthrightly acknowledge the inspiration for their subject matter. Video-game designers and players like to brag about how “realistic” the games are, but when gamers talk about verisimilitude, they’re usually talking about graphical fidelity, about how lifelike the characters and environments are in an otherwise fantastical world — and not about how the medium reflects anything else about the actual world in which we live.

The one war game at the expo that acknowledged the ripped-from-the-headlines nature of its setting was Medal of Honor, the latest iteration of a game franchise created in 1999 by Steven Spielberg, in the wake of “Saving Private Ryan,” as a World War II game for Dreamworks Interactive. The new game (the 11th in the series for PCs or consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox) will be published in October by Electronic Arts. With it, Medal of Honor is following the path trod by Call of Duty, “rebooting” a popular World War II series by situating a game in something that resembles the present day. Unlike its rival, however, Medal of Honor is not anticipating the very near future. Instead it is delving into the very recent past: the game will be set in Afghanistan, in the early stages of the American intervention there.

In a darkened room at the expo, PlayStation 3s were hooked up to HDTVs, so that a team of players, of which I was a member, could insert themselves into the avatars of coalition soldiers in the Helmand Valley and do battle with Taliban fighters. On the convention-center floor, I adopted the role of a Taliban insurgent in the ruins of Kabul, shooting at coalition (read: American) troops in a “Team Deathmatch” mode.

Medal of Honor does not aspire to capture the war in Afghanistan in a documentary sense, but like other shooters, it creates a visceral sensation of combat. In essence, it forgoes one kind of realism while embracing another. Are video games like this mere frivolities that dishonor the real soldiers who have fought in the wars depicted — as critics, including military families, have recently charged? Or does their popularity indicate that they are successfully conveying an experience of war to audiences in a way that is at least as effective and affecting as the war stories told in literature or film?

Electronic Arts is no doubt hoping that Medal of Honor will make it a lot of money. Video games have become astonishingly expensive to produce — the entrance fee to develop a big-budget, mainstream video game is now north of $20 million, and Medal of Honor probably cost significantly more than that to make. New games usually sell at retail for just under $60, and selling even a million copies of a new game is no longer considered an indication of success. The best insight I received into the size of Medal of Honor’s budget, during a visit in June to Electronic Arts in Los Angeles, came when Greg Goodrich, the game’s executive producer, told me that if the game doesn’t sell at least three million copies, “I’m not going to be able to do another one.”

Medal of Honor’s story begins, chronologically, just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In an opening sequence, the camera — gamers describe the perspective you see in a game as “the camera,” even though video games are not really a lens-based medium — descends through the earth’s atmosphere toward Afghanistan, passing communications satellites that give off the sounds of Al Qaeda “chatter” and of news broadcasts from Lower Manhattan.

From there, the game places the player in the body of a member of a Navy Special Operations team infiltrating the Taliban-held town of Gardez, Afghanistan. Medal of Honor later puts players behind the eyes of an Army Special Operations soldier, as well as an Army Ranger and an Apache helicopter gunner, as they seize Bagram air base from the Taliban, ride all-terrain vehicles through the Shah-i-Kot Valley, snipe Al Qaeda fighters near the mountain of Takur Ghar and more. (The game is rated M, for Mature, the video-game equivalent of an R rating.)

In the argot of video games, Medal of Honor is a first-person shooter, meaning that players see the action from the viewpoint of the characters they control. The term for the genre is something of a misnomer. Properly described, these games would be called second-person shooters, as the protagonist in them is a broadly identifiable You, rather than a richly drawn I, a character speaking in his own voice. In fact, the protagonist of Medal of Honor never talks at all.

One of the most compelling things about video games is this sense of identification between the player and the protagonist. The best games do not give you a sense that you are controlling someone else — they give you a sense that you are someone else. For this reason, over the course of the 10 or 12 hours that it generally takes to complete Medal of Honor, you never see or hear any of the four different playable characters — beyond the sight of the hands that extend from the edges of the screen to grip the weapon that you’re carrying. “Because we don’t ever want to break that immersion, that it’s you, there,” Goodrich told me in June as I watched him play through one of the game’s levels.

Rich Farrelly, the game’s senior creative director, sat on a couch across from Goodrich. We were in Overlord, a room on the campus of Electronic Arts in Los Angeles — nearly all the rooms used by the Medal of Honor development team are named after military operations. Camouflage netting lay on a counter nearby. “That’s where the fun comes in, at least for me,” Farrelly said. “I’ve now created this soldier fiction for the player and put him in those boots. And now I’m making him think like a soldier.”

One of the buzzwords tossed around frequently by the Medal of Honor team is “authenticity.” The game has more than 50 actors, delivering thousands of lines of dialogue, with foreign dialogue recorded in Pashto, Gulf Arabic and Chechen. To create some of the animation used in the game, Medal of Honor’s computer-graphics team examined videos from Afghanistan that are posted on sites like YouTube and LiveLeak. “We want the player to feel, not like they’re in a movie, but like they’re in Afghanistan,” Waylon Brinck, the computer-graphics supervisor for the game, told me.

The scale of the effort devoted to this can be mind-boggling. Using more than 100 microphones, audio engineers recorded actual weapons fire at Fort Irwin in California, in a mock Iraqi village used by the military for training. With the Pentagon’s permission, the audio team attached microphones to Apache helicopters and recorded the sounds of takeoffs and landings, as well as the sounds of the helicopters firing their rounds. They even hooked microphones up to the targets that the helicopters destroyed.

Goodrich described Medal of Honor as “historical fiction,” but it felt transgressively real when I played it. The battles are fought in civilian-free zones, where pretty much everyone you encounter is an enemy — Taliban, Al Qaeda or Chechen — and a threat to your life. Or rather (there’s that sense of identification again), your character’s life. The action is sometimes slow and methodical — your character is asked to kill four enemies instead of 40, or 400 — and at other times the body count exceeds that of a 1980s Schwarzenegger movie. I killed a lot, and was killed, a lot.

Critics of the war in Afghanistan (and perhaps even its supporters) will detect at least a whiff of jingoism in the game. During one of the game’s levels, as the Rangers approach the Shah-i-Kot Valley in a helicopter, one of them describes the flight’s “main course” as “all-you-can-eat Taliban” and adds, “Hope you like foreign foods.” Within sight of the Pakistan border, a Ranger says, “We’ll be going there soon enough.” At another moment, a character brags that “we’re going to make it farther than the Russians did.” The game ends with a dedication written by its consultants, who are veterans of the Special Operations community.

There are limits to the game’s aspirations to realism. I was repeatedly told that Medal of Honor intentionally avoided the subject of politics in favor of “telling the soldier’s story.” Goodrich also told me, “I don’t want to make the bummer game.” Still, mistakes are made in the game by American troops and commanders. Friendly fire accidents happen. The intelligence agencies get things wrong. No matter how skilled a player is, Americans will die. The general arc of the entire game is consistent with the theme of most war video games, which Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and an author of several books on video games, summed up to me this way: “War is horrible and badass.”

In what may have been the first — and sometimes feels like the only — time that someone suggested video games are making humanity less violent and militaristic, a 33-year-old Stewart Brand, writing about the video game Spacewar in Rolling Stone in 1972, opined that “Spacewar serves Earthpeace.” Invented by a band of students at M.I.T. in 1962, Spacewar is regarded by many observers as the first successful video game. Brand was smitten. He wrote that this new form of digital play (“the enthusiasm of irresponsible youngsters”) was “heresy, uninvited and unwelcome” in a world of “passive consumerism.” Spacewar, and by logical extension the new medium of video games, was remarkable, Brand went on, because it was “intensely interactive in real time with the computer,” because it “bonded human and machine,” because it “served human interest, not machine” and, perhaps best of all, it was “merely delightful.” (Brand also wrote that the fact that “computers are coming to the people” was “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”)

In the intervening four decades, most of the rhetoric, if not the evidence, has been on the other side of the debate. Not many of the first observers of video games were willing to give Earthpeace a chance. From almost the moment that arcades and consoles appeared in America’s shopping malls and living rooms, critics have charged that video games “add to the dehumanization and objectification of human beings,” as a rabbi from the Philadelphia suburbs put it on “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report” in 1982, a time when the country came down with a seemingly anodyne bout of Pac-Man fever. Six years before that, the nation had already seen what one historian of the medium calls “the first major moral panic over the content of a video game” when “60 Minutes” examined the controversy over 1976’s Death Race, a sort of proto-Grand Theft Auto involving rudimentarily animated cars that drove over rudimentarily animated pedestrians. The apotheosis of this critique could be heard years later, in 1999, when the video game Doom was blamed, implausibly, for helping to prepare Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to carry out the Columbine massacre.

As video games have become a more-or-less accepted form of mass entertainment for adults, arguments like these have been heard with less frequency and mounted with less vigor. But many people still find something unsettling about the medium. A mini-scandal over Medal of Honor played out in August after Karen Meredith, the mother of Ken Ballard, an Army lieutenant killed in Najaf, Iraq, in 2004, went on “Fox and Friends” and said that any game based on a continuing conflict was “disrespectful” to those whose family members have died in the war. “Families who are burying their children are going to be seeing this,” she said. Not long after Meredith’s interview with Fox News, Britain’s defense secretary, Liam Fox, called the game “un-British” because, in its multiplayer incarnation, it will allow players to fight as the Taliban against coalition forces. “I would urge retailers to show their support for our armed forces and ban this tasteless product,” he said. Earlier this month, a Defense Department agency asked GameStop, a chain of video-game stores, not to sell Medal of Honor on Army and Air Force bases.

Liam Fox is a member of Britain’s Conservative Party; others, on the left, have raised their own reasons to find Medal of Honor disquieting. An editor at Mother Jones, Adam Weinstein, blogged in August that the game is “war profiteering of the first order,” and Adam Serwer, who blogs for The American Prospect, wrote, “Realistic war simulations have always bothered me.” Serwer added, “I’m playing video games to escape from the frustrations of the real world, I don’t want to be thrust into another, realistic existence far more bleak than the one I’m currently living.”

Many gamers, however — no matter their politics — subscribe to a McLuhanesque notion that only the form, and never the content, of this medium is of significance. Video games, in this view, are about problem-solving and game play, the captivating, kinetic interaction between the movements a player makes on a controller and the simultaneous action on-screen. And it’s surely true that Medal of Honor’s game play will determine whether it is a best seller or a bust. “Whether this is set on Afghanistan or set on the moon, it doesn’t really matter,” Geoff Keighley, a video-game journalist who hosts a show on Spike TV, told me. Will Wright, the designer of games like SimCity and The Sims, has seemed to embrace this view, saying that games are about agency (the ability to navigate a virtual world), not empathy (relating emotionally to the particulars of that world). But in many ways, the main project of the past several years among video-game developers has been to try to prove Will Wright wrong. Maybe the agency that games allow can, in the hands of the right storytellers, lead to empathy. Maybe the interactive nature of video games can, when combined with narrative elements like story and character, evoke feelings in players in a way that is unique to the medium.

After all, the video gamers who choose to play military shooters typically take the fictional elements of these games quite seriously. A survey conducted by Joel Penney, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, found that these gamers viewed their chosen pastime as something more than simple escapism or problem-solving exercises with good sound effects. The players — adults mostly between ages 18 and 29 (though some were in their 50s), largely Americans and almost all men — said playing the World War II versions of Medal of Honor or Call of Duty made them feel empathy for their countrymen. One wrote that, after playing the games, his “feelings have deepened in respect for those who have died.”

Greg Goodrich told me that the “holy grail” of his medium was to get game play and fiction to interact in such a way that the fusion of the two would affect players in ways that movies and books cannot. “I think you have the potential to touch them in a more emotional and engaging way because they took part in it,” he said. Penney’s study suggests that military shooters, by grounding their stories in the lived experiences of American soldiers, have had more success in this realm than their designers are given credit for. Feeling empathy for real soldiers fighting in foreign wars is not the same as feeling it toward fictional characters, but without being moved by the fiction in these games, it’s hard to see how players were subsequently moved to feel more humanely toward their fellow citizens.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, video games are taken more seriously as a form of entertainment than ever before, even by the priests of high culture. Nicholson Baker recently wrote in The New Yorker that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 might be “truer, realer than almost all war movies.” Junot Diaz cheerfully reviewed Grand Theft Auto IV — the kind of game that once provoked a moral panic with every sequel — in The Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. And in The London Review of Books last year, John Lanchester called the first Modern Warfare game, published in 2007, “more involving” than the Hollywood movies with which it might be compared. “The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists,” Lanchester wrote. “If the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form.”

But the feeling among many video-game players is that the artists lost an important skirmish a little more than a year ago. In April 2009, the video game Six Days in Fallujah was canceled by its Japanese publisher, Ko­nami, in the very same month that the game’s development was announced to the public. Six Days in Fallujah had been billed as an “interactive documentary” about the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. In addition to working with actual Marines who fought in Fallujah, the game’s developers said they were talking to Iraqis who lived through the battle — both civilians and insurgents.

Peter Tamte, the president of Atomic Games, the North Carolina-based studio that was developing Six Days in Fallujah for Ko­nami before it was canceled, told me this summer that “the heart of the controversy that caused Konami to pull out of the project” was the combination of “the stereotypes that are associated with the word ‘game’ and the incompatibility of that with the word ‘Iraq.’ ”

Read Omohundro, the captain of a Marine company that fought in Fallujah, served as a consultant on the game. “It’s very important to have the enemy’s perspective of what’s going on,” he told me. “You have to understand the environment, and if you just see it from the American viewpoint, that’s all you know.”

Six Days in Fallujah proposed adding “a layer of moral ambiguity” to warfare that Jamin Brophy-Warren, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who now publishes Kill Screen, a magazine about video games, says he hasn’t seen in other military shooters. Brophy-Warren says he was “kind of blown away” by the demo for Six Days in Fallujah that he saw last year in San Francisco during the annual Game Developers Conference. “There’s an Iraqi who picks up a gun, and you don’t know if he’s an insurgent or not,” he said. “Do you shoot him?”

Omohundro described the reaction from the public, especially from a group of mothers whose sons had been killed in action in Fallujah, as “blinded by fury.” Beth Houck, the mother of David Houck, a Marine rifleman who was killed in Fallujah in 2004, told me that her objections to Six Days in Fallujah apply to Medal of Honor as well: despite the genre’s claims to authenticity, military shooters do not show the toll the wars have taken on the homefront. “They don’t show the heartache of family members who are left without a spouse, or a father, or a child who does not return,” she said.

Omohundro says he is disappointed the game was never completed. A video game, he suggested, can portray combat in a way that is impossible to achieve in another medium. “In a movie, you don’t get the opportunity to make decisions that have consequences,” he said. “You simply watch what’s on the screen that’s in front of you.”

The Marines that Six Days in Fallujah planned to portray would have been based on real people who fought in a real battle. The soldiers in Medal of Honor, on the other hand, are fictional characters. But some of them are inspired by the careers of real service members, men now working as consultants to the game who have experience in Special Operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. On Father’s Day, I met with three of them for brunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Marina del Rey, Calif. They did not tell me their names and instead asked to be known by the handles — Coop, Dusty and Vandal — by which they are known inside Electronic Arts. They said they have done “extensive work in the two main theaters, and theaters outside of those as well,” as Vandal put it. Greg Bishop, a retired lieutenant colonel who worked with the Medal of Honor team for two years as the Army’s liaison to the entertainment industry, told me later that the men represented themselves accurately. Vandal and Coop said they came from a background in naval special warfare — meaning the most elite Seals — and Dusty is a former member of the Army Special Operations unit commonly known as Delta Force.

None of the three men would discuss their current work, but a Central Intelligence Agency contractor with the handle of Dusty is mentioned in the book “Jawbreaker,” by the former C.I.A. field commander Gary Berntsen, as a participant in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. They did not sport beards or balaclavas and wore sunglasses only because we were sitting outside. They all wore taut T-shirts and jeans or khakis. Dusty brought his wife. They addressed one another openly by their first names.

The day before, Dusty sat for an interview for a promotional Web video for the game. In a nasal Georgia accent that was obscured, along with his face, when snippets of the interview were posted on the Medal of Honor site, Dusty talked about riding in a pickup truck from Jalalabad into the mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001. He stood on a ridge only about 3,600 feet from an Al Qaeda camp. He watched planes drop 675,000 pounds of bombs on the camp over the course of 72 hours.

But even a man who may have come painfully close to killing Bin Laden feels the need to look cool for a teenage child. “The reason it was important for me to be involved in the game was so I could impress my 19-year-old son,” Dusty said. “He was like: ‘You? They asked you? For your advice, Dad?’ ” More important, Dusty went on to say, “I want people to come away with an honest feeling of what it’s like to be out there, doing some of that stuff.”

At the Ritz-Carlton, Coop, Dusty and Vandal acknowledged that one of the things they asked the Medal of Honor developers to do was to make the game less realistic than its creators initially envisioned. In a document called “Faceless” that the consultants wrote and circulated to the Medal of Honor team when they first joined the project, the men explained that their cooperation was dependent on maintaining their community’s reputation as silent professionals. “People want to know who these men are,” they wrote. “With MOH” — everyone at E.A. calls Medal of Honor “MOH,” pronounced like the Stooge or the bartender from “The Simpsons” — “they are going to get a little slice of that. However, a little slice is all they should get.” At the men’s behest, Medal of Honor refers to these elite members of the Special Operations community merely as “Tier One.”

“They’re selling authenticity and realism,” said Coop, a thick man with a Boston accent; he looks not unlike one of the muscled space marines in Gears of War, a popular sci-fi video game. “We wanted to help bring that to the table,” he said. “But we also wanted to make sure it didn’t go too far.”

Last summer, Goodrich showed the men storyboards for a game, with the title Medal of Honor: Anaconda, that would be something like a “Black Hawk Down” for Afghanistan: it would be based on the disastrous 2002 operation known as Anaconda, including the battle of Takur Ghar, in which Neil Roberts, a Navy Seal, fell out of a helicopter and was dragged away to his death by Al Qaeda fighters. The game “resembled very closely events overseas that involved friends of ours that had been killed,” Coop said. “We thought it hit a little too close to home” and would “put a sour taste in our brothers’ mouths.”

That night, Goodrich told the men at dinner that he would excise the scene with Neil Roberts from the game and change the game into a work of historical fiction rather than a sort of docudrama. In Medal of Honor, when a helicopter is hit over the mountain of Takur Ghar, the men on board leap out and take the fight to the enemy. Goodrich says the consultants helped to make the game “authentic and plausible” rather than “accurate and realistic.”

“There’s nothing so close where it’s a re-enactment,” Coop said at brunch. “In my eyes, that would be wrong.”

Not all soldiers are eager to endorse video games as a medium for helping audiences understand the nature of combat. As an Army platoon leader in 2002, Andrew Exum found himself in the Shah-i-Kot Valley, where he killed a man for the first time in his life and then found the gear of three dead Rangers who had been sent to try to rescue Neil Roberts. “I can tell you I’d probably be a little offended if things were exactly modeled on some of the things that happened during Anaconda,” Exum, now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me. “Returning that gear to those guys who were in the First Rangers, it was a tough thing.”

Exum emphasized that he is not outraged by Medal of Honor or any other military shooter. But he can’t help, he says, being a little bit bothered by these games. “This is the thing,” he told me. “Point 5 percent of this country actually fights in these conflicts.” Nearly 80,000 Americans are deployed in Afghanistan, Exum said, while 2.2 million played Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live during a single day last fall. “There’s something annoying that most of America experiences the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are actually taking place, through a video game,” he said. Would he feel similarly, I later asked, if Americans were heading to a movie called “Medal of Honor” about Operation Anaconda? “I think there is a difference between being a participant and an observer,” Exum replied in an e-mail.

All war fiction, granted, reduces combat to something less than what it is in reality. “ ‘The Iliad’ trivialized war into something ancient feasters could listen to while they ate,” Roger Travis, a classics professor at the University of Connecticut, wrote earlier this year on his blog about video games. But it does seem a fair critique to suggest that military shooters turn the classic description of war on its head, converting the experience into long periods of sheer terror punctuated by moments of boredom. “Real war’s a lot more like ‘Catch-22’ than ‘Black Hawk Down,’ ” one veteran told me. “No one would dramatize the real experience” of a platoon in Afghanistan “because it’s too boring,” he added. “How do you make a game out of drinking chai with an elder?”

The Onion actually gave this a shot last year, with a mock news broadcast about “Modern Warfare 3,” described as “the most true-to-life military game every created, with the majority of game play spent hauling equipment and filling out paperwork.” In this nonexistent game, the single-player campaign lasts “a record 17,250 hours.”

To be fair, comedy is easy. Making video games is hard. Medal of Honor may not reinvent the first-person shooter, but some in the industry — including several who worked on Six Days in Fallujah — hope that its mere existence is a brave and incremental step that will pave the way for nonfiction approaches to war in the medium. A video-game documentary about Iraq or Afghanistan is inevitable, whether it is a Medal of Honor sequel, or Six Days in Fallujah, or another game altogether, Read Omohundro told me.

“I think that eventually it will be permitted,” he said. “And if it becomes permitted, it will be accepted. It’s just going to take a while.”


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September 22, 2010
Kafka’s Last Trial
By ELIF BATUMAN

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?

In May, I attended a session at the Tel Aviv district courthouse, dealing with the fate of the papers. Heading to the courtroom, I found myself in a small and dilapidated elevator with flickering fluorescent lights and a stated maximum occupancy of four people. I was reminded of “The Trial,” the novel that opens with the unexplained arrest of Josef K. by a mysterious court that turns out to have its offices in attics all over Prague, running its course somehow separately from the normal criminal-justice system. Half-expecting the elevator to deposit me in the upper stories of a low-income residential building, I emerged instead into a standard municipal-looking hallway with faux-marble floors. Black-robed lawyers paced around, carrying laptops or giant file folders tucked under their arms; many dragged still more files behind them in black wheeled suitcases.

Some minutes later, a barely perceptible charge in the air signaled the arrival of the sisters. Ruth, with her white sneakers, pearl earrings and short, bleached hair, looked like somebody’s grandmother (which she is). Eva, a former El Al employee who was by all accounts a great beauty in her youth, was dressed entirely in black, with a black plastic clip holding back her long auburn hair. Ruth wore a white shoulder bag, while Eva carried a plastic Iams bag with a paw-print logo.

Of five rows of wooden benches in the courtroom, the first three were occupied by more than a dozen lawyers: two lawyers for the National Library; a representative of the Israeli government office that is responsible for estate hearings; and five court-appointed executors: three representing Esther Hoffe’s will (which the National Library considers irrelevant to the case) and two representing Brod’s estate (which the sisters’ attorneys consider essentially irrelevant to the case). The German Literature Archive in Marbach, which has supposedly offered an undisclosed sum for the papers (said to be worth millions), was also represented by Israeli counsel. Ruth’s lawyer and Eva’s three lawyers rounded out the crowd. It’s impressive that the sisters had between them four lawyers, although, to put things in perspective, Josef K. at one point meets a defendant who has six. When he informs K. that he is negotiating with a seventh, K. asks why anyone should need so many lawyers. The defendant grimly replies, “I need them all.”

The events leading up to the hearing that day were set into motion many decades earlier. In Prague in the 1930s, Brod, a passionate Zionist, began mentioning plans to deposit the Kafka papers in the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his and Kafka’s mutual friend Hugo Bergmann was then librarian and rector. Brod renewed these plans after his emigration to Palestine in 1939, but somehow nothing ever came of them, and the papers passed to Esther Hoffe. In 1988, Hoffe made headlines by auctioning the manuscript of “The Trial” for nearly $2 million; it ended up at the German Literature Archive. Philip Roth characterized this outcome as “yet another lurid Kafkaesque irony” that was being “perpetrated on 20th-century Western culture,” observing not only that Kafka was not German but also that his three sisters perished in Nazi death camps.

In later years, Hoffe engaged in negotiations to place the Kafka papers — as well as the rest of the Brod estate, which includes Brod’s voluminous diaries and correspondence with countless German-Jewish intellectual luminaries — at the archive in Marbach. Nevertheless, at the time of her death, no transaction had been completed. The bulk of the collection remained divided among an apartment on Spinoza Street in central Tel Aviv and 10 safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich. It is unclear how much of Brod’s estate is still housed in the Spinoza Street apartment, which is currently inhabited by Eva Hoffe and between 40 and 100 cats. Eva’s neighbors, as well as members of the international scholarly community, have expressed concern regarding the effects of these cats on their surroundings. More than once, municipal authorities have removed some of the animals from the premises, but the missing cats always seem to be replaced.

In 2008, when the sisters tried to probate their mother’s will, they were opposed by the National Library. The library contends that Brod left the Kafka papers to Esther Hoffe as an executor rather than as a beneficiary, meaning that, after Hoffe’s death, the papers reverted to the Brod estate. Brod’s will, dated 1961, specifies that his literary estate be placed “with the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Municipal Library in Tel Aviv or another public archive in Israel or abroad.” The Municipal Library in Tel Aviv has renounced any claim to the estate, making the Hebrew University Library — today, the National Library of Israel — the only claimant specifically named by Brod.

The National Library’s argument is complicated by Brod’s so-called gift letter of 1952. The most crucial and enigmatic document in the case, it appears to give all of the Kafka papers outright, during Brod’s lifetime, to Esther Hoffe. The sisters presented the court with a two-page photocopy of this letter. The National Library, however, produced a photocopy of a four-page version of the letter, of which the two missing middle pages appear to clarify the limitations of Brod’s gift. When the court ordered a forensic examination, the sisters were unable to produce the original letter.

Last year, the court decided to grant the National Library’s request that the papers in the sisters’ possession be inventoried: some evidence suggests that the vaults contain further documentation clarifying Brod’s intentions for the papers. The sisters appealed the decision, maintaining that the state has no right to search private property for documents whose existence can’t be proven beforehand. The hearing I attended was to determine the outcome of their appeal.

Eva and Ruth, who fled Nazi-occupied Prague as children, are elusive figures who keep out of the public eye. The fact that they are represented by separate counsel reflects Eva’s greater investment in the case. While Ruth married and left home, Eva lived with their mother, and with the papers, for 40 years. Her attorney Oded Hacohen characterizes Eva’s relationship to the manuscripts as “almost biological.” “For her,” he told me, “intruding on those safe-deposits is like a rape.” (When asked whether Eva had used the word “rape” herself, Hacohen looked a bit tired. “Many times,” he said.)

As long as Esther Hoffe’s will is debated, Eva and Ruth are unable to touch any part of their inheritance, which includes more than $1 million in cash. According to Hacohen, the money is a Holocaust compensation from the German government. The National Library argues that the sum could just as easily represent the proceeds from the sale of “The Trial,” which the library considers to have been a violation of Brod’s will. Eva, who claims to live in direst poverty, has unsuccessfully petitioned for a partial probate, which would have released the money before a decision was reached about the papers.

The hearing I attended brought no good news for the sisters. Their appeal was overruled that day by the district court, and again the next month by the Supreme Court. In late July, one safe-deposit box in Tel Aviv and all four Zurich vaults were inventoried. Witnesses in Tel Aviv reported seeing Eva run into the bank after the lawyers shouting: “It’s mine! It’s mine!” Eva also somehow turned up at the bank in Zurich but wasn’t allowed into the vault.

Five of the safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv initially resisted inspection. Some of the keys obtained after strenuous negotiations with Eva turned out not to match the locks. By now, most of the boxes have been opened. According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the banks have already yielded “a huge amount” of original Kafka material, including notebooks and the manuscript of a previously published short story. The specific contents, including any documents that might illuminate the question of ownership, will be made public once everything has been cataloged — a process estimated to last another month. In the meantime, the world continues to wait.

Kafka's life passed almost entirely within the space of a few city blocks in Prague, where he was born in 1883, attended school and university and, as an adult, lived with his parents and worked in an insurance agency. Kafka and Brod met in 1902, at Charles University, where both were studying law. Brod was 18 — one year younger than Kafka — but already a literary sensation. According to Brod’s biography of Kafka, the two met at a lecture Brod gave on Schopenhauer, during which Kafka objected to Brod’s characterization of Nietzsche as a fraud. Walking home together afterward, they discussed their favorite writers. Brod praised a passage from the story “Purple Death” in which Gustav Meyrink “compared butterflies to great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka, who took no stock in magic butterflies, countered with a phrase from Hugo von Hoffmansthal: “the smell of damp flags in a hall.” Having uttered these words, he fell into a profound silence that left a great impression on Brod.

For years, Brod had no idea that Kafka also did a bit of writing in his free time. Nonetheless, he began right away to commit Kafka’s utterances to his diary, starting with “Talk comes straight out of his mouth like a walking stick” (an observation about an over-assertive classmate). In 1905, Kafka showed Brod his story “Description of a Struggle.” Brod directly adopted a lifelong mission “to bring Kafka’s works before the public.” (An uncannily perspicacious talent-spotter, Brod also brought early recognition to Jaroslav Hasek and Leos Janacek.) In a Berlin weekly in 1907, Brod named a handful of contemporary authors maintaining the “exalted standards” of German literature: Franz Blei, Heinrich Mann, Frank Wedekind, Meyrink and Kafka. The first four were big names of the time; Kafka had yet to publish a single word. After much prodding by Brod, Kafka began publishing literary sketches in 1908, which were collected in a book in 1913.

In most respects, Brod and Kafka could not have been more different. An extrovert, Zionist, womanizer, novelist, poet, critic, composer and constitutional optimist, Brod had a tremendous capacity for survival. In his biography of Kafka, Ernst Pawel recounts how Brod, having been given a diagnosis at age 4 of a life-threatening spinal curvature, was sent to a miracle healer in the Black Forest, “a shoemaker by trade, who built him a monstrous harness into which he was strapped day and night.” Brod spent an entire year in the care of this shoemaker, emerging with a permanent hunchbacklike deformity, which did not impede him in a lifelong series of overlapping relationships with attractive blondes.

Kafka, tall, dark and broodingly handsome, had fewer and more anguished relations with women. From an early age, he was deeply concerned with his health, clothes and personal hygiene. (“The afternoons I spent on my hair,” a 1912 diary entry reads.) He practiced vegetarianism, “Fletcherizing” (a system of chewing each bite for several minutes), “Müllerizing” (an exercise regimen) and various natural healing programs. He worried about dandruff and constipation to an extent that occasionally exasperated even Brod (“for instance, in Lugano, when he refused to take any laxative . . . but ruined the days for me with his moanings”). He wasn’t a good decision maker, and he didn’t have good luck. After years of complaining about his job at the insurance office, he finally worked up the nerve to mail his parents a letter saying that he was going to move to Berlin and write for a living — less than a week before the outbreak of World War I, which obliged him to stay in Prague. In 1917, he was given a diagnosis of tuberculosis. In 1921, he told Brod that his last testament would consist of “a request to you to burn everything.” Brod promptly replied that he would do no such thing: his main justification, in later years, for overriding Kafka’s wishes.

In 1923, Kafka met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old runaway from a conservative Hasidic family in Galicia. She was his last and happiest love. The six-foot-tall Kafka at that point weighed 118 pounds. The couple lived for some months in a rental room in Berlin but moved in 1924 to a sanitarium in the Austrian town of Kierling, where Kafka, unable to eat, drink or speak, edited the proofs of his story “The Hunger Artist” and eventually died in Dora’s arms, having published, in his lifetime, fewer than 450 pages.

Kafka studies now proliferate at a rate inversely proportional to that of Kafka’s own production: according to a recent estimate, a new book on his work has been published every 10 days for the past 14 years. Brod, in his 84 years on this planet, published 83 books, most of them now out of print.

In his role in Kafka’s estate, Brod presents the paradox of a radically un-Kafkaesque protagonist in a Kafkaesque plot. This was a recurring theme in their friendship. After graduating from law school, Brod, already a published author, allowed himself to be convinced by Kafka’s thesis that “breadwinning and the art of writing must be kept absolutely apart” and took a job in the post office. Brod later bitterly regretted “the hundreds of joyless hours” squandered in offices by himself and the author of “The Trial.”

Four years after Kafka’s death, Brod published a novel, “The Enchanted Kingdom of Love,” featuring a moribund, Kafka-like character called Richard Garta: “a saint of our day” whose brother turns up on a kibbutz in Eastern Galilee and unmasks Richard, posthumously, as a fervent Zionist. In 1937, Brod wrote his biography of Kafka, which, alongside genuinely brilliant insights into Kafka’s life and work, also quotes wholesale from the descriptions of Richard Garta in “The Enchanted Kingdom,” advancing the thesis that Kafka was, if not “a perfect saint,” then still “on the road to becoming one,” and that his most seemingly ambiguous literary works are essentially religious treatments of the transcendental homelessness of European Jewry.

Brod’s biography of Kafka was not well received. According to Walter Benjamin, it testifies to a “lack of any deep understanding of Kafka’s life,” one great riddle of which is, indeed, Kafka’s choice of such a philistine for a best friend. “I will never get to the bottom of the Brod mystery,” Milan Kundera writes, marveling that Brod was astute enough to preserve Kafka’s novels for posterity, yet capable of doing so in such sentimental, vulgar and politically tendentious books. The received image of Brod in Kafka studies is a well-meaning hack who displayed extraordinary prescience, energy and selflessness in the promotion of his more talented friend, about whom, however, he understood nothing and whose dying wishes he was thus able to ignore.

The truth is more complicated. Although the loss, within a few years, of both Kafka and Europe could easily have driven Brod to despair, he instead resolved to transform it into the foundation for a new future, adopting a lifelong determination to fuse his two favorite causes — Kafka and Zionism — into a single, future-bearing entity. Kafka’s life and work became a uniform and inherently meaningful body, in which every last detail had the same supreme importance: in the “22 years of our unclouded friendship,” Brod recalled, “I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a postcard.” Whatever Brod thought that Kafka was going to do for mankind, it was definitely something huge. “If humanity would only better understand what has been presented to it in the person and work of Kafka,” Brod writes, “it would undoubtedly be in a quite different position.”

Pinning his hopes of a new world order onto Kafka’s oeuvre — onto, that is, a collection of abstruse literary fiction, mostly dealing with the lives of Prague white-collar workers and animals — Brod was following a dream logic common to Kafka’s own characters. In “Amerika,” Karl believes that he can “have a direct effect upon his American environment” by playing the piano in a certain way; Josephine the Mouse Singer believes that when the Mouse Folk “are in a bad way politically or economically, her singing” will save them. In 1941, Brod published an extraordinary column in the Hebrew paper Davar, recounting his arrival in Palestine with “only one plan” rising from a “mist of many obscure thoughts”: “to act for the memory of my friend Franz Kafka in this country that he missed.” (According to Brod, only Kafka’s “sickness and sudden death prevented his immigration.”) Having transported Kafka’s manuscripts by train and ship to the soil of Zion, Brod had already found a few fellow thinkers “for whom Kafka is more than any other modern writer — he is the 20th-century Job.” Once they had fulfilled their true purpose — namely, the establishment of a Kafka archive and a Kafka club in Palestine — “the Hitler era, the era of destruction” would be followed by an age of “the infinite creation in the spirit of Kafka,” “a good era for humanity, and for Judaism, which has again professed salvation to the peoples by one of its finest sons.”

Kafka’s actual relationship to Zionism and Jewish culture was, like his relationship to most things, highly ambivalent. (In 1922, Kafka compiled a list of things he had failed at, including piano, languages, gardening, Zionism and anti-Zionism.) Although Brod’s attempts to convert Kafka to Zionism were a source of tension in the early years of their friendship, Kafka grew increasingly sympathetic to the cause. As early as 1912, he discussed a journey to Palestine with Felice Bauer, a dictating-machine representative with whom he was to pursue a long, anguished, mainly epistolary romance. (The two were twice engaged to be married before separating in 1917.) In 1918, Kafka drew up his vision of an early kibbutz. The only nourishment would be bread, dates and water; notably, in light of recent developments, there would be no legal courts: “Palestine needs earth,” Kafka wrote, “but it does not need lawyers.”

Kafka’s plans to move to Palestine grew more concrete only as their fulfillment grew less likely. He began studying Hebrew in 1921. According to his teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, “he already knew he was dying” and seemed to regard their lessons “as a kind of miracle cure,” preparing “long lists of words he wanted to know”; rendered speechless by coughing, he would implore his teacher “with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another.” In 1923, Ben-Tovim visited Kafka and Dora Diamant in Berlin. She found them living in bohemian squalor, reading to each other in Hebrew and fantasizing about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, where Diamant would work in the kitchen and Kafka would wait on tables. “Dora didn’t know how to cook, and he would have been hopeless as a waiter,” Ben-Tovim observed. Then again, “in those days most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them.” Ben-Tovim left one of Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks in the National Library, where I saw it this spring: a long list of those words from which Kafka expected such miracles: “tuberculosis,” “to languish,” “sorrow,” “affliction,” “genius,” “pestilence,” “belt.”

Brod's interpretation of Kafka as a Zionist manqué is now on trial: if not, technically, in the court of law, then certainly in the court of public opinion. “Why does Kafka belong here?” asks Mark Gelber, a literature professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “Because the Zionist enterprise was important to him.” Gelber told me he considers Kafka’s animal stories to participate in a Zionist discourse, from which “Kafka removes the particularist markers, erases the particularist traces.” (This lack of “particularist markers” makes Kafka particularly susceptible to different interpretations and ascriptions: those same animal stories caused Elias Canetti to call Kafka “the only essentially Chinese writer to be found in the West.”) Many European critics — for example, Reiner Stach, Kafka’s most recent and thorough biographer — object to the view of Kafka as “a Zionist or a religious author.” “The fact that specifically Jewish experiences are reflected in his works does not — as Brod believed — make him the protagonist of a ‘Jewish’ literature,” Stach told me. Rather, “Kafka’s oeuvre stands in the context of European literary modernity, and his texts are among the foundational documents of this modernity.”

In a perfect world, Kafka could be both engaged with a specifically Jewish discourse and a foundational author of European modernity. As Brod himself observes of “The Castle,” a “specifically Jewish interpretation goes hand in hand with what is common to humanity, without either excluding or even disturbing the other.” But an original manuscript can be in only one place at a time. The choice between Israel and Germany could not be more symbolically fraught.

For the proponents of Marbach, the debate is really about storage conditions. “In Israel there is no place to keep the papers so well as in Germany,” Eva Hoffe has stated; Stach corroborates that “scholars everywhere outside of Israel are in agreement” that the papers would be better off in Marbach. Anyway, Marbach already has “The Trial,” and it would be more convenient for scholars to have everything in one place. In hopes of securing the cooperation of the National Library, Marbach has proposed to grant Israeli scholars priority access to the collection and to lend the papers to Jerusalem for a temporary exhibit.

But in a battle between expediency and ideals, the two sides are speaking different languages. Otto Dov Kulka, an emeritus professor of history specializing in the situation of Jews during the Third Reich, describes the claim that Israel doesn’t have the resources to take care of the papers as “outrageous and hypocritical.” I spoke with Kulka in his office at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I found him editing a document titled, in an enormous font legible from across the room, “Between the Periphery and the Metropolis of Death.” A diminutive, dynamic figure in his 70s, wearing ergonomic sandals and a short-sleeved khaki shirt that exposed a five-digit number tattooed on his forearm, he repeatedly jumped up from his chair to retrieve books from the shelves that towered above us.

Kulka produced and read aloud from a long list of German-Jewish intellectuals whose papers are in the National Library: Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber. “We are taking care of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and we will take care of Kafka,” he said. “They say the papers will be safer in Germany, the Germans will take very good care of them. Well, the Germans don’t have a very good history of taking care of Kafka’s things. They didn’t take good care of his sisters.” He fell silent. “I was together with Kafka’s sister Ottla,” he added, in a conversational tone.

“Oh, really?” I said, not understanding what he meant.

“Yes,” he said, smiling vaguely. “In Theresienstadt, before she was murdered.” Kulka, 9 years old at the time, never spoke to Ottla but described her as a kind and selfless person, who voluntarily escorted a group of Jewish orphans from Bialystok to Auschwitz.

Oded Hacohen, Eva Hoffe’s attorney, maintains that “moral positions” about Germany are irrelevant to the case. “People ask me, ‘Don’t you care that those manuscripts could end up in Germany?’ ” he said. “I care much more that those Holocaust refugees cannot pay their electricity bills here in Israel.”

Brod met his future secretary Esther Hoffe and her husband, Otto, shortly after his arrival in Tel Aviv. After Brod’s wife died in 1942, he and the Hoffes became extremely close. “Our home was his home; he didn’t have another one,” Esther told a reporter for Ha’aretz in 1968. Esther had an office in Brod’s apartment. She and Otto and Max took vacations together in Switzerland. Although acquaintances of Brod described the relationship as a “ménage à trois,” Eva has denied that her mother and Brod were romantically involved. The relationship will presumably be illuminated in Brod’s diaries, which are believed to be in one of the vaults.

The opening of the safe-deposit boxes might also elucidate the central mystery in this case: given Brod’s evident intention for the papers to end up in an archive, why did he make them a gift to a private individual? And why did he choose an individual who proved capable of hanging onto them for 40 years?

Brod’s surviving acquaintances at the Hebrew University, including Otto Dov Kulka, are convinced that the 1952 gift letter, in which he seemingly bequeathed the papers to Esther, has been altered and that Brod never wavered in his intention for Kafka’s work to remain in Israel. They maintain that the vaults will yield proof that Brod changed his will in later years to name a new executor: Felix Weltsch, a Zionist and philosopher who worked at the Jerusalem library. (Brod mentions this change in a 1964 letter to Weltsch, but the codicil has never been found.)

Reiner Stach, Kafka’s biographer, sees things differently. He maintains that Brod was torn between Marbach, with its impressive facilities, and the library in Jerusalem, where so many of his friends worked. Unable to announce that he was leaving Kafka’s papers to “the country of the perpetrators,” as Stach puts it, Brod left Hoffe to play the bad cop. Stach also suggests that although Brod didn’t wish to profit financially from Kafka, he might have wanted to compensate Hoffe for her long years of secretarial work by allowing her to sell the materials to a well-financed institute.

Etgar Keret, a best-selling Israeli short-story writer who considers Kafka to be his greatest influence, proposes that Brod had no idea that Hoffe would sit on the papers for so long. “Half of us are married to people who say, ‘I’m just going to buy a pack of cigarettes,’ and never return,” he told me. “I think this is the literary version of that, with this Hoffe chick.” Keret characterizes Brod as “a good judge of texts, for sure, but a very bad judge of human characters.” If Brod could see what was happening now, Keret says, he would be “horrified.” Kafka, on the other hand, might be O.K. with it: “The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

Kafka wasn’t the only ambivalent one. Some part of Brod clearly wasn’t ready to let the papers out of the vaults. Most scholars agree that Brod was reluctant to give up his control over Kafka’s image. Materials in the estate will probably testify to the friends’ visits to prostitutes — which Brod excised from his edition of Kafka’s diaries — or to Kafka’s occasional anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic comments, like the wish he once expressed “to stuff all Jews (myself included) into a drawer of a laundry basket.” Furthermore, Brod’s view of Kafka as the savior of mankind made the papers a huge, life-consuming responsibility, which Brod himself must occasionally have wished to stuff into the drawer of a laundry basket. Everything was at stake — the memory of Kafka, the fate of world literature, the future of Israel — and nobody could be trusted.

Meir Heller, an attorney for the National Library, told me he believes that Brod turned to Hoffe when, in his old age, he began to suspect everyone else of distorting his friend’s legacy. “She was wiping him, she was making his food,” Heller said. “He thought, I can trust her.” He describes Brod’s school of interpretation of Kafka as a “sect” into which only true believers were permitted. Heller mentioned a 1957 letter from Brod to Hoffe, specifying that, after Esther’s death, the Kafka papers should pass to one of Brod’s friends (although her daughters would still receive royalties from their publication); in later years Brod periodically returned to this letter, adding and subtracting the names of those he considered trustworthy. The publisher Klaus Wagenbach was there for a while, but Brod crossed him out after Wagenbach published a Kafka biography that Brod didn’t like.

Heller’s recurring metaphor for the papers comes from “The Lord of the Rings.” “You remember the ‘precious’?” he said, alluding to the magic ring that causes its possessor to guard it obsessively. “That’s how it is. Whoever touches these papers — it distorts their vision.”

One afternoon during my stay in Tel Aviv, I headed to Spinoza Street on the off-chance that Eva Hoffe was home and felt like talking to the press. I was accompanied by Avi Steinberg, an American writer living at the time in Jerusalem. I had become acquainted with Steinberg two months earlier, when he mailed me the galleys of a memoir he wrote about his experiences as a prison librarian. In subsequent correspondence, I mentioned my impending Kafkaesque assignment to report on a “Kafka archive kept for decades in a cat-infested Tel Aviv flat,” confessing to some apprehensions that I would be unable to locate the apartment. Steinberg promptly replied that the address was 23 Spinoza Street, that he had recently rung the doorbell himself but had no answer and that “last week in court, Eva Hoffe’s sweater was covered in animal hairs, possibly originating from a cat or cats.”

Walking through the city center, we discussed the mystery of Kafka’s testament. Steinberg saw in Kafka’s cryptic letter to Brod another version of the parable of Abraham and Isaac. (Kafka wrote several retellings of this story in 1921, the same year he first mentioned to Brod that he wanted his work to be burned.) Kafka, Steinberg suggested, wanted to prove that he was ready to incinerate the child of his creation, simultaneously knowing and not knowing that Brod would step in and play the role of the angel.

“The thing is,” Steinberg said, “we only have Brod’s word for any of this. What if Kafka never even told him to burn his stuff? Has anyone ever seen that letter? What if this is all some big idea Brod had?”

Similarly paranoid thoughts cross the mind of nearly everyone who studies Kafka. At a certain point you realize that everything — even the picture of Brod as a good-natured busybody who ignored Kafka’s wishes — comes from Brod himself. “Don’t write this down — I don’t want to be the laughingstock of the academic community,” one scholar told me, having ventured the idea that Brod himself had composed all of Kafka’s writings and, alarmed by their strangeness, attributed them to a reclusive friend who worked at an insurance office.

Spinoza Street is in a quiet residential neighborhood lined by flat-roofed stucco buildings. The dingy off-pink stucco facade of No. 23 was partly obscured by a tree with enormous glossy leaves that were apparently being eaten away by something. Parked under the tree were a broken shopping cart and an old bicycle. Behind a large protruding window, enclosed by two layers of metal grillwork, lay an indistinct heap of cats. Some commotion involving a blackbird took place in one of the trees, causing six or so cats to look up in unison, elongating their necks. The breeze turned. A terrible smell wafted toward us.

The smell was stronger inside the building. We knocked on Hoffe’s door several times. Someone or something was moving inside, but nobody answered. Steinberg, who has a mild cat allergy, began sneezing. The sneezes echoed terrifyingly in the empty stairwell.

Back in the yard, we squinted in the hazy sunlight. Two cats staggered out of a rhododendron bush, looking drunk. I kept remembering a line from “The Trial”: “The wooden steps explained nothing, no matter how long one stared at them.” Having taken the precaution of bringing some cat toys with me, I began waving an artificial mouse at a gray kitten I had just noticed under the shopping cart. After some hesitation, the kitten ran out from under the shopping cart and pounced on the mouse, then scooped it up with its little white paws and bounced it off its chest.

What would Brod have made of it all? The situation struck me as enormously sad. It was sad that Esther had gotten so terribly old and died, and that Eva, the beautiful girl whom Brod once taught to play the piano, was now making French headlines as the “cat woman septuagénaire” who guards Kafka’s papers amid “feline miasmas and angora toxoplasmosis.” Ostensibly trying to defend her privacy and financial interests, Eva was plagued at all hours by journalists, while presumably racking up a fortune in legal fees. Nor would Brod conceivably have been delighted that Kafka’s papers had generated decades of acrimony and become the playthings of lawyers. He might have felt gratified by his friend’s extraordinary fame; but it was thanks to that very fame, which Brod himself both predicted and created, that Kafka didn’t belong to Brod anymore. Brod always knew that he couldn’t hold on to Kafka forever, but he never really faced up to it, and this was the result.

The more I learned about the papers’ stormy history, the more convincing I found the “Lord of the Rings” analogy invoked by Meir Heller, the attorney for the National Library. Brod really does seem to have regarded Kafka’s work as “one ring to rule them all.” Ever since he brought it to Israel, it has been guarded with a secrecy and fanaticism unusual even within the contentious world of literary estates.

The first conflict over Kafka’s papers arose in the 1930s between Brod and Salman Schocken, a former department-store magnate who took over the publication of Kafka’s works in 1933. During the war, Schocken continued to publish Kafka from Palestine and, later, New York, but retained the original manuscripts at his library in Jerusalem. Several sources confirm a fraught letter exchange between the two, with Brod demanding the return of certain manuscripts. In 1956, Schocken moved the papers in his possession to Zurich. The Zurich papers were eventually acquired for the Bodleian Library at Oxford through the offices of Sir Malcolm Pasley, an Oxford Germanist and a friend of Kafka’s great-nephew Michael Steiner.

Esther Hoffe was notorious for her elusiveness regarding the papers that she inherited from Brod. According to Der Spiegel, she backed out of a plan to lend “The Trial” to a Kafka exhibition in Paris because she didn’t get a personal phone call from the French president. Later a German publisher reportedly paid her a five-digit sum for the rights to Brod’s diaries, but she never produced the goods.

In 1974, at the request of the Israeli State Archives, an Israeli court reviewed Hoffe’s claim to the Brod estate. The judge ruled that she could do whatever she wanted with the papers during her lifetime. The following year, Hoffe was arrested at the Tel Aviv airport on suspicion of smuggling Kafka manuscripts abroad without first leaving copies with the State Archives (a stipulation of the Israeli Archives Law of 1955). A search of her luggage yielded photocopies of letters written by Kafka and, reportedly, originals of Brod’s diaries. (An estimated 22 letters and 10 postcards from Kafka to Brod were sold the previous year, presumably by Hoffe, in private sales in Germany.)

Hoffe was released. Soon after, an archivist from the State Archives came to Spinoza Street and, in the presence of Esther, Eva and an attorney, tried to inventory the estate. The archivist reported finding more than 50 feet of files, including originals of Brod’s diaries, letters to Brod from Kafka and letters to Brod and Kafka from unspecified “personages.” Most of the files, however, consisted of photocopies. When asked about the originals, Hoffe’s attorney, according to the archivist, “hesitated for a moment, then said that the material is not here,” adding that he, the lawyer, “always counseled to leave a photocopy in Israel, in compliance with the Archives Law.”

The incompleteness of the inventory leaves many questions about the contents of the estate. The answers may well be in a more thorough catalog compiled in the ’80s by a philologist named Bern­hard Echte, now the publisher of Nimbus Books in Switzerland. Copies of Echte’s inventory, which lists some 20,000 pages of material, are closely guarded. Heller has been trying vainly to get one for years.

Echte, the rare scholar whose brush with the Kafka papers doesn’t seem to have injured his sense for the magic of literary discovery, is also the only interviewee in this story who described Esther Hoffe with genuine warmth. Echte told me in an e-mail interview that Hoffe “really tried to fulfill Max Brod’s will because she admired and loved Max Brod like a young girl (and I liked her very much for it).” Although her preference for “books with a good and interesting story” led her to find Kafka “strange,” Echte said, she nonetheless recognized Kafka’s importance to world literature and was prevented only by old age from placing the papers at Marbach. Echte fondly recalled “all the discoveries we made — Mrs. Hoffe and me.” Inside “quite a normal folder” for example, they found “two or three sheets of paper with Kafka’s last notes from Kierling,” the sanitarium where Kafka died. In Zurich, they unearthed a letter that Kafka sent to Brod in 1910, enclosing two birthday gifts: “a small stone,” still in the envelope, and “a damaged book” — which turned up two years later at Spinoza Street and proved to be a novel by Robert Walser. Other treasures that Echte described to me included a copy of “Tristan Tzara’s ‘Première Aventure Céleste de M. Antipyrine,’ the first Dada publication, with a personal dedication of the author to Kafka. Imagine that!”

What else is in the vaults? Most experts agree that the estate is unlikely to contain any unknown major work by Kafka. On the other hand, Kafka often embedded lapidary parables and short-short stories in his letters and diaries. Brod published everything he saw fit, but Peter Fenves, a literature professor at Northwestern University, speculates that there might still be some “literary gems” left: “Perhaps a story like ‘Jackals and Arabs,’ which I can imagine Brod would have suppressed” if Kafka hadn’t published it himself. (In this fable, a European traveler is informed by some jackals — sometimes interpreted as a caricature of Jews — that they have been waiting for generations for him to slit the throats of their unclean enemies, the Arabs.)

The estate is of great interest not only to literary scholars but also to historians and biographers. Reiner Stach, who has already published Volumes 2 and 3 in his three-volume life of Kafka, told me that he has been waiting for years for the vaults to divulge materials necessary for Volume 1: an early notebook by Brod “that is said to contain ‘a good deal about Kafka’ ”; Brod’s unpublished diary from 1909; and letters from Kafka’s hitherto unknown “early friends.”

Kathi Diamant — Dora Diamant’s biographer and the founder of the San Diego-based Kafka Project, which in 2000 discovered Kafka’s old hairbrush at a kibbutz in Jezreel Valley — is eagerly awaiting the release from the vaults of 70 letters written by Dora to Brod. In one letter, Dora, to whom Kathi says she may or may not be related, confesses to having burned at Kafka’s request a number of his manuscripts, perhaps including an unpublished story about a blood-libel case in Kiev. But Dora also saved 20 notebooks and 35 letters, which were seized from her apartment by the Gestapo in 1933. Kathi says that information from the Brod correspondence may help her track down these materials, possibly to a sealed archive in Poland. Both Kathi and Zvi Diamant, Dora’s last living nephew, repeatedly tried to contact Esther Hoffe about the letters: “She refused to help and hung up,” Kathi recalled.

On my last night in Tel Aviv I found myself back at Spinoza Street, to meet the filmmaker Sagi Bornstein, who is working on a documentary about the Kafka case. We met at the end of the block, just as dark was falling. Bornstein, wearing a striped knit cap and a lapel button that said simply “K” (the gift of Dutch Kafkologists), was accompanied by two crew members and a medium-size dog named Babylon Fighter. We sat on a public bench, and Bornstein fitted me with a microphone. His crew filmed our conversation from the other side of the street, where they appeared to be standing in some bushes.

Bornstein was considering two titles for his film: “Kafka’s Last Story,” referring to Kafka’s will, and “Kafka’s Egg,” referring, he said, to “an Easter egg, or the egg of Columbus.”

“It’s something that everyone is trying to solve — but in the end, it’s only an egg,” Bornstein explained. He talked about his experiences shooting in Marbach, Prague, Berlin and Kierling, and about his fruitless efforts to interview Eva Hoffe. “I feel pretty sorry for her,” he said. “I think I understand her pretty well. It’s her life, and she doesn’t owe a report to anyone. Still, the story doesn’t belong only to her. She accidentally got into a story that’s bigger than all of us together.” He fell silent. A girl passed on a bicycle. Babylon Fighter, who does not wear a leash, seemed inclined to follow her, but Bornstein dissuaded him with a stern clicking noise. “So,” he said, turning to me. “You want to go knock on her door?”

I didn’t, frankly, but a job is a job. The crew emerged from the bushes, and we all headed back up Spinoza Street. The lights were on, although it was now past 10 p.m. Bornstein walked me to the door, standing away from the peephole; if she saw him, he said, she wouldn’t open the door.

“I don’t think she’s going to open the door anyway,” I said — accurately, as it turned out. We could hear voices inside. “She’s on the phone,” Bornstein said. Back outside, he speed-dialed Eva’s lawyer Oded Hacohen on his iPhone, and they spoke for some minutes. A large moth circled over our heads in the light of a streetlamp, its wings flapping like some great opened-up book of magic.

“We’ve been having the same conversation for a year,” Bornstein said, hanging up. “He just says we can’t talk to her now. He doesn’t say ‘never’ — just ‘not now.’ It’s ‘Before the Law.’ It’s the exact same thing.”

Bornstein was alluding to the famous parable in “The Trial” about a man who comes before the law but is turned away by the doorkeeper. The man asks if he will be allowed to enter later. “It’s possible, but not now,” says the doorkeeper, explaining that he is only the first in a series of increasingly powerful and terrifying doorkeepers (“The mere sight of the third is more than even I can bear”). The man sits next to the entrance for hours, days, years, waiting to be admitted to the law. In his dying breath, he asks the guard a question: Since the law is open to everyone, why has nobody else approached it in all these years? “This entrance was meant solely for you,” the guard says. “I’m going to go and shut it now.” Like many of Kafka’s stories, it carries the dreamlike impact of a great revelation, while nonetheless not making much immediately apparent sense.

Bornstein gave me a lift home on his moped, together with Babylon Fighter and a substantial amount of video equipment. As we whizzed through traffic and a pedestrian mall, narrowly missing a fateful encounter with a young man sprawled on a sheet and claiming to be the Messiah, I reflected on “Before the Law” — specifically, on the feelings the man projects onto the doorkeeper. “Over the many years,” Kafka writes, “the man observes the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets the other doorkeepers and this first one seems to him the only obstacle to his admittance to the Law.”

Who is Eva Hoffe if not the doorkeeper, the one whom we observe incessantly, who seems to us the only obstacle to our understanding of Kafka? But in fact, beyond Eva lies a series of doorkeepers, most notably Brod, who has been reproached with everything under the sun: with making Kafka a saint, with refusing to burn his papers, with hiding the papers that he refused to burn, with writing such dreadful novels and, overall, with his general inescapability. And then, when we get past Brod, it’s only to face the most powerful doorkeeper of all, Kafka himself.

“With Kafka, people go crazy about getting the original manuscript — not a photocopy, not a facsimile,” Meir Heller once remarked to me. “With most writers, once there’s a copy, nobody cares.” We fetishize the original manuscripts, because they seem to offer some access to a definitive Kafka — a Kafka beyond Brod. But this, too, is an illusion. The manuscripts aren’t definitive, because definitiveness, for better or worse, is the product of deadlines and editors and publishers: things Kafka either went out of his way not to have or ended up not having because of bad luck, tuberculosis and the First World War. When Kafka did prepare manuscripts for publication, he spent much time correcting mistakes and decoding his own abbreviations, sometimes even enlisting Brod’s help; one critic thus speculates that “Brod’s version might, in the end, look more like what Kafka would have published” than the most meticulous German scholarly editions. Maybe there is no Kafka beyond Brod.

Nonetheless, like the man in the parable, we ultimately come back to our faith in the law. In the coming weeks, a court-appointed group will finish inventorying the remaining boxes, as well as the contents of the Spinoza Street apartment. It’s only a matter of time before the list is made public and most of the materials find their way to one archive or another. The last doorkeeper out of the way, we’ll be as close to Kafka as we’re ever going to get.


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September 23, 2010
The Connecticut-Country-Club Crackup
By MATT BAI

You could spend your life around political campaigns and never see a celebration quite like the one Linda McMahon held last month after Connecticut Republicans made her their Senate candidate in a three-way primary. McMahon is the fabulously wealthy founder (along with her high-school sweetheart and husband, Vince) of World Wrestling Entertainment, a company the McMahons transformed into a sort of Disney for the age of postindustrial American anger. Unknown to Connecticut voters before she began her run, she spent more than $20 million of her own fortune to beat out two Republican candidates — one of them recruited by the national party — for the right to square off this November against Richard Blumenthal, the state’s longtime Democratic attorney general, in a contest to succeed Christopher Dodd, who is retiring.

The first thing I noticed when I wandered into McMahon’s victory party, at a Crowne Plaza Hotel south of Hartford, was the lavish spread — not the usual weenies and plastic cups, but warm pasta and flaky pastries and drinks from an open bar, all of it consumed by supporters carting free “Linda” tote bags and T-shirts. The second thing was the vintage 1980s soundtrack, which included decidedly unpolitical tracks like the AC/DC classic “You Shook Me All Night Long.” She had the sightless eyes, telling me no lies, knocking me out with those American thighs. . . .

Onstage, a tableau of supporters carefully constructed for television in the way of modern campaigns — nonwhite faces up front, directly behind the candidate — stood assembled under a banner that read, blandly, “It’s Time for Something Different.” Just behind the lectern, alongside other family members, loomed McMahon’s ponytailed, R.V.-size son-in-law, the wrestler known as Triple H. Then a state senator, Len Fasano, delivered one of the more bizarre political orations I had ever heard, getting himself so worked up that he apparently forgot which state he served and introduced the crowd to “the next U.S. senator from the great state of New York!”

The 61-year-old candidate herself walked onstage in a pink suit and pearls, looking for all the world like the president of the Fairfield P.T.A., and proceeded to deliver a victory speech that was sort of amazing for its amalgamation of clichés and a complete, almost defiant, lack of substance.

“I had a great fear that the American dream was in the greatest jeopardy that it has ever been in our lifetime, and I didn’t want to lose that opportunity for the American dream for our children and our grandchildren.”

“The great communicator Ronald Reagan had it right, but this president and this Congress have it wrong!”

“This campaign has never been about the political pundits or the establishment. This campaign is about you!”

And so on. Then McMahon strode off the stage to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.”

Such a spectacle might not seem out of place in a state like California, where millionaires and celebrities are always jumping into the fray, or in one like Minnesota, where popular revolt seems to come in waves. But this is Connecticut, my home state, where the business of campaigns and governance used to be a predictable, serious affair, the province of mostly estimable public servants who worked their way up through town councils or local party machines. Sometimes called the Land of Steady Habits, Connecticut was never a place for garish campaigns and outsize characters with bank statements to match.

Until recently, the closest thing Connecticut experienced to an overturning of the political order, at least in modern times, was the revolt over a state income tax in the early 1990s. So incensed were the voters then that they replaced their moderate governor, the former longtime senator Lowell Weicker, with a more conservative career politician, a three-term congressman named John Rowland. Take that, status quo!

That, however, was before Rowland and a small cadre of other Connecticut officeholders were hauled away to prison on corruption charges; before Democrats ousted Joe Lieberman from the party only six years after they nominated him for the vice presidency; before the politicians in Hartford blew a hole the size of Long Island Sound in the state budget. As I watched McMahon’s hopeful supporters file out of the ballroom clutching their tote bags, I found myself wondering: when, exactly, did genteel Connecticut become Louisiana? And if politics could get this weird here, then what did that mean for the rest of the country?

As in much of the Northeast, Connecticut politics for most of the last century was the purview of two distinct cultural camps: the urban, ethnic machines that dominated the Democratic Party and the patrician Republicans (the Bushes of Greenwich, most notably) who considered it their duty to serve. In postwar suburbs like Trumbull, where my parents moved from Bridgeport and raised their three children, the two groups coexisted uneasily but, for the most part, productively and congenially. Democrats and Republicans might have argued over where to build a new school or whether to let the highway plow through a park, but rarely was there anything personal about it.

Things started to change in the 1980s, for reasons both cultural and economic. A new generation of politicians ascended to power — liberals and conservatives with sharply moralistic approaches to politics. At the same time, the manufacturing decline that was beginning to erode the nation’s economic base, along with the “white flight” that began in the 1960s, hollowed out Connecticut’s cities and weakened its governing establishment. Outsiders tend to think of Connecticut as a collection of wealthy suburbs and rural horse farms, as portrayed in books and movies like “The Ice Storm.” That side of things does exist, particularly on the “gold coast” that runs along the southwest edge of the state, where many hedge-fund managers and movie stars live. And yet much of the state is heavily industrialized, or at least it was until the 1970s. According to data compiled by the Brookings Institution that looks at the core cities of the 100 largest metropolitan areas, two of Connecticut’s largest cities — Hartford and New Haven — are now among the dozen poorest in the country. Hartford, the capital, is the poorest in America.

The effects of this kind of industrial decline, politically, were so gradual as to be almost imperceptible on a daily basis, but cumulatively they took a toll on the political climate. Fear of crime created political pressure for stricter sentencing guidelines, which drove up the state’s incarceration costs significantly. College graduates went off to other regions in search of jobs, leaving behind an aging population whose Medicaid costs are soaring. Public-sector unions replaced trade unions as the dominant political force, and soon the state was paying out unsustainable retirement benefits to its employees. The state budget has grown 60 percent in the last decade, sustained mainly by an income tax that everyone hates.

And then there’s the corruption, the sudden proliferation of which nobody I talked to in the state could adequately explain. No fewer than half a dozen major political scandals erupted in the past several years. Bridgeport’s former mayor just got out of jail after, among other things, accepting free gifts from city contractors; Hartford’s mayor is headed in for doing the same thing; and Waterbury’s onetime mayor (a convicted sex offender) isn’t getting out anytime soon. Governor Rowland, who also accepted free services from contractors, resigned from office in 2004 and served 10 months in prison.

Voter outrage at both parties, but particularly at Democrats, has been building since at least 2006. That’s when Ned Lamont, a cable-television executive whose great-grandfather was a partner at J. P. Morgan, defeated Joe Lieberman in a primary that focused mostly on the war in Iraq. (Lieberman went on to win re-election as an independent.) This year, Lamont spent $9 million to run for governor against another of his party’s entrenched politicians, a former Stamford mayor named Dan Malloy, but without a single galvanizing issue like the one he rode four years ago, he found himself unable to stir much passion from the disillusioned Democratic base, and lost.

The next incumbent after Lieberman to feel the walls closing in was Dodd, who just a few years ago seemed very likely to live out his days in the Senate. Instead, he decided not to seek a sixth term after polls revealed he had very little chance of winning. Dodd is the chairman of the banking committee and is the second-ranking Democratic member on the health-and-education committee — hard-won appointments that would, at another time, have made him seem virtually indispensable to the state. Instead, even fellow Democrats pilloried Dodd for his close ties to Wall Street executives, who make up a significant part of the state’s economy. In other words, Dodd was blasted as a sellout to his state for championing the interests of what had always been, up to now anyway, a crucial constituency.

The state has lost 103,000 jobs and counting during the current recession. And so the moment would seem well primed for Republican officeholders, who don’t control the government in Washington. The problem for Connecticut Republicans is that they don’t really have a lot of candidates left from which to choose. Ever since the party took a hard right turn in the 1980s, it has been slowly disappearing from the state. The last of the state’s moderate Republican congressmen, Rob Simmons and Chris Shays, were defeated in the past two election cycles. (Simmons, who was the national party’s choice to run against Blumenthal, was one candidate Linda McMahon defeated in the primary.) The one centrist Republican on the statewide scene, Gov. Jodi Rell, is retiring. The Republican who is bidding to replace her, a longtime party fund-raiser named Tom Foley, is, like McMahon, a self-financed candidate from Greenwich who had never run for office.

“The Republican Party is a nonentity in Connecticut today,” Weicker, who formed his own party when he ran successfully for governor in 1990, told me when I visited him at his home in Old Lyme. “It can’t find men or women that have come through the chairs to get to where they are. They find people with a wad of dough who just try to buy the office.” (Dodd, who said he was shocked when McMahon got the Republican nomination, puts it another way: “Her main selling point is money.”)

Coincidentally, and a little oddly, Weicker sits on McMahon’s board at W.W.E. After a lengthy discussion of the health care reform law, I asked him if McMahon, who favors repeal, knew what she was talking about. “No,” he answered, waving me away as if I had just asked whether either of his large dogs could fly. “I think she’s following the Republican line — to say no.”

Contrary to conventional thought, you can’t just go out and buy yourself a substantial political office in America. Al Checchi spent $40 million trying to become governor of California in 1998 and couldn’t get past the Democratic primary. Tom Golisano, a New York businessman and philanthropist, spent $93 million on three futile attempts to become that state’s governor between 1994 and 2002. The Texas entrepreneur H. Ross Perot spent $60 million during his 1992 campaign, back when 60 million bucks really meant something in presidential politics, and even though he won 19 percent of the vote, all anyone really remembers are a couple of flip charts and some “Saturday Night Live” skits. That said, $50 million — which is most likely a very conservative estimate of what Linda McMahon calls “investing in myself” — will get you a serious hearing in a state the size of Connecticut. And the way McMahon goes about spending her wrestling fortune is about as subtle as a folding chair to the skull.

Two days after the primary, I arrived at McMahon’s headquarters in the swanky suburb of West Hartford. The headquarters looked more like some interior-design-by-appointment showroom than any campaign office I had ever seen. The glass storefront, over which the word “Linda” was elegantly stenciled in small letters on a navy blue awning, sat between a toy store and an exclusive clothing boutique that had a rack of summer dresses on the brick sidewalk.

Inside, brand new iPads, still in their packaging, lay scattered on desks where you might have expected to see discarded pizza boxes. Upstairs, where the press aides sat, a dozen or so flat-screen TVs hung from a futuristic grid of metal rods, with a stack of digital recorders within easy reach. It felt as if McMahon were campaigning to be commander of Starfleet.

In person, McMahon has a confident, likable presence. Her voice retains the lilt of her native North Carolina, and she laughs easily and warmly, with the sense of humor of a woman who had no problem pretending to violently feud with her husband in front of a national television audience. She is also intensely disciplined with a script, and repeatedly, in the course of our hourlong conversation, she came back to her central theme — that what was missing in Washington were officials who understood what it took to make a small business work. “I’ve built a business,” she told me right off. “I’ve put capital at risk. I understand what rules and regulations and taxes do to business.”

At another point, she told me: “What I continued to hear even before I got into the race was: ‘Do we not have anybody who’s run a business, who can be a part of government? Can government not be run more as a business, with a little bit of attention to the bottom line?’ ”

What McMahon has in mind for the country, more specifically, is to slash or freeze a slate of corporate taxes, while also abolishing the estate tax and the gift tax and creating a series of new deductions for capital expenditures. Businesses will create jobs, McMahon says, when the government stops taking so much of their money away and wasting it on so-called public investments, and those jobs will in turn lift more Americans into affluence.

If all this stirs in you a feeling of nostalgia, like the songs on McMahon’s campaign soundtrack, that’s because it is a perfect distillation of what was once called “supply-side economics,” the gift that Ronald Reagan bequeathed to America in the 1980s and that George W. Bush then regifted in a sparkly new box. In fact, McMahon’s economic plan is largely the work of the economist and sometime television commentator John Rutledge, a supply-side evangelist who helped design Reagan’s program back in the day.

The supply-side argument, which George H. W. Bush once derided as “voodoo economics,” is prevalent among conservative candidates running this year. But as David Stockman, who was Reagan’s first budget director, argued in a Times Op-Ed essay in July, supply-siders during the Reagan and second Bush eras proved far more adept at cutting taxes than they did at scaling back federal spending, which is the main reason we have trillion-dollar budgets deficits. And so it would seem to be incumbent on a candidate like McMahon, who also rails against the debt and who advocates a balanced budget in Washington, to articulate some specific idea of where the budget can be scaled back.

I asked her, for instance, whether she was in favor of reforming entitlement programs that, along with military outlays, represent the principal forces driving spending levels ever higher. “We’re going to have to look at them,” she said, “but I can tell you that that has got to be done in the legislative arena, with open debate, with people on both sides really tackling this and talking about it. We’ve got to strengthen our entitlement programs. We’ve got to make sure that our contract with seniors is maintained and upheld.” But, she added: “I’ve made a specific point of saying I’m not going to go into that on the campaign trail, because I don’t think that’s appropriate. I think the appropriate arena is the legislative arena.”

In other words, this business of governance was too serious to be discussed in any detail during a campaign, which McMahon seemed to regard more as an exercise in theater, like “Saturday Night’s Main Event.” Instead, she returned, once again, to the value of her business experience.

“What I’ve said to people as I’ve gone around the state,” McMahon said, “is: ‘Look, I don’t have all the answers. I wish I had a magic wand and could go to Washington and wave it. But one thing that you will have from me is to take my 30 years of experience, roll up my sleeves. I built a company with 24/7 sweat equity, and I don’t think you can take your eye off the ball until you can solve all these issues and keep working at them.’ ”

For Republicans, the surprising win by the Tea Party candidate Christine O’Donnell in Delaware, in a Senate race they now seem resigned to losing, has made the campaign in Connecticut more pivotal. It is hard to see how Republicans can retake the Senate without capturing Dodd’s seat in November. But Democrats in Washington don’t seem terribly worried about McMahon’s candidacy. For one thing, they are confident that the details of McMahon’s lifestyle and her involvement in a steroid-addled industry won’t sit well with the state’s well-mannered voters. McMahon had a yacht called Sexy Bitch, and the most famous video clip of her — shown by a Republican opponent in the primary — shows her kicking Jim Ross, a W.W.E. announcer, in the groin.

And Democrats remain bullish on Blumenthal, a fixture in Connecticut politics for 25 years who has already won five statewide elections. Blumenthal’s campaign suffered through an existential crisis in May, after Raymond Hernandez reported in The Times that Blumenthal repeatedly misled voters about having served in Vietnam. But Blumenthal apologized — after several agonizing days — and maintained his double-digit lead over McMahon in the polls. This advantage, which has since narrowed considerably, led elated Democrats to conclude that if he could survive that kind of scandal with hardly a hiccup, then he could very likely survive anything McMahon might throw at him.

Near the end of my interview with McMahon, I asked her how exactly she intended to take on Blumenthal in a reliably Democratic state. What was her critique of a man the voters seemed to find eminently acceptable, even after his integrity had been called into question? McMahon didn’t hesitate.

“The voters in Connecticut are going to have a very clear choice in November,” she told me, describing Blumenthal as “a career politician” who has never created a single job. “He’s been in the lawsuit business. His business is suing people. My business is creating jobs. My business is adding and building to the economy. So it’s just a very clear choice.”

She paused and held up a hand to literally frame the choice for me. “The primary differences are career politician versus businesswoman,” McMahon said, sounding very much like a human bullet point.

If McMahon’s sleek storefront command center was the antithesis of what one would expect from a campaign office, then Blumenthal’s headquarters in downtown Hartford was depressingly predictable. It is just the kind of ground-floor suite that campaigns rent for nothing, with faded dingy walls and industrial-strength carpet to match, illuminated by yellowy fluorescent bulbs. When I met Blumenthal there, the day after my conversation with McMahon, he showed me into an office that was bare except for a couple of chairs and a battered wooden desk.

After decades on the immediate periphery of the state’s Democratic landscape, always next in line for a Senate seat but biding his time with the patience of a monk, Blumenthal is a recognizable brand in Connecticut. He doggedly shows up everywhere, listens attentively, takes copious notes and makes prudent statements. He has sued or subpoenaed tobacco companies and subprime-mortgage lenders, to name just a few, and even took on MySpace (in order to get the names of sex offenders) — a record of “standing up” for businesses and families that, more than any one issue, forms the basis of his pitch to voters. Surprisingly boyish for a man of 64, with prominent ears and squinty eyes, he comes across as earnest and a little robotic. “One of my most important strengths in this race is that people know me,” Blumenthal told me. “Not just from the TV, but personally. I’ve been to the parades and the fairs and the funerals and the christenings and, you know, places where people talk and interact.” He added, “I think that personal touch is still very important to people.”

Blumenthal said he can understand why Connecticut voters seemed enraged at anyone in power these days. “I feel the anger and frustration about the way Washington is failing to listen and to respond,” he said carefully. “And I share it, because I’ve fought it as well. So, you know, some of the sense of distance and frustration and even anger — I feel it as a public servant and as a citizen. It’s very well justified, and I share it.”

Blumenthal didn’t sound angry; he sounded as if he were dictating a letter. But this was his message, and he steered back to it no less than three more times in a 20-minute conversation. “So when people are angry and frustrated about what’s happening in Washington, they’re right,” he said at one point. “They’re dead right.” And then: “I’m an outsider to Washington.” And later: “I’m as frustrated and angry as anyone.”

Blumenthal has faithfully done the people’s business all these years, in a way that has apparently gratified them. But now that his moment has arrived, just having been in office for all that time turns out to be his most significant vulnerability. It may not help that Blumenthal just seems so stereo­typically incumbent. Even if he hadn’t been in office for a quarter century already, it would probably feel as if he had.

The assault on Blumenthal’s Vietnam half-truths didn’t stick with the voters because it didn’t reinforce anything they already believed about him. This is how it is in politics; because the voters long ago decided that this Blumenthal guy they kept reading about was basically an honest sort, it will likely take more than a few misstatements to derail him. But the other argument that McMahon is just now beginning to make, that Blumenthal is your typical insider, a lifelong politician who just doesn’t get what they’re going through — this is an attack that might flower in the current environment, and he seems to know it.

And so perhaps Washington Democrats should be more concerned about McMahon and the challenge she presents. At a time when unemployment in the state hovers around 9 percent, voters may not especially care about McMahon’s yacht or whether she gave her wrestlers health care plans or tacitly encouraged them to shoot up steroids. (And, in any event, it’s doubtful they consider anything that happened at W.W.E. to be so much less respectable than the path traveled by some of the investment bankers and trial lawyers who have made it to the Senate.)

McMahon is a talented candidate, in the sense that she knows how to choose a point and drive it home, and you can bet she will spend the next six weeks hammering away at the center of the electorate — that is, at all those civic-minded former Republicans in Connecticut who routinely provide Democrats their margins of victory but who long for a better alternative. She has been careful not to box herself into any positions that might strike voters as kind of wacky, unlike the party’s Senate candidates in Kentucky (where Rand Paul qualified his support for the Civil Rights Act) and Nevada (where Sharron Angle has suggested that voters might look for “Second Amendment remedies” to a dysfunctional Congress). There is little Tea Party presence to speak of in Connecticut, and so McMahon was never caught having to take a stand on repealing the direct election of senators or anything like that. She is pro-choice and pro-stem-cell research, and she supports Connecticut’s right to codify gay marriages — all positions well within the mainstream of the state’s moderate electorate.

Blumenthal told me he takes “nothing for granted,” and apparently he means it. The day after I saw him, he left a phone message for my mother, who still lives in Trumbull. He knew my late father, a trial lawyer, and he wanted her to know he enjoyed talking with me, he said, and he left his home number. It was old-school, detail-oriented politics (what mother doesn’t want to hear kind words about her son?), and I had to admire the effort. But when I asked her about it later, my mother said she never called him back.

For the better part of three decades, from the years after World War II until his death in 1975, John Bailey was the most important man in Connecticut politics. Your classic cigar-chomping party boss of the industrial age, Bailey served as chairman of the state Democratic Party through five presidencies and as the party’s national chairman for seven years in the 1960s. He is said to have wielded nearly absolute power in the state’s urban wards, the force behind second-generation Irish, Italian and Jewish politicians who went on to long careers.

Paul Timpanelli, who runs Bridgeport’s business council — and who, as a young Democratic politician back in the 1980s, gave me my first summer internship — is just old enough to remember the tail end of that era, and over lunch at one of Bridgeport’s few really good downtown restaurants, he marveled at how party politics had changed. Specifically, Timpanelli was talking about how state Democrats failed to rally behind Dodd earlier this year — how they seemingly did not know how to offer an endangered incumbent, a man who served for 30 years in the Senate and became a giant of state politics, any incentive to seek re-election.

“John Bailey would have offered him the world, and he would have given the world,” Timpanelli told me. When I mentioned this to Dodd, he agreed. “The party apparatus didn’t seem to be there or know how to handle this,” he said, speaking of the erosion in his standing.

Party bosses like Bailey are a thing of the past in Connecticut, as most everywhere else. So is the party loyalty they inspired. As recently as 1982, Democrats in Connecticut made up 40 percent of the electorate, with Republicans making up about 27 percent and unaffiliated voters another third. By 2010, Democrats actually slipped a few points, to 37 percent, while Republican affiliation fell to 20 percent. Some 42 percent of the state’s voters now identify themselves as independent, a number that has been rising for 20 years.

Connecticut in my parents’ day was the kind of state in which institutions really mattered — religious congregations and city newspapers and insurance companies, garden clubs and the Knights of Columbus, with their towering headquarters in New Haven. Connecticut voters, like voters in a lot of the country, trusted in an established order that seemed to be working pretty well for them, but then people saw their cities and their industries collapse, and even the Catholic Church was tainted by scandal, and elected officials started selling their services for home improvements.

And this is what makes a Linda McMahon possible here and in other parts of America — not just her millions of dollars or the crippled economy, but the sense that the establishment has lost its credibility. It is something McMahon, having built a megaentertainment business without the imprimatur of cultural arbiters, intuitively understood about politics. The more her party’s leadership tried to write her off, the more Democrats scoffed at her candidacy, the more viable she became.

I was discussing the mood in the state recently with Tom D’Amore, a former state Republican chairman who has long since bolted the party, when suddenly he told me a story about his father, an Electrolux vacuum salesman who smoked more than a pack a day for most of his life. “One day, it must have been in the 1960s sometime, he just quit,” D’Amore told me. “Cold turkey. I said to him, ‘Dad, why did you suddenly decide to stop smoking?’ And I’ll never forget it. He pointed a finger at me” — and here D’Amore demonstrated by grimly pointing one at me — “and he said: ‘The surgeon general of the United States says smoking can kill you. And they wouldn’t lie about a thing like that.’

“I mean, can you imagine anyone saying that now?” D’Amore asked me. “In that generation, government really displayed by its actions that it was a force for good.” He leaned back in his chair and shook his head.

“Nobody here thinks that way anymore.”

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