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Sen. Ben Nelson

The Senate likes to think of itself as the world's greatest deliberative body. But there's a less charitable way to think about it: It's the world's greatest collective-action problem.

Passing health care reform has been the Democrats' worst nightmare, but it's a game theorist's dream. The dilemma is simple. The worst-case scenario for Democrats as a whole is to pass no health care bill at all. (Both chambers have already voted in favor of health care reform, so Democrats have spent political capital without anything to show for it.) And yet some individual Democrats oppose moving forward with the bill. And Republicans, of course, have many reasons to oppose it on both individual and collective grounds: They may disagree with its proposals, and, politically, they have no incentive to join the opposition.

It turns out the dilemma facing Democrats reflects a classic model in game theory. Or, rather, two classic models, depending how you look at it. The first is the "prisoner's dilemma," the other is a model called "the battle of the sexes." The prisoner's dilemma imagines two prisoners locked in separate cells. If both deny committing a crime, they both go free. If one cooperates and the other denies, the one who cooperates goes free and the other gets locked away. If they both confess, they're both screwed. In other words, it's in their collective interest to deny but in their individual interests to cooperate.

The political equivalent is that when all other Democrats are voting for health care reform, it's in an individual Democrat's interest to oppose it. And not just for ideological reasons. By holding out, he or she can extract concessions in exchange for his or her support. If the whole thing collapses, that's bad for the Democrat in the end. But short-term calculus suggests he or she should oppose it.

There are two ways to solve this kind of problem: Change the payoff system or promise to return the favor later. Changing the payoffs basically means adding incentives to cooperate. Hence the "cornhusker kickback" Sen. Ben Nelson was able to extract for Nebraska and the "Louisiana purchase" Sen. Mary Landrieu got for her state. Future promises work in repetitive systems, where similar dilemmas come up again. The Senate is a perfect example. If Nelson supports health care reform, for example, Majority Leader Harry Reid will be sure to prioritize Nelson's pet legislation next time around.

Adding Republicans to the mix complicates things a bit. Republicans don't benefit politically if the bill passes (in the sense that their party won't get credit for it). But the model remains essentially the same. Republicans just require even greater payoffs to make it worth their while. According to this model, Democrats would simply have to make Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins or Scott Brown an offer they can't refuse. These deal-sweeteners—some might call them bribes—could backfire as they did with Nelson. But they could still work.

The "battle of the sexes" model is slightly different. The premise is that a couple wants to spend a night out. But they want to do different things. The man wants to go to a football game. The woman wants to go to the opera (or the reverse, if you prefer). But more than anything, they want to spend the evening together. It's therefore in their interest to cooperate, even though whatever they decide will be one person's second choice. It's also to each person's advantage to go first—to signal that they're determined to go to the football game, say, so the other person is forced to come along.

Democrats mirror this model in that they all want health care reform—they just want different versions of it. They also can't agree on how to pass it. Does the House want to pass the Senate version? Do they want to use the reconciliation process to push through the budgetary aspects of the bill? Or do they want to start from scratch and work with Republicans? In this scenario, President Obama would theoretically signal that he wants to go one way, and Democrats, who want something, anything, passed, would be forced to follow. But he hasn't done that.

Again, the model is oversimplified. The fact that the Republicans have veto power means that Democrats have to do more than just agree among themselves. And the assumption that all Democrats agree that any bill is better than no bill may be off, too. (Clearly, some would be happier with nothing at all.) But the central problem—the interests of individual Democrats trumping the collective interests—remains.

This fact isn't true of the health care debate alone. Congress is designed to create collective action problems. It's a structurally "indecisive" body, says Alvin Roth, an economics professor at Harvard University who teaches game theory. And not just because of the filibuster. By requiring a majority (at least) in two separate chambers to pass legislation, the founders created a situation in which most members of Congress can favor a bill but it still gets blocked. "They set us up for not passing laws," Roth says.

That doesn't mean the Founders didn't want health care reform to pass. It just means they intended it to be a pain in the ass.

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Digging out

The National Weather Service is forecasting as much as 20 inches of new snow in Washington, D.C. and 18 inches near Philadelphia by Wednesday—the second major snowfall to affect the Middle Atlantic region in the last several days. The House canceled debates scheduled for Tuesday night, airlines are canceling flights, and—as always happens when there's snow on the ground—journalists are writing stories about shoveling-induced heart attacks. "Shoveling Snow Can Cause Heart Problems" (WHIZ News); "shoveling snow can be incredibly dangerous for someone with a cardiac condition" (Staunton News Leader); "heart attacks among shovelers are a major concern" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette). Is there a real connection between shoveling and cardiac trouble?

Yes. Studies published in the Lancet and the American Journal of Cardiology, among other outlets, show that the incidence of heart failure goes up in the week after a blizzard. The Lancet study, based on death certificates in eastern Massachusetts after six blizzards from 1974-78, demonstrated that ischemic heart disease deaths rose by 22 percent during the blizzard week and stayed elevated for the subsequent eight days, suggesting that the effect was related to storm-related activities, like shoveling, rather than the storm itself. Similarly, the AJC article, based on medical examiner records from three Michigan counties, found that there were more exertion-related sudden cardiac deaths in the weeks during and after blizzards, and that 36 of the 43 total exertion-related deaths occurred during or shortly after snow removal.

It's possible that snow-shoveling is no more dangerous than any other physically draining activity—that the same individuals who die while clearing their driveways could just as well succumb to a vigorous jog. The post-blizzard spike could be attributed to the fact that sedentary people with potential heart problems have no choice but to engage in heart-pounding work with a shovel, whereas other aerobic activities (at other times of year) can be put off or skipped altogether.

There is some reason to think that snow-shoveling is particularly tough on the cardiovascular system. Whereas jogging leads to a fairly steady rise in blood pressure, shoveling is an intense, rapid exercise that may result in a blood pressure spike. Cold weather, in itself, increases the risk of heart attack, since the shoveler expends energy just to keep warm and may have more trouble breathing. Researchers have also pointed out that shovelers hold their breath when they bend down, which can lead to a sudden change in heart rate. One study of 10 sedentary men with no history of cardiac disease found that their heart rates while shoveling rose above the recommended upper limit for aerobic exercise.

The absolute risk of death-while-shoveling is low. An often-quoted statistic holds that 1,200 American die from a heart attack or other cardiac event during or after a blizzard every year, and that snow-shoveling is frequently to blame. This figure is sometimes attributed to the Centers for Disease Control, although an agency spokeswoman could not verify its source. Even if this statistic were correct, it's nothing in comparison to the total number of annual heart-related deaths. According to the American Heart Association, there are 425,425 deaths per year from coronary heart disease.

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

Explainer thanks Johnny Lee of American Heart Associates, Maggie Francis of the American Heart Association, and Karen Hunter of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks also to reader Michael Carrasco for asking the question.

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Nexus One

When Google launched the Nexus One in January, the company hit on an odd bit of marketing to distinguish the new phone from its rivals. This was a "superphone," Google said—every other cellular device on the market was merely "smart." The designation didn't make much sense—despite what Google would have you believe, the Nexus One doesn't have any major features that set it apart from other top-of-the-line phones. It makes calls, does e-mail, and browses the Web; so do the iPhone, the Palm Pre, various BlackBerrys, and every other Android phone. All top-end smartphones have Wi-Fi, 3G, and GPS. They've all got app stores that can give you access to a wide variety of third-party programs. And though smartphones come in two distinct hardware flavors—either with or without a physical keyboard—they are all very pretty to look at.

If you're looking to buy a new smartphone, then, the most important thing to ask isn't "What does it do?" Instead, it's "How does it do it?" Phones that seem identical on paper turn out to be wildly different once you turn them on. The most important feature on any phone is one rarely mentioned in a spec list: the operating system. If the OS is clunky and overstuffed, like what you'll find on the BlackBerry, you'll have a devil of a time doing everything on your device. If it's stylish and intuitive, like the iPhone's, you'll find your phone a pleasure.

So where does the Nexus One fall in that range? Right near the top. I've been using Google's new phone for a month, more or less as a replacement for my own phone, the iPhone 3GS. Google has described the Nexus One as a kind of concept car for its open-source Android platform—the company designed the phone from top-to-bottom in order to show off how awesome an Android phone can really be. To that end, the Nexus One succeeds. If I were forced to give up my iPhone, I'd replace it with a Nexus One.

But I hope that doesn't come to pass. I like the Nexus One, I really do—but it has a long way to go to catch up with Apple's device.

The essential problem is that Android's interface is much less intuitive than the iPhone's. Much of the OS's functionality is hidden—Android can do a lot, but unlike the iPhone it keeps many of its options stuffed in menu bars. As a result, the Nexus One asks new users to climb a steeper learning curve. You've got to poke around every program to find out how to do its most basic tasks. Even once you've learned the easy stuff, the OS is still a struggle—it takes several steps to do something on Android that you can do in one step on the iPhone.

To illustrate my point, look at both phones' calendar programs. Here are shots of each phone's "month view"—the Nexus One is on the left, and the iPhone on the right:*

As you can see, the Nexus One's screen offers a bit more detail than the iPhone's. It gives you a little indicator bar next to each day of the month to show how much of the day has been booked up, while the iPhone adds only a small bold dot on any day with an appointment—which doesn't tell you much in a quick glance.

But say you want to change your calendar—if you need to add an appointment or switch to a daily view, for instance. Even if you've never used one before, it's obvious how you'd do so on the iPhone—every button is right on the screen. To add an appointment, just click the plus sign in the top right corner. To switch to a daily view, hit "Day." To look at another calendar, tap the "Calendars" button.

Doing those same things on the Nexus One isn't as obvious, because many of its functions are hidden in a list of options that require you to hit an additional button first—the phone's universal Menu button, which is not on the screen but under it, one of four built-in buttons below the screen. To add an appointment, you've got to hit Menu first, then click the Plus icon. To switch to the weekly view, do the same thing—first hit Menu, then choose the weekly option. But that's not all: There's another menu button hidden under this menu. When you hit this menu-within-menu, you'll get another list of options, including one to adjust which of your calendars is displayed—an option that, on the iPhone, is presented on the calendar's main screen.

This problem is not confined to the calendar app—it's everywhere on Android, in Google's built-in apps as well as third-party programs you download from the app store. To search for an address in the iPhone's map program, you click the search bar at the top of your screen; to do the same thing in Android's map program, you hit Menu first, then Search. To load a bookmarked Web page in the iPhone's browser, you hit the bookmark icon. To do so in Android, you've got to—you guessed it—hit Menu first, then Bookmark.

Android partisans might counter that you need to learn only one thing to use the phone: When in doubt, hit Menu and everything will be revealed. That's true; after using the Nexus One for some time, I eventually learned to click this universal button when an option wasn't immediately visible. But the constant menu hunting isn't ideal. First, it's a hurdle to new users—it's not obvious that you've got to keep clicking this button to look for features that ought to be highlighted on a single screen. What's more, the hidden menus slow you down. The whole point of loading up the maps program is to look up an address; why would you hide that option under a menu bar?

I think the answer comes down to a philosophical difference between the Apple and Google user interface teams. With the iPhone, Apple is clearly trying to make a complete break with desktop operating systems. The iPhone's Human Interface Guidelines—Apple's instructions for developers creating iPhone apps—are clear on this point, stressing that every iPhone app should highlight its main functions on its main screen, using icons that are easy to understand. "Make it obvious," the guidelines chide developers: "You can't assume that users have the time (or can spare the attention) to figure out how your application works. Therefore, you should strive to make your application instantly understandable to users."

The Android platform is much looser in this regard. Its interface guidelines don't discourage hidden menus: "All but the simplest applications have menus," the interface guide tells developers. In other words, under Android's design philosophy, menus are a natural consequence of complexity—and the more powerful a program, the more likely it is to be stuffed with hidden menus. That's a familiar view of computing, one deeply tied to the interface on the standard PC—after all, every program on your laptop or desktop hides much of its functionality under menus, too.

But that philosophy feels outmoded. We're increasingly abandoning desktop programs for most of our computing needs, and we're replacing them with Web apps or mobile apps that are much more straightforward to use. I rarely reach for menu bars anymore; the programs I use most often these days—Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps, Microsoft Office 2007, and nearly everything on my iPhone—present most of their functions on the main screen.

So come on, Android team— join the menu-free bandwagon! You've got a great OS—with a little work, it could be the best mobile operating system on the market. Wouldn't that be more obvious if you didn't keep everything hidden?

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Correction, Feb. 9, 2010: Due to an editing error, this article originally misidentified images of the iPhone's and Nexus One's calendar applications. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Bruce Springsteen

It was a classic piece of music industry journalism: Rapacious Big Music beats up on hapless Little Guy, with The Artist, who just wants to make ars gratia artis, caught in the middle.

This time, Big Music was ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, which collects licensing royalties for songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The Little Guy was a humble Irish bar called Connolly's Pub & Restaurant. And The Artist was none other than New Jersey's own "rock & roll working-class hero," Bruce Springsteen.

As first reported by the New York Daily News, The Boss sued Connolly's last week for copyright infringement after the bar allegedly failed to obtain a license from ASCAP to publicly perform his songs, including "Growin' Up" and "Because the Night." But shortly after the story about the lawsuit broke, Springsteen's flacks claimed it was all a big misunderstanding, blamed ASCAP, and said he was ditching the suit.

"ASCAP was solely responsible for naming Bruce Springsteen as a plaintiff in the lawsuit," said a Feb. 4 statement from his PR reps at Shore Fire Media. "Bruce Springsteen had no knowledge of this lawsuit, was not asked if he would participate as a named plaintiff, and would not have agreed to do so if he had been asked. Upon learning of this lawsuit this morning, Bruce Springsteen's representatives demanded the immediate removal of his name from the lawsuit."

Sorry, Boss, but if you say you really believe all that, then it won't be you that's on fire—it will be your pants. And since small-time songwriters rely on big-timers like you to enforce these copyright protections, you shouldn't try to back out of this lawsuit anyway. (As of this writing, Springsteen still hadn't withdrawn.)

Contrary to Springsteen's protestations, ASCAP is not freelancing here. In fact, Springsteen—like all members of the 96-year-old organization—has given ASCAP explicit permission to file lawsuits in his name against noncompliant venues. Paragraph 4 of the ASCAP Membership Agreement states that members:

irrevocably ... authorize[], empower[] and vest[] in the Society the right to ... litigate … and in its sole judgment to join the [member] and/or others in whose names the copyright may stand, as parties plaintiff or defendants in suits or proceedings; [and] to bring suit in the name of the [member] ….

ASCAP often gives a heads-up to members before it sues on their behalf, but that's not required. Despite my repeated inquiries to Springsteen's press people, attorney, and manager, as well as ASCAP, no one would tell me whether anyone on his team was alerted in this specific case. (The Code of Silence reigns.)

In any case, Springsteen's claim of fawnlike innocence, that he's the kind of guy who would never file a suit against a poor, defenseless little bar, crumbles in the face of the dozens of nearly identical copyright suits he has filed over the past decades against bars and restaurants that wouldn't pay their ASCAP fees. Here are just a few of the fine establishments the Boss has sued: Bull & Bear Pub, in Syracuse, N.Y.; Aftershock Sports Bar & Grill, in Wentzville, Mo.; the Deerhead Tavern, of Evansville, Ind.; Corky's Pub, of Beach Park, Ill.; Pretenders, in Benton, Ill.; J.R.'s Pub & Grille, in Dunellon, Fla.; and Monaco's Ristorante, of Winsted, Conn. Also, Meritage, in Charleston, S.C.; Southern Belle's, in Charlotte, N.C.; and the aptly named Rolling Thunder Road House Cafe in Folly Beach, S.C. And he even sicced his lawyers on the Holiday Inn way down in the U.S. Virgin Islands, though it was owned by a limited partnership in his beloved New Jersey. And as anyone with a few minutes and a few bucks to spend on the federal court database PACER can quickly confirm, these are but a small sample of Springsteen's Shermanesque march of litigation across the American Land.

In fairness, there's no reason to believe Springsteen is any more litigious than the average songwriter or music publisher. His name likely appears in the caption of so many complaints simply because his songs are played so often in bars and restaurants. ASCAP sends increasingly stern letters to unlicensed venues; if those letters are ignored, it sends investigators, who note the songs they hear. Those songs then appear as "Schedule A" on the numerous complaints it files each year.

Restaurants and bars don't like ASCAP's practices, and they occasionally kvetch to the local press. But the backlash rarely hits well-known artists, because the named plaintiffs are usually faceless corporate entities like "Sony/ATV Tunes LLC" or "Jobete Music Co., Inc.," recognized by few except the songwriters who cash their checks. Springsteen is only in the news because he had the balls—or the lack of foresight—to publish his songs as "Bruce Springsteen."

The right of copyright owners to sue over unlicensed performances of their songs at bars and restaurants is hardly in legal doubt. None other than Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes heartily endorsed the practice in a 1917 case called Herbert v. Shanley Co. He noted that music provides "to people having limited powers of conversation, or disliking the rival noise ... a luxurious pleasure not to be had from eating a silent meal." In other words, any songwriter or composer whose sounds fill the awkward pauses, or drown out the babbling of the drunken boor at the adjacent table, deserves to be paid for the favor.

By withdrawing from the Connolly suit, Springsteen may think he avoided the PR hit that comes from beating up on a little guy (though Connolly's, a mini-chain with four locations in Midtown Manhattan and an elaborate live-music setup, isn't exactly a hole-in-the-wall). But the reality is that his actions harm a different brand of little guy: the no-name songwriters and composers who—unlike Springsteen—don't make any money by recording and performing their tunes, and depend on their ASCAP (or BMI or SESAC) checks to pay the rent. If big-name songwriters like Springsteen aren't willing to step up and fight for their rights when they're infringed upon, the system that enables them to make a living will eventually collapse. If no one is willing to sue the noncompliant bars and restaurants, why would they pay their license fees? As music licensing expert and 37-year former ASCAP executive Todd Brabec told me, lawsuits like the one against Connolly's serve as a valuable "reminder to all users [of music], large and small, that yes, these are copyrighted works out there, and you have to have permission to use them."

Springsteen receives regular and very large payments from ASCAP, some portion of which come from fees paid by bars and restaurants and other portions of which can be attributed to lawsuit judgments and settlements. Springsteen and other artists also benefit from the deterrent value of suits exactly like the one against Connolly's. Isn't it a bit churlish of The Boss to go missing as soon as the press notices?

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A comatose patient

A study published last Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that British and Belgian scientists were able to communicate with a patient in a "persistent vegetative state" using high-tech brain scans. When did we start describing comatose patients as "vegetative"?

In the mid-1800s, although the word itself has been around much, much longer. In De Anima, Aristotle used the word vegetative (or, rather, the ancient Greek equivalent) to denote lesser forms of life. Plants, he wrote, have a "vegetative" soul, capable only of growth and reproduction, whereas humans have a "rational" soul that allows for thought. Starting in the 18^th century, English speakers employed this Aristotelian word in a more metaphoric sense—living a merely physical life, devoid of intellectual activity or social intercourse. From here we get "vegetative state" to describe reduced brain function. The earliest example of this medical usage in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1893—when the Daily News, a now-defunct British paper, referred to a man in a "vegetative state" who was "incapable of connecting two ideas together." But the Explainer also uncovered a slightly earlier reference. An 1866 report from Guys Hospital in London mentions a man admitted to the hospital in the midst of an apoplectic fit. He lay in a "vegetative state" for 15 months and never woke up.

Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum coined the specific term "persistent vegetative state" in a 1972 Lancet article. It denotes patients who have no apparent internal or external awareness. Jennett and Plum acknowledged that the term had been used for years as unofficial lingo. In fact, they intentionally avoided making it sound like medical jargon, in part because they wanted journalists and the general public to latch onto it.

The more colloquial expression "he's a vegetable"—meaning someone who leads a monotonous life without intellectual activity—has been around since at least the 1920s. In Back to Methuselah, George Bernard Shaw wrote, "What use is this thousand years of life to you, you old vegetable?" And in a 1933 letter, Aldous Huxley wrote, "It will be a weary business for a bit … sitting still and being a vegetable."

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

Explainer thanks Anatoly Liberman of the University of Minnesota, Nicholas D. Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College, Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary, Ford Vox of Washington University in St. Louis, Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus, and Carl Zimmer of Discover magazine.

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Model Brooklyn Decker is on the cover of the latest edition of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue. The magazine also features "Olympic Stars" in various stages of undress. In a 2005 column, Bryan Curtis argued that "Sports Illustrated helped create the sex-sports nexus, by bringing the supermodels directly to the fans." The entire column is reprinted below.

When you spot the supermodel Carolyn Murphy in repose on the cover of the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, the first unseemly thought that crosses your mind is: "What is Carolyn thinking?" OK, maybe not. But—no groans, please—that's the question we're here to answer today. In its 41 years on newsstands, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has been hailed as the arbiter of supermodel succession (Tiegs to Porizkova, Macpherson to Ireland) and as a commercial juggernaut ($35 million in ad sales this year). But it has yet to be celebrated as a magazine with the kind of sophisticated intellectual framework of, say, the Partisan Review. We plan on advancing that argument, just as soon as we finish ogling Carolyn Murphy.

The editors of the swimsuit issue have perfected a genteel notion of female sexuality. You might call it Minivan Cheesecake. That is, the magazine is just tasteful enough to be enjoyed comfortably by a middle-aged man who operates a minivan. This year's crop of 18 supermodels would look right at home in a Subaru commercial. They never reveal anything more than a stray nipple—and then it's tucked beneath a translucent swimsuit (Page 75) or body paint (Page 78). In return, the SI cameras maintain a discreet distance from the babes—none of the too-close-up shots you find in Playboy or Penthouse. The models seem to smile a lot more than they do in the skin magazines, and they stop to pay tribute to inspirational heroes like Jane Goodall and Brett Favre. Why, there's even a special treat for the kids: supermodel trading cards!

The family-room aesthetic was handed down by Andre Laguerre, a raffish Frenchman and ex-DeGaulle associate who edited Sports Illustrated from 1960 to 1974. Laguerre, who believed that a good deal of all magazine business should be conducted from inside a bar, found himself with a minor editorial problem: He had no compelling sporting events to cover during the winter months. In 1964, he had a brainstorm: He would supplement sport with skin. Laguerre summoned a young fashion reporter named Jule Campbell to his office and laid down the intellectual roots of the issue. He asked Campbell, "How would you like to go to some beautiful place and put a pretty girl on the cover?"

The first swimsuit issue, published earlier that year, hadn't been much to look at. Because the models were still sharing space with the athletes—they would achieve special-issue status in 1997—they were only granted five pages. The inaugural cover model, Babette March, was photographed standing in the surf with a finger curled under her nose, as if she'd just inhaled two pints of saltwater. But Jule Campbell, who would soon become one of the most powerful women in modeling, remade the swimsuit issue into a juggernaut. She ditched the reigning archetype of female beauty—epitomized by the model Twiggy—for California women who were "bigger and healthier." She began printing her model's names with their photos—a rare practice at the time—which made them into house brands and ushered in a new era of supermodeldom.

Campbell's 1978 issue proved a watershed moment for cheesecake. In Brazil, Campbell had persuaded model Cheryl Tiegs to pose for a throwaway shot in a white fishnet top, her nipples fully exposed. Somehow the shot made its way into the magazine. According to The Franchise, Michael MacCambridge's excellent history of the magazine, nasty letters poured into Time-Life headquarters—more than 340 subscriptions were cancelled—and the swimsuit issue reached new heights of ignominy. But in some ways, the Tiegs fiasco was also a logical endpoint. Barring nudity, the Sports Illustrated model had nothing left to reveal. Thus for the next few decades the editors had to maintain a careful balance: They had to make the issue seem much racier than it actually was, while still maintaining its wholesome aesthetic.

SI's editors have never been above dabbing the swimsuit issue with an intellectual gloss. The 2001 edition, dubbed "Goddesses of the Mediterranean," took a Homeric "swimsuit odyssey" as its theme and produced a mishmash of mythic and historical scenes. The writer Franz Lidz contributed an article about Roman gladiators. The model Shakara Ledard posed as Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, and Veronica Varekova posed as Aphrodite.

But the magazine couldn't give itself over to eggheads; it had to feel mildly dangerous. To that end, Sports Illustrated editors have always felt obliged to pretend that the swimsuit issue is a source of massive national controversy. This is best observed in their insistence, two weeks after the annual issue, on printing correspondence from outraged parents and besmirched librarians. The first recorded caterwauler was W. Frank Caston, of Columbia, S.C., who on Feb. 10, 1964, wrote, "I most certainly do not want such pictures coming into my home for my young teen-age son to ogle, much less myself." Twenty years later, SI was gleefully running letters from outraged subscribers who denounced the issue as "smut" and mailed back the offending pages. Just as Hugh Hefner relied on censorious foes to elevate his stature, Sports Illustrated has cultivated its own opposition to enhance its probity; the magazine is sporting about its own critics.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of wholesome-but-smutty aesthetic is the Sports Illustrated writer. The presence of the swimsuit issue has bestowed upon him a kind of macho glory. Outsiders imagine that the Sports Illustrated office crawls with semi-nude models, who tend to the writer's every need. There's a practical effect, too. The writer Franz Lidz tells stories of recalcitrant athletes who lit up at the mention of the swimsuit issue—why, they'd say, my girlfriend is just as hot as Ashley Montana! (Then they answered Lidz's questions.) A writing assignment for the swimsuit issue is a dream come true for the Sports Illustrated staffer. He grabs an exotic dateline and the guarantee that no one will read anything he comes up with.

The swimsuit issue has benefited enormously from the growing nexus between sex and sports. Whereas a reader in 1966 could wail, "What do swimsuits have to do with football?" today's subscriber recognizes that sports is irretrievably linked with sex—from cheerleaders to beer commercials to Nicollette Sheridan dropping towel and jumping into Terrell Owens' arms. (It's one reason, the magazine reports, that the number of cancelled subscriptions has diminished over the years.) Of course, Sports Illustrated helped create the sex-sports nexus, by bringing the supermodels directly to the fans. For four decades, the swimsuit issue has somehow managed to wedge itself between football and Barely Legal and make a fortune in the process. What Carolyn Murphy is thinking is, "I hope I look this good when I'm 41."

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Barack Obama

The Obama White House has built a "bypass" to reroute the president's message around the pesky White House press corps, Washington Post transportation beat reporter Howard Kurtz reported yesterday.

"[T]he decision to bypass the White House press corps is no accident," Kurtz writes. [Emphasis added.]

The verklempt proprietors of the traditional White House media district interviewed by Kurtz fear that the new artery will put them out of business.

"It's a source of great frustration here," CBS White House correspondent Chip Reid tells Kurtz. "It's important for us to hold the president's feet to the fire." NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd calls the rerouting a "shame." Michael Shear, a Post White House reporter, says, "What's lost is the ability to get beyond talking points." In a nutshell, the White House press corps feels Wal-Marted by the president.

They're particularly aggrieved by the paucity of presidential news conferences in the old press district—President Obama hasn't participated in one since July. Instead, the president has been meeting with non-White House reporters out at the bypass, Kurtz reports, including CBS's Katie Couric and Steve Kroft; ABC's Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, and Charlie Gibson; as well as Oprah Winfrey, TV anchors, Sunday-show hosts, and even foreign-policy columnists.

Diminishing the significance of his own scoop, transportation reporter Kurtz digs into the archive to report that the bypass has been there in one form or another for more than two decades. "Every president attempts to circumvent the press corps, viewing it as obsessed with process stories and 'gotcha' questions," he writes. Clinton frequented Larry King Live and MTV instead of the White House corps. Bush boycotted them and the bypass outlets when he thought he could get away with it.

But should Obama's preference for the bypass operators over White House reporters be considered shocking? Or even news? In November 2008, two months before Obama took the oath of office, Agence France Presse was reporting the likelihood that Obama would patronize the "bypass"—where shops like Politico and Huffington Post were doing a thriving business—instead of the old district.

In 2006, the Guardian spotted Vice President Cheney as he "bypassed" the White House press corps after he had shot Harry Whittington in the face. Cheney asked his hostess to give the story about the shooting to the local newspaper instead of to the White House gang.

In 2003, President Bush sprinted out to the bypass to give five consecutive interviews to regional broadcasters instead of the White House press corps, whom he was snubbing. Nixon pulled the same regional news reporters stunt during his administration because he was feuding with the network anchors.

"[T]he tactic is nearly as old as the presidency itself," the New York Times reports in a 2003 article. Indeed, President Franklin D. Roosevelt frequently motored out to the bypass to give his "fireside chats" on radio. According to the Times, President Woodrow Wilson took his whistle-stop tour on the bypass during his administration to sell the League of Nations over the heads of Washington reporters

Here's the story Kurtz missed: The White House press corps is, always has been, and always will be a gang of miserable, whining whiners. Like other guilds, they excel at bellyaching when their privileges are canceled—or even when they think their privileges are in the process of being canceled. Nobody likes them, not even other reporters. Especially not other reporters. They exist to be bypassed!

There is no story here, or if there is, Kurtz has botched it. The Post should reassign him to a less challenging beat. Like the press.

******

(Disclosure: I have never heard John Dickerson, who covers politics and the White House for Slate, whine. Never. Not ever.) Soon the new beltway will make the bypass obsolete. Send directions to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Please partake of my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type bypass in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

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Are Western "experts" overestimating the greens?

TEHRAN, Iran—I've begun to wonder about all the so-called "Iran experts" in the West. As Feb. 11, the 31^st anniversary of the Islamic republic's founding, approaches, many of the reports about the imminent demise of the Iranian regime read like wishful thinking. On the flip side, those who claim the theocracy will survive as is also seem off the mark. Here in Tehran, things are much murkier.

The stakes are higher than ever, especially now that opportunists of every stripe are doing their best to fill the gaps in the green movement. Many groups oppose the current government, but few can agree on what a nontheocratic Iran will look like. The lazy and, sadly, most common mantra is, "Anything would be better than this." But looking at some of the alternatives, I'm not so sure. If the millions of Iranians dissatisfied with the current system are not careful, they might soon look back nostalgically on the last 30 years in much the same way in which many now regard the shah.

A number of figures from Iranian history are currently vying for attention, all dreaming of taking power in a post-Islamic republic era. Each offers vague promises of a freer, more democratic Iran.

There is a growing schism between people battling for change inside Iran and those based outside the country. Individuals and groups operating outside Iran's borders hold little sway with the domestic protesters. A 25-year-old graduate student and office worker in Tehran told me, "I think most of those who have left forget about those of us here very quickly. I can't think of one person speaking on behalf of Iran who I believe is out for anything besides their own gain."

Nevertheless, she expressed a strong belief in the validity of the protest movement. "We exist. We're not sure what we are yet, but we're struggling to find out. And we keep growing in numbers. Ultimately, though, it's up to us who are here. We wish the world would respect that and just encourage us."

The spokespeople in exile refuse to honor this request, and some are attempting to capitalize on the work of the internal Iranian opposition.

Recently, Reza Pahlavi, the last shah's son, has inserted himself into the fray, turning his tired call for a constitutional monarchy into a crowd-pleasing appeal for secular democracy. Even if this is what most Iranians ultimately want, he, like many of the self-anointed green leaders, doesn't have enough support inside the country to help foster democracy in Iran.

For months now, Mohsen Sazegara has been a fixture on Voice of America's Farsi network. He also created a YouTube channel dedicated to disseminating protest news. As a self-proclaimed "founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard," Sazegara has become a favorite interview subject, as well as a spokesman for nonviolent resistance. Anything's possible, I suppose, but so far his biggest contribution to the struggle has been talking up the "currency campaign," in which bank notes—many millions of them by his estimation—were defaced with pro-green-movement slogans. But as anyone in Iran will tell you, it never caught on. Still, Sazegara has been so vocal about it that many Iran experts now point to the currency campaign as a prime example of the ingenuity of the greens. While Sazegara's international profile has risen, he is fading inside the country. Indeed, many Iranians compare him to Ahmad Chalabi.

The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or "People's Mujahedin of Iran"—also known as MEK and PMOI—is now taking credit for much of the unrest. No political group—or terrorist organization, according to the U.S. State Department—is more hated inside Iran. It is practically impossible to find anyone in the country who has anything positive to say about the MEK. The group was founded in the 1960s to seek the ouster of the shah, but in the 1980s, it sided with Saddam Hussein in Iran's war with Iraq, effectively destroying any popular support it still had in Iran. The Iranian authorities have accused some of the protesters they have arrested, including one of the young men hanged last month, of being MEK agents. The group's leadership, long on the fringes of Iranian politics, are surely patting themselves on the back for sticking around long enough to capitalize on the sacrifices of others.

These three examples—and there are more—show the level of opportunism at work. The lack of reliable information from Iran is dangerous, and we should be wary of a media that fails to distinguish between individuals who have little or no credibility with the Iranian people and those who still retain popular support. More attention should be paid to organizations that are trying to promote dialogue among disparate groups—as well as with the West—rather than those simply seeking to topple the regime in Tehran.

Reading foreign news coverage of the Iranian protest movement, I can see why the regime is so concerned about the "soft war" it claims the West is waging against it. Since most international media outlets are not currently permitted to report from Iran, many of their reporters rely on sources who tell them what they want to hear about the imminent demise of the Islamic state.

The truth is, no one knows whether the theocracy is doomed by its rigid adherence to a system much of its constituency doesn't accept or whether it will evolve into a truly modern society. (Incidentally, the original leaders of the green movement—presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karoubi, and former president Mohammad Khatami—have all championed change within the current system, not the end of the system they helped to establish.)

In the battle of world opinion, the Islamic republic has done itself no favors. Last month, Iranians were banned from having contact, let alone working with, more than 60 U.S. and European organizations that the regime claimed were working for the overthrow of the government. Still, there are signs of some softening, perhaps signaling reconciliation between the regime and its domestic opponents. In January, state-run television launched a weekly live political debate show—it has since undergone a change of format—that touched on many of the most sensitive topics in post-election Iranian society, especially abuses of power in the wake of the election. Many of the participants stated on the air that they believed the effort made to promote internal dialogue was too little, too late.

The job of reporting from Iran has never been an easy one. Those of us who are now working in Iran have been asked by some of our Iranian colleagues abroad to refrain from reporting certain events. Revisionism, propaganda, and accusing those journalists who have yet to be arrested of being somehow complicit with the regime isn't an effective way of keeping the world informed about events inside Iran.

The line between journalism and activism has always been blurred here, but failing to paint a clear and complete picture of what is really happening—admittedly a difficult task, given all the current restrictions—can only impede the world's understanding of a complex situation, even if it isn't always exactly what we would like it to be.

With sporadic executions and assassinations, routine detainment of dissidents and journalists, and ever-changing positions regarding domestic politics or nuclear issues, the situation in Iran is bizarre and volatile enough that it needs no exaggeration. Unfortunately, if foreign journalists continue to rely on unverifiable sources in the diaspora, it is only a matter of time before they will realize they've been had.

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Update, Feb. 8: If you've already voted, click here to see which actors and movies are in the lead.

The 2010 Oscar nominations were unveiled Feb. 2, launching a month of frenzied forecasting about who will take home a gold statue. Can Avatar's stunning visuals compensate for its clunky screenplay? Meryl Streep has received 11 nominations since she last won, in 1983—is she due for a victory?

Slate wants to know who you think will win in the major Academy Award categories. Choose your winners from the dropdown menus below. Beginning later this week, we'll post rankings based on the intuitions of Slate readers and update them daily as more responses come in. Once the awards are announced, we'll comb through the responses and publish a list of the readers who were the best Oscar prognosticators.

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Best Picture	(Choose a Best Picture) Avatar The Blind Side District 9 An Education The Hurt Locker Inglourious Basterds Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire A Serious Man Up Up in the Air
Best Actor	(Choose a Best Actor) Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) George Clooney (Up in the Air) Colin Firth (A Single Man) Morgan Freeman (Invictus) Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)
Best Actress	(Choose a Best Actress) Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side) Helen Mirren (The Last Station) Carey Mulligan (An Education) Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia)
Supporting Actor	(Choose a Best Supporting Actor) Matt Damon (Invictus) Woody Harrelson (The Messenger) Christopher Plummer (The Last Station) Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones) Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Supporting Actress	(Choose a Best Supporting Actress) Penelope Cruz (Nine) Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air) Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart) Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) Mo'Nique (Precious)
Director	(Choose a Best Director) Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) James Cameron (Avatar) Lee Daniels (Precious) Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Score	(Choose a Best Score) Avatar (James Horner) Fantastic Mr. Fox (Alexandre Desplat) The Hurt Locker (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders) Sherlock Holmes (Hans Zimmer) Up (Michael Giacchino)
Original Song	(Choose a Best Song) "Almost There" (The Princess and the Frog) "Down in New Orleans" (The Princess and the Frog) "Loin de Paname" (Paris 36) "Take It All" (Nine) "The Weary Kind" (Crazy Heart)
Cinematography	(Choose the Best Cinematography) Avatar Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince The Hurt Locker Inglourious Basterds The White Ribbon
Animated Feature	(Choose a Best Animated Film) Coraline Fantastic Mr. Fox The Princess and the Frog The Secret of Kells Up
Adapted Screenplay	(Choose a Best Adapted Screenplay) District 9 (Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell) An Education (Nick Hornby) In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong et al) Precious (Geoffrey Fletcher) Up in the Air (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner)
Original Screenplay	(Choose a Best Original Screenplay) The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal) Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino) The Messenger (Alessandro Camon & Oren Moverman) A Serious Man (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen) Up (Bob Peterson et al)
Costume Design	(Choose a Best Costume Design) Bright Star (Janet Patterson) Coco before Chanel (Catherine Leterrier) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Monique Prudhomme) Nine (Colleen Atwood) The Young Victoria (Sandy Powell)
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Driver-to-driver communication

A funny thing happened on the way to the mall the other day. Coming down a two-lane rural highway, an approaching driver flashed his headlights at me. My first instinct was that my high beams were on—but it was a sunny day. A few seconds later, it dawned on me that the burst of illumination was meant as a warning: Just around the upcoming bend sat a local trooper on the grassy shoulder.

As it happened, I was more or less going the limit, so this was moot. But the experience stayed with me as the miles wore on. Firstly, I couldn't recall the last time I had seen such a warning, which I thought another victim of the Internet age, given over to things like Trapster.

Secondly, I was curious as to why anyone would bother: It takes time and effort to warn strangers about a speed trap—all for the sake of helping someone whom you will not see again and who cannot return the favor. It's an interesting question for evolutionary biologists; a form, perhaps, of what Ernest Fehr and his colleagues have called "strong reciprocity" (PDF)—one of those curious "forms of human behavior involving interaction among unrelated individuals that cannot be explained in terms of self-interest." This makes sense when each person's sacrifice in time and effort goes toward the collective (and thus his own) good. But what about when the helping behavior comes at a potential cost to group fitness—by ensuring a higher supply of speeding drivers on local roads? (One also wonders about those people who are tweeting DUI checkpoint locations.)

What really intrigued me about the episode, however, was the existence of this informal language of road signals—either creative adaptations of the simple communicative tools available on an automobile (lights, turn/brake signals, horn) or, often, some gesture by the driver himself (a wave, "the finger," etc.). How do these things emerge, how are they transmitted, and how are they understood?

The headlight flash for the speed trap seems, like most informal signals, to be of rather obscure origin. One source speculates that the gesture came into widespread practice only with the advent of a steering-column-mounted headlight control in the late 1960s, which made it simpler to "flash" than the old floor-positioned switch. Another idea is that headlight flashes (as well as some other signals) are introduced by people—like truckers—for whom the road is a job site, and so they are born as a kind of workplace lingo. Take, for instance, this account of a Greyhound bus driver in the New York Times in 1975: "Traveling west, the sun was level with the windshield, yet Al spotted a radar signal from an oncoming truck. This section of the turnpike was notorious for speed traps. 'Did you catch that?' I hadn't. 'To signal radar, first flash your headlights then make a circular motion with your hand.' " Informal road signals, then, are seen as a kind of secret code, like gang signs or Masonic hand symbols, which only certain groups understand. (The paranoid conclusion of this may be the "gang initiation killing" rumors of a few years back, in which motorists were warned that flashing their lights at another car would trigger a homicide.)

As with any communication, context is key. The simple headlight flash is a bullying move for a tailgating Ferrari on the Italian autostrada, a gentle reminder (or a stern rebuke, if done repeatedly) on a rural road that an approaching driver has not dimmed his brights, or a quiet alternative to a horn-honk at a stalled driver when the light turns green—not to mention a number of other reported uses, including signaling to a truck driver that he has cleared one's vehicle and can safely merge. In all these cases, the meaning of the signal seems to grow, awkwardly and organically, out of a need to convey things amid the complex interactions of traffic for which we have no "official" signals: that moment, for example, when you are trying to tell another driver that it is OK to make a turn in front of you.

Before the advent of electric signals, hand signals were an integral part of the official driving experience—an arm extended and bent downward down meant the driver was slowing down, for example. This language is long forgotten by most drivers, but a variety of unofficial signals still flourish—the most prominent, "the finger," needs no explanation. Nor does its opposite, the "thanks" wave. (There are regional variants on the latter: On narrow Seattle streets, where one person pulls to the side to allow another to pass, the wave is considered a proper reply; in Hawaii, they give the "shaka.") But there are still other situations for which people have never quite settled on the appropriate signal. How does one say that he's sorry? A correspondent to a British newspaper suggested a finger pointed to the head as a gun — I should be shot for such an epic gaffe! —but as one letters-column respondent (self-identified as the chairman of the "Polite Society") aptly noted, the problem with this "is that it can be misconstrued as meaning 'you should be shot'."

There is one other class of gestures worth noting, what I shall call the vehicle affinity experience; namely, people driving the same vehicle exchanging a wave. One of the most oft-cited examples of this is for Jeep drivers, and one strain of speculation says it emerged from soldiers waving to another in passing vehicles. Or perhaps it's because Jeep drivers were more likely to have their windows open and tops down. But the wave is hardly limited to people in Jeeps: One hears it talked about among drivers of Corvettes, Saabs, Volkswagen GTIs, Subarus, Harley-Davidsons, and others.

There seem to be two things at work here. The first is the general human bias in favor of self-similarity. Studies have shown this effect in myriad ways; people are more likely to be drawn toward those whose surnames begin with a shared letter (e.g., "B" people gave more money to Bush in 2000, "G"s gave more to Gore) and more likely to look favorably on those who share their birthday. This appears to hold true on the road: Studies have found, for example, that drivers are less likely to honk at cars of similar perceived status as their own.

Not honking is one thing, but a true vehicle affinity experience probably requires a second condition: Two drivers will exchange an outright wave only if their car in common is exceedingly rare or if it has a strong distinguishing feature or personality. (Think of the tweedy, imported cache of early Saabs or the rough-riding, free-spirited appeal of Jeep.) So, while you don't get a lot of Camry drivers waving at one another (they'd be busy, for one), the Prius has been highly wave-able. In a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David turns to Jeff Garlin and exclaims, "See that? I waved to a guy in a Prius and he didn't wave back!" Jeff responds: "I don't wave to people in the same car as me." Larry's reply, perhaps harkening to that idea of kinship-based altruism alluded to earlier: "We're Prius drivers, we're a special breed." But even they might have trouble trying to apologize to one another in traffic.

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Laundry hanging in the Shati refugee camp

SHATI REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip—Ayman Hamad ekes out a living as a porter, wheeling suitcases along the passageway from the Erez crossing point between Gaza and Israel along the mile-long open-air passageway to the Palestinian side.

These days, he doesn't have much work. The only Palestinians making the crossing are those going to Israel for medical reasons, and the only Westerners are journalists and NGO workers.

"Hamas is terrible for us," he told me. "They only help those who support Hamas. I don't support anyone—neither Hamas nor Fatah. I just want to take care of my own family."

Open criticism of Hamas is growing in this densely populated strip of 1.5 million Palestinians. Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006 and then seized sole control of Gaza in June 2007, remains firmly in control of the police and security apparatus. But Israel's boycott of Hamas, which Israel imposed after Hamas captured an Israeli soldier three and a half years ago, is making life in Gaza harder.

During last year's war between Israel and Hamas, which left around 1,400 Palestinians dead along with 13 Israelis, more than 4,000 homes were completely destroyed, and about 17,000 were partially demolished. But there has been almost no reconstruction, because Israel refuses to allow cement and iron into Gaza, saying Hamas could use these materials to make weapons.

Shortages of consumer goods have been partially alleviated by a system of hundreds of tunnels dug under the border between Egypt and Gaza. Israel has turned a blind eye to the items—everything from car parts to cola—that are smuggled this way. But Palestinians here say the prices of the Egyptian-made goods are high and that the quality is inferior to what they used to get from Israel.

Now Egypt is building a wall that will reach deep underground and will cut off many of the tunnels, and Palestinians are bracing for more shortages.

"Egypt's steel wall does not serve the interests of any Arab party," says Hamas spokesman Munir al-Masri. "The Israeli occupation benefits from it, because it has killed the last lifeline keeping the Gaza Strip alive after two and a half years of siege."

At the preschool she runs for 130 poor children in this refugee camp, Abir Salah, a tall, imposing woman, says she feels suffocated. Last summer, one of her sons, who lives in Croatia, got married. She and her daughter had their suitcases packed so they could attend the ceremony, but they were unable to get an Israeli permit to leave Gaza.

"We tried Hamas, but now we have to get rid of them and change them for someone else," she said. "We're tired of everything. And because of Hamas, the international community has imposed a siege on us."

She then abruptly ended the conversation, saying she was worried that Hamas might hurt her or her children.

Despite the sense of anger and frustration, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative political leadership. Many senior members of the Fatah movement fled the strip after Hamas seized sole control. Elections that were scheduled for this month have been put on indefinite hold.

Hamas won the election in 2006 mostly because the average Palestinian was angry with the rampant corruption of the ruling Fatah movement. Hamas' slogan of "Change and Reform" resonated. But with daily life getting worse, some are calling for Fatah to return.

Taxi driver Iyad al-Shafi says that he voted for Hamas in 2006 but that if elections were held today, he would look for another party to support. "The truth is that Israel is the basis for all of our problems here," he said. "And nobody likes Fatah because they're corrupt. But when Fatah was in charge here, people were working and had money. There were no shortages, and, most important of all, we could leave Gaza."

In an interview in his office in Gaza City, Hamas senior official Ahmed Yusuf insisted that the majority of the public still supports Hamas and its social and political goals. Yet he admits that Hamas would find it hard to win another election. "It's because of the siege and all of the suffering of the people here," he said. "Next time they might vote for somebody else."

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A building will tell you a lot about its builder—the conventions of his time, his wealth, his hubris. As architect Julia Morgan said, "Buildings speak for themselves." Ruins, however, speak for all of us. And they're monotonous. They're always saying the same thing: Nothing endures. Nature can be tamed for only a brief period of time. Permanence is an illusion. We look at ruins and sigh. Then we start building again.

No director in film history has made more of rubble than Roberto Rossellini. There are few buildings that aren't collapsed, or at least structurally unsound, in the three films of his War Trilogy—Rome Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero—which the Criterion Collection has just released as a box set. Rossellini's broken buildings come to stand for broken political theories, a broken social order, broken morality, broken people. Rossellini was not always an attentive director of actors, and he cast amateurs and friends in many of the major roles of the trilogy. But his graphic depiction of shattered, war-torn cities helps the viewer to empathize with his characters' overwhelming sense of dislocation and despair. They're half-dead, but the ruins are alive.

Rome Open City is the famous film of the group, the clarion call of the Italian Neorealism movement. Using real locations and film stock cadged on the black market, Rossellini broke dramatically from the grandiose historical epics and escapist romantic comedies that stultified viewers throughout the Fascist era. Yet it is the least visually inventive of the three films, shot mostly indoors, with relatively stationary camerawork. Watching it now, especially on a television, it's easy to empathize with the plight of the resistance fighters who are the film's main characters. The screen feels as claustrophobic as the cramped apartments, jail cells, and interrogation rooms in which so much of the action takes place.

There are notable exceptions. The film's two iconic scenes—the sudden death of Pina (Anna Magnani), gunned down in the street while chasing after her captured lover, and the point-blank execution of Aldo Fabrizi's parish priest—take place in wide-open spaces, in broad daylight. A third street scene, early on, establishes the mood of moral ambivalence that suffuses the film. The pregnant, exhausted Pina is walking home from the bread line, escorted by a Fascist police officer. Pina, whose fiance is a Communist resistance fighter, is no friend of the Fascists, but the cop is so pathetic that she can't help but pity him:

When Pina says that it looks like the Americans are coming, Rossellini cuts to a shot of an apartment building across the street, half-obliterated by a bomb. Both characters are desperate for the war to end, for the Americans to liberate the city from Nazi occupation. Yet their hope is tempered by the knowledge that, should the Americans come, there will be more bombs, more fighting, more death. The broken building stands as a fair warning, an omen for what is to come.

The wages of war are more visible in Paisan, which is shot mostly outdoors, in the pulverized cities of Naples, Florence, and Rome, where tanks roll past ruins both modern and ancient. As in Rome Open City, hope of salvation is revealed to be little more than a delusion, a fairy tale Rossellini's characters tell themselves so they can endure hell for another day. When the film begins, the Americans are surging through Italy, but they're much too late. Something irretrievable has been lost, and the liberators are greeted with apathy and even, at times, malice.

In the Sicily sequence, a battalion of American soldiers creep along the shore at night, where they encounter the ruins of an ancient castle, perched on the edge of a cliff. Shot from below, the building looms in the fog like a haunted house. "Some joint," says the commanding officer. "Hey, junior, remember Frankenstein? This reminds me of the old mill." But it's unoccupied, so one of the soldiers is assigned to set up base with an Italian peasant girl who has been serving as their guide. Neither the soldier (who introduces himself as "Joe from Jersey") nor the woman, Carmela, speak each other's language, and at first any prospect of camaraderie seems unlikely. "You men with guns are all the same," says Carmela. But Joe is persistent. Relying on childish gestures and pantomime, he manages to make himself understood. Before long, they're sitting together in a window overlooking the sea, and make wishes on shooting stars. Joe flicks on his lighter to show Carmela a photograph of his sister—and then crumples over. A German sniper, spotting the flame in his binoculars, has fired off a round.

By the time the sniper and his cohorts get there, Joe is dead, and the castle sinks back into the shadows, a house of horrors once again. "I could get romantic here," jeers the sniper, unwittingly mocking the scene his bullet disrupted only minutes earlier. The notion of romance now seems ludicrous, as the castle is transformed into a dank warren of tunnels and caves. For Carmela, awaiting capture, it has become a prison; for Joe, a tomb.

Germany Year Zero's terrifying depiction of psychological torment makes it the most powerful and disturbing film of the three. Shot in Berlin in 1946, the film is dedicated to Rossellini's eldest son, Romano, who died before filming began (ruptured appendix). It is the story of the final days of an angelic 15-year-old German boy named Edmund. His family torn apart by the war, his childhood violently truncated, Edmund has little to do but spend his days wandering through the wasteland of postwar Berlin.

To earn money for his starving family, he tries to pawn an old recording of Hitler's speeches to two Allied soldiers. When he plays the record on a wind-up Victrola, Hitler's voice rings out—"German people, set your hearts at rest! We shall overcome! Victory awaits us in the end!"—while Rossellini pans over rows of demolished buildings and the crumbled Reich Chancellery. An old man walking through the rubble with his son seizes up in surprise, as if he's heard a ghost. And he has. Hitler may be gone, but his spirit stalks the flattened city.

In Germany Year Zero Rossellini goes even further than before in his depiction of devastation. The camera brings the piles of debris into close focus, laying bare each loose brick and warped pipe, as if to expose the inner workings of a deranged mind. As Edmund becomes increasingly tormented, he shuts off, goes mute. The images of Berlin speak for him. He spends more and more time in the streets, gamboling through a ruined landscape that has become a physical representation of the damage inside him.

At one point during the grotesque final sequence, he wanders into an abandoned building. A piece of rubble attracts his attention. He picks it up and wipes it off. It looks, to him, like a gun. He fingers the trigger, raises it to his head, and fires.

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Here's a real-life horror story: Five people have been found buried alive inside their bodies. Paralyzed by brain injuries, they lay inert for years, seemingly oblivious to the doctors and loved ones around them. Four were diagnosed as vegetative. Then a European research team scanned their brains. It turns out they're aware; they just can't speak or move. God knows how many more are trapped like this.

On the heels of this frightening idea comes another: The scans that exposed these patients' thoughts could expose yours. They could read your mind. "Governments are interested in the thoughts of their citizens—whether their voting intentions or their propensities to crime," warns Colin Blakemore, an Oxford neuroscientist. In the European scans, he sees "the possibility that brain science could bring an era of surveillance that will make the epidemic of CCTV cameras look trivial."

Relax. The brain scans are wonderful news. The patients were trapped anyway; the scans have simply restored their ability to communicate. Better yet, that communication remains voluntary. Without the patients' cooperation, the scans would have found nothing. That's the most marvelous thing the scans have discovered: Human minds stripped of every other power can still control one last organ—the brain.

In the age of neuroscience, this sounds ridiculous. We think of the brain as its own master, controlling or fabricating the mind. The New York Times, for instance, says that when the first pseudo-vegetative patient was scanned, "areas of her motor cortex leapt to life," and "spatial areas in the brain became active"—as though these areas animated themselves. The Times of London calls the organ in the scans "the talking brain." Blakemore sees the scans as part of a new understanding: Our intentions, far from guiding of our behavior, are really just products of brain cells that have already "made up their minds."

If the brain controls the mind this way, then brain scanning seems like mind reading. The Washington Post says the European scans enabled scientists to "peek inside the minds" of the patients. The London Independent says the scientists "read the minds of the living dead." Blakemore thinks such scans will soon detect not just lies but intentions, now that technology can "see inside the heads (and hence the minds) of living people."

It's fun to spin out these neuro-determinist theories and mind-reading fantasies. But the reality of the European scans is much more interesting. They don't show the brain controlling the mind. The patients' brains didn't talk; their motor cortexes didn't leap to life; their neurons didn't "make up their minds." The scans show the opposite: the mind operating the brain.

The scans rely on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which maps the distribution of blood oxygen—a proxy for cellular activity—across brain regions. They're far too coarse to differentiate neurons or discern hidden intentions. But they can detect gross categorical differences. For example, they can distinguish activity in the area that processes navigation from activity in the area that processes motor commands. In an open-ended test, they can't tell that you're imagining playing tennis. But if you alternate between two prescribed thoughts—playing tennis and walking through your house—they can tell which is which.

That's why the European scientists used tennis and navigation to do their scans. They asked each patient to imagine swinging a tennis racket. Then they asked him to imagine navigating his home or his city. In essence, they asked the patients to generate the kinds of brain activity scans can read.

Then the scientists put one patient through a further experiment: They asked him several yes-or-no questions about his life. But brain scans can't distinguish "yes" from "no." So they asked him to say "yes" by imagining tennis and to say "no" by imagining navigation. The machine needed translation assistance from the paralyzed human being.

If the scientists had been trying to read hidden intentions, this would be cheating. But their aim was exactly the opposite. They were looking for deliberate activity—the signature of a living, choosing mind. The patients couldn't produce physical activity, as you or I would. But they could produce mental activity. They could use the brain as a kind of tablet, writing "tennis" on their supplementary motor area or "navigation" on their parahippocampal gyrus. That's the real genius of the European study: The mind can use the brain as a communication device.

Before brain scans, this was impossible. Nobody could see your brain. Thinking was one thing; doing was another. Scans have abolished that distinction. They have illuminated the paradoxical world of cognitive acts. We can ask you to think about tennis, and the scan will show whether you've done it. The European scientists' report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, brings us a strange new language in which patients "perform imagery tasks" and then "rest" between thoughts. The criteria by which patients prove they're aware—interaction, communication, purposeful response—have been redefined to include mental feats. Scans, the authors explain, can take us beyond "behavior that is readily observable" to something deeper: behavior within the brain.

But this inner behavior, in turn, is only a clue to something still deeper. Look at the title of the scientists' report: "Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness." The purpose of the scans is to detect the will. To make itself detectable, the will must generate activity. If activity can't be found in the visible body, we must look for it in the brain. It isn't the brain we're after. It's the person using it.

Everything the scientists did was designed to detect the will. They instructed patients to concentrate on tennis or navigation for a full 30 seconds because no unwilled brain blip could last that long. According to the report, the patients' success in doing this demonstrates their "sustained involvement in the task." The scientists also made the instructions to patients somewhat complicated so that their responses would "depend on the patient's conscious decision (or 'mindset') about which answer to give."

In other words, the patients had a choice. They could write the requested answer on their brains, or they could write something else, or perhaps nothing. Four years ago, when members of the European team reported their first successful scan of a pseudo-vegetative patient, they observed that "her decision to cooperate with the authors by imagining particular tasks when asked to do so represents a clear act of intention." In their latest report, they make the same point: "Participants were asked to respond by thinking of whichever imagery corresponded to the answer that they wanted to convey." Even when every other power is gone, you can refuse to cooperate. On the tablet of your brain, you can write whatever answer you want.

So cheer up. Brain scans have brought you a whole new way to communicate—or to tell your interrogators to go to hell.



Human Nature's latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:

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Jack Murtha

The one promise Jack Murtha broke to me was to explain Abscam. The night the news broke that a group of congressmen had been caught boozing up, taking bribes—one tucked the money into his suit and asked, "Does it show?"—Murtha seemed the most implausible of the bribed.

"Dennis, after this is all over, I'm going to tell you what happened," Murtha promised. I'd reached him at his house at about 11 at night. He was astonished at what had just happened. Two congressional pals had taken Murtha along for a visit to a group of guys who said they wanted to get their client, some sheik from the Middle East, into the United States. They told Murtha they were lawyers, seeking a special deal to make sure the sheik could stay in the United States.

"I thought, these lawyers couldn't be very good, because they didn't know how to get their client into the goddamned country," Murtha said. (Caveat: I'm going by memory here, but my memory is pretty clear. Murtha was not impressed by these guys.)

Murtha played around with them for a while, and then they opened a briefcase—he later recalled it as a drawer. "They pulled this drawer open, and I said 'I'm not interested. I'm interested in investment in my district.' And I've been doing that ever since I've been in Congress," he recollected in an interview after a subcommittee meeting last year.

Matt Mazonkey, Murtha's press secretary, cringed when his boss said that into my tape recorder. Me? I laughed. This was absolutely how things were done in Washington, and would somebody kindly show me how such a thing violated any statute or law save that of good manners and polite fiction?

Murphy and Thompson left with money in their pockets. Murtha, who'd been told there was "walking-around money" available, couldn't be bribed. The most he suffered was the temporary opprobrium of testifying against two fellow members of Congress.

Instead of taking the moolah, Murtha teased his federal moles with talk of how he might be interested in doing business later on—but for now, he wanted to know what the sheik might invest in Johnstown, Pa. That was Murtha's hometown. To anyone raised there, that city is the blood of his heart. Three generations of Johnstowners have been driven out by floods. Death, recession, unemployment, and general struggle are the coda of the place.

Murtha was "not interested" in a bribe that did not go directly to his hometown. The fictitious Abscam sheik's bribe meant nothing to Murtha unless it was an earmark for his district. That's why, try as they did for three decades, federal prosecutors never nabbed Murtha: He didn't want to be rich. He wanted to be powerful. So far, that's not illegal.

Murtha's stature within Congress was predicated on his power: his ability to turn the spigot of federal dollars on or off depending upon his goals, strategy, even his mood. He served on the appropriations committee and, at life's end, chaired its outrageously well-endowed defense subcommittee. This penchant for directing federal dollars into his district, the perennially recession-wracked 12^th of Pennsylvania, annoyed reformers.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington annually ranked him among the most corrupt in the House. Republicans howled at his penchant for redistributing federal monies. Advocates of abortion rights and gun control found his western Pennsylvania ethos odious. Nobody liked John Murtha but the voters. Since he first won office in a special election in 1974, Murtha always won at least 55 percent of the vote in the general election. For the most part, he could count on 60 percent.

That was true even after Murtha astonished his constituents in November 2005 by announcing that the Iraq war was unwinnable and that the United States ought to get out. For a longtime defense hawk, a man whose counsel was sought by every president save the feckless George W. Bush, such a stand meant something. If Jack Murtha didn't want to fight another country, forget it.

"I feel like I've been preparing my whole life for this," he told me after making that announcement. He meant that he had the moral authority and personal history to speak against war because his doubts about war would mean more than Rush Limbaugh's certainties. Jack Murtha had seen combat. Most of the guys blathering about military authority had not.

What explains this is a combination of things, and the first is not so much his delivery of federal pork as the fact that he was a perfect fit for the political sensibilities of western Pennsylvania. Democrats here would be perfectly happy if George Meany's bones were elected president so long as they were assured that his skeletal hands held a hunting rifle and a set of scapulars were wrapped around the bony neck. This is a socially conservative place, and those social conservatives recall their grandparents facing down armed guards in coal towns or trading blows with company goons outside of steel plants.

Murtha's Democratic politics fit famously with this view. If someone were to accuse him of redistributing the wealth, he'd have smiled and said he certainly was: He was sending it back where it came from.

If truth be told—and I'm not writing this from Washington, so let's do it—there were three Jack Murthas.

The first was the young Pennsylvania legislator who was pushed before the electorate in a special election in February 1974, as a test case for Richard Nixon's future. A few months earlier, Nixon had fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. The vote to replace longtime Republican Rep. John Saylor, who died on an operating table around the same time Cox was fired, was posited as a test case for Nixon's popularity. This was stuff and nonsense: The people of the rural coal and steel towns of the old 12^th District paid no more attention to Washington politics than they did to Argentine soccer. Nonetheless, it was fun to get the attention.

Murtha won in a squeaker. Then he became Young John Murtha, the first Vietnam combat veteran to serve in Congress. That vanished in less than three years when he became the "Congressman Who Saved Johnstown." In July 1977, a flood clobbered the city. Murtha turned up everywhere: helicoptering in to relief centers; bringing the governor, then Cabinet members, into the city to promise relief; facing down closet racists in the suburbs when they objected to people from the city's poor areas being set up in trailers on high ground.

The third John Murtha was the one who figured out that what the free market failed to do, he could do in other ways. In the 1990s, after Bethlehem Steel had fled the city, he began earmarking defense money to companies that set up shop in his district. Doing so, he employed, without apology, whatever lobbyists would do the paperwork.

He put it to me this way last year, in the midst of a federal investigation in which he was the clear target: "I have no idea why they're going after these lobbyists. Lobbyists play an important part. These forms that they have to fill out, the small companies, the small universities, the small corporations, the small hospitals, are complicated. When you come to Washington you don't just come and say 'I need something.' You don't come to a member and say 'Look, here's what I need.' You gotta fill out forms. You have to know exactly where the forms are."

In short, to his dying day, John Murtha saw lobbyists as clerks, Washington as the bank, and himself as little more than a conduit for the flow of those dollars back to his district. For all that clarity, nobody of virtue understood him. And nobody in his district could understand why anybody beyond the Alleghenies saw him as anything other than Robin Hood with a per diem.

Murtha was not the last of his kind. He was just the last of his kind who knew how to be that kind.

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I keep reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, that floating island of trash between California and Hawaii. Can we ever clean it up? And should we even bother?

The Lantern always thought the Garbage Patch was a huge, waterborne landfill—sort of like a massive hair clog in a big drain. In reality, it's not so much an island of trash as a thin, soupy area of litter, mostly in the form of tiny flecks of plastic, studded here and there with old fishing gear and children's toys. (It's also not the only trashy area in the Pacific.) Even if you were to sail right through the Patch, the water itself probably wouldn't look too remarkable, unless you scooped some up and looked at it closely. So cleaning up this part of the ocean isn't as simple as you might have imagined.

Because the trash is so dispersed, it's not like we can just steer a big ship out to sea and pick up the Garbage Patch. Collecting all those small fragments of plastic would be extremely expensive. Plus, thanks to a variety of factors—from winter storms to El Niño—the Garbage Patch moves from season to season and year to year, making it hard to target effectively. Finally, in gathering up those little scraps, you also run the risk of catching—and killing—any marine animals living amid the debris, many of which are the same size as the plastic bits.

For all these reasons, most organizations stress that the best way to keep oceans clean is to prevent garbage from getting there in the first place. The Lantern does know of one group that's actively testing methods for removing trash from the open seas: the San Francisco- and Hong Kong-based Project Kaisei. In the expeditions it's planning for 2010, Project Kaisei will focus on picking out big, derelict fishing nets, which can snarl up marine life in a process known as "ghostfishing." It's also planning to use modified purse seines—large nets used by commercial fishing operations—to collect the medium-sized pieces of garbage floating near the surface of the water. Finally, the project will continue to experiment with methods of gathering the smaller bits of debris, though co-founder Mary Crowley notes that this part of the puzzle is still very much in the R&D phase.

Kaisei—which receives some of its funding from a recycling trade organization—is also looking for ways to squeeze value from the trash it collects. Currently, the group is focusing on methods that use pyrolysis—in which heat is used to break down materials in the absence of oxygen—to transform the collected waste into fuel. Some experts, however, are skeptical that this particular solution will make economic sense.

Meanwhile, we ought to know a lot more about the Garbage Patch—and ocean trash in general—before making a decision as to whether large-scale cleanup operations are viable or even warranted. There are still a lot of basic questions that remain unanswered. For example, no one has accurately estimated how much garbage enters the ocean each year—much less the volume of plastic that's swirling around in the water at any time. And despite the oft-repeated claim that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is "twice the size of Texas," we don't really know the exact size of the Patch or how much garbage it contains.

Nor do we fully understand the precise impacts of ocean trash. It's possible that, when all is said and done, we'll decide it's better to leave the Patch alone, rather than bringing all those bits and pieces back on land and dealing with a brand-new disposal headache. (Particularly when you consider all the emissions associated with fueling collection vessels.) Scientists do know that the marine debris can entangle or otherwise harm sea life: For example, animals may eat the garbage, which can not only lacerate their throats and stomachs but can also make them feel so full that they stop eating actual food. But it's hard to say with certainty exactly how many animals are killed this way. Some of the garbage patches in the Pacific have more teeming ecosystems than others—the dragonfly-shaped area on this map, for example, has high amounts of fish, phytoplankton and zooplankton, whereas the Garbage Patch itself (the pink area between California and Hawaii) is a relative dead zone, biologically. However, no matter where debris resides, it can pose a threat to wide-foraging seabirds like the albatross. And, because garbage patches move, they can also sweep trash onto land, endangering shore animals like seals.

There are even more questions about the risks posed by those tiny bits of plastic. It's well-established that plastic can absorb certain toxic pollutants, like PCBs and DDT, and that those pollutants—if absorbed into an animal's fat tissues—can work their way up the food chain. But according to Miriam Goldstein, a doctoral student who served as principal investigator on a recent expedition to the Garbage Patch, we can't yet draw any firm conclusions about the plastic's effects on human health. For example, while we do know that some fish species are eating these specks of plastic, we don't know whether they're doing so in significant numbers. We also don't know whether ingesting bits of polluted plastic is enough to transfer those toxins from the plastic into the fish's fatty tissues. (For that matter, there's already plenty of PCBs and DDT in the water itself, so even if we could remove all the plastic from the ocean, we wouldn't necessarily be fixing the toxic fish problem.)

None of this is to say that plastic in the oceans shouldn't be an area of concern. But unless the flow of garbage is stanched at the source, cleanup can only ever be a temporary solution.

Is there an environmental quandary that's been keeping you up at night? Send it to ask.the.lantern@gmail.com, and check this space every Tuesday.

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Meg Whitman

Arnold Schwarzenegger used to call his rivals for the California governorship "girly men." Meg Whitman, who is running to replace him, could be called the "manly girl." Whitman made her name in the testosterone-heavy halls of Silicon Valley. She is a passionate fly-fisher, and a self-described "frumpy" dresser who shies away from the worlds of "fashion and decorating." When she reveals personal details, she does it with the spontaneity and warmth of Al Gore.

Whitman is instead billing herself as something few women could plausibly pull off: the future "CEO of California." In this way, she is the anti-Sarah Palin. She's no 40-something pinup, but she finished high school in three years and entered the Harvard Business School at 21. In the corporate world, she is known for her competence and cunning. Instead of talking about her political experience, she talks about her business expertise—years of working on branding at Procter & Gamble, Bain, Hasbro, and Disney, all of which led her to create the "Country First" slogan for John McCain's presidential campaign, of which she was national co-chair. Her campaign revolves around the GOP standbys of tax cuts, deregulation, and gutting welfare as the keys to recovery.

Whitman even behaves more like an insular CEO than like a politician. Unlike Palin, she seems mortified by her own celebrity. "That's what I hate," Whitman told the New York Times in 1999 about her fame. "I even have the furniture man noticing me." Of course, when you're running for office, this is a problem. A December survey by the Public Policy Institute of California found that at least half of likely voters across parties and demographic groups haven't heard of Whitman or don't know enough about her to have an opinion.

Her answer to that problem is to write her own book. But even here, she has failed to reveal her softer side. Her recent stab at literary outreach, The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life reads more like Everything I Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten for the corporate set. The book is full of platitudes like "you can't buy integrity," "courage is contagious," "the power of validation," and "enfranchise your partners" but is very short on humanizing revelations. The few moments of personal trauma included are described in PowerPoint-ready sound bites: her sister overcoming a bout with mental illness is her "power of many moment"; the family's reaction to the disease's onset is when their "bias-for-action gene kicked into gear." When she refers to her marriage to neurosurgeon Griffith Harsh IV as the "Whitman-Harsh merger," it's not entirely clear whether she's joking.

Whitman does have one public relations problem, as she might call it. Her two college-age sons, Griff and Will Harsh, have reportedly been tossed from more than one prep school, and a private dining club, and are said to have been banned from the dorms at Princeton. (If true, that means they would be forbidden from living even in the $30 million Whitman College dorm created by a donation from their mother.) Her camp has not responded to the Internet rumors about her sons' behavior—which also includes accusations that they casually toss around the N-word. This makes Whitman the latest in a chain of female candidates who have had to answer for errant family members, a list that includes Palin, Hillary Clinton, Claire McCaskill, Dianne Feinstein, and Geraldine Ferraro.

And like those female politicians, Whitman is not immediately attracting sisterly support. One survey shows her leading Steve Poizner, her main rival for the GOP nomination (himself a billionaire former tech CEO) by 35 points among men in the primary vote but only 25 points—one-third less—among women; the gender skew is even more pronounced when Whitman is pitted against prospective Democratic nominee Jerry Brown. Brown has a 19-point gender gap working in his favor against Whitman, giving him an overall 41-36 percent edge. "Female candidates ... have to remember that women can be deeply suspicious and critical of one another," political journalist Ann Kornblut warns in her book Notes From the Cracked Ceiling.

But maybe being a woman won't matter. If California is about to declare bankruptcy, then the fact that Whitman took a no-name Web auction house peddling little more than collectible Beanie Babies and turned it into a multibillion-dollar juggernaut may be her best qualification. Despite a personal fortune topping $1 billion, her campaign has centered on slashing state spending. She's written op-eds declaring she'd hack away at welfare by imposing "stricter sanctions on adults who fail to meet work requirements." She's also said she would suspend the state's pioneering greenhouse-gas emissions restrictions. Her book is peppered with words like "value," "lean," "streamline," "frugal," "minimizing," and "budgeting." Her operating principle is somewhat flat and overly practical but maybe appropriate for these times: "You have this much money and this much time, and you'll have to figure out how to do the best job you can."

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Viktor Yanukovych

Every revolution sparks a counterrevolution. The French Revolution in 1789 was followed by Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy. Following the Russian Revolution, the czar's forces regrouped and fought a bloody civil war.

Sunday's election of Viktor Yanukovych to the presidency of Ukraine does not represent the counterrevolution—or at least not yet. For those who don't remember, Yanukovych was the bad guy of the 2004 Orange Revolution. An ex-thug and ex-Communist with a criminal record, he ran for president that year with the overt backing of the Russian government and tried to steal the election. After weeks of street protests, he backed down and eventually allowed the real winner, Viktor Yushchenko, to come to power. It was post-Soviet Ukraine's first truly democratic election.

Fast-forward to 2010, and many things look different: Yushchenko was a bitter disappointment to his countrymen. The recession hit Ukraine hard; many difficult decisions were not made. The Ukrainian government still has not gotten around to privatizing land or removing Soviet-era subsidies from the budget. Tensions between the western and eastern halves of the country have not decreased. As things got tougher, politicians began squabbling among themselves, making reform impossible; the value of the currency has halved.

The only thing that has remained consistent over the past four years is the democratic process itself. Far and away the most striking thing about this Ukrainian presidential election is that we genuinely did not know who would win it. By contrast, the only mystery about Russian elections is the question of why they bother to hold them, since the winner is known long in advance. Six years after the Orange Revolution, Ukrainian political culture remains open, unpredictable, and interesting—so much so that formerly prominent Russian journalists have now moved to Kiev to ply their trade. "The difference between Russian politics and Ukrainian politics," one of them told the New York Times, "is the difference between a cemetery and a madhouse."

And who has been the biggest beneficiary of this madhouse? Yanukovych, the original bad guy: Two parliamentary elections and one presidential election have been held since the Orange Revolution, and he has won them all. The Ukrainians are not an illogical people: The only real advantage of democracy is that it enables people to throw out leaders they don't like. When the various "orange" coalitions failed to deliver the expected reforms, the Ukrainians took full advantage of their voting power to throw them out. Anyone else would do the same.

The test now, of course, is whether Yanukovych will respect those who elected him and ensure that democratic elections continue to be held into the future. His success will be easy to measure: If he is evicted from office in due course, as all politicians eventually are, then he has respected the spirit of the Orange Revolution. If he tries to stay on past his term by falsifying votes, intimidating the opposition, and killing journalists, then we will know that the counterrevolution has come to power. And it is by these terms that we should judge him. Whether he tries to join NATO (he will not) or befriend the European Union (he might well) matters less to Ukraine's political future than the simple question of whether Ukrainians will be allowed to replace him if they disapprove of his choices.

That does not mean his choices are irrelevant: Ukrainians, like everyone else under the sun, will select their future leaders based on their perceptions of how well their country is run. "It's the Economy, Stupid," is not a uniquely American slogan. In the coming months, the Ukrainian government will be (and should be) far more concerned with what one regional analyst calls "geo-economics," as opposed to geopolitics. The Ukrainians need to expand their relationship with the International Monetary Fund; they need to negotiate stable and reasonable gas agreements with their Russian neighbors to the east; they need to conclude visa and trade agreements with their European neighbors to the west. They are in need of practical and literate politicians, not ideologues. For their sake, we must hope that Yanukovych is the former, not the latter.

The big questions—will Ukraine ultimately be "Western" or "Eastern"; will its political culture come to resemble Europe's or Russia's; will Ukraine eventually join European and transatlantic institutions—have not disappeared with the election of an "Eastern" president. But they have been put on hold, at least for the moment.

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Calls for Senate reform peaked over the weekend after Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., put a "blanket hold" on more than 70 Obama nominees, not out of principled opposition, but because two projects in his home state of Alabama weren't getting enough attention. [Update, Feb. 9: Shelby lifted most of his holds late Monday.]

This, for Senate-reform advocates, was the last straw. "The genie is out of the bottle with this abuse of Senate rules," wrote FireDogLake's Jon Walker. "I congratulate Shelby on fully exploring the logic of the modern United States Senate," remarked Matthew Yglesias. "Why, after all, should a great nation of 300 million people have a functioning government if preventing the government from functioning can help a lone Senator advance parochial interests?" "America is not yet lost," Paul Krugman reassured. "But the Senate is working on it."

Complaints about Senate procedure tend to focus on two tools: The filibuster, which many liberals hold responsible for the failure (so far) of health care reform, and the "hold," which allows a single senator to stall a president's nominee. Both mechanisms are outdated, say critics. Filibusters used to be rare, with roughly 8 percent of major bills getting blocked in the 1960s. Now, the rate is 70 percent. And holds, while always common, are being used more frequently now than ever.

What can be done? Well, quite a few things. What will be done? Probably not much. Here are a few of the possible reforms on the table—and why they won't pass anytime soon.

Lower the threshold—but not yet. In 1975, the Senate lowered the number of votes needed for cloture from 67 to 60. Now, some reformers suggest they lower it even further—to 55, say, or all the way to 51. No minority is going to undermine itself by scrapping the filibuster immediately, so the change would kick in six or eight years from now, when either party could be in power.

Why it won't work: Altering the filibuster requires changing the Senate rules, and changing the Senate rules requires a 67-vote supermajority. It's hard enough to get 60 votes on a contentious issue like health care reform. Getting 67 votes on scrapping the filibuster? Unlikely. "Nobody's got 67," says Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution. "Unless there's some calamity where the two sides come together."

Lower the threshold slowly. One proposal that gets kicked around is to keep the initial threshold for cloture at 60 votes, but then lower it incrementally. After three days, it falls to 57. Three days later, to 54. Three days later, to 51—a simple majority. That way, the minority has time to express its opposition, but can't block legislation forever.

Why it won't work: While the proposal sounds good in theory, it faces the same obstacle as abolishing the filibuster altogether: This, too, would require 67 votes.

Use the fast track. Senate rules allow the chamber to "fast track" certain pieces of legislation, or pass them without extended debate. Budget reconciliation is just one example. Congress can also fast-track treaties or troop requests. The Senate could conceivably set up fast tracks for other types of legislation, too, like judicial nominees—if, say, a bipartisan commission signed off on a nominee beforehand—or for raising the debt limit.

Why it won't work: Fast-tracking legislation is more plausible than scrapping the filibuster altogether, since it would take only 60 votes to accomplish instead of 67. But the political cost could still be high, as the minority party would accuse the majority of shoving the bill through using unconventional channels. (See the current bickering over reconciliation.)

Limit the opportunities for filibusters. Filibuster, in the singular, is a misleading term. It should really be plural. Any piece of legislation needs to overcome several different procedural hurdles, including a motion to proceed with debate, a motion to end debate, a call for a conference, the naming of conferees, and a motion to proceed to conference. All of this takes time: The Senate must wait at least 24 hours for a cloture petition to "ripen," plus another 30 hours for consideration after cloture is invoked. Congress could speed up the process by eliminating some of these votes. The filibuster would be intact, but its stalling potential would be lessened.

Why it won't work: It might achieve a short-term goal of speeding the final vote. But it doesn't change the need for 60 votes to get anything done. In the end, the majority—which presumably has other items on its agenda—is more likely to blink.

Roll out the cots! It's been years since we've seen a full-blown Jimmy Stewart-style filibuster. These days, the mere threat of a filibuster is tantamount to the real thing. Why don't the Democrats require the Republicans to actually stand there and talk (or not) for days on end?

Why it won't work: It makes everyone look bad. The majority could accuse the minority of obstructing, sure, but the minority could just as easily accuse the majority of wasting the American people's time.

The "nuclear option." This procedural gambit was made famous in 2005, when Republicans sought to scrap the filibuster in the face of Democratic opposition to George W. Bush's judicial nominees. The process itself is complex and opaque, but in short, the presiding officer (the vice president or the Senate president pro tempore) rules that the president's nominees require a mere majority vote, the opposition appeals, the majority votes to table the appeal, and from then on, a simple majority rules—effectively killing the filibuster.

Why it won't work: Because, well, senators like the filibuster. The 2005 effort failed when the bipartisan "Gang of 14"—seven Democrats and seven Republicans—interceded to block a majority vote from changing the senate rules. Senators may not like the filibuster when they're in the majority, but they cherish it as the minority.

Make holds public. Most holds on Senate nominees are anonymous—that is, a senator can stall a nomination without having to reveal him or herself to anyone but the Senate leadership. Some suggest that requiring holds to be public would discourage them, since senators would be too embarrassed.

Why it won't work: Shelby is a case in point that senators feel no shame about placing holds. If anything, they're proud of them. And even if the Senate imposed a rule that a hold would become public after, say, six days, Senators could simply remove their holds just before the deadline arrives, to be replaced by a hold from an anonymous colleague.

Ignore holds altogether. There's nothing in the Senate rule book that covers holds. Rather, they've grown out of the Senate practice of "unanimous consent," which allows the Senate to move forward on legislation without taking a vote on every last procedure. When a senator places a "hold" on a nominee, he or she is merely blocking the unanimous consent motion. The majority leader can still put the nomination to a vote and override the hold with a 60-vote supermajority.

Why it won't work: Unanimous consent works because the Senate considers itself "a collegial body" in which members respect each other. Part of this tradition is majority leaders respecting the holds placed by individual senators. To ignore a hold would be seen as an affront at best, at worst a declaration of partisan war. Senators also like being able to place individual holds. If they revoke the opposition's ability to do so, they revoke their own.

Proposals for Senate reform may pick up steam in the next few months, as Democratic frustration mounts and the 2010 elections approach. But the odds of streamlining the Senate anytime soon are low, thanks to a central paradox: Changing the rules surrounding the supermajority (60 votes) requires an even greater supermajority (67 votes). As of now, the political will simply isn't there.

The inability to get anything done may eventually reach crisis level. Anger with the chamber may run so high that Senators are forced reform it or get voted out. But until then, they face a collective action problem: No one wants to give up the power to obstruct, even if it means that their own goals get obstructed. Plus, the Senate is still getting stuff done. It's mainly the big-ticket legislation like health care reform and the stimulus package that run into problems. "Eventually, senators could realize the institution has become unworkable," says Gregory Wawro, a political science professor at Columbia University. "At that point, you will get reform." But it could be a long wait. You might need a cot.

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Akio Toyoda

Toyota president Akio Toyoda held a press conference Friday to apologize for the quality problems that led to a massive automotive recall and at least 19 deaths. The Los Angeles Times noted that Toyoda performed a short bow to express regret rather than a long, sustained bow to indicate contrition. How many kinds of bows are there in Japan?

Four. Japanese bows can be formally categorized as eshaku, a simple 15-degree bend or nod of the head; keirei, a 30-degree tilt to show respect; saikeirei, a full 45- to 90-degree bow intended to show the deepest veneration or humility; and dogeza, a fetal prostration expressing utter subjection or contrition. Toyoda's bow last week fit best into the keirei category, but some observers felt he should have committed to a saikeirei instead.

There are gradations of meaning within each category, so you can't interpret a bow just by measuring the angle between legs and torso. As important are the duration of the gesture, and the exact context under which it's made. A graduating student might perform a full, prolonged saikeirei to his professor as a gesture of gratitude, but he might perform the same bow in an abbreviated form to apologize for having accidentally stepped on someone's foot.

Bowing is so important in Japan that parents begin to teach the practice to children shortly after they start walking, and some schools hold enormous assemblies where preteens spend hours bowing in unison to master the postures. One company supposedly developed a machine with a laser line to teach their sales staff the ideal angle for bowing to customers. Still, in most daily interactions, the four categories and the precise pitch of the body matter far less than properly representing the hierarchical relationship between the two parties: The subordinate person—student, son, employee, etc.—must always must bow down lower, and stay there longer, than his superior. (This can lead to stooping competitions when a pair whose relative social standing is not altogether clear comes into contact. There may be uncertainty, for example, when a successful novelist is introduced at a lecture by a university president.)

While your typical street and office bows have more to do with relative depth, the four traditional bowing categories still come into play in very formalized situations, like a corporate press conference. Japanese salarymen, like former Mitsubishi CEO Katsuhiko Kawasoe and Yamaichi Securities boss Shohei Nozawa, have performed deep, almost comically prolonged saikeireis—often exceeding 30 seconds—for the public in recent years. (Even the most contrite bows don't last more than 10 seconds in less formal settings.) More than a few of the disgraced, like late Agriculture Minister Matsuoka Toshikatsu, subsequently committed suicide, raising questions in Japan about the level of shame faced by failed leaders. Toyoda's refusal to self-flagellate to the same degree may be a signal that the relatively young president intends to break from the seppuku practice of older corporate honchos.

Bonus Explainer: The Los Angeles Times article suggested that Toyoda may have avoided the saikeirei because a fuller gesture would have acknowledged responsibility for the safety problems and thus expose the company to increased liability in U.S. courts. Could a deeper bow really have gotten the car company into legal trouble? It's highly unlikely. In many states, the bow couldn't even be mentioned at trial, because "benevolent gestures expressing sympathy" are excluded from evidence. In addition, Toyota's massive recall is a far stronger admission that the cars were flawed than a simple bow.

Bonus Bonus Explainer: Why is the car company called Toyota, if its founding family goes by the name Toyoda? The former is more auspicious. The written form of Toyota requires eight brush strokes—as opposed to 10 for Toyoda—and eight is considered a lucky number. The kanji symbol for eight widens at the bottom, suggesting that a more prosperous future awaits. Eight is also the number of auspicious symbols in Buddhism.

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

Explainer thanks Ian Condry of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sona Iliffe-Moon of the Toyota Motor Corp.; Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica; and Curtis J. Milhaupt of Columbia Law School.

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Gerald Posner

Last week, a reader tipped me to an instance of potential plagiarism by Gerald Posner in the Daily Beast, for which Posner is chief investigative reporter. After I called the plagiarism to the attention of Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal, the site deleted five pilfered sentences and added an editor's note to explain the deletions and to apologize.

In an interview with me, Posner admitted he had plagiarized the Miami Herald in his piece—although he had no explanation for how he had lifted the copy. Posner's editor, Edward Felsenthal, also acknowledged without flinching that Posner had plagiarized but added that he believed the act to be inadvertent and that Posner would continue to write for the Daily Beast. (I've saved a copy of the unexpurgated article.)

But this isn't the only example of Posner pinching copy without attribution. Slate reader Gregory Gelembuik and I have uncovered additional examples of plagiarism by Posner in the Daily Beast from the Texas Lawyer, a Miami Herald blog, a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald article, and a health care journalism blog.

Posner copied from a July 20, 2009, Texas Lawyer article in his Feb. 4, 2010, Daily Beast piece titled "Can This Man Save Jacko's Doctor?" Here are the plagiarized passages, with the relevant sections marked in bold:

On Dateline NBC and in other TV interviews over the next few days, Chernoff got out four main messages: Murray was cooperating with the police; he did not prescribe Oxycontin or Demerol to Jackson; he had only briefly been Jackson's doctor; and many other physicians had treated and prescribed medication for Jackson.

—The Daily Beast, Feb. 4, 2010

Chernoff taped the show in Los Angeles on Sunday June 28. During the broadcast, Chernoff says he was able to deliver his main messages about his client: Murray was cooperating with police; he did not prescribe Demerol or Oxycontin to Jackson; he had only treated Jackson for a short period of time; and other doctors had treated and prescribed medication for Jackson.

—Texas Lawyer, July 20, 2009

~~~~~~

Then Chernoff flew to Las Vegas and gave Murray, who had returned to his home there, a secure cell phone to prevent electronic eavesdropping.

—The Daily Beast, Feb. 4, 2010

On June 30, Chernoff flew to Las Vegas to bring Murray a secure cell phone to prevent electronic eavesdropping as well as to collect certain documents.

—Texas Lawyer, July 20, 2009

In his Nov. 21, 2009, Daily Beast article, "Murder or Miscarriage?," Posner plagiarized an Oct. 27, 2009, Miami Herald blog post. Again, the relevant section is marked in bold:

Turned out that 37-year-old Woodward was being held at the Wilshire Division jail, in lieu of $2 million bail on suspicion of murder for the death of an unborn child—believed to be his. At the time, the police said the arrest happened after an investigation revealed "suspicious circumstances of a miscarriage" reported to them only a few days earlier. The fetus was estimated to be in its 13th week.

—The Daily Beast, Nov. 21, 2009

Josh Woodward, owner of South Beach's 8 Oz. Burger Bar, was arrested Sunday in Los Angeles and is being held on at the Wilshire Division jail in lieu of a $2 million bail on suspicion of murder for the death of an unborn child believed to be his. Police say the arrest happened after an investigation on Monday revealed "suspicious circumstances of a miscarriage" that was reported on October 19. The fetus was estimated to be in its 13th week.

—Miami Herald blog, Oct. 27, 2009

Posner plagiarized the Miami Herald again in his July 29, 2009, Daily Beast piece, "Pill Mill Capital Cracks Down":

Until now, pain clinics have avoided rigorous state inspections because of a legal loophole that exempts facilities that don't accept medical insurance. Most clinics only take cash. As a result, pill-mill owners and employees don't have to undergo the background checks required at other medical clinics. More than a dozen doctors and clinic owners in South Florida with disciplinary records or criminal convictions are operating freely. An owner of an Oakland Park pill mill is sitting in jail awaiting trial on charges of trafficking Oxycodone. ...

—The Daily Beast, July 29, 2009

Until now, many pain clinics have escaped rigorous state inspections because of a quirk in the law that exempts facilities that don't take insurance—and many clinics accept cash only. This loophole also allows clinic employees and owners to avoid the background checks required at other health clinics.

The Miami Herald has identified more than a dozen doctors and clinic owners in South Florida with disciplinary records or criminal convictions. One man continues to own an Oakland Park pain clinic while in jail awaiting trial on charges of trafficking oxycodone.

—Miami Herald, June 19, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; the St. Petersburg Times also posted the Herald story)

~~~~~~

The new law, passed nearly unanimously in the legislature, requires doctors and pharmacists to record patient prescriptions for most drugs in a state-controlled database.

—The Daily Beast, July 29, 2009

The new law, passed nearly unanimously in the Legislature, will require doctors and pharmacists to record patient prescriptions for most drugs in a state-controlled database.

—Miami Herald, June 19, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; the St. Petersburg Times also posted the Herald story)

Posner also swiped from a Herald editorial and a health care journalism blog (which credits a Herald editorial) for his July 12, 2009, Daily Beast piece, "Jackson and the 'Pill Mills' ":

Now the state has become the unofficial national headquarters for a thriving black market in addictive prescription drugs, especially oxycodone, one of the drugs found in the sweep of Jackson's house after his arrest.

—Daily Beast, July 12, 2009

The report describes how Broward has recently become the unofficial national headquarters for a thriving black market in dangerous prescription drugs, especially oxycodone.

—Miami Herald editorial, April 8, 2009 (retrieved from Nexis; reprinted by the Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce)

~~~~~~

Only 45 South Florida doctors are responsible for prescribing nearly nine million oxycodone pills in the last six months of 2008. Thirty-three of the top 50 oxycodone-dispensing doctors in the United States practice in Broward County.

—Daily Beast, July 12, 2009

Among [Miami Herald reporter Scott] Hiaasen's findings:

45 South Florida doctors sold nearly nine million oxycodone pills in the last six months of 2008.

33 of the top 50 oxycodone-dispensing doctors in the United States practice in Broward County.

—Covering Health, April 13, 2009

A lawyer by training, Posner is a full-time journalist who has written books about the Kennedy assassination (Case Closed), Ross Perot, Motown, the U.S.-Saudi Arabia relationship, 9/11, and other subjects. His byline has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Talk, Time, U.S. News & World Report, and elsewhere.

Asked for a comment about the new findings, the Daily Beast's Felsenthal e-mailed this statement: "We obviously take what's happened very seriously. We will be suspending Gerald Posner while we review his articles, to return if we are satisfied that he has taken the necessary steps to avoid this in the future."

Posner offered this statement:

Today I found out that I am suspended from my Chief Investigative Reporter position at The Daily Beast. I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984 on book research, obviously does not work in a failsafe manner at the warp speed of the net. Some of the incidents raised by Jack Shafer are not plagiarism, but are instances in which I received the same exact prepared quotation or statement from a police officer or press agent as other reporters. But others are mistakes that I deeply regret.

Rest assured, no one has been tougher on me than I have over this issue. I ask all of you to accept my apology for these instances, a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of words I've written over decades. I accept, however, the full responsibility.

******

I read my e-mail at slate.pressbox@gmail.com hourly and tweet at Twitter intermittently. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Posner2 in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

Return to article

by Gerald Posner

February 2, 2010 | 10:39pm

The death of the heir of the Fontainebleau Hotel fortune has sparked a twisted blame game as the victim's wife and stepdaughter accuse each other of his murder. Plus, VIEW OUR GALLERY of The Fontainebleau through the years.

Ben Novack built Miami Beach's iconic Fontainebleau Hotel in 1954. It was a magnet for the rich and famous, including so many mobsters that the FBI assigned undercover agents to conduct surveillance at the grand ballroom to keep a tally of which northern kingpins were in town. As I discussed in my book, Miami Babylon, Novack himself was long rumored to have mob connections, which he always denied.

But Monday, the Novack legacy took a strange turn when a Fort Lauderdale Probate Judge awarded Narcy Novack, the widow of Novack's murdered son, Ben Jr., control of his $10 million estate. What made the probate ruling odd was that other relatives wanted Narcy Novack—a suspect in the murder—removed as the estate's executor under the state's slayer statute. That law prohibits a killer from inheriting any part of a victim's estate. The relatives dropped their lawsuit at the last moment, unable to marshal the evidence that Narcy was the killer. But the lawyers for the other Novacks asked for a dismissal without prejudice—which allows them to file another challenge at a later date.

Some background: This past July, Narcy found her husband's bloody corpse at the Rye Town Hilton hotel in Westchester County, New York. He was on the floor beside his bed and had been bludgeoned. His mouth was covered with duct tape, his hands taped behind his back, and his legs were tied together together below the knees. Missing was Novack's gold bracelet, with "BEN" in diamonds. Novack had been directing a business conference he had organized. According to his Web site, his company, Convention Concepts Unlimited, took in $50 million annually. Narcy told the police she found her husband's body when she returned from breakfast. The Westchester police believe the murder was a professional hit, although they are not sure who ordered it, much less carried it out.

While the family fought over burial expenses, Novack's corpse was preserved on ice at the Westchester County medical examiner's office for 52 days before he was finally buried in the family's mausoleum in Queens, New York. Armed guards kept the fighting family members separated.

The Westchester police say Narcy is a "person of interest." She hasn't been charged, nor has anyone else. But the Novack family is a 10-plus on the dysfunction meter. Narcy Novack's daughter from a previous marriage, May Abad, charges that her mom arranged the murder to collect her husband's fortune, and that her mom knew Ben was having an affair.

There is little doubt the Novacks had a volatile relationship. In 2002, 11 years into their marriage, Narcy and two others tied Ben Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and took money from his safe, according to the police report filed at the time.

"If I can't have you, no one else will,'' she told him, according to a divorce petition Ben Jr. filed and then dropped.

Narcy told police investigators at the time that the entire episode was part of a sex game. And she also showed them porno snapshots of women with artificial limbs having sex, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

And just when you think things can't get spicier, Narcy has turned the tables in the current probate fight and accused her own daughter of murdering Ben Jr., a charge Abad vehemently denies. A few days after Novack's body had been found, Narcy and her daughter had a violent fight at Narcy's Fort Lauderdale home. Narcy called the police, accused Abad of assaulting a niece who was at the home, and had the police remove her forcibly from the property. Abad told the police her mother had struck her with a crowbar. Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday's hearing in Fort Lauderdale.

Because her husband left her his estate, Narcy is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his yacht, and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia. The Batman collection, the largest in private hands, was started by Ben Sr. when he owned the Fontainebleau. It was estimated by Christies in 2000 as potentially worth $15 million. But after Ben Jr.'s death, much of the Batman memorabilia turned up missing from several warehouses in Broward County. Sources close to the case told The Daily Beast that the locks on the warehouses where the materials were stored had been hacked off.

The Novack family is a 10-plus on the dysfunction meter.

If yesterday's probate ruling stands, Narcy will likely also gain control of the estate of her late husband's 87-year-old mother, Bernice Novack, who was found dead three months before her son. Part of her estate was inherited by Ben Jr. and part by an illegitimate son of Ben Sr., a homeless man who dramatically showed up eight years after his mother's death and claimed his inheritance just before a court was about to declare him legally dead.

Bernice Novack's April 2009 death—in which her body was found face down and her skull was fractured—was ruled accidental by Fort Lauderdale police and the Broward County medical examiner. The coroner's ruling was despite some blood police found smeared on her car and on the walls in the house. But second thoughts on the closed case came when Rye Brook detectives received an anonymous letter, after Ben Jr.'s murder, claiming that both Bernice and her son were killed by Narcy and an unnamed accomplice. Although initially skeptical, Rye Brook police have said that during the course of their investigation they determined that details in the letter were accurate.

``What we found interesting in the letter is there were names in it at the time we were not aware of, and as we did our own investigation, we found that information to be true," a Rye Brook police spokesman told reporters.

The letter, written in Spanish, is dated July 20, 2009, a week after Ben Jr.'s brutal murder and three months after his mother's death. It names those involved, says how the murders were committed, and describes the events leading up to the alleged dual homicides. Based on that letter, the Fort Lauderdale police have opened an investigation into Bernice's death and whether foul play was involved.

Narcy Novack's attorney, Howard Tanner, says the allegations about his client are based on unfounded rumor and innuendo and that she had nothing to do with her husband's death and had nothing to gain from the murder. Attempts to reach May Abad, or her attorney, for comment were unsuccessful.

As for Ben Novack Sr.'s great achievement—the Fontainebleau—it's hanging on by a thread, close to bankruptcy after a billion-dollar renovation failed to revive its fortunes. It doesn't seem like anything is going right for the Novacks—not even their Miami Beach legacy.

Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, on topics ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-02/the-murder-mystery-rocking-miami/p/

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Barack Obama

During the early 1990s, Slate's founder, Michael Kinsley, was co-host of CNN's Crossfire. The title described the show accurately, and (though a model of civilized debate by today's cable-chat standards) it was criticized for rewarding noisy disagreement for its own sake. A few years later, Kinsley proposed a show called Ceasefire that would be Crossfire's opposite. Instead of locating areas of disagreement between opposing parties, its hosts would cajole warring parties into finding areas of agreement, however fragile. This approach had been shown to work, Kinsley observed, in labor mediation and marital counseling. Why not politics? "For a while," Kinsley e-mailed me, "every time there was a new head of CNN or MSNBC … I would email them with the idea. They would usually write back 'this could be interesting' and then nothing would happen."

Now President Barack Obama is picking up on Kinsley's idea. In a Feb. 7 interview with Katie Couric of CBS News (video, transcript), he said:

I want to consult closely with our Republican colleagues. So, they're gonna be coming into the White House next week. And what I want to do is to ask them to put their ideas on the table. And then after the recess, which will be a few weeks away, I want to come back and have large meeting with Republicans and Democrats to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.

The White House says that this large meeting will take place on Feb. 25 and that it will be televised.

One reason Ceasefire never made it onto the air, I suspect, is that it's very difficult to get public figures to set aside their differences whenever a television camera is running. Labor mediation and marital counseling do not occur in public settings, and it's hard to imagine they'd be very successful if they did. The late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News, created a series of televised Socratic dialogues on PBS in which prominent people were challenged to reconcile their clashing views regarding public issues. I haven't seen any of these in a while, but my recollection is that they focused on hypothetical cases, not real ones in which the participants had already invested in public positions. Even then, it was hard to get them to do much more than smile thinly and mumble, "You raise an interesting point."

Maybe Obama thinks the Ceasefire format of his meeting will have a different effect. Maybe he thinks that the GOP's obstruction of a health care reform bill modeled to a great extent on policies it has advanced in the past is so crudely partisan that the harsh glare of klieg lights will shame Republican members of Congress into reclaiming vast acres of common ground. Until fairly recently, national polls consistently found that voters trusted Democrats more than Republicans when it came to reforming the health care system. But Republican members of Congress don't run on a national ticket. They run in states or districts where opposing health care reform tends to be viewed not as obstruction but as prudence or (in some places) as patriotic opposition to creeping socialism. And even nationally, recent polls indicate that when it comes to health care, the public's trust is drifting toward the GOP.

Consider the case of Scott Brown, the new Republican senator from Massachusetts. Way back in July, Sen. Brown—then a mere state senator—gave every indication that he supported health care reform. "They're really mirroring what we did a couple of years ago through Gov. Romney's leadership," he said. Then Ted Kennedy died and somebody persuaded Brown that running against Obamacare might actually pay off. Suddenly, Obamacare bore no resemblance at all to Romneycare. "They're two different programs," Brown told Fox News' Neil Cavuto last month. "What we have here is a free-market enterprise where we're providing insurance in various levels to people in Massachusetts. The plans in Washington are a one-size-fits-all plan." This last assertion, in addition to contradicting Brown's earlier views, is blatantly false. Does that suggest a man capable of being shamed about political opportunism? Political opportunism vanquished Camelot!

Obama must know this. I therefore interpret his decision to host Ceasefire at the White House as another depressing sign that, his public assertions to the contrary, Obama has given up on health care reform. The White House has reportedly failed to provide any legislative guidance to Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, furthering suspicions that Obama just can't bring himself to dirty his fingernails with the sort of behind-the-scenes politicking necessary to pass major legislation. I'm honestly starting to wonder whether I've given more thought to legislative strategizing than the president has.

This televised meeting will be a lousy forum in which to reach agreement. But it should serve well as occasion for Obama to put his own spin on health reform's demise. That, I fear, is its sole purpose.

Update, 10:15 p.m.: The House GOP is already threatening not to participate. "If the starting point for this meeting is the job-killing bills the American people have already soundly rejected," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R.-Ohio, and Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R.-Va., wrote White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, "Republicans would rightly be reluctant to participate."

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

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The unraveling of the congressional debate over health care reform is already renewing calls to abolish the Senate filibuster. As many have argued, the filibuster undermines the democratic principle of majority rule and compounds the unrepresentative character of the Senate's design. The health care debacle suggests that the filibuster may also be rendering our country ungovernable. So why not just do away with it?

Because one of the most entrenched assumptions about the filibuster—that it thwarts majority rule—is only half-true. When you crunch the numbers, it turns out that the filibuster has often served to enforce majority rule in recent years, not to undermine it. Instead of abolishing the filibuster, we should try to curb its undemocratic excesses while preserving its role as a democratic check.

Of course, the filibuster is by definition a tool for a Senate minority to obstruct a Senate majority. But since Rhode Island and California enjoy equal representation in the Senate, a majority of senators isn't the same as a majority of Americans. To gauge the relationship between the filibuster and national majority rule—the kind where everybody counts equally, and the representatives of the majority carry the day—it's necessary to look at the data.

To do this, I downloaded records of all Senate votes on cloture motions—used to limit debate—from 1991 to 2008. For each of the 152 votes where a filibuster successfully thwarted a Senate majority, I tallied the populations represented by the senators who supported the filibuster. (A more technical explanation—including some significant details I've glossed over—is available here.)

What do these calculations reveal? First, over the past two decades or so, the senators who successfully filibustered something represented about 46 percent of Americans on average. Yes, that is a minority—but it is a far cry from the nightmare scenarios sometimes deployed by opponents of the filibuster, who worry that as little as 11 percent or 12 percent of the country could obstruct popular legislation. Since 1991, in fact, there have been only four filibusters—0.03 percent of the total—that thwarted senators representing more than 65 percent of the American people.

What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans. In fact, in 40 percent of the filibusters since 1991, the senators making up the "obstructionist" minority represented more people than the majority they defeated.

The traditional debate over the filibuster—which equates filibustering with a minority veto, and then argues the merits of giving the minority such a prerogative—entirely misses this fact. Democratic filibusters against President Bush's judicial nominees were decried as undemocratic usurpations, for example. But nearly all of them fell into this category of "majority rule filibusters."

This example is typical of a more general partisan pattern. When Republicans have been in the majority, the filibustering minority has actually represented the majority of Americans 64 percent of the time. When Democrats have been in the majority, that figure plummets to 3 percent. So the charge that it is somehow hypocritical for Democrats to decry Republican filibusters as affronts to majority rule—if they also stand by their past decisions to filibuster the Republicans—is easily answered. When Democrats have filibustered Republicans in recent years, they have very often represented more Americans than the Republican majority; the same is almost never true in reverse.

All of this suggests that reformers should not be too quick to reject the filibuster outright as an impediment to democracy. During recent periods of Republican control, the filibuster has served as a democratic backstop that counteracts the structural inequality of the Senate—often empowering a majority of Americans, acting through their senators, to veto extremist bills or nominees.

It's difficult to weigh this counterintuitive benefit of the filibuster against its obvious democratic costs. Fortunately, however, retaining the filibuster in its current form and eliminating it are not the only options. Indeed, politically speaking, abolishing the filibuster outright may not be an option at all. Instead, then, frustrated progressives should propose to simply reduce the 60-vote threshold. Such a change could preclude many of the most tyrannical minority filibusters while retaining most of the filibusters that enable national majorities to exercise a democratic veto.

After all, the larger a Senate majority is, the more likely it is to represent a majority of Americans. So if 55 votes were required to break a filibuster, rather than 60, many filibusters would be prevented—but most of the filibusters that block unrepresentative Senate majorities would be preserved. The evidence from the past 18 years bears out this theory. With a 55-vote threshold, 60 percent of the "minority rule" filibusters would have been prevented, but 78 percent of the "majority rule" filibusters would have remained intact.

Even if it is interpreted conservatively, this historical thought experiment illustrates a crucial point. If lowering the cloture threshold represents a compromise relative to the principled goal of abolishing the filibuster, it is not nearly as large a compromise as we might have thought. Despite the conventional wisdom, many of the filibusters that would remain with a reduced cloture threshold would be perfectly consistent with majority rule—and a small-d democrat should generally applaud these, not regret them. At the very least, those who would abolish the filibuster for ordinary legislation should consider retaining it, with a reduced cloture threshold, for approval of presidential nominees. Because the House of Representatives has no say in these cases, filibusters can impose a vital democratic check on narrow Senate majorities that represent a minority of the American people.

The fact that the conversation over Washington's paralysis is turning to institutional reforms is a hopeful sign. As this discussion gets under way, however, reformers should remember that the filibuster sometimes protects the kind of majority rule that it is usually assumed to undercut. We should do what we can to preserve this democratic function. That might mean pursuing the kind of moderate compromise—simply reducing the number of votes needed to end a filibuster—that has the best chance of succeeding anyway.

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How does cyberbullying compare with bullying on school premises?

Last September, South Hadley High School in Western Massachusetts hosted a workshop on bullying for parents and anyone else interested. Attendance was low. As the school year progressed, a ninth-grader who'd recently arrived from Ireland, Phoebe Prince, got caught in a torrent of mean-girl taunting. In school, girls who didn't like the way she was talking to their boyfriends called her a slut. Someone scribbled Prince out of a student-body photo hanging in a classroom, one student said. Outside school, her tormenters ganged up on her on Facebook, making the bullying incessant.

In January, Prince, who was 15, hanged herself. Both school officials and students connected her death to the bullying that preceded it, and the school committee meeting that followed her suicide was packed with 300 people. Many of them were parents, and some of them blamed the school. One father, whose daughter had also been bullied in ninth grade said, "This is not a new problem," according to the local paper.

That's why school administrators had convened the bullying workshop and asked anti-bullying expert Barbara Coloroso to talk to parents. The school had been looking at the problem of bullying for two years, they said, and had been about to convene a task force when Prince took her own life. They'd also been savvy enough to add warnings about online cruelty to the twice-yearly handout they give students about bullying, Coloroso said. Prince even got some counseling at school before her death, according to the principal. And yet none of this was enough. Prince's suicide stands as an awful illustration of how the Internet is making the old problem of fighting bullying even more difficult. It's not that prevention is a theoretical puzzle—the experts know a fair amount about what works. But actually implementing a prevention effort is another matter. It requires getting the attention of the whole school. And getting it before a tragedy, not after one, is no easy feat.

For starters, cyberbullying is trickier than the on-campus variety for schools to police. The basic conundrum is that harassment via Facebook, text messaging, and e-mail usually involves off-campus student speech, which is more protected by the First Amendment than what happens on school grounds. The standard is that schools can only discipline students for off-campus speech if it causes a "material and substantial disruption" within school. Online bullying that takes place off-campus is a new test for this standard, and courts are just beginning to sort it out. So far, they've been split. Some judges have said that speech that makes it difficult for one student to learn counts as a substantial disruption, as Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use explains. Other courts have erred on the side of protecting the First Amendment rights of students by ruling that schools can only discipline for bullying that disrupts school activities more widely. (See this recent ruling in California.) Unsure of their power to discipline, schools sometimes assume they can't do anything at all.

But that's never true says Elizabeth Englander, a psychology professor who directs the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center at Bridgewater State College. "They can always sit down with the cyberbully and with the parents and say: 'This isn't about discipline. It's about making sure you understand that if you take this further, you could break the law. And also you're really hurting people. Often, in milder cases, kids underestimate how hurtful what they're doing is." Schools can support the kids who are targets of bullying, too, as South Hadley tried to do.

When working to prevent the new mix of bullying and cyberbullying, schools can look at the lessons learned from an earlier effort to stop the traditional, in-person kind of kid cruelty. After the rash of school shootings in the 1990s, a comprehensive study by the Secret Service of 37 such incidents found that many of the shooters were chronic victims of bullying who hadn't gotten help. Other research, conducted around that time, showed that bullying reduces school achievement. And so a series of prevention programs were launched at schools across the country. Some of them were shown to work. But this was before Facebook and text messaging became part of the bully's arsenal. So what translates?

The overall insight is pretty basic. "You have to work with the whole school—students, teachers, administrators, everyone," Englander says. "You need a new social norm, where the community looks down on these behaviors." How to pull this off? Essentially, a school or a school district has to decide to mount a public health campaign, like the ones that have reduced the rates of teen smoking or drunk driving. Here's an outline for schools from Patricia Agatston, who co-wrote the book Cyber Bullying. Here's a curriculum from the Seattle public schools, where Mike Donlin, who works on both technology and safety for the district, is at work on the evolving problem of bullying. So is the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. To summarize the approach that the experts advocate: A school asks students how big a problem cyberbullying is and how, exactly, it's playing out. That assessment in hand, administrators and teachers start talking—to students, parents, and the community—about the damage it's causing, and they keep talking about it. They get parents' attention so they actually show up for workshops, for example, and absorb the importance of talking about the subject with their kids—the importance of taking the issue seriously.

The best thing parents can do, Englander says, is simply to start a conversation with their children. Ask teens and 'tweens where they go and what they do online. Ask if they've seen hurtful postings or texts. Ask what they'd do if they did. Schools can jump start this process by giving parents advice about how to respond, so they don't feel like they're fumbling around in a brave new world they don't understand.

If all of this sounds obvious, well, that's the upside. These efforts take awareness and effort and commitment on the part of schools and parents, but they're not technical or particularly difficult—you don't need to open Twitter account to help your kid navigate the online world. That's a relief, because cyberbullying and traditional bullying are increasingly tangled up with each other. One 2008 paper found that about 60 percent of kids who said they'd been bullied online had also been bullied in person. The bullies were also active both on and offline, said Agatston, who co-wrote her book with the paper's authors, Robin Kowalski and Susan Limber. There are also, of course, kids who just get drawn in by the anonymity and ease of trashing someone online—just press "send" while you're at a safe remove from the person who's your target. But often the mean girls and the menacing guys online are the same ones who are mean and menacing at school.

In South Hadley, the bullying-prevention taskforce was postponed for a month in the aftermath of the suicide to give the Prince family space and students time to process it, the principal said. The school, the local DA, and the South Hadley police are each investigating the events that led up to the suicide. (Two students have already been disciplined.) Chillingly, after Phoebe Prince's death, comments taunting her were posted on her Facebook memorial page. It's been taken down.

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Listen to Hang Up and Listen with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the podcast, or you can subscribe to the weekly Hang Up and Listen podcast feed in iTunes. (If you'd prefer to subscribe to the podcast in a program other than iTunes, here's the direct link to the Hang Up and Listen RSS feed.)

Become a fan of Hang Up and Listen on Facebook. Leave us a note, answer Mike's trivia question, and see what other listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca talk about all things Super Bowl: the key moments in the Saints' win, the coaches, the quarterbacks, the ads, and the media coverage.

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

Josh's story about the Saints' big win.

Mike's report from Miami after the Super Bowl.

Stefan's Slate piece on how Peyton Manning is a genius and a pain in the ass.

Slate's Seth Stevenson reviews the best and worst Super Bowl ads.

NFL.com's game highlights.

SI.com's Peter King on the Super Bowl.

Advanced NFL Stats on the success rate of surprise onside kicks.

Football Outsiders' back and forth about the Super Bowl.

The New York Times' Judy Battista on whether Peyton Manning is the best quarterback ever.

Focus on the Family's Tim Tebow ad (with behind-the-scenes commentary).

Hang Up and Listen's weekly lagniappe:

Mike's lagniappe: A sound bite from Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams.

Stefan's lagniappe: Cornell's surprising ascent to college basketball's top 25 and Penn's hiring of ex-player Jerome Allen.

Josh's lagniappe: Saints miscellany, including a New Orleans congregation getting crunk during Sunday services.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

You can e-mail us at hangup@slate.com.

Posted on Feb. 8 by Josh Levin at 3 p.m.

Feb. 1, 2010

Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the podcast, or you can subscribe to the weekly Hang Up and Listen podcast feed in iTunes. (If you'd prefer to subscribe to the podcast in a program other than iTunes, here's the direct link to the Hang Up and Listen RSS feed.)

Become a fan of Hang Up and Listen on Facebook. Leave us a note, answer Mike's trivia question, and see what other listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca talk about the NFL's Pro Bowl, Tim Tebow's pro-life Super Bowl ad and NFL prospects, tennis's Australian Open, and a golf equipment controversy.

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

The AFC beat the NFC 41-34 to win the Pro Bowl.

Colts President Bill Polian lambasted the NFL for scheduling the Pro Bowl a week before the Super Bowl.

The Patriots' Robert Edwards suffered a career-killing knee injury in a flag football game.

NFL scouts were not impressed by Tim Tebow's performance at the Senior Bowl.

Could Tebow be heading to the Canadian Football League?

Slate's Jason Fagone on the real meaning of Tebow's pro-life Super Bowl ad.

Dan Shanoff on the Tebow ad controversy.

CBS rejected an ad from the gay dating site ManCrunch.

Reuters on the marketing buzz generated by rejected Super Bowl ads.

David Foster's Wallace's article "Roger Federer as Religious Experience."

Federer says it's been "150,000 years" since a British man had won a Grand Slam title.

Andy Murray cries after losing the Australian Open final to Federer.

Federer crying after his 2009 Australian Open loss to Rafael Nadal.

Scott McCarron accuses Phil Mickelson of "cheating" by using a wedge with square grooves.

John Daly uses the square-grooved Ping wedges.

Last July, FINA banned high-tech suits from swimming.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly persimmon drivers:

Mike's persimmon driver: Will the Super Bowl coin toss come up heads or tails?

Stefan's persimmon driver: The dangers of the Winter Olympics sport ski cross.

Josh's persimmon driver: Therapeutic use exemptions for ADD drugs in Major League Baseball. (Read more about "greenies" in Jim Bouton's Ball Four.)

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

You can e-mail us at hangup@slate.com.

Posted on Feb. 1 by Josh Levin at 4 p.m.

Jan. 25, 2010

Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the podcast, or you can subscribe to the weekly Hang Up and Listen podcast feed in iTunes. (If you'd prefer to subscribe to the podcast in a program other than iTunes, here's the direct link to the Hang Up and Listen RSS feed.)

Become a fan of Hang Up and Listen on Facebook. Leave us a note, answer Mike's trivia question, and see what other listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca talk about the NFL conference championship games, NASCAR's latest attempts to attract fans, and Stephen Colbert's embrace of the U.S. Olympic speedskating team.

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

Who dat writing about his hometown team's first Super Bowl appearance? It's Josh!

Football Outsiders breaks down the conference championship games.

NASCAR responded to its drivers and fans with new rules to make races more competitive and exciting.

Here's what the changes might mean for the sport.

Stephen Colbert comes to the rescue of cash-strapped U.S. speedskating.

After a bizarre feud, Colbert made up with and "raced" against gold medalist Shani Davis.

With sponsorships down, Winter Olympic athletes have been forced to get creative to find funding to train.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly "Dempseys":

Mike's "Dempsey": A top major-league prospect quits baseball to pursue the priesthood.

Josh's "Dempsey": Why former Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert will wear a dress at the Super Bowl.

Stefan's "Dempsey": The arbitrary scoring and outcomes in figure skating and other winter Olympic sports.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

You can e-mail us at hangup@slate.com.

Posted on Jan. 19, 2010, by Josh Levin at 4:25 p.m.

Jan. 19, 2010

Listen to "Hang Up and Listen" with Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can also download the podcast, or you can subscribe to the weekly Hang Up and Listen podcast feed in iTunes. (If you'd prefer to subscribe to the podcast in a program other than iTunes, here's the direct link to the Hang Up and Listen RSS feed.)

Become a fan of Hang Up and Listen on Facebook. Leave us a note, answer Mike's trivia question, and see what other listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca talk about the NFL's final four, nepotism in coaching, the Marvin Harrison shooting case, American soccer players abroad, and figure skater Johnny Weir.

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

Sports Illustrated's Peter King on New York Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis' "perfect game" against the Chargers.

USA Today story on college football coaches with relatives on staff.

Spencer Hall of the Sporting Blog argues that nepotism, not racism, is the biggest problem in college coaching.

Sports Illustrated profile of Rex and Rob Ryan and their father, Buddy.

Jason Fagone's GQ story on the Marvin Harrison shooting case.

Fagone offers some "deleted scenes" from his story on Deadspin.

The FBI and the new Philadelphia district attorney are re-examining the Harrison case in light of Fagone's story.

Harrison was accused of putting an autograph-seeker in a choke hold during the 2005 Pro Bowl.

A 2007 Sports Illustrated feature on Harrison.

Shaun Assael and Peter Keating covered the shooting case for ESPN the Magazine.

Landon Donovan might stay in England longer than expected due to his early success.

The U.K. press loves Donovan.

Injuries to Charlie Davies, Oguchi Onyewu, and now Clint Dempsey have hurt the United States' World Cup chances.

Johnny Weir came in third behind Jeremy Abbott and Evan Lysacek at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

Jim Caple's ESPN story on Weir.

The Deadspin feature "Today in Euphemizing Johnny Weir's Gayness."

Weir is the subject of the documentary Pop Star on Ice.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly salchows:

Mike's salchow: the Pittsburgh Penguins' broadcaster intentionally withholding an instant replay of a questionable goal.

Stefan's salchow: the basketball career of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Josh's salchow: Stephon Marbury signing to play in China, a move that probably won't end well.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

You can e-mail us at hangup@slate.com.

Posted on Jan. 19, 2010, by Josh Levin at 5:01 p.m.

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Sarah Palin

Are there any Republican grown-ups out there, and, if there are, will they ever start coming to the aid of their party?

That sentence could segue into any number of topics, but the one at hand is Sarah Palin, her Saturday-night speech at the Tea Party "convention," and her morning-after declaration on Fox News that, yes, a White House run is on her mind.

Do responsible Republicans (if the phrase hasn't lapsed from disuse) really want this pumped-up incarnation of Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes as their standard bearer?

Again, the question could be split up into many parts, but this is the "War Stories" column, so let's focus on Palin's take on war and peace.

Here's the key applause-getting line from that section of her talk:

Treating [terrorists] like a mere law-enforcement matter places our country at great risk because that's not how radical Islamist extremists are looking at this. They know we're at war. And to win that war we need a commander-in-chief, not a professor of law.

Obviously, she means to be attacking President Barack Obama, but the real question on the table here is does she believe what she's saying? Or, to put it another way: Is she a rank opportunist, or does she live on another planet? And of the two possibilities, which is worse?

President Obama was at one time a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, but to suggest that he regards counterterrorism as a "mere" legal matter, or that he's gun-shy as commander-in-chief, is preposterous.

Obama, after all, has nearly tripled the number of U.S. troops sent to Afghanistan. He has approved nearly twice as many CIA airstrikes against Taliban targets in Pakistan during his first year of office as President Bush did in his final year (65 vs. 36), killing more than twice as many militants in the process (571 vs. 268).

He has sent military trainers to help the Yemeni government fight al-Qaida insurgents. He has continued to boost the military budget. He has maintained the Bush administration's secret surveillance programs (despite protests from many Democrats). And Palin seems to have forgotten the time, last April, when Obama authorized SEAL sharpshooters to kill the three armed pirates who'd hijacked the merchant ship Maersk Alabama off the coast of Somalia. (The amnesia seems to have afflicted many Republicans, including some who lauded the president at the time.)

As for the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who nearly blew up a passenger plane on Christmas Day, yes, Obama took three days to comment on the incident—though, as many have since noted, Bush took six days to say anything about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid (and no Democrat made an issue of his reticence).

Reading Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights may have seemed a stretch (Obama the law professor!), but it turns out Reid was read his rights, too. More to the point, in neither case did the suspect use the occasion to clam up. As Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief under Presidents Clinton and Bush, has noted, Abdulmutallab briefly went quiet because the FBI agents read him his rights while he was under sedation, but after he woke up, he resumed talking quite freely.

Palin's words (which she read with a venom unbecoming to one who, by her own admission, hadn't thought a whit about foreign affairs until 18 months ago) are not merely false. They're dangerous.

If there is a terrorist attack on the United States in the next few years, we could deal with it more confidently, and respond more effectively, if the president were able to rally a spirit of national unity. George W. Bush was given a chance to do this after Sept. 11 and, despite some initial fumbling, rose well to the occasion, at least for a few months.

But if the Republican Party's most popular aspirant declares that the sitting president doesn't know we're at war, isn't even a commander-in-chief (and crowds roar at this charge with approval), then Obama would have a much harder time repairing a wounded nation.

Palin, of course, is not alone in this irresponsible fraudulence. Just last week, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House minority leader, casually said that Obama is taking a "pre-Sept. 11" approach to fighting terrorism.

Nobody is suggesting that Boehner run for higher office. But the tea-partiers are screaming, "Run, Sarah, run!" At the Nashville party on Saturday, someone in the audience asked her about the prospects for what he called the "two words that scare liberals—President Palin."

Let's be clear on why those words should terrify anyone with a thinking brain. Palin is someone who has clearly never seriously thought through any issue of national importance on her own. She's excellent at reciting a raucous speech, but she can't improvise a coherent sentence, which usually reflects an inability to form a coherent idea. (At Nashville, she even had to scribble her five-word legislative agenda on her palm, and glanced down at it during the Q&A.) She is deluded enough to believe (or at least to say Sunday morning on Fox News) that her brief, aborted stint as Alaska's governor gave her more executive experience than President Obama has even now. She believes that the country should elect leaders, including presumably herself, who seek solutions in "divine intervention."

Is this how Republicans who aspire to true leadership want to shape their party's ideas and their country's discourse? If not, they should hop off the circus wagon now.

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Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon. I hope everyone in the D.C. area has their shoveling arms in shape for Tuesday!

_______________________

Chicago: Because this is anonymous, I don't have to pretend here that I don't know that I have great, firm, wrinkle-free skin at almost 50. I just won the genetic lottery in that regard. The problem arises in that people often peg my age at mid- to late 30s. Great, right? Not really. Recently I found myself at a work function with younger people. One man in the group starting bemoaning being 43 and the oldest person at the table. That led to a whole funny-serious discussion about being old. I stayed silent because I'm five years older than 43, and telling people my age often leads to the "look," which is where the other person will sort of freeze for a moment in disbelief and then change to a growing look of horror. Good lord, she's old! I've found there's a big disparity between how a person perceives and treats someone in their mid- to late 30s vs. late 40s, and it's led to some awkward moments. I don't think I should be saying, "Hi, I'm Mary, and just so you know, I'm 48," when meeting people, so what do I do? Drop a Culture Club reference right away?

Emily Yoffe: You've come to me for sympathy? Try being the person at the table who can remember hearing that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Do you really think the phrase "The horror, the horror" runs through the minds of your acquaintances and co-workers when they realize you're not in your 30s but are in your ... FORTIES! (Actually, probably not, since they're too young to remember Apocalypse Now.) I'm assuming these young people have actually met, interacted with, and even enjoyed the company of such ancient mariners as you. Since you are blessed to look eons younger than you are, maybe you are just seeing surprised recalculation. Maybe they are wondering if they can ask you the secret to eternal youth. If you don't feel like discussing your age then, sure, keep silent when decrepit colleagues of 43 bemoan their creaking bones. Otherwise, how often does one's age come up at work, anyway? And be aware that women who are uncomfortable about their age, or make a fetish of never revealing it, end up seeming older than they are.

_______________________

Topeka, Kan.: Do you have any advice for a gal who despises her mother-in-law? We got along great until she decided that what she (and her daughter—my sister-in-law) wanted at the birth of my child was more important than what I wanted and threw a fit at the hospital. That was a lack of respect I couldn't forgive. (Just so you know, my husband defended my desires to the end. I gave in to their demands to lessen the stress so I could, you know, give birth.)

Almost two years later, I still hate them. I do nothing to get in the way of them seeing my child (despite the fact that they don't deserve the privilege), but unfortunately, I see them frequently, and to see my child bringing them such joy just kills me. And I'm bitter because, due to proximity, they see my child more than my family does.

I tried faking it for the first few months, but that made me feel worse. Right now, I barely speak to them. But soon my child will be old enough to notice that Mommy doesn't like Grandma, so I need to change my tactic. Do you have any advice?

Emily Yoffe: What did they demand at the hospital——that Grandma perform the episiotomy and sister-in-law cut the cord? I agree that anyone who makes demands of a woman in labor and then throws a fit deserves to be firmly put in her place—which should be in the hospital parking lot. But you say all of you got along great until the maternity-ward unpleasantness. Now you have not only nursed your child, but the past two years you have been nursing a grudge, and guess what, the person it's hurting is you. "To see my child bringing them such joy just kills me" is a very disturbing admission. If you don't get over this, you're only going to poison yourself and your child's relationship with your in-laws. I think you should seek some short-term therapy so you can talk this out and come up with a plan for getting over it. Maybe you need to have a conversation (not a confrontation) with your mother-in-law that allows her to acknowledge that her actions caused you pain so you can move on. But it's possible you won't get that from her, yet it's imperative you find a way to heal this wound. This has become an obsession, and you need to find a way out.

San Francisco: My uncle married a wonderful woman when I was 7 years old. She had two kids from a previous relationship who were 8 years old. We grew up as cousins (even though we weren't really related by blood). A few years ago, my aunt and uncle separated. My cousins and I remained close. Last week, one of my cousins asked me out on a date. I haven't really thought of him in that light up until he asked me out. Is it strange for me to be considering saying yes? HELP!

Emily Yoffe: It's true a DNA cheek swab would show that you aren't cousins by blood. But family members routinely don't check their DNA status in order to understand incest taboos. You were all raised since childhood as cousins, close ones, as you say, that's why this potential date feels so funny. Many states have laws against cousin marriage, which I think are ridiculous—people should be allowed to make that choice. But most of the successful cousin romances I've heard of involve people who barely ever, or never, saw each other as children, or who perhaps knew each other as kids, but hadn't interacted in decades. This just sounds too strange to go from childhood family members to potential dating partners. Say no for now and continue dating others. If ultimately this was "meant to be," it will have been worth it to wait.

_______________________

Canada: What is the proper "break-up etiquette" in today's day and age? I have been seeing someone for over a year now and could probably count on one hand the number of times that we have talked on the phone. Our main forms of correspondence are e-mail and text messaging. Over the last few months, our relationship has become quite strained, and we barely see each other anymore. Over the last month, we have e-mailed each other maybe three times (down from several times a day), and gone from seeing each other once a week at least, to more than a month since the last time we did something together. I would like to e-mail him to discuss our failing relationship, and most likely just end it, but in discussing it with friends, they feel that it has to be done over the phone or face to face. I feel that with our situation, e-mail is the more appropriate option since it is how we had based all communication (and even I will agree that a break-up text message is not an option). Thoughts?

Emily Yoffe: If you're not seeing each other anymore because things are so strained, and your only communication is a weekly e-mail, and you're wondering which medium is most appropriate for announcing your desire to break up—guess what, you've already broken up. But since you've been in a yearlong relationship, and not just had a few dates, then it is a good idea to actually go ahead and formally end it. A discussion about what went wrong might help the two of you figure out what you want out of your future relationships. So send him an e-mail and say obviously things between the two of you have gotten off-track, but you'd like to get together in person to talk about this. If he doesn't respond, or replies that he's too busy, then consider yourself on the market.

_______________________

Hey! I'm 48 and have great skin, too!: But seriously, most people assume I'm in my mid-30s, as well. My kids are younger, and it really IS a problem, just like the poster said it was. For some reason it is a constant. I don't hide my age and invariably someone will bring up how "old" she is and then turn to me, "Oh, but you're older than I am, aren't you?" People DO treat you differently after that. Heck, I probably did when I was in my 30s. Anyone in their 40s seemed ancient at the time. I cannot imagine how difficult that would be for this woman in the workplace. I hope you can give her a better answer.

Emily Yoffe: Where do you and Great Skin work, on MTV's Real World? I can understand if you're the outlier at a really young workplace, you would be aware that you're at a different place in your life. You could take, "Oh, but you're older than I am" as a kind of insult, but maybe it's a thoughtless form of self-reassurance for an aging young person, a way to acknowledge that there are still productive and attractive people in their 40s out there. I'd love to give a better answer, but what's the solution except to either go work at AARP, or be comfortable and confident about yourself no matter how old you are?

_______________________

Caracas, Venezuela: Recently, my husband and I were asked by his sister to have her two boys spend a week with us as their spring break vacation, without her. It seems that we're not her first choice and that everyone else she's asked has the same reservations as we do. One, that the boys would not be accompanied by her and, two, the youngest boy (8 years old) is autistic.

While our nephews are precious to us, and we enjoy spending time with them, we feel that this is too great a request for her to make of the family. Our youngest nephew requires nearly 24-hour supervision. He's destructive and impossible to control without his mother or father present. Even then, it's not unusual for him to harm himself or others.

She's taken the refusal as a sign that we do not care about her and our family. She says that this is a family obligation— to care for one another's children. She did not even want to entertain the idea of accompanying the boys herself on this visit.

I understand that she is tired. It is not easy being the mother to a child who requires so much. Yet I cannot help but feel that a week of caring for the two boys is simply too much to ask.

What say you, Prudie? Are we not upholding our family duty, or is she asking too much of us? Thank you for your help.

Emily Yoffe: Your sister-in-law sounds desperate for a break. She needs and deserves one. Being a full-time, possibly lifetime caregiver is overwhelming. What your family needs to do is pull together to find ways to give relief to your sister-in-law and brother-in-law. The discussion has to be not just about a vacation but about how to structure their lives so that your nephew is getting the help he needs, and your in-laws are not so worn out that they collapse. They need respite care, that is, professional relief so they can get away, relax, and recharge. You are your husband need to be honest with them and explain that you two don't feel competent to care for their 8-year-old for a week. But is there another way? Could the whole family come down, and you watch the boys during the day while your in-laws get some daytime vacation? Could you come up and take care of the boys for an extended weekend while they get away? As you're contemplating what to do, watch HBO's wonderful movie Temple Grandin, about the autistic woman who became a world-famous scientist. And note that her aunt was a crucial presence in her life.

_______________________

Chicago:

My husband and I are embarking on a weight-loss regime not for health reasons but for our respective careers. Although we are both "festively plump," as Cartman would say, we've been able to maintain rewarding careers, and we are great networkers.

We have this sinking feeling that we'll reach a "cellulite ceiling" as our careers progress. I think I've already been passed over on a promotion because of my size-16 frame, which is illegal but still "done."

My question is this: Psychologically speaking, is it OK to focus on weight loss exclusively for our careers? Are we demented to think that we cannot succeed because of our expanded waistlines? Will we have negative repercussions? What if we don't get that bigger job? What if things stay the same but we just happen to be thinner?

Emily Yoffe: Do you work at MTV also? It's true that in elite circles being thin is de rigueur, but if being plump is a career killer, then American workers are in trouble. (Oh, jeez, is this the reason for the jobless rate, American companies are simply shedding their overweight workers?) Deciding to get in better shape is obviously a worthy goal. But only you can decide how you'll feel if you get smaller but the jobs don't get bigger. But it seems like a bad idea to pin your promotion plans around going from a size 16 to a 6. Sure, get a new exercise and eating plan. But in the meantime, it would be worthwhile for you to make sure that instead of dressing like someone who is trying to hide her body, you make yourself the most stylish "festively plump" person out there.

_______________________

Break up etiquette: I must be the only person in the world who doesn't want to discuss the end of a relationship. If someone clearly loses interest in me, then I just stop trying. Because, really, it's not like I'm going to hear anything good in the postmortem. No one breaks up with anyone because they have to marry to end warfare between nations. They stop calling/e-mailing/texting you because they'd rather be doing something else with someone else. Why do people want that spelled out?

Emily Yoffe: I agree that if you've been seeing someone for a short while and the "relationship" winds itself down mutually but not explicitly, no postmortem is necessary. But it's rather strange to have a relationship of a year's standing and never even bother to actually break up. I don't mean each party needs to list the other's flaws ("The way you sneeze always drove me nuts"), but a real relationship should have a real ending.

_______________________

Cleveland: One of my friends is getting married in the fall. She is not having any bridesmaids, but a few of her friends have gotten together to organize a surprise bachelorette party a few weeks before her wedding. The surprise involves most of her friends flying across country on a holiday weekend. My problem is this: I speak to her almost daily and I feel like it will be extremely hard to not bring this up for the next seven months and might strain our talks a bit. (I am a terrible liar.)

Also, she is already talking about planning her own party. I'm concerned in keeping the surprise, I (and her other friends) am going to make her feel like no one cares enough to throw her a party, which I don't think is the best way to feel right before your wedding. I'm sure my friend would like the surprise once it comes to fruition, but I think it might be more trouble than it's worth. Should I bring this up to the other girls? Or I am just no fun?

Emily Yoffe: Your girlfriend's wedding seems like the ideal time not to throw a surprise party. Since she's not having any bridesmaids, it sounds like she's having a pretty casual affair, but still, she will have lots of planning to do, and while she might appreciate the surprise, she'd surely appreciate much more knowing that her friends were organizing one for her. Have a discussion with the other friends and say the bride-to-be is making noises about having to throw her own party. Say that as much fun as a surprise would be, this is a case where it seems like advance planning is the way to go.

_______________________

Anywhere, Md.: I mentioned to my husband that his father needed a haircut, and then (just to be funny) I mentioned that his dad's curly hair resembles his grandma's (standard older lady) 'do. So what does my husband do, but say to his dad at Sunday dinner, "Hey Dad, some people at church think you need a haircut, because you and Grandmother have the same hairdo." Then he proceeds to say it was ME. His family is fairly unbuttoned, and his mom and grandma laughed hysterically, but I think it made my father-in-law unhappy. Obviously, now I know never to say anything to my husband that I don't want repeated. But how do I apologize? (My observation was pretty accurate.)

Emily Yoffe: Please don't extrapolate from this one incident a lifetime policy. (See above letter about the scene at labor and delivery.) Instead of confronting your husband, gently tell him you cringed when he gave you credit for the hairdo line. Explain that you know his family loves jokes, but you were embarrassed and his father seemed to be, too. Tell your husband he's free to steal your lines, but you don't want credit for them. Then next time you see your father-in-law, pull him aside and simply apologize about the hair remark. Then forget about it. Having a family comfortable with teasing each other can make family get-togethers lively and fun.

_______________________

Don't hang on to the hate for the in-laws: But I totally get it. My mother-in-law and brother-in-law decided that they should not only be allowed into the delivery room with me and my husband, but that they should be allowed to film it. And no I am not kidding. He burst into the hall while I was "walking" and tried to get a close-up. My mother threatened them both with physical violence, and my husband broke the camera, not that I agree with that, but well ... I can see them now and know that they know just because I am a nice person does not mean I would like them to take pictures of my lady parts!

But let go, or tell them off. That might help if you have a meeting with them and get it off your chest, that they really messed things up and you are going to need them to make it up to you by behaving themselves forever!

Emily Yoffe: Let me state that I deplore violence, but I wish I'd been there to see your husband do his Russell Crowe on your brother-in-law's camera! It's a good thing he did it, too, or else millions might be enjoying the YouTube video of said lady parts. I'm glad you've been able to let it go. I agree a meeting to clear the air might help, but it's a bad idea to put the pre-condition that they have to "behave themselves forever." It's better to go into one of these summits simply with the desire to have them hear why you feel as you do. Dictating how they should respond is likely to prolong the difficulties.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: The mom who hates her in-laws—I'd also point out that she gave in at the hospital. She didn't stand her ground. That's not their fault. If she wanted to stand up to them, she should've, but she didn't, so it's time to get over it. For reals. That is anger way out of proportion to the offense.

Emily Yoffe: It's hard to stand your ground when you're on your back pushing out the newest family member. Whatever the in-laws did, they should not have done. And when your cervix is dilating, you should be exempt from having to defend yourself from intrusive in-laws.

_______________________

New York, NY: Re: Cleveland, whose friend is getting married...

My friends did the same thing for me before my wedding, and I really did think that no one cared about me before the "big day." Although it was a wonderful surprise when it happened, and I did really enjoy myself at their well-planned party, I spent the couple of weeks before my wedding re-thinking years of (wonderful) friendship, because I thought that they didn't care enough about me to plan anything. So I think you guys should re-think your plans

Emily Yoffe: This is exactly the problem with the surprise bachelorette party. To carry it off, all the friends have to pretend they are totally busy with their own lives and not planning anything for the bride. The surprise is not worth the hurt feelings that will build up beforehand.

_______________________

Emily Yoffe: Thanks, everyone. Talk to you next week—after I dig out of the avalanche.

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Undercover Boss

The reality show that debuted after the Super Bowl goes by the title Undercover Boss (CBS). I mention this for the benefit of readers who were too befuddled by saturated fats and thin lager to have caught the name—though I'm confident that the show itself made quite an impression. With each episode finding a top corporate executive covertly working among bottom-rung employees, Undercover Boss is a fanfare for the common man, a fantasy of revenge against the haute bourgeoisie, a genial riff on both types of Marxian self-alienation, and a tribute to the Protestant work ethic.

The producers dare not speak the word class outright, but that is their subject, and I think the show will be huge because of its cross-class appeal. Undercover Boss celebrates blue-collar fortitude (and milks just a little populist anger) while offering lessons worthy of a white-board management seminar and also honoring prosperity. Sunday night's intro featured the juxtaposition of an ugly stretch of Manhattan's skyline with a foreclosure sign. Then it presented a shot of actors playing pinstriped bigwigs, red-faced with mirth, gripping fat cigars and baronial brandy snifters, presumably sharing a good laugh about having unlawfully evicted a widow from her hovel in order to build themselves a drive-through humidor.

But the intro goes on to suggest that survival in these our recessionary times necessitates that capital recalibrate its relationship to labor: "Extreme times call for extreme measures. … They [the cigar-wielding widow-torturers] will discover the truth." This sequence proposes that we don't hate the rich; we just want them to tell us sincerely that they appreciate all our hard work. While some of you Debbie Downers out there may thus view Undercover Boss as an agent of social control, I'll leave it at saying the show espouses a sort of compassionate corporatism.

The pilot starred Larry O'Donnell, the president and chief operating officer of Waste Management, the logo of which appears no fewer than 300 times as he hauls garbage, spears runaway paper at a landfill, and works a conveyor belt tougher than that of the "Job Switching" episode or the Shotz Brewery. His cover story is that he, a construction worker named Randy, is trying out various menial jobs for a rinky-dink TV show. Of course, the fact of any camera whatsoever in view means that the Hawthorne Effect is in play. And we've got to assume that WM had final cut or something like it. Wouldn't shareholders repurpose their brandy decanters as Molotov cocktails otherwise? The only villains in sight are soft, slick middle managers, and even they get opportunities to redeem themselves.

Moreover, the episode also reads as a pretty good in-house motivational video. An exhausted O'Donnell comes to appreciate the burdens placed on a grossly overworked woman at a landfill and the morale-boosting cheer of a man who cleans toilets at a fairground, and he responds by ordering changes to make the company fitter, happier, more productive. All of this phoniness and fabrication is quite entertaining. Undercover Boss could only be improved if the benevolent spies were heirs to the fortunes of the privately held company (which might give it a screwball-comedy aspect) or snot-nosed McKinsey consultants (which could even prove somewhat prurient as these blow-dried Natalie Keener types tumbled from their high horses).

Me, I'd love to see Don Graham come to appreciate the rigors of professional TV criticism—the thesaurus-page paper cuts, the midafternoon bong rips, the brain-damaging struggle to deliver a Frankfurt School take on Jersey Shore—but I can't find the Washington Post Co. featured on the list of upcoming episodes. It is a small consolation to see that next week's show will feature the CEO of Hooters. Is it too much to hope that he will serve plates of Five Wing Flappetizers with a smile while high-waisted Lycra hot pants ride up his gluteal cleft?

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Frank Luntz

The sense of hope that swept in with President Obama has been supplanted by existential doubt: Can the nation ever address its critical structural crises in health care, financial services, energy, and education?

Governmental gridlock has frozen us while many of our competitors—most notably the BRIC nations—eat our lunch. The notion is gaining traction that our system of government cannot confront tough issues and that other, more autocratic nations will be better-suited to the nimble shifts in policy that are needed to maintain a competitive position in the world. As Tom Friedman has said, "We need to be China for a day." Who's to blame for this mess? One theory that has some merit and current appeal is that legislatures—which by their very nature and structure are designed to protect the status quo—are responsible. Legislators get re-elected in their gerrymandered districts by appealing to the current establishment. Transformative policies do not have a broad enough base of appeal to sweep away local ossifying forces.

While it is true that legislatures generally are quicksand to transformative ideas, it is now also the case that within the Congress, the Republican Party has become the party of nihilistic opposition to any proposal for reform. The GOP does this partly by smartly exploiting the rules of the Senate but mostly by being much better at telling stories, narratives that through their simplicity appeal to the public.

Their principle narrative—the small-business owner creating jobs, government as interfering, destructive force—has dominated the past 30 years. After the economic cataclysm of the last two years, you might think that selling this narrative would have gotten tougher. But somehow the Republicans are still the masters at telling a story that grips the public psyche.

Exhibit one is health care reform, which fell prey to stories of "death panels" and demands by Medicare recipients to "get government out of my health care." The Republicans successfully exploited the public's disdain for government—even though it is government itself that is providing the Medicare they so prize.

Nobody is better at the use and mastery of this language than Frank Luntz, who helped script the demise of health care and has now told Republicans how to end financial services reform. Luntz has a new memo—"The Language of Financial Reform" (scroll down to see a PDF of the full memo text)—to manage the death-paneling of financial reform. In the memo, Luntz is effectively advising them how to use language of change and reform while stymieing every meaningful structural shift.

The clear political imperative of the memo is simultaneously to appear to be empathetic to the victims of the economic crisis and pro-reform while fundamentally opposing any change that might harm major financial institutions seeking Republican support. The political strategy is to turn government bureaucrats and low-income borrowers into the blameworthy parties.

Luntz's advice and language are simple: focus on what he calls "words that work." "Bad decisions and harmful policies by Washington bureaucrats" created the crisis; "Taxpayer bailouts reward bad behavior." "We don't need another federal government agency." "The architects of failure are now designing the rescue." "[T]he Financial Reform Bill and the creation of the CFPA makes it harder to be a small-business owner …"

In the face of this language, Democratic support for the critical elements of reform—implementation of the Volcker Rule, creation of a specific consumer protection agency, overhaul of the market for derivatives, and establishment of appropriate capital and leverage ratios—is crumbling.

There is a strong temptation for Democrats to sulk about the distortions of the other side and crawl off in self-pity at the public's failure to grasp the critical arguments we are making. That would be useless, but all too typical.

What we need, in the alternative, is a full-throated response to Luntz from the Oval Office. Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions for phrases Democrats can use to regain the momentum:

1. It is time to get the cops back on the beat and the bank robbers out of the bank vault. It is your money—not theirs.
2. "Heads I win; tails you lose" is a first-grade joke—not a theory for our banking system. Yet that is the game that has been played on us.
3. If Wall Street wants to gamble on a casino economy, they will not use the American taxpayer as a chip on the table.
4. For the first 50 years after the Great Depression, we avoided disaster—but then Washington bought the oldest line in the book from Wall Street bankers—trust me. We have learned the lesson—and we don't, and we won't.

A counternarrative has to be told: A market needs rules, and those who play by the rules must be protected from those who do not. The Republican rhetoric must be called out for what it is: a defense of the very institutions that caused the crisis and a mere continuation of the "Party of No" ideology that has prevented us from moving forward. The public anger that has so far been channeled by Sarah Palin and Scott Brown must be redirected in favor of the necessary structural shifts.

This is the moment for the president to establish that he is, in fact, the great communicator we saw during the campaign. The alternative is to let the sense of foreboding that is sliding across the nation metastasize into something far worse—a sense of defeat and cynicism, a sense that another decade of stagnation will leave us dangerously at the precipice.

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Vandals in Malaysia splashed red paint on a statue of the Virgin Mary

In Malaysia last month, there was vicious rioting after high court judge Lau Bee Lan issued a ruling on the proper naming of God. A complaint had been lodged by Muslim groups that local Christians were using the word Allah in their services and publications. (In the Malay language, that happens to be the word for God, a term Christians find it hard to do without.) The high court finding was very narrowly drawn; it said that the Catholic Herald could say Allah in its Malay-language edition, provided that the paper was sold "only on church grounds and bearing the label FOR NON-MUSLIMS ONLY." Even this restriction was too lenient for the Islamists. Several churches and convents have been firebombed and defaced, and the Malaysian government has publicly regretted the court's decision. According to an Associated Press report, the authorities believe that "making Allah synonymous with god may confuse Muslims and ultimately mislead them into converting to Christianity." The danger of this seems small—most of Malaysia's 2.5 million Christians are ethnically Chinese or Indian, and indeed there is a slight but unmistakable racist tinge to the Malayan Muslim demand for an ethno-linguistic monopoly on the word for the deity.

This is interesting and alarming for several reasons. First, it is happening in one of the world's most celebratedly "moderate" Muslim states. It seems very probable that the same sectarian intolerance will now spread to neighboring Indonesia, which has a language very similar to Malaysia's in which the "G-word" is also Allah no matter which confession is employing it. This would add to the existing pressure being brought by Islamists in Indonesia to reduce the size and influence of the country's Christian minority, as well as to make Islam an enforceable religion by means of sharia.

When speaking silkily to ignorant Western audiences, Muslim propagandists sometimes like to say reassuringly that we all—Christians, Jews, Muslims—worship the same God. We are all children of Abraham, blah blah blah. We are all "peoples of the book," blah blah again. It is true that the Quran contains much material borrowed from the Pentateuch and the New Testament, but it is also true that it is widely considered to be authentic only when written or declaimed in Arabic. The Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia lingua franca contains many borrowings from Arabic, including the G-word, but this doesn't stop its Christian speakers from being told that they can't follow their own faith in their own tongue. This quite clearly negates the notion that Islam is universal, that it preaches brotherhood, that it is a "religion of peace," blah blah blah. Instead, it shows a very calculated sectarianism, not entirely free of racial and national exclusivity at that, which proves that deep down the Islamists are not monotheists at all but believe that there are several gods, of whom theirs is naturally the best.

It won't surprise you, I hope, to learn that I have been an expert on this for decades and took it in literally with my mother's milk. My earliest years were spent in the island nation of Malta, that wonderful spot of earth between Libya and Sicily, with its capital, Valetta, perhaps the greatest Baroque and Renaissance city in Europe. Malta has a language of its own, which I used to speak in a boyish way. The Maltese tongue was once considered by some philologists to be descended from the speech of the Carthaginians, but by far its closest kinship is with the Arabic spoken in the Maghreb of Libya, Tunisia, and Morocco. It is the only Semitic language rendered in a Latin script, and, along with English, it is an official language of the country. Since Malta's accession as the smallest member state, it is also an official language of the European Union. And in Maltese, the printed word for God is Alla, which means that when spoken by a priest, it sounds exactly the same.

This is made additionally interesting by the fact that Malta is probably the most Christian country in Europe, more observantly Catholic than Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or even Poland. It is studded with beautiful and ornate churches and was the site of one of the longest sieges ever mounted by the Ottoman Empire—a siege that eventually led to a Crusader victory. (They don't call themselves the Knights of Malta for nothing.) When services are held in the vernacular, God is addressed as Alla.

It could well be that all this unsettling information has not yet reached the ears of the jihadists. But it now joins the long list of actual and potential confrontations, derived from the infinitely elastic list of matters about which Muslims award themselves the right to be aggrieved—and also the right to resort to violence. Who could have guessed that they wouldn't notice until last year that there were non-Muslims speaking the same language as them? Who could have foreseen that within weeks of this startling discovery we would witness the usual dreary display of yelling crowds, snarling preachers, and smoldering buildings?

Arabic is a great language of literature and poetry, and derivations from it (such as algebra) are found in our own dictionaries as well as across the geography of Spain (Alhambra, Alcázar, etc.). You might think that Muslims would be flattered that Christians in Mediterranean Europe and Asia employ the Arabic word for the divine. (As presumably do the local atheists, maintaining stoutly that Allah is not great or does not exist.) But it seems that grim sectarianism now carries all before it. Perhaps our newsroom copy editors should begin to make the relevant adjustments so that mobs howling "Allahuh Akbar" are now translated as howling only that "Allah is great," and people intoning "Insh'allah" are quoted as saying only "If Allah wills it," rather than "If God wills it." But if this change were ever adopted, you could make a sure bet that there would be rioting and burning and killing about that as well.

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Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson

Investment bankers are among the least reflective of financial birds. They deal with the problem at hand without asking too many questions about how it got there. One of their favorite trills is, "It is what it is." So it's no surprise that On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, the memoir of Henry Paulson, the avid bird-watcher and former Goldman Sachs chief executive who served as Treasury secretary for 30 turbulent months, doesn't contain much second-guessing or navel-gazing. "I'm a straightforward person. I like to be direct with people," he tells us. His first-person account of the epic financial collapse is just that—straightforward and direct. Shorn of anonymous, unsourced dish, it nonetheless offers plenty of excellent color and detail.

Paulson reveals that he's prone to dry heaves when he's under pressure. And be forewarned: Reliving the epic, wholesale failure of the financial system and the nauseating bailouts can trigger a gag reflex. Paulson was in an unenviable position. The Bush administration was on its last legs, the economy was in recession, and the global financial system melted down smack in the middle of a torrid campaign season. Working with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke —"an incredible stand up guy"—and the cool, calm and collected president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Tim Geithner, Paulson stitched together the guarantees, bailouts, and backstops that helped cushion the fall.

Paulson offers a brief glimpse of his compelling background: farm boy, Dartmouth offensive lineman, young aide in the Nixon White House and hard-charging Goldman Sachs banker. In some ways, Paulson was an odd fit for New York's most august investment bank. He's a birder, not a golfer; he doesn't use a BlackBerry; he's an earnest Christian Scientist and an inconspicuous consumer. The Paulsons have had the same toaster oven for 40 years. (He neglects to mention the $500 million in Goldman Sachs stock he sold upon assuming office at the treasury in the spring of 2006.)

As a condition of accepting the job, Paulson demanded to be President George W. Bush's chief economic spokesman. But Paulson, a halting public speaker, wasn't particularly good at constructing narratives about what was happening in the economy—leaving the public and his boss continually shocked at the succession of failures. In late April 2007, he said subprime mortgage problems were "largely contained." In March 2008, as Bear Stearns was about to implode, Bush asked: "We're not going to do a bailout, are we?" The response: "I told him I wasn't predicting one and it was the last thing in the world I wanted."

When the bailouts began, Paulson took charge, acting as investment banker in chief. He personally replaced the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and put the government's credit behind the faltering mortgage agencies. "We had, I thought, just saved the country—and the world from financial catastrophe," he writes.

But just as one crazy caper ended, a new one was about to begin. The reason: The Wall Street banks were royal screw-ups. Without passing judgment on them—these were members of his former fraternity—Paulson treats us to a parade of big shots asking the government to save their banks from their own incompetence. Here's Chuck Prince, Citigroup's hapless chief executive, at a dinner in June 2007: "Isn't there something you can do to order us not to take all of these risks?" Lehman Bros. chief executive Richard Fuld calls from India to ask if Paulson can get him flyover rights from Russia to get home more quickly. Then on the day before Lehman Bros. went bankrupt, Fuld pleads: "Hank, you have to figure something out." John Mack of Morgan Stanley begs: "Hank, the SEC needs to act before the short sellers destroy Morgan Stanley." On the Brink will do little to dispel the notion, which Paulson acknowledges, that some Republicans believe him to be a closet Democrat. His wife, Wendy, held a fundraiser for her fellow Wellesley classmate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in 2000, and the Paulsons are big-time tree-huggers. His mother, a once-staunch Republican, had so soured on Bush that she urged her son not to take a job in his administration. Paulson love-bombs Barney Frank as "scary-smart, ready with a quip, and usually a pleasure to work with," praises Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and notes that then-Sen. Barack Obama was "always well informed, well briefed, and self-confident."

But while Bush ("admirably stalwart") comes in for similar praise, Paulson has little positive to say about other Republicans. Sarah Palin annoyed him from the get-go. When he spoke to House Republicans about efforts to help Fannie and Freddie, he was chagrined that many responded with speeches about ACORN, the low-income housing activist group. House Minority Leader John Boehner was ineffectual. John McCain comes off worst of all: impulsive, ill-informed, and counterproductive. "This was crazy," Paulson writes of McCain's decision to suspend his campaign in late September 2008 and demand a White House meeting on the bailout. At the climactic meeting in the Cabinet room, Obama spoke for the Democrats, delivering a "thoughtful, well-prepared presentation." But McCain? "When it came right down to it, he had little to say in the forum he himself had called."

Thanks largely to Republican recalcitrance, the $700 billion legislation authorizing the bank bailout was one deal Paulson couldn't close. To get the job done, the former lineman was ultimately forced to hand the ball to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

As the narrative lurches from crisis to crisis—TARP, AIG, GM—the reader, and Bush, are continually presented with bailout moves as unavoidable faits accomplis. Bush was "visibly shocked" when Paulson told him in November 2008 that Citigroup was in big trouble. "I thought the programs we put in place had stabilized the banks," the president said.

The main problem with this fast-paced book was the main problem with Paulson's tenure—a surprising inability to see the big picture. And as tough as he is on congressional Republicans, Paulson lets some people off much too easy. If many smart, highly regarded people had simply carried out their responsibilities with a bit more diligence—Bernanke, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, Wall Street bankers—much of the catastrophe could have been avoided. "As first responders to an unprecedented crisis that threatened the destruction of the modern financial system, we had little choice," Paulson writes. But the first responders assembled the bonfire and helped light it. Paulson was among the Wall Street chief executives who, in 2004, lobbied the SEC to allow them to use much larger amounts of debt—a move that set the stage for the debacles of Bear Stearns and Lehman.

Finally, given that Paulson knew this culture from the inside, it's disappointing that he doesn't reflect more on Wall Street's pathological need for compensation, on its pathetic leadership and corporate governance. But this is to be expected. Investment bankers look forward, not backward. So, largely, does this engaging, well-written narrative. It is what it is.

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Welcome to "Friend or Foe," the DoubleX advice column for your queries about the trickiest of all love affairs: friendships. Lucinda Rosenfeld, author of I'm So Happy For You, a novel about best friends, is now taking questions at lucinda@imsohappyforyou.com. (E-mail may be quoted in a future article or elsewhere unless the letter writer stipulates otherwise.)

Dear Friend or Foe,

My friend "Sara" met my now-former best friend, "Diane," through me. After the two started hanging out, I was a little annoyed and jealous, but I let it go. But when I decided that Diane (who backed out of being my maid of honor at my wedding) wasn't someone I wanted to be close to, Sara complained that I was making her feel like she had to choose between us.

Enter "Bianca," an acquaintance who approached me and said she wanted a deeper friendship. I opened my heart and told her about my break with Diane, and she assured that she "had [my] back." I also introduced Bianca to Sara, and they started to bond, which I was fine with. Although by then I'd begun to notice a pattern: Sara wanted to get close to anyone I was close to.

One Saturday a few months later, Sara told me she was crafting with her fiance. I found out later on Facebook that Bianca had been there, too. I forgot about it until I got an e-mail that Bianca, Sara, and Diane were going canoeing. I had vocalized that I was too busy to do anything that weekend. Still, I was stunned and hurt not to have been invited. I confronted Bianca, who played dumb and said she found out about the trip two hours before. She must have then e-mailed Sara about my complaint. The next thing I knew, Sara had sent me an incredibly nasty e-mail, referring to me as "Queen Bee," telling me I needed to let go of my jealousy, and saying that life wasn't a popularity contest. She even had the nerve to ask me if I was "abandoned as a child." I felt hurt and betrayed by everyone, including Bianca, who—it turned out—had set up the craft-time with Diane and Sara. When I confronted Bianca about forwarding my e-mail to Sara, she lied and said she hadn't.

Even so, both Sara and Bianca think this is all about me and Diane. But it's not. It has to do with all three of them being sneaky and withholding information. Sara is trying really hard to be buds again. She offered to watch my dog when I travel. I haven't decided how or what I'm going to do. But I have noticed that Sara is starting to get close to other good friends of mine, too. Please tell me how to defuse this situation.

Sincerely,

Help, I've Been Poached

Dear HIBP,

A victim of friend-poaching once myself, I wrote an essay a bunch of years ago on the very subject. From your description, sweet, magnanimous Sara sounds like a classic FP indeed. The generous reading is that she just loves everyone she meets and can't stop pursuing new friendships. The less generous interpretation is that, like some kind of friendship Don Juan, she enjoys drawing others in before spitting them out again. I suspect she's guilty only of the former, and here's why.

You've managed to feel hurt and excluded by THREE of your girlfriends. Could they really all be two-faced schemers? Certainly, feeling left out is awful as an adult, just as it was on the schoolyard. But it might be time to take a look at how you're contributing to your own alienation. I've never heard of anyone outside the military, gangland, or the mafia assuring her new bestie that she "has [her] back." Friendship is supposed to be about confession and companionship, not swearing your allegiance.

What's more, paranoia tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you rant and rave about having been scrapped from scrapbook night, the more your friends will begin to feel as if they have to invite you out, rather than desire to do so because your company is such a delight.

Regarding canoe weekend, you did say you were busy. And forwarding others' e-mails is something all of us do by accident all the time. Bianca shouldn't have lied about it. But nor can you assume that she purposefully exploited your privacy. You don't mention how you and Bianca are getting on now. But it sounds as if Sara is offering to make a fresh start of it. I suggest taking her up on it. Her e-mail was harsh, yes. But I'm sorry to say it sounds as if it contained some uncomfortable truths.

Sincerely,

Friend or Foe

Dear Friend or Foe,

I don't want to be friends with "Andi" anymore. She's incredibly passive-aggressive and condescending. She'll send me an article about Michelle Obama and her big butt and then say, "See! You shouldn't feel bad! You're just like the first lady!" Or after telling me that she's moving in with her boyfriend, she asks me, "So why aren't you moving in with your boyfriend? Is he just not ready for that sort of commitment?"

In addition, she's in a terrible relationship that I don't want to be a part of in any way. Last year, she was a 27-year-old-virgin. Her boyfriend took advantage of her while her dad was dying. A year later, he's still taking advantage of her, allowing her to pay for their trip to Aruba and subsidize an apartment he can't afford on his own. He has a dead-end job and does nothing but smoke pot, but somehow she thinks it's the best relationship ever. When I try to express misgivings about it, she doesn't want to hear them.



I don't want to have a big blowout with her since unfortunately her boyfriend is friends with my boyfriend (and a lot of our other friends.) But she's noticed that I wasn't really responding to her anymore and asked me what the deal was. I don't know what to say. Telling her that she's awful and I don't want to be around her—and that I think her relationship is ridiculous—seems judgmental and mean. But just thinking about her makes me seethe! I would like to get to a point where I just don't care about her, she knows nothing about my life, and vice-versa. How can I accomplish this?



Sincerely,

Cannot Stand the Sight of You Anymore

Dear CSTSOYA,

I guess I'm failing to see where passive comes into the aggressive. The woman basically told you were fat and that your boyfriend doesn't love you. In Andi's defense, however, 27 is kind of old to be a virgin. (In her shoes, I might be a little defensive, too.) What I don't follow is how a woman that old can be "taken advantage of." Maybe you mean that she was a 27-year-old virgin and so happy to finally have company in bed that she allowed herself to be taken advantage of financially?

In any case, since your boyfriends are friends and you have other friends in common, too, my advice would be to avoid a major rift. Tell her you've just been busy or some other innocuous lie. The only reason to really "have it out" would be if you think there's any hope of salvaging the friendship. Which you apparently don't. For the record, many people (including Barack) find Michelle Obama's backside to be a thing of beauty.

Sincerely,

Friend or Foe

Dear Friend or Foe,



I'm in my late 20s. From elementary school until the end of college, I always had loads of guy friends and one female best friend. Lately, things have changed. I finished college, moved across the country, and got married. In our new town, my husband and I have several social circles, and he has a male best friend he spends one-on-one time with. But I don't have an equivalent buddy. It's not that I'm anti-social. I spend time with different kinds of people in various social settings. I'm close with my mother and sister, but they both live far away. Most of the time I'm happy, but sometimes I lament my lack of a confidante. Now that I'm married, I don't feel that I can go back to cultivating independent friendships with men, and none of the women I know strike me as BFF material. Should I give the girls I do know more of a chance? Should I wait and hope I'll meet someone more interesting? Or should I just accept that life has different phases and the best friend one is over?



Sincerely,

Painting My Own Toenails Is No Fun

Dear PMOTINF,

I'm reading between the lines that you're feeling a tad isolated in your new life. Which is completely understandable. You've moved thousands of miles away to a town where everyone has probably known one another since nursery school. My advice is to get out there and schmooze in whatever capacity you're capable of. And yes, by all means, invite the girls you do know out for a ladies' night. If you work in an office or equivalent, pursue friends there, too. You might also want to consider throwing a party at your house. Invite the gals you know to bring their friends, too. Husbands are fine, but everyone needs girl friends. Who else are you going to talk to about the Kourtney Kardashian OK! post-pregnancy retouching controversy (and other important issues of our time)?

Sincerely,

Friend or Foe

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Welcome to the annual Ad Report Card Super Bowl Special. Among the recurring advertising themes I noticed during the big game: animals hot-tubbing with sexy ladies, paunchy dudes wearing tighty-whities, defiant misogyny. Not being a huge fan of bestiality, hairy male thighs, or woman-hating, I must admit I was underwhelmed by this year's commercial crop.

First Quarter

It's one of the most enduring and most irritating Super Bowl traditions: Bud Light buys the first ad slot of the game and ruins it with a not-especially-funny joke. This year, the gag is that a guy has crafted his house out of full Bud Light cans. People begin ripping out the walls and fixtures in an effort to quench their thirst for watery lager. Is there a less exciting brand slogan right now than Bud Light's "Here We Go"? It sounds like a defeated office drone trudging back into his cubicle each morning—or bellying up to the bar each night for the familiar bottle of swill.

Snickers throws Betty White and Abe Vigoda into a sandlot football game. The message: When you're hungry, you play football like a withered octogenarian, and the solution is to wolf down a restorative Snickers bar. I'm not sure I buy the underlying argument (did I miss the sideline shots of Drew Brees licking nougat from his lips?), but the visual metaphor (frail old person morphing into hearty young person through the power of Snickers) was clear. And, yes, it's fun to watch Abe Vigoda take a crushing hit to his ribcage.

Focus on the Family airs its controversial pro-life Tim Tebow ad. But the ad's content is the opposite of controversial; it skips the details of his mother's placental abruption and decision not to have an abortion when she was pregnant with Tim. Big winner: the Tebow family. This is a Super Bowl ad in which the entirety of the message is that Tim Tebow's mommy loves him. It's sort of like when your mom bought that half-page spread in the program for your elementary school graduation—except this cost $2.5 million, reached a national audience, and was paid for by someone else. As for Focus on the Family, the group behind the spot: They tricked us. Their clever media strategy thrust Mrs. Tebow's story into the national conversation long before the ad aired. The spot itself turned out to be their post-game celebration. (See my Slate colleague Will Saletan's piece for a deeper take on the Tebow tale.)

Boost Mobile brings back the '85 Bears to perform a bloated, creaky Super Bowl Shuffle. This cellular phone service brand previously targeted teens and young adults. I have to assume—since most people under 25 weren't even alive for the original iteration of the Super Bowl Shuffle—this is an attempt to reach a broader demographic. I'm not sure what sort of cachet dorky 50-year-old dudes in nonlicensed, generic football outfits will bring. But the cringe-worthy spectacle held my attention long enough to make me aware of Boost Mobile's offer of $50 unlimited talk/text/Web, so I grudgingly deem it a success.

Secondary characters from The Simpsons star in a vaguely upbeat ad for Coke. Fiendish tycoon C. Montgomery Burns loses his fortune and his mansion but is consoled when Apu hands him a bottle of corn-syrupy sunshine. It was nice to see the Springfield gang's communitarian spirit, but I have to ask: Is America ready to feel sympathy for evil billionaires brought low? Anyone care to offer Bernie Madoff a Coke and a smile? (I did find it interesting to learn that the Burns fortune totals only $3 billion. I'd always thought he was a Warren Buffet-level billionaire, not a Ross Perot-level billionaire.)

Bud Light makes an Auto-Tune/T-Pain joke. Note that Jay-Z released a single titled "Death of Auto-Tune" in the summer of 2009. And that I released my own single, titled "Death of Jokes About Auto-Tune," a short time later.

Second Quarter

A promo for The Late Show With David Letterman finds the ornery talk-show host seated three-on-a-couch with Oprah and Jay Leno, enduring the "worst Super Bowl party ever." Fascinating dynamics here. Whose idea was this? I assume Leno's motivation was to soften his image by showing he can take a joke. But why is Leno-hater Dave helping to resuscitate the battered image of his sworn enemy? Why is CBS promoting an NBC star? And is poor, forgotten Conan crying into his Super Bowl chili as he watches this chummy post-war rapprochement between talk-show survivors?

A pair of back-to-back ads inflict on us the sight of pudgy middle-aged people in underwear. First, a CareerBuilder.com spot is set at a company where "casual Fridays" have become a fleshy affair. (Note that The Office made this joke a while back, when office drunkard Meredith wore a casual Friday mini-dress cut simultaneously too low and too high.) Query: In this economy, would anyone really leave a job because of something as trivial as an eccentric workplace culture? I imagine a more fruitful market for CareerBuilder's services would be found among those who have no job to complain about. But perhaps the specter of unemployment is too depressing and scary to be raised in a Super Bowl ad.

Immediately following the CareerBuilder spot, Dockers shows us another pack of pasty thighs. Yes, I realize that lumpy guys in their skivvies are a comedy winner (every bit as can't-miss as talking babies, naughty animals, and pummeling blows to the groin—all of which appeared in this year's and last year's ads). But two such ads in a row is about 1.8 too many.

In an ad for the Dodge Charger, men stare into the camera with expressions of either defeated resignation or seething resentment. "I will be civil to your mother, I will put the seat down," goes one section of the voiceover litany—much of which centers on how unbearable it is for men to listen to the opinions of, and on occasion respect the wishes of, women. The Charger is billed as "man's last stand." Not long after, an ad for Flo TV declares that when a man goes shopping with his girlfriend she has "removed his spine." He is urged to "change out of that skirt." Is it me, or was this year's dose of casual misogyny a little rawer and angrier than usual? Are men feeling especially threatened by the fragile economy and by the fact that the vast majority of job losses have afflicted traditionally male, working-class strongholds like manufacturing and construction (the kind of guys I picture wanting … a Dodge Charger)?

In another Flo TV ad, will.i.am offers his updated take on the Who's "My Generation." Last year, in a Pepsi ad, will.i.am offered his updated take on Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." Two points: 1) Corporate America, please end your fascination with will.i.am, and stop enlisting him to desecrate the history of music. 2) Can we all take this moment to acknowledge that it is still possible for an artist to sell out, and that will.i.am is demonstrating this possibility on a near-daily basis?

Halftime

Stumbling around over by the drum kit—with his black fedora, patchy white stubble, and oversized eyewear—Pete Townshend looks a bit like a confused Junior Soprano. By the way, how tempted must CBS have been to parade CSI stars across the stage during "Who Are You"? Gary Sinise windmilling on a Fender. David Caruso snapping off his sunglasses to stare accusingly into Roger Daltrey's eyes. This must have been narrowly rejected in the planning meetings.

Third Quarter

Megan Fox's Super Bowl ad for Motorola—in which she imagines what might happen if she snapped a semi-nude pic of herself with her cell phone and put it on the Web—is the final rung in the actress' ascent (or descent?) from actual sex symbol to culturally signifying "sex symbol." I did enjoy the notion that straight and gay men would enrage their partners by being unable to resist the allure of Megan Fox cheesecake photos.

HomeAway.com resurrects the Griswolds, the hapless tourists from the Vacation films, played by Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo. Nice gag about the "complementary" water in snooty hotel rooms. ("With an E—it complements the rooms. It's not free.") But the ad simply teases a longer video posted to the Web at the expense of explaining to the Super Bowl audience what HomeAway.com is and how it works. I, for one, am not anxious to log on and view more sweaty Chevy Chase antics. I'd rather watch the depressing, fully-clothed jiggle footage at GoDaddy.com.

The E-trade talking baby sweet-talks his girlfriend over video chat—and then gets busted for two-timing when his girlfriend realizes "that milkaholic Lindsay" is over at our hero's crib. Maybe talking babies are your thing. They don't do a lot for me. Whatever. Can I just point out: The original idea behind the talking baby was to send the message that E-trade is incredibly easy to use (so easy that an infant can do it). The ads have now lost all connection to this logic. They're just a series of 30-second Look Who's Talking sequels.

The rumblings were correct: Google bought its first Super Bowl ad. True to form, the company didn't attempt to shape its brand with a celebrity spokesperson, a lame comedy bit, or shenanigans involving animals. Instead, an almost all-text ad told the story—through search engine inquiries—of a guy who visits France, meets his soulmate, and starts a family. This was one of multiple ads this year tracing long character arcs (Cars.com and Dove Men+Care both followed a character from birth through adulthood), but, amazingly, the narrative here was expressed entirely through a product demonstration. Ad Report Card has long considered the melding of practical sales pitch with uplifting emotion the holy grail of advertising, and here's a prime example. Frankly, I'm getting a little of sick of Google doing everything right.

Fourth Quarter

An ad for Vizio televisions—touting their ability to display content from the Internet via special included software—shows you all the incredible Internet stuff you could be watching on your Vizio TV: dramatic gopher, the "Numa Numa" guy, the "Chocolate Rain" guy. … Wait, this is what's supposed to convince us we need the Internet on our TVs? Ancient YouTube clips? Tell me honestly: Are you excited to watch content like this on your TV? If so, please let me know, so I can decline your invitation to come over and watch TV.

Emerald Nuts and Pop Secret (both owned by Diamond Foods) team up to share a 30-second ad with the tagline "Awesome + awesome = awesomer." I can't decide whether it's appealingly frugal for two brands to split the expense of a single ad or whether it's just low-rent. I'm leaning toward the latter.

A man is so protective of his Doritos stash that he uses the savory snack chips as ninja throwing stars when someone tries to steal a bag from him. I admit I chuckled at the suit of Samurai armor made entirely from Doritos. I also liked the earlier ad in which a little boy admonishes his mother's suitor, "Keep your hands off my mama, keep your hands off my Doritos." In the battle of pure humor spots, I'd say Doritos bested Bud Light. Which is remarkable when you consider that all the Doritos ads were submitted as part of a contest, while the Bud Light ads were made by an expensive advertising agency. Chalk one up for the slightly superior mediocrity of crowds.

Two-Minute Warning

With the game slipping out of Peyton Manning's hands (how delightful for this Patriots fan to once again see the glazed eyes, flushed skin, and pursed lips of a whupped Manning), Joe Montana celebrates his intact legacy as the greatest Super Bowl quarterback of all time. How does he celebrate? By doing a voice-over endorsement for Skechers Shape-ups—the butt-toning sneakers that look like orthopedic hospital equipment.

And thus ends a decidedly uninspiring slate of Super Bowl commercials. Will we still be talking about any of these ads years from now as we do with truly great Super Bowl spots? I doubt it. But we can talk about all of them today, in the comments section. Have at it.

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Slate 60 Introduction | Donor Bios | Interactive Feature | Searchable Database

Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller

"It's not what you were given. It's what you do with it that matters."

Although I was only 8 years old, I vividly remember my mother's reprimand. I thought my report card—with an unbroken string of E's for excellent—was cause for great praise. Instead, she focused immediately on the postscript about behavior: "Patty often finishes her work early and distracts the other children." To her, that was simply unacceptable. I should be helping—not hindering—my fellow second-graders. Nothing less would be rewarded.

The philanthropists who appear on the Slate 60 understand, at least in part, what my mother was saying. This year proved their generosity. Because of the massive losses that even the wealthy suffered in 2008 and early 2009, few would blame them for taking a year off. Giving USA 2009 found that giving in 2008 fell by the largest percentage in five decades. But donors on the 2009 Slate 60 came through with $4.2 billion in new commitments (pledges and gifts) to philanthropy.

So first, a heartfelt cheer for the generous donors on this list. They have certainly earned E's for excellent by sharing their wealth in these difficult times. But—taking a cue from my mother—I challenge the givers on past, present, and future Slate 60 lists to consider what they are doing with their largesse.

Are the Slate 60 really Great Givers or simply wealthy and generous?

In the past 14 years, I have had the pleasure of working with several donors on this list. I've learned how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I see more philanthropists striving to be Great Givers. In 1997, as he pledged $1 billion to establish the U.N. Foundation, Ted Turner issued a very public challenge to his fellow-wealthy—many of them gathered at the black-tie affair—to use their wealth to aggressively tackle today's problems. (It was a follow-up to a challenge he made in a Maureen Dowd interview, a challenge that prompted the creation of this list.) A brilliant move for a man who loves to give it away and loves to compete in equal measures. But today, even Ted no doubt would acknowledge that size (of a gift) is not all that matters.

There are three simple measures that distinguish the Great Givers from the merely wealthy and generous. Great Givers are those who: 1) give big, 2) give now, and 3) give for great social impact.

Stanley and Fiona Druckenmiller, who lead this year's Slate 60, embody the term Great Giver. They are known for being reluctant to attract attention and praise for their giving, but their leadership stands as a strong model for others. They give big: gifts that are large, focused, and institution-changing. Their sustained support of Geoff Canada's Harlem Children's Zone Project since the 1990s is estimated to be more than $100 million and was game-changing for Canada as he built on the agency's early track record with a 10-year business plan encouraged by Druckenmiller to create a neighborhood zone of support so that Harlem's children are surrounded by an enriching environment of motivated peers and supportive adults with the right services within. Stanley Druckenmiller acknowledges that in choosing to support Canada, he used the same skills set that served him as a successful investor: He bet on the right mission and a great leader.

The Druckenmillers (whom I have never met) also give now. Stanley, 56, and Fiona, 47*, already have a decadelong record of giving both money and time. And they give for great social impact: Much of their giving is focused on improving education in Harlem. Fiona's recent announcement of a gift to create a neuroscience institute reflects their shared belief that better understanding of the brain sciences can improve millions of lives.

As Andrew Carnegie put it: "Surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community." Let's look more closely at what it takes to be a Great Giver.

Great Givers Give Big

There are two elements here. Great Givers don't spread the peanut butter too thin—they regularly give big, transformative gifts that can create real change for both institutions and issues. They focus on a few big ideas—and a few big leaders—and get behind them. And, equally important, Great Givers have resolved to give away the majority of their wealth.

Andrew Carnegie also said: "Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket." My favorite illustration of that wisdom from this year's Slate 60 is the Terwilliger family donation of $100 million to Habitat for Humanity International to support home development and home improvement in struggling regions around the world and here at home. Seventy percent of the gift must be spent within five years for microfinancing to support housing for the poor. The other 30 percent will fund an endowment for Habitat for Humanity International. Great Givers give it away the same way they accumulated it: investing capital when they see an opportunity to create great returns, taking some risk when the upside warrants it, supporting the baseline institution when that is the best goal. Terwilliger's gift—and the urgency he attached to distributing the bulk of it—reflects his deep appreciation of the fact that not all philanthropic money should be patient money. Approximately 70 percent of foundations with more than $250 million in assets exist "in perpetuity"—doling out a minimal percentage of their endowments year after year while protecting the principal. What corporation would corral most of its assets and sit on them rather than trying to ensure that future executives and directors will be able to invest them when and where they can with an eye for pursuing the greatest return?

Warren Buffett (who topped this list in 2006 with a gift of 10 million shares of Berkshire Hathaway stock that is likely to hold the "biggest gift" title for some time) likes to remind folks who praise his giving that he hasn't missed a meal, delayed a vacation, or denied himself any earthly pleasures while still giving big. In tax year 2007, Americans with incomes greater than $1 million gave away 4 percent of their income in charitable contributions. Note that is 4 percent of their current income—not 4 percent of their accumulated wealth. High-net-worth households—those with liquid assets of $1 million or more or earning more than $200,000 annually—gave 7.4 percent of their income to charity in 2005.

Great Givers Give Now

Only those who are active, engaged givers in their lifetimes make my list of Great Givers. Certainly we owe thanks to those who, after a lifetime of accumulating wealth, leave a good chunk of it to charity. A dozen of the Slate 60 donations are generous bequests. Individuals with estates in excess of $100 million gave nearly four times as much at death as they did in the last decade of their lives. Where's the sense in that? Take the cautionary tale of Leona Helmsley. Ridiculed in life as stingy, she left almost her entire fortune to her foundation. For a while there was a real dog fight (pun intended) about her intention, and even with that issue resolved (a judge ruled the Helmsley funds do not have to go to animal welfare) her trustees are left with scant direction on what Harry and Leona's intentions were. Contrast that with Charles "Chuck" Feeney who in 1980s, while still in his 50s, transferred the billions in wealth he made as a partner in a chain of duty free shops to create Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the past 25 years that gift resulted in over $4 billion of grants focused on Atlantic's mission of making great change in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people.

I have to ask the 60- or 70-year-old wealthy Americans: What are you waiting for? Witness Pierre and Pam Omidyar, who—still in their 40s—make their seventh appearance on this list with their gift to the Community Foundation in Hawaii. I have watched the Omidyars (Pierre co-founded of eBay) shape, tune, and revise their strategy to use their wealth for the greatest good. Pierre is widely quoted as citing the best piece of philanthropic advice he ever got was "Don't set up a foundation." And indeed the Omidyars are giving away their money in various ways: market incentives, philanthropic gifts, often under the umbrella of the Omidyar Network.

The very wealthy should be able to give away at least 5 percent of their "surplus" wealth per year and more when a promising cause or opportunity presents itself. New examples are emerging of bold givers who don't just tithe based on current income but who invest the bulk of their wealth in philanthropy. These include not just ultra-wealthy families like the Gateses or the Buffetts, but Great Givers like Tom White who, now in his 80s, has already given away almost all of his wealth. In 1987, White backed the founding of Partners in Health, led by Paul Farmer and his partners working in Haiti to improve health care. Today PIH operates in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Russia, and the United States, and is one of the leading health providers in Haiti, working feverishly to serve the health needs of hundreds of thousands of Haitians after the devastating earthquake. Bootstrapped by one man's wealth, today PIH has a broad base of donors, taking in $23 million in private donations the first week after the Haiti quake.

Giving while living seems the only rational thing to do: It allows the generous wealthy to apply the smarts and skills that helped them build their wealth to returning it to society in the smartest way possible. It allows the wealthy to use the media spotlight to draw attention to the organizations and causes they believe in, which invariably need the attention as much as they need the philanthropic dollars. When Eli Broad says that our education system needs to be fixed, and then over one decade he and his wife Edye invest more than $400 million into public education reform, politicians, other philanthropists and myriad captains of commerce sit up and listen.

With George Soros devoting his reputation, wealth, and time to accelerating the emergence of open societies around the world, or underscoring the urgency of climate change with this year's gift of $100 million to the Fund for Policy Reform, the causes he focuses on are more likely to succeed because Soros gave his time and influence in addition to his money. That can be done only by the living.

Finally, Great Givers Create Great Social Impact

Religion, arts, and higher education represent the lion's share of giving in this country. But wealth generation and distribution, nationally and globally, is far from ideal. Great Givers know they can right the balance just a bit by focusing on improving opportunity for the poor or others who suffer from injustice. More than half of the giving represented by this year's Slate 60 goes to private foundations that will distribute the funds for charitable purposes. But historically, most foundation gifts in the United States do not focus on addressing inequity. (The Foundation Center's most recent roundup estimates that 25 percent of foundation giving was tightly focused on the economically disadvantaged.) Many of the Slate 60 foundations lead the way: Soros' Open Society Institute made a $50 million challenge grant to the Robin Hood Foundation in New York to benefit the poor and to prod other wealthy donors. The Stryker gift to the Arcus Foundation helps to fight injustice for gay, lesbian, and transgender citizens. The Golisano Foundation supports services for the developmentally disabled; Oprah Winfrey's foundation focuses on programs for women and children in need; and the Gates Foundation spends its considerable funds to address inequities in health, development, and education.

Large (and often named) gifts to local, regional, and national health centers, universities and arts organizations landed 41 givers on this list and bring considerable benefit to society. And several innovative gifts on this year's list will accelerate scientific research and support efforts for a more sustainable planet. But we see far too few large gifts on this list to standout organizations—local or global—fighting inequity and poverty here and around the globe. Where are CARE, YWCA, Save the Children, Boys & Girls Club, United Negro College Fund, ONE.org or—even more notable in their absence—the standout regional human services or advocacy organizations that serve a donor's community and would be able to reach new heights with a major gift? This year's Slate 60 has precious few examples of gifts sharply focused on reducing inequity. The Terwilliger gift to Habitat for Humanity and Michael Bloomberg's investments to improve road safety in the developing world stand out in the crowd. Virginia Bernthal Toulmin's $20 million pledge to the Dayton Foundation will no doubt serve the social service sector in her hometown. It would be great to see future Slate 60s contain a higher number of big gifts targeted at reducing inequity.

To be sure, the best Great Givers don't just give big, give now, and give for great social impact—they measure success as well as failure and they learn from their giving and continue to improve their investing year after year—whether they make the Slate 60 or, like Tom White or Chuck Feeney, fall off the major wealth lists because their giving was so great.

"It's not what you were given, it's what you do with it that matters. " Mom was right.

For the ninth time in the 14 years of the Slate 60, the list has been compiled by the staff of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. We'd like to thank them for their tremendous work, especially Maria Di Mento, who prepares the list, and Sue LaLumia for photo research and collection. Thanks also go to Heather Joslyn, Caroline Preston, Joan Waynick, Ian Wilhelm, and Grant Williams.

Correction, Feb. 8, 2010: The article originally stated that the Druckenmillers were in their 50s. Fiona Druckenmiller is 47. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Return to article

One of the considerable challenges to compiling the Slate 60 is figuring out how and what to count. Throughout our history, our methodology has evolved. As we have for the past few years, we count pledges and donations made to foundations or charitable organizations. To avoid double-counting, we do not count gifts made by foundations, and we do not count payments made on previous pledges.

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Head Coach Sean Payton of the New Orleans Saints

For the last four years, fans on the message board SaintsReport.com have been adding to a thread called "Write the Times-Picayune's Headline for the Day After the Saints Win the Super Bowl." The 13 pages of suggestions that piled up between 2006 and the opening kickoff of Sunday's Super Bowl XLIV—"Convoy of Snow Plows arrives in Hell!"; "Holy *Bleep*!!!"; "We Won! We Actually Won!!!"; and "New Orleans Runs Out of Liquor," to name a few—reveal that, even for the most-optimistic Saints fans, this day was unimaginable. When it actually happened—holy bleep, the Saints really, seriously won the Super Bowl 31-17 over the Indianapolis Colts—the Times-Picayune's real-life headline writers shrugged and admitted defeat. On the field, Saints coach Sean Payton held up a paper that said "World Champs." The paper delivered to subscribers this morning said, simply, "Amen!" Yeah, there really are no words.

If New Orleanians couldn't picture their team winning the Lombardi Trophy, the Saints played like a team that didn't show up to lose. Head coach Sean Payton's Super Bowl philosophy, it appeared, was that it was better to look foolish than to act timid. Down seven at the end of the second quarter, Payton chose to go for a touchdown on fourth and goal rather than kick an easy field goal. The Saints got stuffed. The coach's response: an onside kick to start the second half, the first in Super Bowl history before the fourth quarter. Win or lose—or lose while taking huge risks that could make you look totally ridiculous—Payton had decided the Saints would be aggressors. After an unholy midfield scrum, New Orleans recovered that onside kick and drove for a score to take the lead. "I wasn't worried," Saints kicker Thomas Morstead said after the game about the surprise onside try, which he executed flawlessly. "I was terrified."

The Saints had good reason to be terrified of Peyton Manning. A narrow victory over Brett Favre and the Vikings in the NFC championship game revealed that the Saints' defense struggles to stop a good quarterback without a silly amount of fumbles and interceptions. In the Super Bowl, New Orleans showed there's one other way for a not-so-great defense to stop a great quarterback: Don't let him take the field. Thanks to some time-killing second-quarter drives and Morstead's onside kick, the Saints kept the Colts star and New Orleans native on the bench for a shockingly long stretch in the middle of the game.

When he did get a chance to fling the ball around, Manning showed the Saints were right to play keep-away. The Colts' QB repeatedly evaded the New Orleans blitz—no "remember me shots" in this game, despite defensive coordinator Gregg Williams' promise—and zipped passes to tight end Dallas Clark. Struggling to stop the pass, the Saints' defense also couldn't get a hand on running back Joseph Addai. All that kept the Colts from running up the score in the first half was a third-down drop by a wide open Pierre Garçon.

And then, after holding the Saints on fourth and goal with less than two minutes to go, the Colts stopped themselves. Rather than let Manning try to throw the team into field goal range, Indy strangely complied with the Saints' plan to keep the NFL's most valuable player on the sidelines. After three faint-hearted running plays, the Saints had the ball back with enough time to cut their halftime deficit to 10-6 on a 44-yard field goal by Garrett Hartley.

Nonetheless, New Orleans' second half comeback wasn't solely the product of momentum or an audacious onside kick. The Saints won for the reason they usually win: Drew Brees' scary accuracy. After the 2008 season, a show called Sport Science asked Brees to throw a football at an archery target 10 times; he hit the bull's-eye on all 10 throws. The Saints' quarterback doesn't do much worse with huge defensive linemen trying to kill him. Brees set an NFL record this season by completing 70.6 percent of his passes. He did even better on Sunday night, completing more than 82 percent of his throws. The final stats for the deserving Super Bowl MVP: 32-39 for 288 yards and two touchdowns.

Brees moved his team against a Colts defense that tackled surely and didn't allow any big plays. All year long, the Saints piled up points with long passes. In the Super Bowl, they had just two offensive plays longer than 20 yards. In today's NFL, though, there's no way to keep a good passing game down without a dominant pass rush. By the second half, Indy's star defensive end, Dwight Freeney, was hobbling around on his busted ankle, and Brees had time to thread the ball to Pierre Thomas for 12 yards, Devery Henderson for nine, and Marques Colston for eight. Every ball was on somebody's fingertips, and the Saints receivers didn't drop anything after Colston let a ball bounce off his face in the first quarter.

Despite Brees throwing close to a perfect game, the Colts still had a 17-16 lead in the fourth quarter. In a game of huge kicks, both onside and conventional—a hat tip to Hartley, the first kicker in Super Bowl history to make three field goals of longer than 40 yards—Matt Stover's missed 51-yard field goal with 10:39 to go had the biggest effect on the outcome. Instead of giving the Colts a four-point lead, the errant kick set up the Saints at their 40-yard line—field position they'd use to drive for the game-winning touchdown.

Stover deserves no blame for missing that crucial kick—he hasn't made a 50-yard field goal since 2006. Blame Colts coach Jim Caldwell. Sure, it would've taken Sean Payton-esque chutzpah to go for it on fourth and 11 from the 33-yard line in a one-point game. But to hell with convention: When your elderly kicker has no chance of knocking it through, why have him try?

Aside from Caldwell's iffy game management, this was a Super Bowl free of all things that make football annoying. The refs kept their flags in their pockets and CBS announcers Jim Nantz and Phil Simms kept their feet out of their mouths, sticking to the on-field action rather than waxing poetic about the Saints uniting a hurricane-ravaged city. (Dishonorable mention does go to Katie Couric, who asked Brees in a pre-game interview, "Did you help save New Orleans, or did New Orleans help save you?") There was also just one contested call—a replay reversal on Lance Moore's catch for a two-point conversion—that, by comparison with your average Super Bowl imbroglio, barely qualified as controversial. (Saints fans should send black-and-gold bouquets to CBS for the copious super-slo-mo replays of Moore lunging the ball across the goal line.)

Even after Brees, Moore, and the guy in the replay booth gave the Saints a 24-17 lead, Peyton Manning still had the ball with a chance to tie the score. Manning trails just Dan Marino in come-from-behind fourth quarter victories, and the Colts had seven such wins this season. One of those comebacks came when Patriots coach Bill Belichick—showing confidence, or boldness, or stupidity—chose to go for it on fourth down from inside his own 30-yard line rather than willingly put the ball in Manning's hands.

On Sunday night, the Saints had no choice but to let the comeback king do his thing. The thing Manning did, shockingly, was seal the Super Bowl for his hometown Saints. On third and 5 from the Saints' 31, Manning threw a quick slant to Reggie Wayne. It's a play the Colts have run a million times, one that's impossible to defend when a receiver and quarterback hit their marks. This time, the Colts went 0-for-2. Wayne appeared to slip and didn't make a sharp break on the ball. Manning, maybe too eager to stick with an old, reliable play call, didn't notice that Tracy Porter—the Saints cornerback who picked off Favre to save the NFC championship game and came out for Super Bowl XLIV with the Superdome and the Lombardi Trophy shaved into the side of his head—had the route sussed out. Porter jumped in front of Wayne, caught the ball in full stride, and streaked 74 yards for the game's final points. "I'm sure when Peyton Manning was growing up he always wanted to throw the TD pass that gave the Saints a Super Bowl win," ESPN the Magazine's Jorge Arangure wrote after the game. "Now he has."

For a team that went two full decades without a winning season and had just two all-time playoff wins before 2010, this ridiculous ending was just as plausible as any. When the game was over, I tried to call home and couldn't get through to anyone for 15 minutes. "All circuits are busy"—that is, everyone who knows what it means to miss New Orleans was dying to find out what they were missing. When I managed to reach a friend who'd been watching the game in the French Quarter, he told me that all the folks in Brees jerseys had sprinted full out for Bourbon Street after the final horn. Once everybody was smashed together, dancing on cars and screaming "Who dat!" there was no doubt it had really happened. We won! We actually won!!!

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Don DeLillo's characters feel slightly more generic with every novel. This is held against them. As detached yet filled with pungent apercus as graduate students warding off depression, these creatures of the novelist's late phase carom numbly around their synthetic environments. Rather than root his inventions in the soil of human particularity, DeLillo thins them into holograms. They become personifications of impersonal processes, and long to return to the same. They develop an irresistible urge to subsume what little they have by way of distinct identity into something purer and less subjective: financial data streams (Cosmopolis), theories of probability (Falling Man), the supernatural (The Body Artist).

Yet we can't accuse his attenuated figures of being entirely unlifelike. They are like more and more people we know. In our lifetime we are witnessing the dematerialization of the human personality, as people withdraw their attention from their bodies and surroundings and give it over to cyberspace. A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, for instance, found that children aged 8-18 use electronic devices for average of 7.5 hours a day, and adults surely aren't any less plugged in. It can't enhance the development of solidly grounded, psychologically rich literary characters to have their real-world counterparts umbilically connected to the ethereal ichor of global media.

As if he had decided to do something about all this abstraction, DeLillo has made the sickness unto death from information overload the subject of his latest novel, Point Omega. The hero, Richard Elster, takes refuge from the toxic unreality in a ramshackle house far into the California desert. He wants "to feel the deep heat beating into his body, feel the body itself, reclaim the body from what he called the nausea of News and Traffic." Elster is a type familiar to anyone who has read DeLillo's great novels of conspiracy, Underworld and Libra: a disillusioned defense intellectual. A brilliant conservative professor of something or other—maybe philosophy, maybe geography—Elster did a stint at the Pentagon advising the planners of the Iraq war and found the strategists so trapped inside "acronyms, projections, contingences, methodologies" they couldn't perceive the reality they were preparing to shatter: "They think they're sending an army into a place on the map."

In the desert, he thinks he can rediscover space and time. The desert has both extension and duration, "the distances that enfolded every feature of the landscape" and "the force of geologic time, out there somewhere." It's a place that will let him establish the true scale of things. The grandeur of the landscape inspires thoughts of extinction. These are comforting thoughts to Elster, who is 73 and Lear-like, and who holds forth with a "liturgical gloom" and may well feel guilty over his part in the war. Deep time, epochal time, like the vast dimensions of the desert, holds us in its safe embrace. In cities, by contrast, time is petty and fungible and terrifyingly fleeting. It's "all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers … [on] train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras … people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives."

As foils to Elster and his craving for what is "out there somewhere," DeLillo gives us two characters who are very much caught up in the machinery of cultural production. One is a filmmaker, the other a film spectator. The filmmaker is the genial Jim Finley, who has the idea of standing Elster against a wall and filming him as he talks, no tricks, no cutaways, just one continuous take. (We are meant to think of Errol Morris interviewing Robert McNamara in Fog of War.) Elster, who has given up on movies along with all other forms of "background noise," says no, but invites Finley to visit him in the desert anyway. It is Finley who elicits Elster's observations.

The film spectator, on the other hand, is a mysterious, solitary, disembodied figure, about far on the spectrum toward creepy depersonalization as DeLillo characters get. He is an unnamed museumgoer standing in a dark room watching a video installation called "24-Hour Psycho" (a work that DeLillo actually saw in 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art). In this piece, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has been slowed to an intolerable crawl. The man is determined to tolerate the crawl. His thoughts while engaged in this tedious occupation take up an entirely separate narrative in the novel, one that bookends the rest of it.

This inner monologue is half Zen film criticism, half psychotic rambling—it's what DeLillo's Oswald, in Libra, and the Texas Highway Killer, in Underworld, would have sounded like if they had apprenticed themselves to a Chi-master who sidelined in film theory. Like those characters, the spectator appears to have no inkling of a boundary between himself and the fantasy he longs to dissolve into. To cure his sickness unto death, he needs to "feel time passing," although unlike Elster, he wants to dig it up at the bottom of this fictitious universe, rather than go looking for it in what he calls the "life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies." He wants to live inside Psycho, to be "alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion"—to experience for the first time the realness, the quiddity, of the filmed event: "Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. It was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins' head swiveling over time on his long thin neck."

For most of the novel, the connection between these two parts seems whimsically formal. Screening room and desert exist in dialectical tension: nature vs. culture, space and time vs. existence outside dimensions; the quest for the real outside civilization vs. the quest for the real in civilization's most claustrophobia-inducing womb. The deeper relationship between the two stories will not become apparent—to our horror—until the end.

Meanwhile, back in the desert, a story unfolds, as much of one as DeLillo is willing to give us. Jessie, Elster's daughter, arrives, sent to the desert by her mother, who worries that the girl's new boyfriend may be a stalker. A vague post-adolescent in T-shirts and rolled-up jeans, Jessie is sweet and slow-moving and idiosyncratic, a caretaker of the elderly, a lighter-up of life for her parents, an inspirer of fantasies in Jim. Given her simplicity and goodness and sexual appeal, a certain sort of film-noir logic dictates that she meet a violent end. Given that it's Psycho playing in the background like a message audible only at slow speed, it seems inevitable that she will vanish into the desert as decisively as Janet Leigh.

Can DeLillo pull all these wildly disparate narrative elements and big ideas into a coherent novel? On the level of the plot, he does, ingeniously. On the larger literary level, it's questionable that much happens here other than a transposition of characters and themes we've encountered many times before in DeLillo novels, the characters signaled rather than fleshed out, the themes reduced to professorial pontification. There's the quest for the real in the desert (also undertaken, in the same place and in similar fashion by Matt Shay in Underworld); the fascination with secret individual worlds, which DeLillo has called the inner life of the culture (a dominant theme in Underworld and Libra); and so on. Elster's disquisitions have a knocked-off quality here; it's like buying DeLillo from an unlicensed street vendor.

But let's be charitable. Let's say that DeLillo wanted to write a novel about encountering the Real. There's no question that Elster's anguish in the face of his daughter's unsolved disappearance feels unusually real, at least for DeLillo. It shrivels Elster into a dotage in which he is incapable of shaving or putting on his own seatbelt. It stops the flow of talk. Shortly before the two men came home to find Jessie gone, Elster had been explaining to Finley the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, according to whom material evolves toward spirit, or at least toward complexity and consciousness. The omega point is reached when matter attains consciousness, when there is, as Elster puts it, "a leap out of our biology." At which moment, Elster suggests—adding his own dark twist—the process inverts itself. Consciousness begins to hanker to revert to matter. Omega point becomes Point Omega. "Do we have to be human forever?" Elster asks. "Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field."

Jessie's disappearance, however, makes it perfectly clear that Elster would not have wanted to be a stone in a field had he known what was about to happen that would reduce him to something very much like one. Like so much else he has had to say, his Point Omega theories are so much romantic, or maybe post-romantic, nonsense. He, like the rest of us, wants to stay alive and conscious and protect his child from a scary, collapsing world. Given the unforgivable war he was implicated in, Elster's silence seems almost blessed; but his punishment seems Jobian. And given how many preoccupations he shares with DeLillo, his tormented lapse into silence can't help but resound with a painful note of authorial self-doubt.

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In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostly negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

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Pope Benedict XVI

Dear Pope Benedict XVI,

I am writing to request a papal dispensation. Not for myself—I'm not even Catholic. My plea is for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as the health care reform bill.

I'm not sure you even know this, but (apart from the Republican Party) no institution poses a greater obstacle to the passage of health care reform than the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops refuses to support a compromise the Senate reached on the question of whether private health insurers operating within the new insurance exchanges established under the bill could provide unsubsidized coverage for abortions. This issue gave both the House and Senate considerable heartburn when they debated health reform (click here for a helpful analysis of their respective approaches), but they pushed through it. Now, however, some parliamentary peculiarities affecting the U.S. Congress make abortion the single biggest roadblock to final passage.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't waste my breath trying to change the Catholic Church's views on anything having to do with abortion. But I'm emboldened by a letter the U.S. Bishops sent on Jan. 26 to members of the House and Senate urging passage of health reform. "Now is not the time to abandon this task," wrote Bishops William F. Murphy (Rockville Center) and John Wester (Salt Lake City) and Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (Galveston-Houston),

but rather to set aside partisan divisions and special interest pressures to find ways to enact genuine reform. Although political contexts have changed, the moral and policy failure that leaves tens of millions of our sisters and brothers without access to health care remains. We encourage Congress to begin working in a bipartisan manner providing political courage, vision, and leadership.

These words gave me momentary hope that the U.S. Bishops, whose role in health reform previously had been confined largely to promoting the House-passed abortion amendment sponsored by Rep. Bart Stupak and opposing the Senate-passed compromise, had decided to set aside their concerns about precisely how the health insurance bill would restrict abortions (as both versions do) to serve the larger goal of extending health insurance to somewhere between 31 million and 36 million of the 45 million Americans who currently lack it. Healing the sick has always been among the Catholic Church's highest priorities. In his 1981 encyclical "On Human Work," your predecessor, John Paul II, wrote, "The expenses involved in health care, especially in the case of accidents at work, demand that medical assistance should be easily available for workers and that as far as possible it should be cheap or even free of charge." The U.S. Bishops put this quotation on their Web site. Health care, they wrote in the Jan. 26 letters, "is a basic human right." Surely the U.S Conference of Bishops has no greater desire than the U.S. Congress to contribute to a "moral and policy failure." Surely it, too, can work in a cooperative manner and demonstrate "courage, vision, and leadership."

Unfortunately, the Jan. 26 letters went on to reassert the bishops' unyielding opposition to the Senate abortion language. "Disappointingly," they wrote, "the Senate-passed bill … does not meet our moral criteria on life and conscience."

Specifically, it violates the long-standing federal policy against the use of federal funds for elective abortions and health plans that include such abortions—a policy upheld in all health programs covered by the Hyde Amendment as well as in the Children's Health Insurance Program, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and now in the House-passed "Affordable Health Care for America Act." We believe legislation that fails to comply with this policy and precedent is not true health care reform and should be opposed until this fundamental problem is remedied.

The bishops giveth, and the bishops taketh away.

It isn't even true that the Senate bill allows federal funds to be used for abortions. I won't go into the details here (if you're curious, see my Nov. 4 column "Don't Be Stupak"), but when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid inserted the final abortion compromise language into his manager's amendment, he was assured by the Congressional Budget Office (whose authority in Washington approaches that of the Holy See in Rome) that the abortion provision had no budgetary effect. How could it have no budgetary effect if it allowed federal funds to be used for abortions?

Ironically, the very fact that the Senate bill's abortion provision has no budgetary effect is precisely what is keeping the entire health reform bill bottled up.

You got a minute?

The health reform bill is now in House-Senate conference. Prior to the Jan. 19 Massachusetts special election to replace Sen. Ted Kennedy, D.-Mass., it was assumed the bill would be sent with minor changes to the House and Senate for final passage. Somewhat unexpectedly, however, a Republican opposed to health reform won the seat, denying Senate Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority. OK then, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reasoned, let's just grab the Senate bill and pass it; a few necessary changes can be made in a separate bill to be considered in the Senate under budget reconciliation rules, which do not allow for filibusters; 51 yeas would be sufficient. The Senate bill ought to be an easier sell to conservative Democrats in the House because the Senate bill is on the whole more conservative.

The problem is that the Senate bill's abortion provision is a smidgen more liberal than the House's. And precisely because it would have no budgetary effect, it is not permitted under Senate rules to be part of a cleanup reconciliation bill. So instead of a two-step procedure, Pelosi and Reid would need to arrange a three-step procedure: House adoption of Senate bill; reconciliation bill on most outstanding differences between the House and Senate; stand-alone bill substituting the Senate's abortion language with the House's abortion language. But could you really get majorities in either the House or the Senate for a bill that would consist entirely of the House abortion restriction, which most Democrats find abhorrent? It was one thing for them to hold their noses and support it as part of a larger health reform bill. It would be quite another for them to vote for a bill whose sole purpose was to limit the availability of abortions in the private sector.

Nate Silver, the brainy numbers-cruncher at FiveThirtyEight.com, did a little whip count on Jan. 27. He counted six likely House defections over abortion, and another six that were "possible." The first six are enough to block passage of health care reform; House Democrats can afford to lose only one vote. (The House bill passed with two votes to spare, 220-215, and one of the ayes, Rep. Robert Wexler, has since retired; a special election to replace him won't take place until April.) Balanced against these six to 12, Silver argued, are somewhere between three and 17 possible additions. The likeliest of these are two House Democrats who voted against the bill because it wasn't liberal enough (Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Eric Massa of New York). After that, Silver's reasoning starts to sound like wishful thinking. Three House Democrats—Bart Gordon and John Tanner of Tennessee and Brian Baird of Washington—have decided not to run again, and therefore might (in theory) figure they have nothing to lose by switching their votes to an "aye." But there's no particular reason to believe these representatives' consciences are pro-reform. Separately, Silver judges three conservative Democrats to occupy a "top tier" of gettability: Rep. John Barrow of Georgia, Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas, and Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania. Of these three, Altmire is probably the best bet. But even if Pelosi were to secure all three, plus the two liberals, that still wouldn't likely be enough to outweigh a mere seven defections over abortion. To overcome the abortion obstacle, Pelosi needs to pick up many more House conservatives who earlier voted no, and in the current climate of post-Massachusetts panic I don't see that happening.

But what if the six to 12 pro-life Democrats could be persuaded to support the Senate bill? That's where you come in, Your Holiness.

I'm going over the U.S. Bishops' heads because I don't see much likelihood of changing their minds. They're too invested in opposing the Senate bill. But you, Holy Father, aren't invested in any position at all, as far as I can tell. I know you're very conservative, but I wonder whether you really want your bishops mucking around in U.S. politics to quite this extent. Are you prepared to see the Catholic Church blamed for denying health insurance to 31 million to 36 million Americans? Primum non nocere.

The Catholic Church, I'm told, is a very hierarchical organization. A simple, private word from you to the U.S. Conference of Bishops would secure from that group a grudging public statement to the effect that the Senate abortion compromise, while hardly ideal, is tolerable under the circumstances. That, in turn, would give Stupak (a Catholic) and his followers sufficient cover to support the Senate bill. Nobody wants to be more Catholic than you.

If you like, you can let word leak out in a year or two or five that you played a key role in creating universal health care in the United States. Your predecessor gained considerable luster from his role in ending communism. This secular achievement would be somewhat less spectacular, but on the other hand your centrality to the outcome would be much greater. Alternatively, if you didn't want anyone to know about your role, you could tell the U.S. Bishops to keep their yaps shut. Catholic clerics have always been extremely good—sometimes a little too good—at keeping secrets.

Think it over.

All best,

Timothy Noah

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

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Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has placed a "blanket hold" on more than 70 presidential nominees, angering both the White House and Democratic lawmakers. In 2006, Daniel Engber reviewed the history of this legislative maneuver in all its forms, including the "secret hold," the "revolving hold," and the "rolling hold." That column is reprinted below.

Two senators who put "secret holds" on a government accountability bill at the beginning of August were outed this week. Alaska's Ted Stevens admitted to having used the parliamentary tactic on Wednesday, and West Virginia's Robert Byrd fessed up the following day. What's a secret hold?

An anonymous objection that's made before a bill hits the floor. The Byzantine rules of the Senate make it very easy for individual lawmakers to stall ongoing debates. Since anyone can slow down or halt the chamber's business, the Senate must rely on collegiality to keep business moving forward. To that end, the Senate majority leader sets an agenda using "unanimous consent agreements" on what will be discussed and for how long. (In the House of Representatives, the majority leader can more easily set and enforce ground rules for debate.)

The majority leader will try to make sure that no one's going to object to a unanimous consent agreement before it's raised on the floor. She'll consult with her own members ahead of time, and then check with counterparts from across the aisle. At this point, senators can tell party leaders in private that they object to that unanimous consent agreement—or that they would object to if it were brought to the floor. The majority leader takes this into consideration and in most cases holds the bill until the problems can be resolved. In principle, the only people who know the identity of the "holder" are the leader and secretary of his party. (Party leaders sometimes spill the beans to the relevant committee chairs or bill sponsors.)

Unanimous consent agreements have been around since the mid-19^th century, and they became official and binding in 1914. But the hold has only been important since the 1960s. As the legislative workload grew, it became more important for the majority leader—then Democrat Mike Mansfield—to set a rigid schedule. To make things run smoothly, Mansfield began to set up a procedure to ensure that consent agreements would be approved ahead of time. Robert Byrd took over the scheduling a few years later and formalized the system of legislative holds.

Holds have always been a custom rather than a rule, designed to speed up business rather than obstruct the passage of bills.But abuses are rampant, and lawmakers have made a hobby of decrying the system as undemocratic. Ohio's Howard Metzenbaum, for example, liked to place a hold on every tax bill so he could read it before it hit the floor. The Ohioan was so freewheeling with his holds that party secretaries took to calling them Metzes—as in, "We've got a Metz on that bill." Other senators used "revolving holds" or "rolling holds." One would put a hold on a bill contingent on some modest demand. After party leaders finagled the necessary concessions, another senator would pop up with a new hold and a new demand.

Party leaders don't always honor a hold request. If they ignore it, they're essentially calling a lawmaker's bluff and guessing he won't try to filibuster or stall the law once it hits the floor. Several senators have tried to eliminate the practice of secret holds. In 1999, leaders Trent Lott and Tom Daschle worked out a deal that all holds had to be reported to the bill sponsor and committee chair and put in writing to the party leader. But the deal fell apart four months later, when several senators put secret holds on the nomination of Richard Holbrooke for ambassador to the United Nations.

Update, Feb. 5, 2010: In 2007, Congress passed a law to limit the use of secret holds (PDF). The practice has not been eliminated altogether.

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

Explainer thanks Don Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office and Steven Smith of Washington University.

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	Barack Obama posted a video: State of the Union Address. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi like this.
	Steve Jobs posted a video: Introducing the iPad. 4,453,813 people like this.
	Pete Souza posted a photo: Obamacam, Take 1. Pete Souza Just don't turn your head or the camera falls off.
	Joe Biden Hey Jill! Robert Gibbs Who let Joe bring his blackberry?
	Barack Obama added Tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts! to his Interests. Mitch McConnell Don't patronize me.
	Barack Obama added Health Care Reform Now! to his Causes. Harry Reid You heard him, Nancy. Get it done! Nancy Pelosi Me? YOU get it done! John Boehner Children. I'm sure we can work something out over the next several decades.
	Barack Obama posted a note: "The Senate must overcome its partisan squabbling." 60 people like this. Mitch McConnell Dammit, who crossed the aisle? Jim Bunning I like clicking the little thumb.
	Sam Alito was tagged in a video: "That's not true." Sam Alito I was saying "Thad's hot, dude." Thad Cochran Well that's certainly true.
	Bob McDonnell was tagged in a video: "Please Don't Let This Response Ruin My Career." Bobby Jindal Trust me, this will be huge for you.
	Republicans invited Barack Obama to the event House Republican Retreat.
	Barack Obama invited House Republicans to the event School.
	Adm. Mike Mullen I personally support repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
	438 people suggested Adm. Mike Mullen download the Grindr application.
	Adm. Mike Mullen Follow me at @thejointstaff, no homo.
	John McCain This policy works, in my experience. Cindy doesn't ask, I don't tell.
	The Associated Press posted an article: "Rahm Emanuel Calls Liberals 'Fucking Retarded.'" Sarah Palin Hey, my son is "fucking retarded." Rahm Emanuel That sucks.
	Rahm Emanuel wrote on The Special Olympics' Wall: "I'm Sorry I Compared You to Liberals."
	Peter Orszag posted a photo: 2011 Budget. Peter Orszag Blue line is spending. Black line is revenue. Red line is projected rate of American sexual enslavement by the Chinese.
	Republicans posted a photo: Our 2011 Budget.
	The Supreme Court posted a note: "Corporations are people, too." Sam Walton Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we're free at last.
	Andrew Young posted a video: John Edwards Sex Tape. Rielle Hunter Hey, that's MY property to exploit for media attention and possible blackmail, not yours.
	James O'Keefe posted the event Mock Assassination of President Obama.. Secret Service You're under arrest. James O'Keefe Haha, psych, it was just a plastic gun! You should have seen the look on your faces! Secret Service Get in the car.
	James O'Keefe joined the group Former Futures of the Republican Party. Bobby Jindal Welcome!
	Newt Gingrich RIP J.D. Salinger. Sarah Palin Oh no! I loved "Tuesdays With Morrie."
	Scott Brown joined the network Washington, D.C.
	Amy Klobuchar, Lisa Murkowski, and Mary Landrieu updated their profile pictures.
	Carly Fiorina posted a video: "Demon Sheep."
	The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added "Demon Sheep" to its nominees for best short film (live action).
	The Washington Post posted an article: "Snowstorm Shuts Down Washington." Richard Shelby Actually, that was me.

.

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Red Riding Trilogy

The Red Riding trilogy, a three-part crime thriller that aired as a television series in Britain and is now being released in the United States both theatrically and with IFC On Demand, is so sprawling that it takes a full paragraph just to describe its provenance. All three parts were adapted by Tony Grisoni from a series of novels by David Peace about the Yorkshire Ripper case—a string of murders that took place in Northern England over a 10-year period. The first segment, set in 1974, is directed by Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane); the second, set in 1980, by James Marsh (Man on Wire); and the third, set in 1983, by Anand Tucker (Shopgirl).

There are a lot of visible influences in Red Riding. Like The Wire, it's a long-form study of institutional corruption and the way mediocrity and venality will always rise to the top. Like Prime Suspect, it's a smart procedural soap opera that also offers a glimpse into the lives of the British underclass. And like The Godfather, it's a sweeping multigenerational epic about chickens coming home to roost. A churl might point out that everything noteworthy about Red Riding derives from somewhere else. It borrows its grainy look from '70s thrillers and its mood of fateful, poetic gloom from a long tradition of British noir. But it's not hard to forgive this series its lack of innovation, because it manages, for long stretches at least, to be something few serial-killer dramas ever are: really, really good.

Each episode of the Red Riding triptych is a stand-alone piece with its own protagonist. In the first, an ambitious young reporter named Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) investigates the death of Clare Kemplay, a little girl who goes missing and turns up dead in a dumpster, in circumstances that recall the disappearance of two other girls. At first Eddie regards the story chiefly as a chance to make his own name, but when the local chief detective (Warren Clarke) starts blocking his access to files and key witnesses, Eddie takes on Clare's murder as a personal cause. He visits the widowed mother of one of the other murdered girls, Paula Garland (a superb Rebecca Hall) and after a disastrous first interview, the two begin an anguished and morally murky love affair. Eddie's reporter colleague Barry Gannon (Anthony Flanagan), one of those paranoid types who always believes "it goes all the way to the top," warns him that the threads he's tugging lead to a vast spider web of police corruption, all of which is somehow related to the machinations of real estate developer John Dawson (an oily and terrifying Sean Bean). As we know from The Parallax View, the most paranoid guy on-screen is usually right. Scandals are exposed and revenge taken, but Red Riding 1974 ends with the child murders still unsolved.

The 1980 episode picks up with an investigation of the apparently unrelated murders of several Yorkshire prostitutes. Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) is called in from Manchester as the head detective on the case, but his ethical probity and Roman-Catholic uprightness immediately rub the local police the wrong way. He soon finds himself being tailed by a blackmailer who threatens to expose his one-time dalliance with a colleague (Maxine Peake). Minor characters from the earlier segment, especially a haunted male prostitute named B.J. (Robert Sheehan), emerge into prominence as the scope of the 1974 corruption scandal expands ever wider.

By 1983, the child murders have started up again, suggesting either that the mentally disabled man jailed for them in an earlier episode was innocent or that a copycat is at work. A local cop, Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), finally begins to bring together the scattered fragments of the story, aided by a lawyer (Mark Addy) who believes the convicted murderer was a fall guy. This last segment is the hardest to follow, perhaps because of its heavy reliance on flashbacks and on the questionable assumption that we understood what was going on in the first two.

The kind description of Red Riding's story line would be "intricately plotted." The uncharitable one would be "confusing." With all the overlapping time frames, murky smoke-filled pubs and thick Yorkshire accents, it's easy to lose track of who's covering up for the sickening wrongdoing of whom. And when the directors attempt to get tricky with point-of-view camera, as happens too often in James Marsh's middle segment, the film can feel overstylized and contrived. But genre crime fiction lives and dies by mood, and Red Riding's mood—gritty, anguished, and unremittingly bleak—is a persuasive vision of the particular hell that was depressed postindustrial England in the Thatcher years.

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Gerald Posner

Veteran journalist Gerald Posner acknowledged today that he copied five sentences from a Miami Herald article this week for a piece he wrote for the Daily Beast. The Daily Beast appended an editor's note to the beginning of Posner's piece today, explaining that the copying was "inadvertent" and that the Daily Beast has deleted the copied passages.

Here are the relevant sentences from the Feb. 2 Miami Herald story by Julie Brown, which was about a local murder and estate battle:

The Novacks, who wed in 1991, had a tumultuous marriage. In 2002, Narcy Novack and two others tied Novack Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and removed money from his safe, according to the police report.

"If I can't have you, no one else will," she told him, according to a divorce petition he filed and later dropped.

At the time, Narcy Novack told police the incident was part of a sex game.

She also showed them pornographic pictures of women with artificial limbs, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

Here are the sentences that have been redacted from Posner's Feb. 2 Daily Beast piece:

There is little doubt the Novacks had a volatile relationship. In 2002, 11 years into their marriage, Narcy and two others tied Ben Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and took money from his safe, according to the police report filed at the time.

"If I can't have you, no one else will," she told him, according to a divorce petition Ben Jr. filed and then dropped.

Narcy told police investigators at the time that the entire episode was part of a sex game. And she also showed them porno snapshots of women with artificial limbs having sex, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

(Here's a cached version of the original Posner article.)

When asked whether what Posner did was plagiarism, Daily Beast Executive Editor Edward Felsenthal didn't dodge. Reading aloud from the definition of plagiarism on Dictionary.com—"the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work"—he agreed that that's what Posner did. "Yeah, you'd have to say it's plagiarism," he said. "I do believe it was inadvertent."

Posner, the Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter, didn't make any excuses, either. And he made no effort to escape the P-word, which writers caught stealing copy usually do.

Stating that he was "horrified" at what he did, Posner agreed that it constitutes plagiarism. But he couldn't figure out how he did it.

He said he had no memory of having seen the Herald story, describing himself as "absolutely sure" he did not see it before sending his own story to Beast editors. But that memory must be wrong, he said, because the similarities between the two pieces are too great, and the Herald's story was posted before he e-mailed his to his editors at 2:03 a.m. on Feb. 2.

"I must have had the Miami Herald there and copied." He regards the subtle differences between his copy and the Herald's as evidence of him "doing the rewrite" of what he thought was his copy.

Posner is no stranger to the story he plagiarized, having covered elements of it for his 2009 book Miami Babylon: Crime Wealth and Power—A Dispatch From the Beach. He has continued to gather material on it for the book's upcoming paperback edition. Citing primary documents in his possession and his own original reporting, he said that he didn't have to plagiarize the Herald to write his Beast story.

But, again, he's not making excuses. He also refused to soft-pedal in any way what he did because it was inadvertent, as many plagiarists do. "The act is the act," he said.

Posner said he's always been tough on plagiarists and has long believed that people who get caught taking other people's copy should say this: "I am humbled by it, and it will not happen again."

"There is no excuse," he said, repeatedly expressing his regret. "I take full responsibility."

According to Felsenthal, Posner will continue to write for the Beast.

"I'm convinced this was an unintentional aberration in an extraordinary career breaking news and doing top quality journalism with high ethical standards," Felsenthal said.

Addendum, Feb. 6: A sixth sentence lifted from the Herald article by Posner has been called to my attention:

"Because her husband left her his estate, she is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his boat and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia." —Miami Herald

"Because her husband left her his estate, Narcy is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his yacht, and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia." —The Daily Beast

Addendum, Feb. 6: The seventh sentence lifted by Posner from the Herald:

"Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday's hearing in Fort Lauderdale." —Miami Herald

"Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday's hearing in Fort Lauderdale." —The Daily Beast

******

Thanks to the reader who alerted me to the similarities between the two pieces. Keep those tips coming to slate.pressbox@gmail.com, and if you're of a mind, make George Packer angry by reading my Twitter feed. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word Posner in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

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by Gerald Posner

February 2, 2010 | 10:39pm

The death of the heir of the Fontainebleau Hotel fortune has sparked a twisted blame game as the victim's wife and stepdaughter accuse each other of his murder. Plus, VIEW OUR GALLERY of The Fontainebleau through the years.

Ben Novack built Miami Beach's iconic Fontainebleau Hotel in 1954. It was a magnet for the rich and famous, including so many mobsters that the FBI assigned undercover agents to conduct surveillance at the grand ballroom to keep a tally of which northern kingpins were in town. As I discussed in my book, Miami Babylon, Novack himself was long rumored to have mob connections, which he always denied.

But Monday, the Novack legacy took a strange turn when a Fort Lauderdale Probate Judge awarded Narcy Novack, the widow of Novack's murdered son, Ben Jr., control of his $10 million estate. What made the probate ruling odd was that other relatives wanted Narcy Novack—a suspect in the murder—removed as the estate's executor under the state's slayer statute. That law prohibits a killer from inheriting any part of a victim's estate. The relatives dropped their lawsuit at the last moment, unable to marshal the evidence that Narcy was the killer. But the lawyers for the other Novacks asked for a dismissal without prejudice—which allows them to file another challenge at a later date.

Some background: This past July, Narcy found her husband's bloody corpse at the Rye Town Hilton hotel in Westchester County, New York. He was on the floor beside his bed and had been bludgeoned. His mouth was covered with duct tape, his hands taped behind his back, and his legs were tied together together below the knees. Missing was Novack's gold bracelet, with "BEN" in diamonds. Novack had been directing a business conference he had organized. According to his Web site, his company, Convention Concepts Unlimited, took in $50 million annually. Narcy told the police she found her husband's body when she returned from breakfast. The Westchester police believe the murder was a professional hit, although they are not sure who ordered it, much less carried it out.

While the family fought over burial expenses, Novack's corpse was preserved on ice at the Westchester County medical examiner's office for 52 days before he was finally buried in the family's mausoleum in Queens, New York. Armed guards kept the fighting family members separated.

The Westchester police say Narcy is a "person of interest." She hasn't been charged, nor has anyone else. But the Novack family is a 10-plus on the dysfunction meter. Narcy Novack's daughter from a previous marriage, May Abad, charges that her mom arranged the murder to collect her husband's fortune, and that her mom knew Ben was having an affair.

There is little doubt the Novacks had a volatile relationship. In 2002, 11 years into their marriage, Narcy and two others tied Ben Jr. to a chair, threatened to kill him and took money from his safe, according to the police report filed at the time.

"If I can't have you, no one else will,'' she told him, according to a divorce petition Ben Jr. filed and then dropped.

Narcy told police investigators at the time that the entire episode was part of a sex game. And she also showed them porno snapshots of women with artificial limbs having sex, claiming her husband had a fetish for them.

And just when you think things can't get spicier, Narcy has turned the tables in the current probate fight and accused her own daughter of murdering Ben Jr., a charge Abad vehemently denies. A few days after Novack's body had been found, Narcy and her daughter had a violent fight at Narcy's Fort Lauderdale home. Narcy called the police, accused Abad of assaulting a niece who was at the home, and had the police remove her forcibly from the property. Abad told the police her mother had struck her with a crowbar. Neither Abad nor her mother attended Monday's hearing in Fort Lauderdale.

Because her husband left her his estate, Narcy is now free to sell his assets, including their home, his yacht, and his massive collection of Batman memorabilia. The Batman collection, the largest in private hands, was started by Ben Sr. when he owned the Fontainebleau. It was estimated by Christies in 2000 as potentially worth $15 million. But after Ben Jr.'s death, much of the Batman memorabilia turned up missing from several warehouses in Broward County. Sources close to the case told The Daily Beast that the locks on the warehouses where the materials were stored had been hacked off.

The Novack family is a 10-plus on the dysfunction meter.

If yesterday's probate ruling stands, Narcy will likely also gain control of the estate of her late husband's 87-year-old mother, Bernice Novack, who was found dead three months before her son. Part of her estate was inherited by Ben Jr. and part by an illegitimate son of Ben Sr., a homeless man who dramatically showed up eight years after his mother's death and claimed his inheritance just before a court was about to declare him legally dead.

Bernice Novack's April 2009 death—in which her body was found face down and her skull was fractured—was ruled accidental by Fort Lauderdale police and the Broward County medical examiner. The coroner's ruling was despite some blood police found smeared on her car and on the walls in the house. But second thoughts on the closed case came when Rye Brook detectives received an anonymous letter, after Ben Jr.'s murder, claiming that both Bernice and her son were killed by Narcy and an unnamed accomplice. Although initially skeptical, Rye Brook police have said that during the course of their investigation they determined that details in the letter were accurate.

``What we found interesting in the letter is there were names in it at the time we were not aware of, and as we did our own investigation, we found that information to be true," a Rye Brook police spokesman told reporters.

The letter, written in Spanish, is dated July 20, 2009, a week after Ben Jr.'s brutal murder and three months after his mother's death. It names those involved, says how the murders were committed, and describes the events leading up to the alleged dual homicides. Based on that letter, the Fort Lauderdale police have opened an investigation into Bernice's death and whether foul play was involved.

Narcy Novack's attorney, Howard Tanner, says the allegations about his client are based on unfounded rumor and innuendo and that she had nothing to do with her husband's death and had nothing to gain from the murder. Attempts to reach May Abad, or her attorney, for comment were unsuccessful.

As for Ben Novack Sr.'s great achievement—the Fontainebleau—it's hanging on by a thread, close to bankruptcy after a billion-dollar renovation failed to revive its fortunes. It doesn't seem like anything is going right for the Novacks—not even their Miami Beach legacy.

Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, on topics ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, was published in October. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Trisha Posner.

For more of The Daily Beast, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-02/the-murder-mystery-rocking-miami/p/

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Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

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

You can download the program here or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. Listener Nathan Wood recommends Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. You'll find links to this and previous Gabfest recommendations on our new Audible RSS feed.

The Gabfesters and engineer Andy Bouvé with Gabfest lunch prizewinner Mike Levere

On this week's Slate Political Gabfest, John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon, and David Plotz discuss the budget debate, "don't ask, don't tell," and abortion at the Super Bowl.

Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:

Frances Kissling and Kate Michelman's Washington Post op-ed.

Planned Parenthood's ad on YouTube.

Emily's piece on Planned Parenthood and the Super Bowl.

John chatters about Carly Fiorina's strange attack ad.

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

Posted on Feb. 5, 2010, by Gail Sullivan at 12:25 p.m.

Jan. 29, 2010

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

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

You can download the program here or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. This week, listener Mary Lane recommends Philip Pan's Out of Mao's Shadow and Rob Gifford's China Road. You'll find links to this and previous Gabfest recommendations on our Audible RSS feed.

Information about the upcoming live Gabfest in New York City can be found here. Five pairs of VIP front-row tickets will be auctioned off on Feb. 10. An additional 40 tickets will soon go on sale for $20 each.

On this week's Slate Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, Christopher Beam, and David Plotz discuss reactions to President Obama's State of the Union address, how to help the Democrats, and the iPad.

Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:

A map of what states might look like if their borders were periodically redrawn to reflect population changes.

Chris chatters about the disintegration of the Nashville Tea Party Convention.

David chatters about a curious Yale admissions video.

Emily chatters about an AARP piece on sexting and the elderly.

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

Posted on Jan. 29, 2010, by Gail Sullivan at 2:54 p.m.

Jan. 22, 2010

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

Listen to the Gabfest fo Jan. 22 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can download the program here or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book. Listener R.J. Bee recommends Ted Sorenson's Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, a fascinating first-hand account of the Kennedy administration. You'll find links to this and previous Gabfest recommendations on our new Audible RSS feed.

On this week's Slate Political Gabfest, John Dickerson, Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and Dahlia Lithwick discuss the Supreme Court ruling on corporations and the First Amendment, Scott Brown's Massachusetts win, and the Obama administration's first year.

Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:

The Atlantic article by James Fallows

George Packer's New Yorker article on Obama

Margaret Talbot's New Yorker piece on the gay marriage trial

David chatters about Thomas Rick's article on using nuclear generators to provide electricity to Haiti

Information about the upcoming live Gabfest can be found here.

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

Posted on Jan. 22, 2010, by Gail Sullivan at 5:39 p.m.

Jan. 15, 2010

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

Listen to the Gabfest for Jan. 15 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

You can download the program here or you can subscribe to the weekly Gabfest podcast feed in iTunes or directly with our RSS feed.

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. Listener Gary Vandiver recommends Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. You'll find links to this and previous Gabfest recommendations on our new Audible RSS feed.

On this week's Slate Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss earthquake relief for Haiti, the week's political roundup, and gay marriage on YouTube.

Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:

President Obama's remarks on Haiti.

The State Department Web site with information on donating to disaster relief efforts in Haiti

A New York Times interview with Harold Ford Jr.

Sarah Palin's sportscasting footage.

The Supreme Court order blocking video coverage of the Proposition 8 gay-marriage trial.

Globe Newspaper Co. v. Superior Court, another case involving press access to courtrooms.

David chatters about the upcoming live Gabfest at 7 p.m. on March 3 at HousingWorks in New York City, a Slate event on Jan. 20 at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and a video of prison inmates who tattooed the whites of their eyes.

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

Posted on Jan. 15, 2010, by Gail Sullivan at 7:43 p.m.

Jan. 8, 2010

Become a fan of the Political Gabfest on Facebook. We post to the Facebook page throughout the week, so keep the conversation going by joining us there.

Listen to the Gabfest for Jan. 8 by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book. Listener Diane Cochran recommends Alfred Lansing's Endurance, a story of Ernest Shackleton's botched Antarctic voyage in 1914. Also, Emily Bazelon recommends Jack Gantos' Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. You'll find links to these and previous Gabfest recommendations on our new Audible RSS feed.

On this week's Slate Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the fallout from the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt, the changing national political landscape for Democrats, and Brit Hume's religious advice for Tiger Woods.

Here are some of the links and references mentioned during this week's show:

The passage from Matthew to which John refers when discussing Brit Hume and Tiger Woods.

David's 2000 piece on Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Peter Baker's article on Obama and terrorism.

David chatters about an article listing the 100 best jobs in 2010.

John chatters about John McCain's Senate re-election radio ads.

Emily chatters about the upcoming gay marriage trial in California, Perry v. Schwarzenegger.

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

Posted on Jan. 8, 2010, by Gail Sullivan at 3 p.m.

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Judge David Hamilton

By February 2002, President George W. Bush had nominated 89 judges to the lower federal courts. This week, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy prodded President Obama, who has nominated just 42 federal judges to date, to "get up names as quickly as possible." President Obama promised to make this "a priority." He'd better.

There are currently 102 vacancies on the federal bench. Of these, 31 constitute "judicial emergencies"—vacancies that have severely threatened a court's ability to handle its workload. Before the end of the year, there will be dozens of additional openings on the lower courts (20 have already been announced) and, in all likelihood, one and perhaps even two Supreme Court vacancies to fill. With an energized Republican Party, the loss of a filibuster-proof majority, and a scary-looking midterm election in November, Obama faces a difficult task in filling these vacancies this year. But this is it—when is he likely to have a better opportunity?

Obama has a difficult road ahead partly because of his failure to act swiftly on nominations during his first year in office. In 2009, Obama nominated 33 judges to the district and circuit courts, and the Senate confirmed 12. These numbers are, in a word, pathetic. New obstructionist tactics by Senate Republicans are partially to blame. But Obama deserves some blame, too; the paucity of nominees made it hard to scream too loudly about the lack of confirmations. The Senate's Republican leadership capitalized by making Majority Leader Harry Reid fight hard for every single confirmation vote for a judicial nominee, even when nominees ended up getting confirmed unanimously. Preoccupied by passing health care, Reid had trouble finding the floor time even to move the nominees.

All told, a shaky first-year performance. Now is the time to turn things around. Quickly. The Clinton administration also started slowly on judicial nominations, facing tough politics on confirmation in 1994. Clinton picked up the pace of nominations, confirmed 98 lower court judges and a Supreme Court justice, and cut by two-thirds the number of vacancies that amounted to judicial emergencies. This is the model.

The White House has made changes in its judicial nominations team, starting at the top with the installation of a new White House counsel, Bob Bauer. Bauer will oversee and coordinate judicial nominations in an administration that has more assembled expertise on judicial nomination and confirmation issues than any in history. His job is to marshal this talent efficiently and to keep the nomination train running on time, which apparently proved impossible once his predecessor Gregory Craig started to lose his grip on the White House counsel job.

The Supreme Court's thunder crack of a ruling in Citizens United, killing campaign finance reform, has also provided the president and his base with the clearest indication since Bush v. Gore of how much courts and judicial nominations matter. Conservative legal activists stand ready to challenge every aspect of the president's agenda in court, just as soon as these measures get through Congress. Citizens United also provides a powerful rejoinder to the argument that conservative judges can be trusted to adhere faithfully to constitutional text and history. It's a useful club for Obama to wield in responding to Republican claims that it's his nominees who will be the judicial activists. It was Justice Sonia Sotomayor who stood on the side of constitutional text and history and judicial restraint in Citizens United, by voting to uphold a century worth of laws that place special limits on corporate election spending.

President Obama's spirited response to Citizens United has usefully energized his base. So now let's direct that energy toward the confirmation of more Obama judges. Another reason to take heart: Last year's two major confirmation battles—over Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and 7^th Circuit Judge David Hamilton—provided important political victories to the administration. Justice Sotomayor was confirmed 68-31, and polls showed that Americans supported her throughout the confirmation process. When the Republicans tried to filibuster Judge Hamilton, Obama's very first judicial nominee, they gathered only 29 votes, and 10 Republicans joined every Democrat in favor of an up-or-down vote. The national press subsequently slammed the senators supporting obstruction hypocrisy in denouncing filibusters under Bush and then using the procedure at the first opportunity.

With partisanship in Washington at a fever pitch, what kind of nominees should Obama tap? It's always hard to describe in the abstract. But the sensible path is for Obama to avoid deliberately provocative nominations while being willing to fight for brilliant, highly qualified, younger nominees who share his views about the Constitution and the law and will be the cornerstone of his judicial legacy. So far, he's succeeded well in the former task while failing for the most part in the latter.

At the moment, one rumored nominee who plainly fits the young, brilliant, hyper-qualified category—Goodwin Liu, a former Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk, and litigator, who now serves as associate dean at the University of California-Berkeley law school, Boalt Hall, and has yet to turn 40—was reported to be "poised" for nomination to the 9^th Circuit weeks ago, yet now seems to be in limbo. Yes, the president must choose judges carefully. But the Sotomayor and Hamilton confirmations show that with the right nominee, a fight will help the administration politically, not hurt it.

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The vice president produced a classic Bidenism this week. Please continue to send your nominations (with a link, please) to slatebidenisms@gmail.com. For more, and our stab at a definition, see "The Complete Bidenisms."

Biden: "I think one of the odds on favorites is—Jill didn't go with me, but—is this, this new program that I looked at it, wished I was seeing at it in 3-D and you sit there and watch this science fiction thing unfold in front of you. I think ..."

Interviewer: "Avatar"?

Biden: "Avatar, the magic of it is kind of overwhelming. There are some other real good ones out there, but I predict Avatar will win."

—Making his best picture Oscar prediction during an interview with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Feb. 2, 2010

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Most military spouses experience the mid-deployment blues, and as I near the halfway point of my husband's 14-month absence, I recognize the signs; in my case, though, the mid-deployment black-and-blues have rendered me useless. Last fall, I fractured my foot and wore a cast for six weeks; just as that was healing, I slipped on a patch of black ice and hit my head. One concussion and 15 stitches later, I emerged bloody, bandaged, and as bruised as a Civil War casualty. I looked terrible, but there was something deeply satisfying about it. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, my broken outside finally matched my (heartbroken) inside. That mid-deployment feeling of floating in time indefinitely—the separation has lasted eons, but homecoming is still many moons away—leaves some spouses angry, some depressed, and some simply exhausted. I fight hopelessness.

For me, long separations don't get any easier with time. I don't get used to it, but I do go numb. After my mid-deployment accidents, when people approached me with sympathy for my physical distress, the spiritual numbness that enveloped me began to wear away. I tricked myself into believing that their tenderness toward my wounds was actually directed at my desolation and that those buried feelings suddenly had a sympathetic audience.

It was liberating. Since my outer appearance matched my inner attitude, there was no longer a need to pretend that our family situation was acceptable. I wasn't required to play the stoic military spouse. The answer to the well-meaning, "How are you doing?" was written in stitches across my swollen face.

But feeling right, or even self-righteous, doesn't help anyone feel better. And in my solo effort to stave off halfway-point hopelessness, I found myself longing for the institutions of military spousehood. (Because of the nature of this deployment, my husband and I decided that the children and I would move away from our military community to be near family. It was the right choice for us, and we don't regret it.)

Military spouse clubs regularly transform lemons into lemon meringue pie, and the groupthink goes something like this: Halfway is nearly there. Halfway is when you start trying on outfits for homecoming. Halfway is when you landscape the yard. Halfway is when you struggle to shed that last five pounds. It's the only deployment-related milestone of any consequence, and like a warm spring emerging from a cold, dark winter, it is fragrant with optimism, bursting with hope.

So I picked up the phone recently and called an old friend, a fellow military spouse who has seen it all. When she asked, "How are you doing?" and heard my hesitation, she translated it with the expertise of a native speaker. "Just muddling through, huh?" she said. There was deep understanding in her light touch. I remembered Emily Dickinson's famous line, "Hope is the thing with feathers."

And suddenly I was hopeful, because muddling through implies forward motion. I might reach the shores of homecoming dirty and disheveled, if not outright bruised and battered, but I'll get there. It's only seven months away.

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Haitians await aid

LEOGANE, Haiti—When Elvis Cineus rushed to his home in the town of Leogane, 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake, he was not prepared for what awaited him.

Under the remains of his home, smashed flat as if pummeled by a giant fist, lay the bodies of his wife, his nephew, his cousin, and a friend, all dead. His 1-year-old son was dangling from the building's jagged facade, injured but alive.

"It was a miracle," he says of the infant's survival. "But I think there are still survivors in the fallen schools, because we still hear them screaming."

This coastal town, once one of the most pleasant in Haiti, was largely decimated by the quake. The International Federation of Red Cross estimates that as much as 90 percent of the town has been destroyed.

Along Leogane's Grand Rue, once-stately concrete buildings lie in rubble, with only a few structures built in Haiti's distinctive wooden gingerbread style remaining. The putrid smell of death wafts through the lanes, helped along by an ocean breeze.

At a ruined dental clinic, a woman cries when she tells how a neighbor died after her leg was severed by falling debris and how the neighbor's child, a little girl, took off screaming down the street.

"It's beyond chaos, beyond catastrophe," says Michael Moscoso, a local businessman. "The losses cannot be numbered."

One week after the earthquake flattened large swaths of central Port-au-Prince, people beyond the capital and closer to the epicenter have grown ever more desperate as much-promised aid has been slow to trickle in or has failed to materialize altogether.

In the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the capital's southern Carrefour neighborhood, several hundred people lay on makeshift surgical tables, on benches, or sprawled on the floor. Half a dozen people groaned with severe suppurating burn wounds caused when a gas cylinder exploded during the great tremor. Nine-year-old Michel St. Franc lay with blood caking his face, his leg in a primitive cast and tears in his eyes.

"This is the worst situation I've ever seen," says Julien Mattar, project coordinator for the hospital. "We have huge needs in terms of human resources, medical supplies, and materials."

Mattar tells me that a supply plane that was unable to land in Port-au-Prince was instead rerouted to the Dominican Republic. From there, the supplies made the seven-hour overland journey to Haiti.

The injured who were able to reach the hospital were the lucky ones. Farther down the road, both the living and the dead waited for respite in the form of assistance from the international community or from the government of Haitian President René Préval, who has faced withering criticism at home for his perceived lax and disorganized response to the disaster.

Along the Route des Rails, almost every home seemed to have been destroyed, and, again, the intense smell of decay intensified under a glaring Caribbean sun. Residents say they feel abandoned.

"No one has ever been here," Vilaire Elise, a 38-year-old Protestant minister, said as he led a visitor and fellow residents to survey homes where his neighbors had died. "We have no water to drink, nor food to eat. We are suffering here."

Though nearly 105,000 food rations and 20,000 tents had been distributed by humanitarian groups on Monday, the effort seemed unable to come to grips with the scale of the disaster. The U.N. World Food Program has said it will need 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days.

The growing foreign military presence in Haiti, which has played host to a U.N. peacekeeping mission since 2004 and will now house at least 2,000 U.S. troops, also seemed overwhelmed.

Late on Monday, with the sun setting outside Leogane, in a scene reminiscent of others played out in severely war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 1,500 townsfolk rendered homeless by the quake took over a flat patch of grassy land and constructed fragile shelters from logs, twigs, bed sheets, and leaves.

"Since the disaster, everyone here has had nothing," said Innocent Wilson, a 31-year-old who acts as one of the impromptu camp's spokesmen. "No one is here to help us, so we are organizing ourselves."

Haitian earthquake victims in Petit-Goâve

PETIT-GOÂVE, Haiti—They work all day under the blazing sun, hammers and saws in hand, pulling down the last remnants of a structure that had served as the crowning jewel for this once-picturesque town set along the glittering Caribbean Sea.



Numbering about two dozen, the men are tearing down what little remains of the town's storied Église Notre Dame, which once loomed over the city in gleaming blue-and-white relief. Now, only its foundation and the altar remain.



Along with the capital, Petit-Goâve, some 45 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, was perhaps the most thoroughly devastated municipality in the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake.



As well as the church, the state telephone company building, the mayor's office, a hotel, and scores of houses—all with people still inside—were leveled by the tremor. Dangerous, yawning fissures opened up along the road into town



"This church was here for a long time, for 208 years," said 67-year-old Nathan Leger, pausing as hammers echoed in the background and men milled about wearing surgical masks to protect them from particles of dust and human decay. "It's a catastrophe. We will not have something like this again."



The church collapsed within seconds, burying market women, passers-by, and people who had paused to rest in its shade. Residents estimate that at least 350 died in the town, which was playing host to three large meetings on the day of the quake.



Once, it was known for its particularly fine collection of Haitian "gingerbread" wooden architecture, as well as for its sweet tricolored candy, douce marcosse. Now, Petit-Goâve presents a face of utter destruction, its streets choked with the debris of collapsed buildings. The town was further traumatized by a 6.1 aftershock Wednesday morning, which caused even more damage



"We were injured, we were hit hard, and now we are sleeping in the street," says Andre Zanmi, a white-haired woman camped out in the middle of Rue Faustin with a dozen members of her family, some of whom bear deep cuts and gashes that have yet to receive medical attention.



Sitting in front of a house with half its roof collapsed, the family has strung a blanket between two trees to provide some cover.



Like most people in town, Zanmi said that other than patrols by a Sri Lankan contingent of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti—which itself lost its top command when the organization's Port-au-Prince headquarters was destroyed—they have yet to receive any outside help.



By late in the week, though, help appeared to be on its way. In a clearing in the town of Carrefour Dufort, near Petit-Goâve, members of the 22^nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., were distributing food aid by helicopter.



"It's just good to be able to be here to help," Sgt. Claude Barthold, who was born in the Haitian capital, told me. "But it's overwhelming what you see here."



On Thursday, the Red Cross also announced that it had opened two first-aid posts in Petit-Goâve, staffed by Haitian Red Cross volunteers.



The earthquake has been a brutal blow for this historically significant community, which was the birthplace of one of Haiti's most important leaders, Faustin Soulouque. The son of African-born slaves, Soulouque climbed through the ranks of the post-independence military before being elected president by a Senate vote in 1847. (Building up an irregular network of armed partisans called zinglins, Soulouque's modus operandi served as a precursor to the creation of the feared Tonton Macoutes paramilitary force of Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier a century later, as well as that of the chimères, the armed youth groups with which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide sought, unsuccessfully, to cling to power.)



After two unsuccessful invasions of neighboring Dominican Republic in search of loot he could use to pay the onerous 150 million franc "debt" that former colonial power France demanded in exchange for Haiti's hard-won independence, Soulouque was overthrown in 1859 and died in exile, the melancholy fate of so many of Haiti's leaders.



In more recent years, Petit-Goâve was the site of one of the first major demonstrations against the Aristide government in December 2001, when the funeral of a local journalist, Brignol Lindor, murdered by Aristide partisans, was fired on by police and flared into a major disturbance.



Now, though, residents are literally picking up the pieces of a shattered way of life.



"Only God knows why this happened," Robert Henry Etienne told me as he walked the dusty streets with a notebook in hand, carefully cataloging every ruined and damaged structure in meticulous handwriting in the hope that they might one day be rebuilt. "But we need the international community to help the Haitian people, who are sleeping on the streets. We need help, from whatever country in the world."

Rebuilding in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Haiti's radio journalists, many of whom have long experience of operating under dictatorships and elected governments with little tolerance for critical press coverage, know a thing or two about adversity. But nearly a month ago, when Haiti's capital was devastated by an earthquake that leveled large sections of the city and killed at least 150,000 people, local reporters were suddenly faced with a whole new set of challenges.



"We try and orient people to where aid is being distributed, and every day we announce messages about people who are still missing," says Wendell Theodore, the silken-voiced news director of Radio Metropole in the capital's Delmas region. His own home destroyed, Theodore now broadcasts the names of the missing from under a tree in the radio station's yard, next to the tent he has slept in since his house collapsed.



"I saw our building shake," says Rotchild Francois, director of the capital's RFM radio in the Pétionville district, who was at his desk in the studio when the earthquake struck and dashed into the street with a dozen other employees. The station lost a reporter in the quake and was knocked off the air for five days. Reporters from Radio Galaxie, Radio Magic 9, and Radio Télé Ginen were also killed.



Francois now spends his days combing the capital, trying to paint an audio picture of what is happening and to get information on the air about where aid is being distributed, the location of feeding and medical centers, and other important information. Many of the station's employees, fearful of aftershocks, refuse to enter the building.

"People come here to send messages to their relatives that they are OK or to have people call to say that they are OK," says Francois. "We do that every day."



Why journalists might be fearful was illustrated vividly when I was in the studio of Radio Kiskeya interviewing its director general, Marvel Dandin. As Dandin explained how the station, which had been knocked off the air for a week, had resumed broadcasting on an abbreviated schedule, a brief aftershock set the damaged, cracked building trembling and sent people running from the studio into the street.



Radio has historically played an important and politically significant role in Haiti's civic life, where newspapers are few and far between and difficult to decipher for a population often unable to avail themselves of proper schooling.



Radio Soleil, a Catholic station, played a key role in spreading information during the ouster of the Duvalier family dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1986, during which time freedom of the press was practically nonexistent.



Independent journalism was a dangerous business during the revolving military juntas that controlled the country after the Duvalier regime collapsed. Under the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in office from 2001 until 2004, reporters were physically attacked by government partisans while covering demonstrations; they were also imprisoned and forced to flee the country as a result of threats against their lives.

Several journalists have been killed in Haiti in recent years, among them Radio Haiti-Inter Director Jean Dominique in April 2000, Radio Echo 2000 reporter Brignol Lindor in December 2001, and Jacques Roche, a TV host, poet, and an editor at the daily newspaper Le Matin, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2005.



But despite powerful forces arrayed against independent reporting, Haiti's journalists have persisted in the face of such adversity—good preparation, some might say, for today's challenges.



"I ran to my house and found that my wife had died," says Marcus Garcia, director of Radio Mélodie FM, a station that has continued broadcasting with the aid of generator despite the lack of electricity or telephone service. "But life has to continue, and if my wife was alive, she would want me to continue as I am doing, working for the people."

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Last summer, a woman wearing hospital scrubs and a backpack stepped into a room of the maternity ward at the Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas. She picked up a 2-day-old baby that didn't belong to her and made for the stairs.

The hospital was just two miles up the road from where military doctor Nidal Hasan would open fire on his fellow soldiers three months later. While that crime seems to have been enabled by sloppy oversight and missed signals, the attempted kidnapping in July was foiled by an efficient, well-designed security apparatus. The baby thief tripped an "infant abduction alarm system" on her way out of the ward, and the building was placed into lockdown. Panicked, she abandoned the infant—later recovered, unhurt—and raced out of the building. Surveillance cameras in the hallway captured her face, and she was arrested four days later.

This astounding level of protection for newborn babies—hallway cameras, alarm systems and auto-locking doors—isn't unique to Army installations. Over the past 20 years, medical administrators have become increasingly attuned to the danger of baby-snatching, in which intruders posing as medical staff pilfer newborns straight from the nursery crib. In a recent survey of hospital security directors conducted by the industry trade magazine Campus Safety, 32 percent reported the purchase or planned purchase of an "infant abduction prevention solution" in 2009. That answer ranked higher than patrol vehicles, fire alarms, turnstiles, emergency lighting, and backup generators. Even with dwindling resources at their disposal, hospital managers are investing in advanced baby-snatching countermeasures like the one used at Fort Hood.

The movement to ward off kidnappings—to "harden the target," in hospital-security parlance—began in 1989, when the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) published the first edition of its cautionary manual for healthcare professionals, Guidelines on Prevention of and Response to Infant Abductions. That book, now in its ninth edition, calls for installing alarms in maternity ward stairwells, locks on every door, and security cameras for the hallways. The NCMEC also recommends that each newborn be footprinted and photographed (in color) within two hours of its birth and "quad-banded"—tagged with a pair of ID bracelets matching those worn by its mother and father. The book further suggests that a sample of the baby's cord blood be stored (to allow for later DNA analysis), and that all medical staff be given appropriate security badges. Some hospitals change the color of those badges every day, like pins at the museum, and tell the mothers which colors to expect.

Then there are the really high-tech measures, like the "Hugs" Infant Protection System (with optional "Kisses" add-on for enhanced mother/infant matching). These consist of radio transponders that tie around a baby's ankle or clamp to its umbilical cord, so the infant's location can be tracked from a nurse's station and an alarm sounded if it leaves a designated area. Here's a video demonstration. It's like baby LoJack.

Hospital administrators take the security guidelines very seriously. An institution's anti-abduction protocols are worked into marketing copy on its Web site and highlighted in recruiting tours for expectant mothers. Having a safe and secure maternity ward—a hard target for baby-snatching—has become a valuable part of the hospital sales pitch.

But there's something fishy about the newly fortified birthing centers. The truth is that no one is trying to steal your baby. It doesn't matter what kind of ID tags your hospital employs, or how many surveillance cameras are mounted in the hallway. The incidence of nonfamily infant abductions is so impossibly low—the actual crime so rare in practice—that it hardly matters at all. Yes, the attempt at Fort Hood points to the fact that a small handful of newborns are stolen every year. Yet our obsession with security has turned the figure of the baby-snatcher into a paranoid fantasy. The precautions that are now in place aren't merely unjustified. They're doing more harm than good.

Consider the stats. The NCMEC has systematically compiled information on every case of baby-snatching (PDF) since 1983, a 26-year stretch in which it has recorded a total of 267 incidents. Over the same period, 108 million babies were born in the United States. That is to say, the chance a stranger will steal your newborn—from your hospital room, your home nursery, or anywhere else—is about one in 400,000. That's a very, very small number. Here's some perspective: Your baby's odds of getting snatched are considerably smaller—five times smaller, in fact—than her odds of being struck and killed by a lightning bolt.

Some parents are more worried about baby-switching than baby-snatching. We don't have any good data on switches, but a 1996 study by the security consulting firm Inter/Action Associates estimated they're somewhat less common than abductions—happening just two or three times per year.

Even the baby-snatching numbers grossly overstate the dangers of infant abduction. With help from the FBI, analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have thoroughly profiled the 267 criminals in their database. Some clear patterns emerge: The thief is almost always a woman of child-bearing age, usually in a relationship with a boyfriend or husband. She often commits the crime in an effort to salvage her romance: She fakes a pregnancy and tells her partner that the stolen infant belongs to him. Even when she's not trying to dupe a lover, the snatcher's intentions tend to be uncomplicated: She will care for the baby as if it were her own.

Another fact about baby-snatchers is that they almost always get caught. Like so many other parents, the rare successful baby-snatcher basks in the attention that comes with a newborn. So there's a good chance the missing infant will be paraded around the neighborhood even as the crime is covered in the local news. According to NCMEC, more than 90 percent of all infant abductions result in the baby being returned to its real family in good health. That low rate of violence is more than just a happy detail. It reveals that stolen babies are much less likely to be harmed by their captors than older kidnapping victims. The Department of Justice estimates that 100 or so children and teenagers are abducted by strangers every year. Half of these are sexually assaulted, and 40 percent are killed (PDF).

That's not to say the growth of the baby-security industry hasn't had any positive effects. The numbers show that total infant abductions are down by one-third since 1995, with thefts from health care settings reduced by two-thirds. The quad-bands and baby LoJack work—but only in the sense that a virtually insignificant problem has now become ever-so-slightly less significant. Even before the advent of high-tech umbilical tags, the likelihood of your infant getting stolen was one in 300,000—and the chance of her being physically harmed during an abduction was at most one in 3 million. (More perspective: One in 3.8 million Americans is crushed to death by a nonvenomous reptile.)

So if baby-snatching was never much of a problem to begin with, why are health care administrators across the country so focused on its prevention? The history of the panic—with its abrupt beginning in the late 1980s and gradual inflation over the following decade—mirrors a broader shift in the medical industry. Hospitals now advertise their services directly to the public, and their efforts are directed, first and foremost, at the most valuable health care demographic: young, pregnant women.

The idea that patients might be wooed with perks and gimmicks emerged in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of managed care. The size and scope of HMOs helped insurance companies squeeze lower rates from the providers. ("Cut your prices, or you're out of the network.") So the hospitals were forced into a more aggressive posture: They stayed in business by actively recruiting customers.

From the beginning, women of child-bearing age were central to the business plan. Maternity wards provided a steady source of revenue in uncertain times. But it wasn't the babies the industry was after so much as the moms. Studies showed that women were responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the health care decisions for their entire families. If you could get a young woman into your hospital when she was just starting a family, you'd have a shot at locking down four or five customers for life.

So began the "Maternity Wars." Birth centers across the country were renovated and ramped up to attract market share, and the maternity ward started to resemble a luxury hotel. Hospitals advertised single-occupancy rooms with flat-screen TVs, plush bathrobes, and deep Jacuzzi tubs. (The unspectacular New York City hospital where I was born in the 1970s now sports Italian glass tile, elegant sconces, and decorative mirrors.) Once all these perks were in place, enhanced infant security was a logical next step. Come for the lakeside views, the fresh-baked cookies, and the motion-activated surveillance cameras …

A competitive marketplace for moms has turned the baby-snatching panic into an expensive arms race: If Mercy West is using umbilical transponders, what kind of parent would risk delivering at Seattle Grace? Now we're seeing hospitals shell out for infant protection and identification systems with six-figure price tags. Those investments, along with the rest of the money that goes into birth center perks, shake out in higher insurance premiums. That's not the only source of increased medical spending: The inflated standards for infant safety may leave some institutions more vulnerable to baby-snatching lawsuits—and multimillion-dollar settlements—in those very rare cases when abductions do occur. According to risk-management expert Fay Rozovsky, some hospitals are buying liability insurance to hedge against this scenario.

The panic over baby-snatching carries a further emotional cost for young parents already dumbfounded by the living, breathing, gurgling creature that just entered their lives. Following the NCMEC guidelines, many hospitals are now stoking our more natural anxieties by warning parents against posting photos of their babies online or decorating their front yards with "signs, balloons, large floral wreaths, and other lawn ornaments." (These might "call attention to the presence of a new infant in the home.") Newspaper announcements are also discouraged, despite data showing that these have played a role in just 2 percent of all known infant abductions.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the baby-snatching panic is its potential for inciting violence. It turns out that heightened security at the hospital has pushed the snatchers toward other venues where they can find newborns. While infant abductions from health care settings have dropped by two-thirds since 1995, the number of attacks in other places—shopping malls, parking lots, people's houses—has risen by 13 percent. That's a danger in itself. Women who stake out hospital nurseries tend to grab a baby and run, like the snatcher at Fort Hood; the ones who end up inside a mother's home are more inclined toward confrontation. According to the NCMEC data, the risk of physical harm goes up by a factor of almost four.

Thus the case of Maria Gurrola, who was choked and stabbed in the neck and chest at her home in Tennessee in September after a woman posing as an immigration official tried to steal her 4-day-old son. And that of Andrea Curry-Demus, the Pittsburgh-area woman who was found guilty last week of murdering an expectant mother in her apartment after removing the victim's unborn child. (The baby survived and remains in good health.) America's most famous baby-snatching—of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. in 1932—also took the form of a home invasion and ended with a murder.

These are awful, terrifying crimes, but a few grisly news reports needn't make us panic any more than we already have. Real-life infant abductions (and baby switches) are freak events, affecting an infinitesimal subset of the population. That doesn't mean we shouldn't make smart choices to minimize tiny risks. Footprinting and ID bracelets offer sensible and appropriate protection against unlikely mistakes. But a consumer-minded, zero-tolerance policy that pushes for high-tech alarm systems isn't saving any lives. The real problem here is the handful of baby-snatchers who will always live among us, desperate and insane. These women will find their opportunities, one way or another—and they won't be deterred by the "Cuddles with Kisses" system in the maternity ward. We have an obligation to keep babies and mothers safe, but the frenzy over infant abduction isn't helping.

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I Am Ozzy is the title of his book. Perfect. Not They Call Me Ozzy or The Ozz I Waz or even Why Ozz? Because. Just this bald declarative, this absolute. And here it all is, in vivid as-told-to prose, an identity and its roots: the childhood playing in a dark city (Birmingham) still half-flattened by Hitler's bombs; the industrialized young manhood in a factory testing car horns and then in a slaughterhouse; the tattooed grandmother, the early imprisonment, the graffiti-ing of the words "IRON VOID" on a roadside wall; the lost fights, the "mouthful of pub carpet"; the bestial recoil from "the hippy-dippy shit that was all over the radio"; and the epochal day when his bandmate Tony Iommi ("an incredible fighter") says, "Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead."

Lester Bangs wrote in 1972 that Black Sabbath was "probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption." Was he thinking of lines like "Day of Judgment, God is calling/ On their knees, the war pigs crawling"? Or of Iommi's de profundis guitar tone, the huge doleful burden of it, as much a sign as a sound, traveling out into space and separation? St. Paul would have had no trouble recognizing it: "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain until now."

Elementally, Sabbath was a power trio plus one: a post-Cream unit playing with thick-toned fluidity (they could shuffle, stroll, vamp, swing, crunch) to which had been added this voice, this presence that lived at the edge of the music, alienated and premonitory. "When sadness fills my days/ It's time to turn away/ And then tomorrow's dreams/ Become reality to me." It was literally prophetic: If anyone in the early '70s had "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," it was Ozzy. His wail, his call, raised itself starkly and with a curious chastity over the general boogie-band din of the hour. And what was he prophesying? "Long ago I wandered through my mind/ In the land of fairy tales and stories/ Lost in happiness I knew no fears/ Innocence and love was all I knew ... It was an illusion!" Or more succinctly: "You're havin' a good time, baby/ But it won't last."

Fervently as he sang them, the words weren't his: They were the words of Sabbath's druidic bass-hog and chief lyricist Geezer Butler, with whom Ozzy shared an uncanny symbiosis—a symbiozzis, you might say. Geezer—"not your average bloke," as I Am Ozzy puts it—was a fearsome poet, as well as a natural depressive, who in his childhood had wanted to be a Catholic priest. His deep-sea broodings and stoned Ultimata in a sense created Ozzy, fulfilled the Ozz-ness, just as Chuck Dukowski's Geezer-inflected lyrics for Black Flag would one day fulfill the Rollins-ness of Henry Rollins. "I have a prediction/ It lives in my brain/ It's with me every day/ It drives me insane." Dukowski or Butler?

Geezer had his flowery, World of Warcraft side, too. I Am Ozzy records a scene from the making of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: Ozzy, in need of lyrics for "Spiral Architect," gets Geezer on the phone. Geezer grumbles a bit, says he'll call back in an hour. "When I spoke to him again, he said 'Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: "Sorcerers of madness/ Selling me their time/ Child of God sitting in the sun ..." ' "

And always, beneath it all, Iommi. There's no ripping off Tony Iommi: His sound is a rite, and to attempt to play like him is a religious act. A thousand bands have done it, from Pentagram to St. Vitus to Alice in Chains: His influence runs like a seam through 30 years of hard rock. (Currently the most reverent copyists seem to be Swedish: Graveyard and Witchcraft, both of which try like hell, and with occasional success, for that blues-y, tambourine-y, early Sabbath feel.)

Black Sabbath, shamans of the mental trough-state, was also a working-class English band that sold a pile of records and did a pile of cocaine. For a few years there, the world was at their feet, and the Sabbath songbook is not without its Oasis-like moments of hooligan exultation. "Supernaut," for instance: "I wanna reach out/ And touch the sky/ I wanna touch the sun/ But I don't need to fly." Inevitably, the crash came: By 1979, Ozzy, who had been deteriorating in grand style at the country seat he nicknamed Atrocity Cottage—"I put down the shotgun, picked up the jerry can, and started emptying it over what was left of the chickens"—was finally unworkable-with, and Sabbath fired him.

Act 2. Shattered, addicted, rejected, a psychological disaster area, Ozzy nonetheless gets his musical shit together. Aided by the formidable Sharon, to whom he is not yet married, he scores himself a killer guitarist (the late Randy Rhoads), and together they write Blizzard of Ozz. Rhoads is pure flash-metal, an anti-Iommi, spewing technique all over the album's lightweight riffola. But it works! The Ozz has gone pop, after his fashion, thereby liberating enormous energies of adoration in his fanbase—energies that the old trouper knows exactly what to do with. "Awright! Okay! You can't kill rock'n'roll! Keep on smoking them JOINTS!!!! I wanna see your hands!" Etc. (Quotations culled from the live album Randy Rhoads Tribute, or from any Ozzy show since 1980.) Lyrically he emerges from the Geezerian under-realm and into his own strobe-lit zone of party-time insanity and going "cray-zay." "What's the future of mankind?/ How do I know?" The people eat it up. This proceeds, expandingly, for two decades.

Act 3. Married to Sharon, and with foulmouthed nearly-grown-up children wandering about the place, Ozzy in the year 2001 invites the virus of reality into his L.A. home. ("I've always believed that you've got to move with the times.") Cameras everywhere, and The Osbournes occurs on MTV—Ozzy as profane and befuddled paterfamilias, scratching pitifully at a sealed DVD case while comedy tubas fart away on the soundtrack. Dog shit is a theme: "I don't mind a little fucking Pomeranian turd," mumbles Ozzy as he staggers through the kitchen in his sweatpants, "but when that fucking bulldog unloads ..." A smash hit: His celebrity is sealed. Greta Van Susteren invites him to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, where George W Bush makes a joke about him.

That's what you might call a portfolio career, and a whole lot of Ozzy. Too much, perhaps, at this point? Are we Ozz'd-out? Impossible. His reputation is indestructibly preserved in layers of heavy metal irony. His rapport with his audience remains ferocious. He still sings with that distinctively smeared sense of melody. His last album, 2007's Black Rain, was actually sort of a knockout: heavy, impassioned, and produced (by Kevin Churko) to flatten tall buildings. "Knowing me," he muses fatalistically at the end of I Am Ozzy, "I'll go out in some stupid way. I'll trip on the doorstep and break my neck. Or I'll choke on a throat lozenge. Or a bird will shit on me and give me some weird virus from another planet." My money, if I had to bet, would be on the interstellar bird-poop.

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Our last article summarized the current state of research on teens and risk. That research demonstrates that teenagers do not suffer from some special inability to reason. Larry Steinberg and other researchers explain the steep rise in risk-taking behavior that comes with puberty by elaborating the interplay between two brain systems. The social-emotional system, which develops robustly in early adolescence, seeks out rewarding experiences, especially the sensation afforded by novel and risky behavior, and is also activated by the presence of peers. The cognitive-control system, which undergoes its great burst of development in later adolescence, evaluates and governs the impulses of the social-emotional system.

During the years of greatest risk-taking, which peak somewhere around the age of 16 and during which the presence of peers greatly increases risk-taking, the adolescent brain is like a car with a powerful accelerator (the sensation- and peer-seeking social-emotional system) and weak brakes (the risk-containing cognitive-control system). That being the case, it's clear why some common approaches to reducing risk-taking by teenagers—explaining why drunk driving is dangerous, asking them to pledge to abstain from premarital sex—don't work very well.

A couple of qualifications are in order. First, the social-emotional system is not always "active." When adolescents are emotionally excited, stimulated, or with peers (which amounts to the same thing, as the brain sees it), the social-emotional system is likely to kick in and exert influence that leads to risk taking. Yet, even those early adolescents most prone to risky behavior can often exert cognitive control and regulate their impulses under conditions in which there is little or no arousal—when peers are not around, for instance.

Second, knowledge of the interconnections among brain function, hormones, behavior, and interpersonal influences is advancing rapidly, so it's likely that the current understanding offers only a partial picture and account. It's also a one-size-fits-all explanation for a process that shows a great deal of variation. We don't yet have a good predictive understanding of who will and will not show high-risk behaviors.

But there's enough clarity in the current research to warrant a second look at some common beliefs about teenagers and risk and some common parental approaches to dealing with it. Having started out in our last article by debunking myths and criticizing some common approaches to reducing risk-taking, we hasten to add that the research also supports the efficacy of some tried-and-true approaches.

Now, if you're expecting modern science to produce a magic-bullet gimmick—or a pill—to contain teen risk, you're going to be disappointed. The parental responses supported by recent research are as mundane as they get. They may strike you as obvious, but that doesn't mean they're unimportant or necessarily easy to pursue. Dealing with adolescent risk seems to be a challenge best addressed not with sudden drastic measures but by sticking to the fundamentals of good parenting over the long haul.

To begin with, the research underscores that the company your child keeps is important. Because early adolescence is a period of increased susceptibility to peer influences, having friends who engage in risky behaviors increases an individual's likelihood of engaging in these behaviors. Affiliating with deviant peers is one of the strongest predictors for adolescents engaging in substance use and abuse.

And don't underrate the value of simply playing for time. It can seem defeatist to tell yourself, "If I can just get my kid through adolescence in one piece, everything will be all right," but there's wisdom in that common parental resolve. The research shows that the earlier the onset of risk behavior, the more likely that there will be negative consequences—poorer mental and physical health later on in life, less economic productivity, and so on. Postponing the onset of risky behaviors through other activities, including out-and-out distraction and pandering ("Let's go clothes shopping again!") is not the worst strategy. Postponing and limiting contact with peers who engage in risky behavior can also help.

How do you do this?

1. Monitor your child

Monitoring means keeping track of where your child is, what he's doing, and whom he's with. The teenage children of parents who monitor their whereabouts and activities are much less likely to engage in sexual activity and illicit drug use. Also, more intense monitoring is associated with greater reduction in risky behavior. This is referred to as a dose-response relation: The more of the dose, the greater the impact. If you feel awkward and uncool about hounding your poor child, remember that there's a strong dose-response relation between monitoring and decreased risk.

One reason proposed for the finding that boys engage in more risky behavior than girls is that parents monitor teenage girls more closely than they do boys. For example, girls have earlier curfews and more household chores to do. There's nothing fair or enlightened about this gender difference, but it has the effect of reducing girls' risk-taking.

But there is more to monitoring than coplike surveillance, and quality matters as much as quantity. The members of families in which parents monitor have stronger ties, are more involved with one another, have warmer relationships, and are more cohesive and communicate better. A more askable, approachable parent with a warm relationship to a child will have more success in monitoring without turning into a warden. To that end, it helps to make monitoring normal and mutual in your household—which you can model by talking to your children about your day at the dinner table or during rides in the car—and to begin early. Monitoring will not work if all of a sudden when your child hits age 12 you develop an intense interest in her whereabouts that takes the form of verbal waterboarding. Also, making your home a place where your child can bring friends while you are there is a form of low-key monitoring that strikes a compromise with the adolescent brain's craving for contact with peers.

For those reasons, the research tends to support the mass media campaign sponsored by the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, "Parents—the Anti-Drug," which encourages parental monitoring to deter teen drug abuse. That would seem more promising than "Just Say No."

2. Build and model bonds to conventional values

Maybe they no longer sound quite so conventional, but valuing schoolwork, time with family, and extracurricular activities are still rewarded in the long run in our society. Building these habits early in life, in elementary school, has been shown to decrease later risky activities. Establishing routines and rituals within the family—special holidays, meals, weekly errands done together with a child, activities in the home that are a regular part of everyday life—can facilitate bonding to the family. Your valuing of reading and learning, teachers and their mission, doing well in school, and other aspects of education will be helpful in a preventive way later. This doesn't mean expecting perfect or high achievement, but it does mean explicitly valuing academic effort and an appreciation of school. And it also obliges you to model the behavior you want: not only respect for school but also moderation, reason, hard work, whatever you expect of your children. The research shows, for instance, that parents who talk about the riskiness of substance abuse and who do not engage in it themselves measurably reduce their children's risk.

3. Develop competencies in the child

Many parents send their children to all sorts of lessons, the familar scheduling overkill, but it's perhaps more reasonable to find one or two areas the child likes and encourage the extended development of skill in them. There's no need to insist on world-beating talent, but it is important to build some competence—in a musical instrument, sport, hobby, or other skill, anything from singing to taking care of animals—and it would be preferable to include an activity in which peers are involved and that might continue into adolescence. The peer component often includes structured activities, like practices and games, or rehearsals and concerts, which the parent can monitor and in which peers are engaging in prosocial activity most of the time and under the supervision of some adult. These typically establish protective influences for when the child is likely to go through the risky period.

4. Parent-child relationship

Of course, this relationship is always important, but it's worth underscoring in this context. For instance, when there's more parent connectedness—a child feeling close, loved, wanted, listened to, and satisfied with the relationship—a child is at much less risk for engaging in dangerous behaviors. The research also shows that parents' presence in the home at key times during the day—before and after school, at dinner, at bedtime—helps reduce the likelihood of risky behaviors.

More generally, a parent's being too loose (permissive, uninvolved) or too tight (authoritarian, controlling) is associated with more antisocial behavior by the child. So, yes, it's important to set up consistent expectations for responsibilities at home and at school, but it's also useful to go out of your way to have discussions in which you listen to your child's view and make as few decisions as possible based on "Because I say so." Compromise when you can and let some things go when you can. Consider bedtime, curfew, messy room, and weird personal appearance as areas in which you can give a little. When you give a little there, you can gain credibility, control, and reasonableness when the topics shift to tattoos, rings through unlikely orifices, and taking two years off high school to learn about the latter-day hippie network in the Southwest.

Parents are often devoted to slippery-slope logic—"If I let this one go, I lose control, and my child will become a barbarian"—but that's typically the opposite of what happens. Go to war over every minor thing and you lose both the minor and the major. And the metaphor of losing battles but winning the war is misguided because it starts out by pitting you against your child. A better metaphor: You are sailing the ship toward a goal of a well-adjusted, functioning, non-freeloading adulthood for your child. This requires tacking, which can look like one is veering away from the goal, but tacking is often the best path to the goal.

This all makes it seem as if you're hanging on while the hurricane of adolescence blows through your child's brain and your home. That's what it can feel like. But to say that much of the impulse toward risky behavior seems to be biologically driven does not mean that it's biologically determined, an ineluctable fate. We have learned from brain as well as genetic studies that environmental changes can have enormous impact on biological processes, and changes in those processes can importantly change behavior. Your choices as a parent are a major part of your child's environment. The scope of such environmental changes' effect on young people's risky behavior is not clear yet, but some influences have been studied, do have an effect, and provide useful guidelines for parents entering the home stretch of child rearing. Here are some resources for parents and some leading examples of research in the field.

Return to article

Teen risk behavior fact sheet.

Facts about teen drivers, from the CDC.

Lac, A., & Crano, W.D. (2009). Monitoring matters: Meta-analytic review reveals the reliable linkage of parental monitoring with adolescent marijuana use. Perspectives in Psychological Science, 4, 578-586.

Steinberg, L. (2008). A social neuroscience perspective on adolescent risk-taking. Developmental Review, 28, 78-106.

Wolfe, D.A., et al. (2006). Adolescent risk behaviors: Why teens experiment and strategies to keep them safe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Parents: The Anti-Drug.

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In a Feb. 3 "Prescriptions," Timothy Noah identified Avastin as an anti-cholesterol drug. Avastin is an anti-cancer drug.

In a Feb. 3 entry of "TV Club," Chadwick Matlin listed "The Numbers" in Lost as 4, 8, 15, 16, 24, 42. They are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. He also misspelled the name of Ilana's henchman Bram.

In a February 2 "The Oscars," Joe Keohane misspelled the name of a mythical beast from the Star Wars universe. It is a tauntaun, not a tonton.

In the Feb. 2 "The Slatest," Meredith Simon incorrectly described The Hurt Locker as a documentary.

In the Feb. 2 "Technology," Farhad Manjoo originally misstated the year Apple introduced the iMac. It was 1998, not 1988.

In the Feb. 1 "Dispatches" slide show, Matthew Power quoted a needle-exchange slogan as "Make it your gig to recycle your rig." The slogan is "Make it your gig to return your rig."

In the Feb. 1 "The Slatest," Jessica Loudis incorrectly wrote that the proposed spending for NASA's "space taxi" program was $6 million. It is $6 billion.

In the Jan. 29 "Explainer," Brian Palmer misidentified one of the sources for the column, Tony Ascroft, as Paul Judkins. Mr. Judkins, also an expert on 3-D filmmaking, was not consulted for this article.

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

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The Spot: Open on a pasture full of grazing sheep. A woman's voice speaks as words flash on-screen: "Purity. Piety. … Wholesome. Honorable. True Believers. Men like Tom Campbell, who would never lead us astray, his pedestal so high." An animation shows one sheep elevated atop a tall column, high above the others. Suddenly clouds gather, lightning strikes, and the sheep falls. Ominous music as a new, evil-sounding male voice tells us about how Tom Campbell raised taxes as California's chief budget officer. "Is that fiscally conservative, Tom?" Intercut with quick images of pigs and sheep. Finally, cut back to sheep grazing. "Tom Campbell: Is he what he tells us? Or is he what he's become over the years? A F-C-I-N-O? Fiscal Conservative in Name Only? A wolf in sheep's clothing?" Cut to man in red-eyed sheep costume crawling through the meadow, scaring the other sheep away. "Might there be a better choice?" the voice asks. Cut to Carly Fiorina in a conference room. "Someone who has not made a career of politics. A political outsider. Perhaps a proven fiscal conservative. … Now that sounds like the right choice for California."

Political advertising is an inherently conservative form. And conservative politicians use it especially conservatively. Anything other than softly lit shots of a candidate and his or her family, with perhaps a cutaway or two to the flag or some hardworking Americans, is considered high-risk. Attack ads are even more likely to backfire and are thus to be used only in times of desperation.

Which may explain the bewildered response to Carly Fiorina's new ad, "FCINO." Wonkette called the ruby-eyed sheep's first appearance "the absolute most terrifying second of video on YouTube since the most recently uploaded clip of Roger Ailes." Valleywag dubbed it "inept." One new media expert dismissed it as "Jon Stewart material." Meanwhile, #demonsheep is currently a trending topic on Twitter, and some quick thinker is tweeting away as @demonsheep. Both opponents of Fiorina, the former CEO of H-P who is running for the Republican nomination for Barbara Boxer's Senate seat, have piled on.

The man to credit—or to blame—is Republican media consultant Fred Davis, the closest thing political advertising has to an auteur. Unlike just about any political media guru out there, Davis embraces weirdness. His oeuvre includes a giant rat storming through downtown Atlanta, a massive hairpiece atop the Illinois statehouse, and a full-length cowboy Western song about a sitting senator. You'd think most campaigns would either laugh him out of the room or run screaming.

And yet, he gets hired. McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt called him "the most creative person in the business—period." When the Fiorina campaign brought him onboard, it knew what it was getting. "He has a reputation for doing things outside the box, that grab attention," says Fiorina spokeswoman Julie Soderlund.

His ads may not be instantly recognizable, but they do contain similar themes and motifs. Aerial shots of American landscape abound. Better yet, giant things casting shadows across aerial shots of American landscape. Time-lapse footage helps suggest that your candidate can navigate a chaotic world with a sense of calm and direction. If you can get your candidate to stand along a fence—George W. Bush, Sonny Perdue—by all means do. Animal metaphors? Go for it. Former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia is depicted as "King Roy," a Godzilla-sized rat storming through downtown Atlanta. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is intercut with shots of horses running free and a Cornyn look-alike atop one. And, yes, Tom Campbell is a Satanic man-sheep furry from hell.

Davis can do positive—see this family-friendly spot he produced for Elizabeth Dole in 2002—but he nails negative. He's the guy behind the "Celeb" ad in 2008 that turned the widespread adoration for Barack Obama on its head. His spot that shows men and women on the street sharing doubts about then-senatorial candidate Harold Ford predicted the RNC's more famous—and more ham-handed—"Playboy bunny" attack ad. And his sendup of a carpetbagging House candidate in Georgia is one of the funniest political ads on the Web.

Bad political spots simply state a candidate's positions. Good ones evoke emotions that the viewer then associates with the candidate. The best ones take full advantage of the medium. To suggest that California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides would take the state backward, Davis used backward video to show a diver rising up out of a lake and traffic moving in reverse. He depicted widespread corruption in Chicago by showing hoards of men and women in suits wearing Ron Blagojevich-like wigs. He wouldn't be a bad choice to direct the next Coldplay video.

Then there's "FCINO." Where Davis's best ads are simple and clear, his "demon sheep" spot is confusing and sloppy. It took me two full views to figure out. Why is the voice-over praising Campbell at the beginning? Ah, sarcasm. But why is it good to be a sheep? Aren't they supposed to symbolize herd mentality or something? OK, I see, he loves taxes. Wait, now there are pigs and sheep? Also, how do you pronounce "FCINO"? I know it's like "RINO," but—OH GOD WHAT IS THAT THING? [Frantically shuts laptop.]

Soderlund, the campaign spokeswoman, told me the spot took about a week to make. The shots of the sheep, including the demon sheep, were not filmed for this spot in particular, but came from footage Davis had shot for another project. (Perhaps this one?) Fiorina has been down in the polls ever since Campbell joined the Republican primary, and this Web video—Fiorina's first—was presumably an attempt to capture attention and change the narrative. Well, it certainly has. Before, Fiorina was a former CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Now she's the lady who made the "demon sheep" ad. Voters may learn Fiorina's name because of this ad. But will they vote for her because of it?

To its credit, the campaign gets the joke. "I think it's fine to make fun of it," says Soderlund. But self-awareness is easy to claim after the fact, and the campaign has proven itself to have a tin ear. Its first tagline: "Carlyfornia dreamin!!!" Its initial Web site was similarly bizarre. Soderlund promises more of the same. "If you were shocked by this, you'll be really shocked moving forward."

The unfortunate part is that taking chances should be encouraged. The fact that Davis is an anomaly says more about the dearth of creativity in political media than it does about Davis. Political advertising is a form that needs more risk-takers.

Grade: C+. "Rule number one in advertising: If your message isn't seen, you are wasting your money," Davis told the Washington Post in January. "Be big and bold. Be different." Mission accomplished. But rule No. 2 is also pretty important: Get your candidate elected, not mocked. It's hard to see how this ad burnishes Fiorina's reputation—or her chances in the June primary.

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When Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out his $708.2 billion budget proposal this week, he also submitted a 48-page document called the "Ballistic Missile Defense Review." Reading this review, you might think that Gates was slashing the missile-defense program. You'd be wrong.

Gates writes of "a new course for spending" that is responsive to "budgetary constraints." He says he won't deploy any system until it passes realistic tests. (In more than a decade of development, no BMD system has been subject to any realistic tests, and none has passed more than half of the rigged ones.) And he's moving away from exotic technologies based on "unrealistic concepts of operation" and designed for threats that won't exist for a long, long time, if ever. Gates says that the program will deal with threats as they evolve. But, he adds, this does not require us to push ahead with missile defenses "at the same accelerated rate" as we have "in recent years."

There's a mismatch, however, between Gates' words and his actions. His proposed missile defense budget for fiscal year 2011 amounts to a staggering $10.4 billion. This is $2 billion less than George W. Bush requested (and received) for missile defense—his most cherished military program—in his last year as president. But it's $700 million more than Gates himself received in FY 2010.

The program is getting more expensive and, in some respects, more exotic—not less.

First, let's get straight on how much money this program is consuming, a more complicated matter than any other part of the defense budget. In his Feb. 2 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gates said he was requesting $9.9 billion for missile defense. But the day before, at the Pentagon's press briefings on the budget, David Altwegg, the program manager for the Missile Defense Agency, put the figure at $8.4 billion.

What accounts for the difference? Three things.

First, the Missile Defense Agency controls most, but not all, of the money for missile defense. The Army controls the program for upgraded Patriot surface-to-air missiles; that amounts to about $1 billion. Various support items for these missiles, also in the Army budget, add up to another $400 million. A space-laser research program, once in the MDA budget but now in the Pentagon's research and engineering office, takes up $100 million. (See the Defense Department's budget books on these items.)

Those three items add up to $1.5 billion—the difference between the two statements by Altwegg and Gates.

Quite apart from this, the Air Force is requesting another $500 million for the space-based infrared system, or SBIRS. This is an element of the missile-defense system, even though, for reasons I've never understood, no administration has ever included it in the missile-defense budget.

So, Gates' $9.9 billion, plus $500 million for SBIRS, equals $10.4 billion. This is not exactly a sign of heeding "budgetary constraints."

Gates is terminating a few pieces of the program. One of them is the "Multiple Kill Vehicle," designed to shoot down warheads and possible decoys as they arc across outer space in the middle of their flight paths. As the BMD Review states, this program is "not maturing at a reasonable rate." (Translation: It has been failing tests and nobody thinks it's going to work.) Similarly, the "Kinetic Energy Interceptor," designed to shoot down enemy missiles as they're launching into the sky, before they get out of the atmosphere, is "neither affordable nor proven," "could not be integrated into existing weapons platforms or systems," and had nearly doubled in cost.

It is worth noting that the Bush administration had described both of these components as critical to the entire missile-defense system. And in fact, they were critical. Under Bush's plan (and Obama's doesn't differ on this point), a full-blown system—if one were ever really built and deployed—would entail a multi-staged, networked system, in which warning systems, tracking radars, firing mechanisms, and missiles (or lasers or whatever weapons are at hand) act in tandem, automatically, to shoot down enemy missiles at several points in their flight path.

The first stage of defense, called "boost-phase intercept," would shoot at the enemy missiles soon after they blasted off. The second phase, "midcourse intercept," would shoot at them as they arced through outer space. The final phase, "terminal-phase intercept," would involve ground-based rockets slamming into the enemy's warheads as they plunged to their targets on American soil.

In most analyses, official and otherwise, the first phase, the "boost-phase intercept," is most crucial. In one sense, the enemy's missile at this phase would be an easy target: Its rocket engines are still burning, and it's moving slowly in a straight, vertical line. In another sense, though, it's very hard: The boost phase lasts only a few minutes, so our interceptors would have to be within range of the missile site. This is one reason Gates killed the Airborne Laser System, a modified 747 jetliner fitted with lasers to shoot down ascending missiles.

However, to replace this item, Gates is restarting a research program in "directed energy"—that is, space-based lasers. This has long been dismissed as the stuff of science fiction. (Ronald Reagan put much stock in lasers when he introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983; it's why some nicknamed the program "star wars.") Certainly it's inconsistent with Gates' pledge to downplay exotic technologies.

True, he's hardly emphasizing lasers. He's presenting it as a research project—within the Defense Department's directorate of research and engineering, not within the Missile Defense Agency—and giving it $100 million, chicken feed in the Pentagon's vast coffers.

It may be that Gates is tossing the space-based-defense crowd a bone. But if boost-phase intercept is a vital part of a missile-defense system, if all the ideas for boost-phase intercept have washed out, and if the only thing going for it is a laser-research project that's not likely to bear fruit for decades, if ever—then the whole vision of a multi-phased missile-defense system is in deep trouble. If that's the case, and if there's no way around it, the idea of spending $10.4 billion on a dream system begins to sound like a fool's errand.

Gates is requesting more money for missiles and sensors—modified Patriots, SM3s, Aegis missiles, X-band radars, and so forth—designed to shoot down short- and medium-range missiles fired by Iran or North Korea against our allies in Europe. This isn't a bad idea, on substantive and political grounds. Shorter-range missiles are easier to track and shoot down than intercontinental missiles. And after canceling Bush's ill-considered missile-defense deployments in Poland and the Czech Republic, Gates needs to reassure the Europeans that we take their security seriously.

So a word to Congress: Keep this "regional defense" stuff (some of it anyway), and drain the rest. If canceling the latter is too daring, turn it into a low-level research project, which is all it's worth, anyway. In other words, align Gates' budget with Gates' words. And save several billion dollars, too.

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Rahm Emanuel

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel earned a trip to the pillory this week after a Wall Street Journal story reported that he had used forbidden language last summer in a strategy session with liberal groups and White House aides. Emanuel, who knows his way around obscene, venomous, and cruel language called one idea presented at the session "Fucking retarded."

After the press and bloggers picked up the story, Sarah Palin used her Facebook page to call for Emanuel's sacking and equated the utterance with the "N-word." (Palin is mother to a child with Down syndrome.) Special Olympics Chief Executive Tim Shriver chastised Emanuel the day the Journal article ran, Jan. 26, and after a face-to-face meeting with advocates for people with intellectual disabilities—including Shriver—Emanuel kowtowed and his apologies were accepted.

According to a press release put out over Shriver's name, Emanuel has promised that "the administration would continue to look for ways to partner with us, including examining pending legislation in Congress to remove the R word from federal law." The release also reiterates the activists' ambitions to eradicate the words retard and retarded from everyday speech because they dehumanize the nation's "seven million people with intellectual disabilities."

The quest to protect the vulnerable from ridicule may be noble, but if a Slate piece from 2001 by John Cook is any guide, it's an impossible quest—and the activists know it. In thrusting public scorn on Emanuel, the activists—no matter how high-minded they might be—are guilty of craven opportunism. Emanuel may have a big mouth, but he is no bigot, no torturer of the defenseless, and the language police that swarmed and handcuffed him, Palin included, should have their badges revoked.

Before you organize a torchlight parade to my office demanding that Slate fire me for defending Emanuel, give Cook's article a quick read. As he points out, the R word was "still a clinic term used, somewhat begrudgingly, by psychologists to describe people who score lower than 70 on IQ tests." Cook reports that while practically everyone in the field wanted to banish the word, it wasn't the first time the field had encountered this problem. Cook writes that moron, imbecile, and idiot were clinically approved words until 1959, when the approved nomenclature became mild, moderate, and severe retardation. The Oxford English Dictionary, by the way, traces the nonpejorative, medical use of retarded to 1885.

Writing from experience, Cook notes that whatever "new term comes into favor today will seem insensitive, or worse, tomorrow." He recalls that as a fifth grader, his classmates would insult one another for being LD, which was shorthand for the respectful label "learning disabled." The phrase currently favored by Shriver and his fellow activists is "people with intellectual disabilities," which any sassy third grader knows can be shortened to PIDs and flung in disparagement. Every "solution" to the retarded problem only re-creates the problem.

Shriver the word cop is every bit the oppressor that he imagines Emanuel to be. His organization sponsors a Web application that counts the number of times the R word appears on a Web site. Slate's count, according to the Shriver dragnet, was 11. That's wrong. The word has appeared on the site least 144 times, including mentions in "The Fray," our readers' forum. A quick review of some of the articles shows that Slate almost always uses the word in a respectful fashion or inside quotation marks. Slate doesn't have an R-word problem. Shriver and his overcalibrated app do.

No decent person—not even Rahm Emanuel—wants to deny the marginalized their dignity. All right-thinking parents discourage their children from grossly misusing the word. But declaring every conversational use of retarded and beating up on public figures who use it colloquially won't bring new dignity to the people upon whose behalf Shriver advocates. Instead of normalizing attitudes and perceptions, Shriver's scolding tactics shove everybody outside his circle into a crouch, begging for his forgiveness.

That—and I mean no offense to the infirm—is lame.

******

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies lame as U.S. slang for a "socially unsophisticated person; one who is not skilled in the behaviour patterns of a particular group" and says that it is frequently used in black English. The earliest citation is from 1959 in Esquire. If you spot an earlier reference please send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. And for a good time, follow me on Twitter. (E-mail may be quoted by name in "The Fray," Slate's readers' forum; in a future article; or elsewhere unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Thanks to Slate intern Jenny Rogers for research assistance.

Track my errors: This hand-built RSS feed will ring every time Slate runs a "Press Box" correction. For e-mail notification of errors in this specific column, type the word retarded in the subject head of an e-mail message, and send it to slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

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"Rahm Emanuel Calls Liberals 'F---ing Retarded': He should have said they were 'f---ing intellectually disabled,' " by Adrian Chen. Posted Feb. 2, 2010 (recycled from Aug. 12, 2009).

"Can We Stop Saying Retarded Yet? Yes, it's intellectually disabled," by Adrian Chen. Posted Aug. 12, 2009.

"What's So Funny? Dana Stevens addresses the touchy questions of sensitivity and humor surrounding Tropic Thunder." Posted Aug. 14, 2008.

"How To Picket Tropic Thunder," by Bonnie Goldstein. Posted Aug. 13, 2008.

"Too Dumb To Fail: And other news from the technological frontier," by William Saletan. Posted Feb. 7, 2005.

"The Young and the Reckless: The Supreme Court contemplates executing juveniles," by Dahlia Lithwick. Posted Oct. 13, 2004.

"They Execute 17-Year-Olds, Don't They? A very bad week for John Lee Malvo," by Dahlia Lithwick. Posted Oct. 24, 2002.

"Poll-Tergeist: Why the Supreme Court shouldn't care what you think," by Howard Bashman. Posted Aug. 21, 2002.

"Death of a Thousand Cuts: Killing the death penalty softly," by William Saletan. Posted July 2, 2002.

"Eagles Eyed," by Caroline Benner. Posted June 21, 2002.

"Ahead by a Nose: The Supreme Court plays the numbers game," by Dahlia Lithwick. Posted Feb. 20, 2002.

"Chasing After Conrad's Secret Agent: It's the archetypal novel about terrorists. And everyone's getting it wrong," by Judith Shulevitz. Posted Sept. 27, 2001.

"What Are the Legal Rights of the Retarded?" by Dahlia Lithwick. Posted July 12, 2001.

"The 'R' Word: How to you avoid saying 'retarded'?" by John Cook. Posted July 5, 2001.

"Does the Law Treat the Insane Differently Than the Retarded?" by Dahlia Lithwick. Posted June 27, 2001.

"Choosing Death," by William Saletan. Posted June 23, 2001.

"Those Were the Days," by Michael Brus. Posted June 23, 2001.

"Reign of Confusion," by Eric Umansky. Posted June 5, 2001.

"T&A&E," by Scott Shuger. Posted March 27, 2001.

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen

The secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs both endorsed the eventual repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy at a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Since its implementation in 1994, more than 13,000 members of the armed services have been discharged for homosexual conduct. We know what happens to a soldier who tells about his sexual orientation, but what happens to one who asks?

Nothing. For most service members, it's not even against the rules. The "don't tell" half of the 1993 agreement between Congress, the president, and top military brass is a matter of federal law. The "don't ask" portion stands for a combination of military regulations and memoranda that ended the Pentagon's long-standing practice of asking service members about their sexual orientation during the recruitment and security-clearance processes. It also limited the conditions under which a commanding officer may investigate suspected homosexual conduct. But there is no provision in law or regulation that forbids a rank-and-file service member from asking a colleague whether he or she is gay. Superior officers, of course, retain the general authority to discipline subordinates who engage in inappropriate behavior—like harassing a peer with repeated accusations—but there is no record of a service member being punished for asking about homosexual conduct.

The phrase "don't ask, don't tell" was coined by sociologist Charles Moskos, who also fashioned the policy that went with it. (His original formulation was actually "don't ask, don't tell, don't seek, don't flaunt.")* Politicians and policymakers adopted the slogan because of its ring of reciprocity. In fact, asking happens all the time, usually without consequences for either party. Gay service members have been outed by colleagues who asked about their sexuality, and there is nothing to stop investigators from relying on that information in a discharge proceeding.

While the rank-and-file are free to ask about homosexuality, military rules require commanding officers to avoid the subject. So when can a commanding officer start making inquiries? He's not supposed to look into a soldier's sexual orientation without credible information—firsthand from a reliable source—that the soldier has engaged in a homosexual act, stated that he is a homosexual, or married someone of the same sex. The Pentagon notes that the following behavior does not constitute credible information: "going to a gay bar, possessing or reading homosexual publications, associating with known homosexuals, or marching in a gay rights rally in civilian clothes." Many commanders look the other way even when they have good evidence, and federal law expressly permits them to ignore confessions if they believe the soldier is lying about his sexuality to avoid military service—a la Klinger from the 1970s series M*A*S*H.

Army regulations also limit whom an investigating officer can interview (PDF) during a sexuality investigation. He may speak only with the accuser, the accused, the commanding officers of the accused, and others who may have witnessed the offending act. To go further, the investigator needs approval from the secretary of the Army, which never happens. Still, the regulations do not prescribe punishment for overbroad investigations, and no officer is known to have been punished for witch-hunting. Prior to 1994, some commanding officers weeded out homosexuals by approaching a friend of the suspect and threatening to investigate him if he didn't out his friend. Today, zealously anti-gay commanding officers are limited to scanning Facebook pages for statements of sexual preference—a practice that has done in many closeted gay soldiers.

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

Explainer thanks Eugene R. Fidell of the National Institute of Military Justice, Diane H. Mazur of the University of Florida, and David McKean and Aaron Tax of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Thanks also to reader Kelaine Conochan for asking the question.

Become a fan of the Explainer on Facebook.

Correction, Feb. 8, 2010: This article originally mischaracterized the original phrasing of the policy as "don't ask, don't tell, don't flaunt." (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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Dear John

Dear John (Screen Gems),

You may wonder why I'm writing you yet another letter, after our thwarted love has finally found its hard-earned happy ending. (Spoiler alert, I guess, but given that we're characters in a film directed by The Cider House Rules' Lasse Hallström and adapted from a novel by The Notebook's Nicholas Sparks, I think we always knew it was meant to be.) I guess I'm just going over everything that happened and trying to sort out why it took us so long to find each other at last.

That magical spring break when we met on the South Carolina coast—I (Amanda Seyfried) was a college student from a wealthy Southern family, you (Channing Tatum) were a Special Forces soldier on leave from service in Germany—it all seemed so simple. We were going to correspond for one year, then be together when your tour of duty was over. Then came Sept. 11, 2001. Granted, we experienced the horrific events of that day primarily as an obstacle to our romantic fulfillment, but nonetheless it was devastating. Because your unit leader insisted that voluntary re-enlistment be unanimous or not at all—a policy that would seem militarily counterproductive, but whatever—you reupped for another two years in the Army.

Oh, we kept writing to each other—long, handwritten letters that the camera panned across slowly enough for viewers to start spacing out on the differing textures of the paper—but it wasn't enough to keep us from drifting apart, and eventually I wrote you a real "Dear John" letter, revealing that I was engaged to someone else. The identity of my fiancé was one of our story's few real surprises, wasn't it, John? So I'll keep the name of the character and the actor who played him secret, except to say that he's a former child actor who's undeservedly little-known as an adult.

Whenever it seemed like things were really over between us, someone would unexpectedly land in the hospital: first you, the victim of a sniper's bullet in an unnamed and thus politically inoffensive Middle Eastern country; then your father (Richard Jenkins), an undiagnosed autistic unable to relate to anything beyond his world-class collection of rare coins; then my unnamed-but-well-cast husband, who needed access to a special drug that our insurance wouldn't cover. Would I be able to organize enough fundraisers to keep him alive and one day realize my dream of opening a horseback-riding camp for autistic children?

It's crazy the way things turned out, when you think about it. I mean, maybe not for the audience, but for us, the whole thing was a wonderful adventure. Every character got a chance to be noble and self-sacrificing (or sacrificed); nobody was the bad guy, except maybe that Arab who shot you. Whenever we doubted our feelings for each other, the music—the sappy, asphyxiating, ever-present music—was there to remind us how strong our passion really was. And the first time we kissed, on the construction site of that house I was volunteering to build for charity, in the pouring rain … well, I'd always dreamed of kissing a boy in the rain, ever since I saw The Notebook.

I have to say in all modesty that Amanda Seyfried was really, really good as me. She's such a luminous actress, a little slip of a thing with huge hyperthyroidal Bette Davis eyes and flossy fairy-princess hair and a beautiful ingénue singing voice. (Remember that song I played you on the guitar the night before you left for the front, that was one of the few bearable musical moments of the movie? She wrote it herself!) Seyfried may yet not be quite up to the challenge of playing the care-weary wife of the later scenes, but, honestly, you have to hand it to her for taking a script of pure sugar and spinning at least her own scenes into pink cotton candy. Channing Tatum, playing you, might not have had the broadest expressive range, but he seemed genuinely bedazzled by Amanda Seyfried (can you blame him?), and his slightly slablike quality suited the character well. And that scene where he—I mean you—read a letter out loud to your sick father saying all the things you'd never been able to say? That got a tear out of even that one poker-faced movie critic in the second row. (What's her deal, anyway? Is she somehow opposed to watching beautiful young people have discreetly framed PG-13 sex while listening to lite R & B?)

Critics and cynics aside, I think people—the people who understand—are really going to love our story. Dear John is as conventional and unworldly as the décor in your dad's onscreen house. It's the cinematic equivalent of a plastic-covered couch under a "Bless This House" sampler. And that's not a bad thing, for audiences who have a high threshold for sentiment and a low one for dramatic conflict. The rest of those frowny types … well, they can just go to H-E-double-toothpicks.

Love always,

Savannah



Slate V: The critics on Dear John and other new releases

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If I were marooned on a tropical island in the Pacific and had to discuss Lost with any two people of my choosing until a submarine transported us back home, I'd pick you, Seth, because of your general popular-culture shrewdness, and you, Chadwick, because of your Lost erudition. (You taught a class on the series when you were an undergraduate!)

As luck would have it, Slate has asked us to pick apart Lost's final season for the next four months but is permitting us to do so from the comfort of our offices—no marooning required. This is a task I'm both eagerly anticipating and dreading. Why? From the first episode of the first season through the Season 5 finale, I've been in a perpetual state of confusion over my feelings for the show.

I didn't mind Smokey the Monster. I could tolerate the visions and Locke's miraculous rebirths—first after he was shot and second after he was stuffed into a coffin by a mortician. Jack's dead father wanders around the island like a clip-boarded Greenpeace advocate looking for donations on a street corner—but I haven't complained. I haven't even protested the lameness of so many characters being killed by gunshot.

But as you both know, when Lost's creators threw time travel into the mix, I became openly derisive of the show. Time travel is the single biggest swindle a writer can pull on his audience. Given the keys to the time-travelmobile, any writer can easily motor out of any dead end or sink hole. Lost's reliance on the device has been doubly irritating because up until its formal introduction in Season 5, I thought the show's creators were about to deploy some brilliant plot twist that would unite all the disparate mysteries. Instead, they turned a weird but satisfying show into a squirrelly, gimmicky one.

I stopped caring about Lost, but since I'd already invested so much time into it, I kept watching and comparing notes with other viewers. For me, Lost is like the tanking stock you won't sell because you can't admit you've taken a financial hit.

One of the creators has said that Season 6, which debuts on Feb. 2, will ditch both time travel and flash-forwards and will deliver something new. For that reason, I have great hopes that after Season 5's shenanigans, a spirit of narrative resolution will save the series. The only way to do that, I think, will be for the writers to close the plot's ever-widening aperture and focus instead on a small set of conflicts and mysteries. Do we have any confidence that the show's creators know how to end something? Or is their expertise concocting nightmares that have no conclusion?

Am I being too hard on the show? Do you find elegance in time travel and Egyptology and polar bears and pirate ships? Or are you prepared to join me in a class-action suit against the authors, charging them with narrative malpractice?

Please advise.

Jack, I'm so pleased to see you're diving into this TV Club with your customary sunny optimism. Were I marooned on a tropical island, I would likewise pick you as a fellow castaway—if only for all the pharm parties we might throw together. (We can carve the pill bowl out of a coconut shell. I call dibs on any Klonopin that washes ashore.)

I'm totally down with your time-travel hate. As you note, it's a sci-fi crutch that lets the writers get away with extremely floppy storytelling. It's also been done to death.

I'd forgive Lost if it had found some new, ingenious way to bring time hopping to life for us. Say what you will about The Time Traveler's Wife; that book managed to offer a fresh take on the genre—delving into the domestic routines and quotidian frustrations of a chrono-displacement victim. But Lost was shoveling out the same old stuff: spooky paradoxes, period wardrobes, and jokes about Marty McFly inventing Chuck Berry's guitar sound … oh, my bad, I meant to say Hurley writing Empire Strikes Back.

Still, I'm very much looking forward to this sixth and final season, for two reasons.

1) We can take comfort, as always, in the words of Samuel Johnson: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." My hope is that the Lost writing team will be similarly snapped into focus. Only 18 hours left to wrap up this whole megillah, dudes. Let's make 'em count.

2) More broadly, I see this Lost victory lap as a sort of farewell to an American institution. It's not every day you see a scripted TV show achieve this kind of massive mainstream appeal.

Consider: More than 23 million people watched the opening episode of Lost's second season. I love Mad Men, for instance, but its audience tops out at fewer than 3 million viewers. As a television phenomenon, it's not in the same universe.

Even now, with ratings way down from their lofty peaks, Lost remains a formidable cultural force. People freaked out when it appeared that President Obama's State of the Union address might interfere with the Lost premiere. Responding to questions (from ABC reporters, natch) at a White House briefing, press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged that the fate of the country was less pressing than the fate of the Oceanic Six: "I don't foresee a scenario," said Gibbs, "in which millions of people that hope to finally get some conclusion in Lost are pre-empted by the president."

It's easy to hate on Lost—the sometimes silly twists and turns, the millimeter-deep characters, the ever-increasing suspicion that the writers entered this tale with no exit strategy in mind. But show a little respect for a program that serves up quality sci-fi, on free network TV, to the great enjoyment of a large slice of America. A show that's unapologetically expensive to make, and looks it. A show that rewards the dedicated die-hard, not the casual drop-in.

This isn't a singing contest, or a dating game, or a crime-scene procedural where one week is no different from the next. This is a serial narrative filmed on location with a huge ensemble cast. My vote is for more of that on TV—not less.

I'll toss this over now to Chad, our resident Lost expert, who'll be making sure we've calculated the denominators correctly in our Valenzetti Equations. What are your hopes and dreams for Season 6, Chad? Any predictions on how it all turns out?

Gentlemen:



As Jack has already blown my cover, I suppose I should admit it straight away: A friend and I once taught a college course on Lost. (For those either curious or looking for easy ways to ridicule me, the syllabus can be found here.) We came up with the idea in 2006, when Lost was a true cultural phenomenon: a show that appealed to sci-fi cultists but could also boast a massive mainstream audience.

Then Lost got weird and shed half of its viewers (from 18.8 million for Season 3's premiere to 9.3 million for Season 5's finale). Unlike these more sensible people, though, I've been masochistic enough to bend my logic right along with the writers. Last season's time travel was just an extension of what we had already seen. At the end of Season 4, Ben turned a giant donkey wheel, yellow flames came out of the wall, and the island disappeared. In this context, time travel isn't that much of a stretch.

So yes, I'm anticipating this season and all the crackpot answers it will bring. And at the risk of sounding like I belong at Santa Rosa's right next to Hurley, I think they can actually pull this thing off. Last week I rewatched the Season 5 finale for the first time since it aired, and remembered that they haven't screwed up a season finale yet. It's far harder to avoid botching a final season, of course, but I think these guys have already shown that they know how to end things.

Of course they have a dizzying number of bets to settle up. In no particular order, here are some of the things that must be answered this year to make this epic worth it: Who were Adam and Eve, those creepy skeletons that Jack and company found in the caves in Season 1? Is Libby a psychopath or a Dharma recruiter? Who controls the smoke monster? Why did Jacob write lists of people the Others should abduct? Why can Miles talk to dead people? Why wasn't Sun magically plucked from the plane along with Jack, Kate, and Hurley? Why did a missile take 31 minutes, 18 seconds longer to get to the island than expected? What's the deal with all the hieroglyphs and Egyptian statues?

There are plenty of other loose ends, some of which I'll try to address later this season. I'll ease down into the weeds week by week. Jack and Seth, beware: I'm taking you with me.

But the biggest issue at hand is who's going to win. This show is at its best when two characters (always two male characters) compete for control of the island. In the first two seasons, it was Jack vs. Locke (the man of reason against the man of faith). In Season 3, Jack vs. Ben. Once Faraday, Miles, Charlotte, and Lapidus came off the freighter in Season 4, the central rivalry shifted to Ben vs. Widmore.

And that's where we were until the final two hours of Season 5. Now there's a new rivalry that appears to supercede them all. Jacob vs. his nameless adversary. (The Lost blogs call him the "Man in Black." I prefer the more biblical name of Esau.)

I'm suggesting that the central question of the show is not, "What is the island?" or "What is the smoke monster?" Rather it's "Who's in charge?" The answer is slippery and nuanced. To keep track, my Slate colleague Chris Wilson and I put together the Lost social network you'll find below. It's a chart of who's following whose orders. As the season progresses, we'll fill in some blanks (is Widmore working for Jacob's enemy?) and keep track of the shifting allegiances. Roll over the lines between characters for more information.

As you were both too timid to make a prediction, I'll offer one big enough for the three of us: This season will be exclusively linear. It will take place entirely on the island and begin at the island's creation. The first shot of this new season will be a man's eye opening, just as it was in Season 1. But it won't be Jack's; it will be Jacob's. We won't see our castaways until a few episodes in, when they'll be back on a hatchless island. The bomb will have changed history, but the universe will have course-corrected in response.

Feel free to brand me with the sheriff's mark if I'm wrong.

—Chadwick

I knew that the detonation of an H-bomb, which closed Season 5 of Lost, would be a noisy act to follow. But I never expected the show's creators, always eager to retrace their own steps, would revisit the blast twice in the debut episode of the final season.

The first replay of the blast projects Lost's characters to a "present" in which Oceanic Airlines 815 completes its flight from Sydney and lands at LAX. Everybody who died in Seasons 1 through 5 now appears to be alive—I'll reckon even Mr. Eko will show up sooner or later. The other leaves Jack, Kate, Hugo, Jin, James, Miles, et al. on the island where, um, most everyone has miraculously survived the blast with no more damage done to them than if a single stick of dynamite had exploded.

Is this any way to treat a loyal audience? Split the story into two different times and have the characters inhabit both and then cut between them? I haven't been this pissed at a pop-culture product since DC Comics killed Superman and then brought him back.

Lost has become the show I love to hate because its creators are forever pulling bunnies out of their hats to 1) advance the story and 2) make the previously preposterous plot elements hang together. This special two-hour opener litters the screen with bunnies.

I won't deny that some of the bunnies resonate at a frequency that makes you take notes. For instance, the episode riffs on death, dying, and the resurrection of the previously dead like a jazz master. You've got two men in coffins—John Locke on the beach and Dr. Christian Shephard, Jack's dad, lost in transit. You've got the double burials of Juliet, first from the blast and then in a conventional dirt nap. Jack saves Charlie from choking to death on Oceanic 815 when he pulls a condom filled with dope out of his throat. And Jacob, who endures a flash-cremation moments after Ben slays him with a knife, appears like Banquo's ghost to Hugo. He gives him a hint on how to save the gravely wounded Sayid: Take him to the temple, Jacob says. And sure enough the healing waters resurrect Sayid after he's died.

That the creators thought it necessary to throw a big, carved ankh—the Egyptian hieroglyphic character for "eternal life"—into the story only demonstrates how devoted they are to keeping Lost on an infinite loop. By making death so abundant (I've lost count of how many people have been shot in the chest) and rebirth so cheap, the creators of Lost have really made it easy for themselves. But now I'm repeating myself from my first dispatch.

I look forward to Seth's take, because he is the mellow to my jaundiced yellow. But it's Chad's account that I crave. He kept my interest in the show alive in Season 5 with his learned if slightly tipsy explanations and apologias for the skitty-skat plots. Heal me, brother Matlin! Bring the show back to life for me!

Slate V: Previously on Lost: LAX

So much anger, Jack. I picture you watching Lost with a revolver in hand, Elvis-style, occasionally firing a round at your flat-screen. (Which reminds me: I hadn't thought about the improbable amount of gunshot deaths in Lost until you pointed it out. Seems like a natural outgrowth of the fact that basically every inhabitant of the island is packing. Shouldn't they consider instituting some sort of gun-control policy there? Though I know that you, Jack, a strict libertarian, will counter: If guns are made illegal, only time-travelers, utopian cultists, and quasi-supernatural entities will have guns.)

I am withholding judgment on the dual-universe thing—mostly because I have no idea what the frak is going on and am willing to wait and see before I condemn it. I'd also prefer not to play Statler to your Waldorf with the season just getting started. So here's an effort to counter your pissiness with a list of things I liked about last night's Lost:

* The wonderful evocation of deafness. When Kate awakes hanging in that tree, we hear the scratching of the bark against her clothes in rich detail, but her yelling sounds like it's coming from miles away. I don't think I've seen that dynamic so accurately captured before—even in Saving Private Ryan, when Tom Hanks goes deaf on a Normandy beach.

* The welcome reappearance of Juliet. I guess I had assumed—unreasonably, as it turns out—that direct physical contact with a detonating nuclear bomb might kill her. Silly me. She was only wounded! (I know, I know, she was thrown into another dimension or whatever. It's still slightly comical that an atomic explosion in her palm has no effect, but she dies from tumbling down a well.) Anyway, I was happy to see her, if only briefly. I've always been a huge Juliet fan. In fact, I can't say I would have minded had it been Kate who bit it and Juliet who survived. Kate doesn't do a whole lot for me. Juliet is a scrumptious enigma with expressive eyebrows.

* "I'm sorry you had to see me like that." After transforming into his smoky alter ego, mauling some unlucky dudes, and then morphing back into humanoid form, the Locke-monster hits us with a Schwarzenegger-style action movie tagline. Another excellent, and hilariously cryptic, Locke-monster sequence: "Hello, Richard, it's good to see you out of those chains." [Throat-punches Richard. Glares at everyone gathered on beach.] "I'm very disappointed in all of you!"

* The big ankh in Hurley's guitar case. For a moment, I thought it was Prince's guitar—the one shaped like his trademark loopy symbol—but smaller, so I guess maybe Prince's mandolin. Then it became clear it was a large, wooden ankh. Then it turned out the ankh was just concealing a few pieces of paper. Which, when you think about it, was a pretty roundabout way for Jacob to pass a message. If I was Hurley, I'd be pissier than Jack Shafer. Make me carry a heavy guitar case "across the ocean and, like, through time" just to deliver a note? Did Jacob not have a manila envelope? (I know, I know, then Hurley would have read it, and the course of events would have been irrevocably altered … blah blah. An ankh inside a guitar case is still a damn unwieldy vessel.)

* Hurley in general. Thank goodness he's here, providing much-needed levity and glimpses of relatable human behavior. Everyone else seems to stoically accept the bat-guano craziness all around them. Hurley reacts the way I think I might. With confusion and wisecracks.

* The stewardess from Oceanic 815 shows up as a temple hippy—and she's still serving food and drinks! Sheesh, you'd think she'd request a promotion when she joined that band of mystical pagans.

So much more to like about the Lost debut, but I'll stop myself there. What did you think, Chad? Everything you'd wanted and more? I'm not going to ritually scar you, as you'd suggested, but I will publicly note that your predictions were not … precisely on target. We won't dwell, though. Let's talk Lost mythology. Any hidden clues or mind-blowing hints that you noticed last night? Who or what, if anything, has inhabited Sayid? Should I consider it significant that when Lost writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse showed up on Jimmy Kimmel last night, one was dressed entirely in black while the other wore a much lighter-hued suit?

Slate V: Previously on Lost: LAX

Jack, you say you're tired of the producers pulling bunnies out of a hat. But you're forgetting the laws of nature! Bunnies can't help but reproduce exponentially. Once the first emerged—there's a polar bear on the island?—there was no way to make them disappear. The narrative gimmicks, fake deaths, and misdirections were all established as a part of this show's DNA in Season 1. To get mad at it now implies that you hadn't properly channeled your anger a few years ago. (And I know that's not usually a problem for you.) Last night's two-timeline structure just wasn't that major a cognitive leap. In fact, by juxtaposing the two narratives, the producers have created something very smart and typically meta. They know that the audience is wondering whether the last five seasons actually amount to anything, whether any of it was really worth it. Now the characters are confronting the same question.

Bouncing between the two narratives also allows the show to answer one of its central questions: Is it better to control your own destiny or to let fate decide it? In the reset timeline, half of the characters are worse off than they once were: Charlie is suicidal; Kate is homicidal; Sawyer is still a con man; Locke is still a crippled man; Sun and Jin are still unequal partners in a failing marriage. But then half actually seem better off: Boone is alive; Sayid is in love; Bernard and Rose are happy; Jack isn't an ass; Hurley is lucky.

(For those wondering why Hurley is now lucky, I think it's because he won the lottery without using The Numbers—4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.* If the island is underwater, Rousseau can't broadcast the numbers in the distress signal. And if there's no distress signal, Sam Toomey never hears them on the radio one day. And if Sam doesn't hear them, he never tells Hurley's crazy friend Leonard about them. Which means Hurley never learns The Numbers.) [Update: Feb. 4, 4:45 pm: Or maybe not! Wise commenter "Will" reminds me that it wasn't Rousseau's distress signal that broadcast The Numbers. In fact, it was The Numbers broadcast that brought Rousseau to the island in the first place.]

Do I think all of this two-timeline stuff makes sense? Not yet. But the writers have offered us a lot of clues. Last night, the most important piece of dialogue belonged to Juliet. While cuddling with Sawyer, Juliet says, "We should get coffee some time. We can go Dutch." It's apropos of nothing, and Sawyer thinks she's babbling. But later Juliet—through Miles—tells us, "It worked." The it, it's safe to assume, was the bomb. Thus I come to my second TV Club theory of the new season: Juliet could only know "it worked" on the island if she was also off the island. Juliet was consciousness-hopping back and forth between the two realities. Just as our pal Desmond used to do.

But let's get to the mythology. Some tips:

• Seth, as you wrote, inside Prince's mandolin was a piece of paper. That piece of paper, it's safe to say, is one of Jacob's famed lists. We've been told Jack wasn't on Jacob's original list when the flight went down—but he's on this one. So Jack wasn't useful to Jacob in the past but is now.
• Smokey Locke (that's what I'm calling him) tells Richard that it's good to see him "out of those chains"—probably a reference to Richard's time as a slave on the Black Rock. (The Black Rock, remember, was the slave ship that arrived in the first few minutes of last year's finale, and was then marooned in the middle of the island.) We know that Jacob brought the Black Rock to the island. Was it for Richard? Is Jacob running his own version of the Underground Railroad? Side benefits include eternal life, eyeliner, Banana Republic outfits.
• Ash played a prominent role. The temple inhabitants spread ash when they hear that Jacob has died, and Bram tries to protect himself from Smokey Locke by drawing his own personal ash circle.* At the end of this dispatch is a video explaining what it all might mean. It's the first in a weekly series connecting the dots between seasons past and season present.

There were all sorts of other fun shout-outs—at least for nut jobs like me. Just a few:

• Jack tries to rescue Sayid, and Kate stops him. This set-up echoes Season 1, when Jack tries to save Charlie, and Kate tries to stop him.
• Relatedly, when Jack saves Charlie in last night's episode, he sends people out to search for a pen, just as he did after the crash in the very first episode of the series.
• Doc Arzt—the entomologist/high school teacher/dynamite expert from Season 1—was carrying an insect guide in his hand when he was on the plane.

But last night raised as many questions as it began to answer:

• The biggest among them: Why isn't Shannon on the plane? The island is underwater, but that didn't stop anyone else from getting on the flight. (But it did stop Jack and Locke's baggage from getting onboard. Metaphor alert!)
• Where is Jacob's corpse? I haven't been to Burning Man, but I'm pretty sure bodies don't just disappear when they're in a fire pit the size of a sundial.
• When Jacob visits Hurley, why is he barefoot? Note that the other Others—the temple-dwelling ones—are barefoot, too.
• Why is Jack's neck bleeding on that plane? Is that what nuclear hickies look like?

Oh, and, Seth, don't forget that we've seen Cindy, the flight attendant, once before. In Season 3, a less-psychedelic Cindy and some kids—the same Zak and Emma from last night, one would assume—visit Jack when he's imprisoned in a cage. Jack asks why they're all there, staring at him. Cindy, rather creepily, says they're there "to watch."

Another note for Seth: You wonder whether someone has taken over Sayid's reincarnated body. Hell if I know. Jacob may have, I suppose. But, for your sake, I hope it's Juliet rattling around beneath that jheri curl.

And, yes, my predictions were … off the mark. So let's play double or nothing. Last night we saw Desmond on the plane with Jack. (Jack, by the way, probably recognizes him not from the island but from running up the stadium steps in Season 2.) But then Desmond disappears and we never see him get off the plane. Lost TV Club theory No. 3: That's because Desmond was never on the plane! That's not to say that Jack is Hurley: He can't see dead people and Desmond isn't dead. Desmond, I submit, doesn't just time-travel with his consciousness anymore. The man can now move his entire body.

I've obviously got more to say—I didn't even mention the Geronimo Jackson album cover I think I saw—but that's enough for now. I don't like the taste of English on my keyboard. I'm going to go surround myself with a circle of ash and clip some bonsai trees.

Slate V: Previously on Lost: LAX

Corrections, Feb. 4, 2010: This entry originally listed the numbers as 4, 8, 15, 16, 24, 42. They are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. (Return to the corrected sentence.) This entry also originally referred to Ilana's henchman Bram as Bran. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

If Lost is going to fracture its narrative in two, I feel entitled to do the same with my crackpot TV Club entries. I have one more dispatch to share, with a few points I didn't have time to cover yesterday.

First off—we haven't fully explored the premiere's major revelation: Jacob's nemesis is the smoke monster. Somebody—maybe a loyal TV Club reader?—needs to compile a video of all the times we've seen Smokey. We need to watch those scenes again now that we know what we know. (Hats off to Entertainment Weekly's Doc Jensen for reminding me of the importance of this particular plot twist.)

Jack and Seth, I'm sure Mr. Eko's death has been etched into your memories like scripture onto a walking stick. Eko kneels at the feet of his brother, who has inexplicably come back from the dead, and chooses not to ask for forgiveness. "I have not sinned. I have only done what I needed to do to survive," he says. Yemi/Smokey, visibly angry, responds, "You speak to me as if I were your brother." Then Yemi/Smokey turns into a fist and smashes the life out of the best character Lost has ever given us. Which brings me to Lost TV Club Theory No. 4! Smokey offed Eko because he was too useful to Jacob—it was a political assassination.

I'm sure there are more nuggets like these waiting to be discovered. Readers, leave your best reinterpretations in the comment section. Speaking of your comments, goodness you guys are good. Not only did you flag three stupid mistakes I made in the last entry, but your discoveries and theories are great. "Matthew" confirmed that the shark swimming around the sunken island had a Dharma mark on its tail. (We saw a similar Dharma-branded shark in Season 2.) "Joe Blow" predicted a dream scenario: "I will offer one prediction: Jacob will soon inherit Locke's dead body. Locke will then be fighting himself, which is what Locke really has been doing all along." Jack, Seth, are either of you opposed to Locke-on-Locke action?

Elsewhere on the Internet, my favorite Lost academic, Jason Mittell, made the smart point that Faraday can't logically exist in either timeline: "I feel like we'll need some good Faraday science expositional scenes, but poor Daniel is dead on the island and his pregnant mum presumably perished in the nuclear blast!"

Maybe Smokey can do us a solid and show up as Faraday next week.

Also, the producers sat down with Entertainment Weekly to try to explain the new season's narrative structure. Jack, this quote made me think of you: "We [knew] the audience was going to come out of the 'do-over moment' thinking we were either going start over or just say it didn't work and continue on. [We thought] wouldn't it be great if we did both? That was the origin of the story."

You should read it in full. If only to get even angrier than you already are.

And, finally, one enterprising fan has cobbled together a neat video showing the first moments on the plane in both timelines. It's like one of those old Highlights games where you're shown two pictures that look the same but have subtle differences. Readers, leave what you spot in the comments. If I could write all the answers upside down at the bottom of this page, I would.

It's going to be a long week waiting around for the next episode. Meanwhile, stewardess, could you pour me a stiffer drink? Maybe with two vodkas, like last time?

Jack, Chad: How do you feel about zombies? More realistic than alternate universes? Metaphorically richer than time travel? It seems Lost has introduced a little body snatching into the mix.

It began last week with Locke, who no longer seems to be Locke. And now we're told—by our Japanese speaking, baseball-fondling temple honcho—that Sayid has been "claimed." Some outside entity is slowly usurping his body. It's worse for Claire: This "darkness" has claimed her completely.

The terrifying thought of human bodies as inhabitable husks has been around for some time. On film, it's at least as old as the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And it's an enduring theme—we can trace it from Night of the Living Dead in 1968 to 28 Days Later in 2003. It pops up again, with a more technological angle, in Dollhouse (which got canceled a couple of weeks ago).

Sometimes the human husk is zombified into a gnashing beast with no higher-level reasoning skills. Other times it's hard to tell precisely what, if anything, has changed—you just know there's something not quite right about your friend. It's this latter version of the husk concept that I find much creepier and more interesting. It leaves you guessing at every moment: Is that real Locke, or smoke-monster Locke? Was that Claire coolly firing those rifle rounds, or some creature controlling her limbs? Opportunities for ambiguity and suspense abound.

On the suspension-of-disbelief chart, I think you have to rank body snatching as incrementally less absurd than time travel. Amazingly, though, Kate is dumbfounded by the notion of Sayid coming back from the dead. "How is that even possible?" she asks. Um, honey, you were thrown back in time 30 years. You have witnessed the existence of a man-eating smoke monster. You've seen an Indian actor ably portray an Iraqi dude for going on six seasons now. All this hasn't opened up your mind even a smidgeon?

But wait, what's that I smell? I think it's Shafer bait! The writers will surely use this latest trick as a means of tying loose plot strings back together, don't you think? Why did [insert implausible and inexplicable plot turn] happen back in [insert season]? Because that wasn't Ben—it was zombie Ben! And zombie Juliet! They were all zombies! You just didn't know it at the time!

Zombies aside, what did we learn this week? I think we continued to learn that life in the universe where Oceanic 815 lands safely at LAX is eerily bending toward the same outcomes as life in the universe where the plane crashes. Last week we saw Dr. Jack suggesting he could help Locke walk again. This week we saw Kate looking poised to play a role in baby Aaron's life.

And of course the show unveiled the biggest shockers in its history: One of the temple henchmen is Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia! Okay, he first showed up on Lost a couple seasons ago (as he reminds Kate, who cracked him in the skull with a rifle butt back then). But it was still jarring to see him out of context, looking like he'd walked over from the Renaissance Fair in his buckskin vest. I kept expecting him to pull a plastic baggie out of his pocket and start huffing glue while quaffing beer from a keg cup.

Assignments: 1) Chad, please explain how the Abraham and Isaac story, as recounted in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, relates to all the father-son Sturm und Drang that seems to infest the Lost mythology. 2) Jack, please swallow the foul-smelling pill I have placed on your desk—over there, to the left of your keyboard. Down the hatch. You'll just have to trust me on this.

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Last month, the Supreme Court tossed out the case Alvarez v. Smith, a challenge to a portion of the asset forfeiture in Illinois that allows the government to keep seized property for up to six months before giving its owner a day in court. The Court declined to rule on the case after determining it to be moot—all of the parties had settled with the government by the time the case made it to Washington.

That's too bad, because the Illinois law should be struck down, and also because the country could benefit from a discussion about the continuing injustice of many states' civil asset forfeiture laws.

Civil asset forfeiture, an outgrowith of the drug war, rests on the legal theory that property can be guilty of a crime. Once authorities establish a nexus between a piece of property and criminal activity—most commonly drug cases, but also prostitution, DWI, and white collar crime—the owner must prove his innocence or lose his property, even if he's never charged with an underlying crime. In most jurisdictions, seized cash and the proceeds from the auctioned property go back to the police departments and prosecutors' offices responsible for the seizure. The scheme, which creates unsavory incentives for public officials, became popular because of a 1984 federal bill designed to encourage aggressive enforcement.

After a number of outrageous forfeiture cases made national headlines, Congress reformed federal civil forfeiture law in 2000. But egregious abuses are still common at the state level. The Indiana case of Anthony Smelley illustrates just how perverse forfeiture proceedings can get.

Early on a morning in January 2009, Smelley, who is 22, was pulled over while driving along I-70 in Putnam County, Indiana. Months earlier, he'd been in a car accident and won a $50,000 settlement. He states in court documents that he had taken around $17,500 with him that January day en route from his home in Detroit to St. Louis, to buy a new car for his aunt.

Smelley was pulled over for making an unsafe lane change and driving with an obscured license plate. He was also driving with an expired driver's license. His traffic stop should have ended with citations for those infractions. Instead, the police officer asked Smelley to get out of the car and patted him down, finding the cash. The officer then called in a K-9 unit for a sniff search of Smelley's car for drugs. The dog alerted twice. Smelley and two passengers were arrested, and the police seized Smelley's money.

A subsequent hand search of Smelley's car turned up no illicit drugs, and no criminal charges were ever filed against Smelley or his passengers. Smelley produced a letter from a Detroit law firm confirming he had been awarded the $50,000 from the accident. That didn't matter. Putnam County has since held Smelley's money for more than a year.

When I started looking into Smelley's case as part of a feature story for Reason magazine, I noticed that the attorney representing Putnam County, Christopher Gambill, wasn't Putnam County prosecutor Timothy Bookwalter or anyone who works for him. Gambill is a private attorney. He told me by phone that he handles civil forfeiture cases for several Indiana counties on a contractual basis and, incredibly, pockets a third to a quarter of what he wins in court.

Allowing police departments to benefit from forfeiture proceeds is bad enough. It creates perverse incentives for cops to err on the side of taking property and can lead to mass civil rights violations like those exposed last year in Tenaha, Texas. And forfeiture critics argue that allowing public prosecutors' offices to benefit is even worse, and likely a violation of due process. It's the prosecutors who decide what cases the state will bring in court—their offices shouldn't materially benefit from those policy decisions.

But allowing unelected private attorneys to oversee a county's forfeiture proceedings on a contingency basis is the worst option yet. These private attorneys, unaccountable to the public, are making decisions about which cases to go after that directly affect their own personal wealth. Steven Kessler, a New York attorney and author of a treatise on state forfeiture laws, says he's never heard of anything like it. "This is scandalous," Kessler told me in a phone interview. "It's blatantly unconstitutional."

It isn't clear just how widespread the practice is in Indiana. The office of Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller and the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council didn't return my calls for comment. But according to Mark Rutherford, chairman of the Indiana Public Defender Commission, it goes well beyond the four counties that work with Gambill. "It's just sort of accepted here that this is the way things are," Rutherford says. "There are attorneys who have amassed fortunes off of these cases."

Smelley's case also demonstrates the zeal an unelected attorney might display to win his fee. At a summary judgment hearing last February, Putnam County Circuit Court Judge Matthew Headley asked Gambill how he planned to tie Smelley's seized money to drug crimes, given the letter Smelley produced about his accident settlement. Gambill responded that while he couldn't show that Smelley had obtained the money illegally, he planned to show that the money "was being transported for the purpose of being used to be involved in a drug transaction." In other words, Gambill wanted to take Smelley's money because of a crime Smelley hadn't yet committed. When I asked Gambill to clarify, he replied, "We can seize money if we can show that it was intended for use in a drug transaction at a later date." As Kessler put it, this is "like something out of that movie Minority Report."

Smelley's case then got even stranger. At the preliminary hearing last February, Judge Headley actually ruled in Smelley's favor. But under state law, Putnam County had an additional 10 days to amend its brief. Three days after his ruling, Headley mysteriously pulled himself from the case. Gambill thinks he knows why. "Several months ago, [the judge] asked the Putnam County prosecutor if he could have $5,000 from the forfeiture fund to buy some new AV equipment for his courtroom. He was turned down," Gambill said. "Since then Judge Headley has had, well, I'll just say he's had a much different demeanor in forfeiture cases." Gambill thinks that in his eagerness to question the county, Headley misstated state law during Smelley's preliminary hearing, then took himself off the case once he realized his mistake.

Headley confirmed to me that he had made the AV equipment request. But he denied that the denial of his request for forfeiture funds had any bearing on his ruling. Maybe that's true, and Gambill is wrong. But think about the impropriety of it all: A judge asked for $5,000 to upgrade his courtroom from a fund filled with money from defendants over whose cases he presides.

Indiana's state constitution requires that forfeiture proceeds go to the public schools. So under the spirit of the law, there shouldn't even be a forfeiture fund for a judge to request money from. And yet as this case reflects, there are ways around the requirement. One tactic is to get a defendant to settle by handing over an amount of money somewhat less than it would cost him to fight the case. Because this isn't actually a court-ordered forfeiture, the money can go to the police department instead of the schools fund. In another scheme, called "adoption," state law enforcement agencies call in the feds on a forfeiture case. The case then is governed by federal law—which allows for up to 80 percent of the money to go back to local law enforcement after the federal government takes it cut, effectively circumventing state legislators.

The 2000 reforms to the federal civil forfeiture laws didn't address this problem. Many state laws are still a mess, too. In the end, the abuses in Indiana, Texas, and elsewhere really aren't surprising. When you incentivize corruption, it isn't exactly shocking to later learn that your public officials have been corrupted. As for Anthony Smelley, he finally had his new hearing last Friday. But it could be another month or more to hear whether he'll get his money back.

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I like to think of myself as the Dick Cheney of the Browser Wars—an unyielding proponent of greater and greater hostilities between the developers working on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera. As all these programmers compete with one another to make faster, more stable, and more intuitive browsers, we Web surfers keep winning. Just two years ago, nearly half of the folks online used Internet Explorer 6.0—the slowest, buggiest, most security-flawed browser on the market. Since then, Microsoft, spurred by its rivals' advances, has released the very good I.E. 8, which is now the Web's most popular browser. I.E. 6 is still around, but now that many sites (including Google) are dropping support for it, its share is sure to plummet. All hail the great Browser War!

Another benefit of this ceaseless conflict: Browsers keep getting faster. Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox at Mozilla, told me recently that his browser's "javascript engine"—which runs complex, interactive Web applications like Gmail or Google Maps—is 20 percent faster in the new Firefox 3.6 than in the previous version. Keep in mind that the previous version was released just last June. Can you think of anything else in the world that can get 20 percent better in only a few months? When I asked Beltzner how coders managed that feat, he pointed to his rivals. "Were there not other competitors who were just as interested in making Web browsers faster, I don't know if we'd be able to find the gains that we can find," he said. "Now it's a game of one-upping each other."

With apologies to Beltzner, though, I'm not going to recommend that everyone jump to the new version of Firefox. To be sure, Firefox is a fantastic browser, and if you're a fan, you'll do no wrong by upgrading. But even though I've been a Firefox devotee since its release, and even though it has long been my default browser, today I'm declaring a new allegiance. I've decided to switch entirely to Google's Chrome. You should, too.

This is not a recent infatuation. I've been using Chrome side-by-side with Firefox since the Google browser's debut in 2008. From the start, there was much to love. Chrome was deliciously fast—it started quickly, loaded pages in a flash, and never stuttered while playing Web videos. Chrome was the first browser to keep its different computational "processes" separated—each tab or browser plug-in is given individualized access to your computer's resources. That means that if one open tab encounters an error, the rest of your browsing session remains intact.

I also loved Chrome's minimal interface. Most browsers have two input bars at the top—an address bar and a search box. Chrome has one. Type in an address or a search term and Chrome will figure out what you want. Indeed, Chrome does something even better—it gives you search results right in the bar. Type in "jd salinger" and the first result in the drop-down list is the Wikipedia entry on Salinger. Want to visit your favorite political blogger? Type in "nate silver" and you immediately get a link to Silver's site, Fivethirtyeight.com. This is a terrific way to navigate the Web—you never have to remember URLs, or even the names of sites, and you don't even have to make a stop at Google to find what you're looking for.

But Chrome originally had a few shortcomings that kept me from signing up full-time. Firefox's main virtue is its flexibility—it's got a huge gallery of add-ons that give it many fantastic powers. There were many Firefox extensions that I couldn't do without, including ones that blocked ads and kept my bookmarks synchronized across computers. Until Chrome added these features, I couldn't leave.

With Chrome's latest upgrades, all that has changed. Late last month, Google released Chrome 4, the latest "stable" version of the browser. Bookmark syncing is now built in: Turn it on and your bookmarks are available on other computers running Chrome. The browser now also runs Greasemonkey scripts, little bits of code that allow you to change how certain Web pages are displayed. (For instance, here's a script that turns all Google pages black, purportedly to reduce "eye fatigue." Here's another that lets you accept all your Facebook requests at once.) Finally, and most importantly, Chrome now does extensions. It's already got a huge library of Firefox-style add-ons that improve many different parts of the browser. I installed several of them in one gulp, including AdBlock—a great though dubiously ethical way to keep lots of tabs open without slowing down your computer.

Now, some caveats. We all browse the Web differently, so your mileage may vary. I think Chrome is perfect for high-volume consumers of the Web—idiots like me who keep several browser windows open concurrently, each populated with dozens of tabs, and don't restart the browser for days and days on end. More casual Web users may find its unusual interface—and its lack of support for third-party interface add-ons like the Yahoo Toolbar—hard to get used to. Also, Chrome has far fewer extensions than Firefox does, so it's possible that you won't find a certain add-on program that you consider indispensible. And then there's Mac support—although Google did release a great Mac version of Chrome last year, it still lags slightly behind the Windows and Linux version, and will only get extensions support in a forthcoming release.

Still, most people would do well to switch, or at least to give Google a try. Chrome makes browsing a dream, and it just keeps getting better. The teams at Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera should take notice: Chrome's now the one to beat.

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Peyton Manning

A common theme in virtually every profile of Peyton Manning is the Super Bowl quarterback's legendary devotion to football. At age 12, he exhorted his pee-wee linemen to block harder. He started deconstructing NFL game video in high school. He arrived at college six weeks early to work out with upperclassmen. A few days after the Indianapolis Colts made him the first pick of the 1998 draft, he had the team playbook memorized. He orders rookies to meet him on the field at 8 a.m. the Monday after they are drafted. He falls asleep watching tape in the basement of his Indianapolis home; his wife slips the remote from his hand. Isn't that sweet?

Then there's Manning's line-of-scrimmage foot-stomping, finger-pointing, signal-shouting choreography. It looks like an act, a bluff, deliberate misdirection—and it often is. It also looks like a twitch that jibes with the nonfootball personality quirks Manning is said to possess. Manning doesn't know how to work a can opener. Manning needs to look at Polaroids of shirt-slacks-and-tie combos in order to get dressed. And there's this, from a 2001 interview with Dan Patrick, who asked Manning for a "trivia question" about himself:

Manning: Why does Peyton Manning lick his fingers after every play or throw?

Patrick: Yeah, I've noticed. What's that, a signal or a good luck thing?

Manning: Nope. The finger lick is just a really bad habit—I do it all the time. My wife, Ashley, is going to kill me if I do it at dinner one more time. I look like an animal about to dig in.

Patrick: Wait, you do it at dinner?

Paging Dr. Sacks! If Manning weren't a star athlete, you might tally his social foibles and physical tics, lay them beside his 3.0 GHz mind, and conclude that the dude has obsessive-compulsive disorder. A more plausible lay diagnosis is obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The difference? People with OCD want to stop a particular behavior; people with OCPD don't. "With Peyton Manning, he clearly doesn't want to stop doing what he wants to do," says Lennard Davis, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of Obsession: A History.

And neither do football fans. After a tenth 4,000-yard passing season, a career-best 68.8 completion percentage, and a chance to win his second Super Bowl ring this Sunday in Miami, it's time to state the obvious: Yes, Peyton Manning is obsessive. But he's also a genius.

The two go throwing-hand in football-glove. It's understood that extraordinary athletes like Manning and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are freaks. But they're respected freaks because they do something valued by society. As opposed to, say, David Gibson, a South Carolina math teacher who studied word lists four hours a day every day for 12 years to become a champion Scrabble player. If Manning did that—or stomped his feet and licked his fingers while watching Jersey Shore all day—we might not be so interested.

Like those other elite jocks, Manning has the attributes of what Malcolm Gladwell has called the popular definition of genius: obsession (notebooks filled with observations on offenses and defenses), isolation (a darkened video room), and insight (a second-half evisceration of the New York Jets' defense in the AFC Championship Game). The 18th-century writer and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, quoted in Nobel-winning neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal's 1916 book Advice for a Young Investigator, put it even more neatly: "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme."

As the privileged son of an NFL quarterback, Manning the genius is no "outlier." But his genius isn't innate, either; with his Opie face and boyishly parted, short, brown hair, Manning looks more like a dentist than an NFL superstar at first glance. In his forthcoming book The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, David Shenk tells the story of how Ted Williams would use his lunch money to pay friends to shag baseballs so he could keep hitting. The point: Like other brilliant obsessives from Mozart to Newton to Darwin to Bird to Manning, Williams worked harder than everyone else. He hated when people described him as a natural. "Why wouldn't he?" Shenk says.

Of course, Williams, like most geniuses, was a pain in the ass, forever yammering about the science of hitting and interrogating great hitters about technique. Teammates grew weary of him, and fans resented his obvious disdain for them. Manning isn't a public grump like Williams, cultivating as he has—to the tune of $13 million a year in endorsement income—an image as a self-deprecating dork. But that doesn't mean he's any easier to work with (or for) than the curmudgeonly Teddy Ballgame.

"He lives, eats, breathes, smokes, snorts, chews football," says Adam Meadows, a starter on the Colts' offensive line during Manning's first five pro seasons. "He's just a machine. That's all he wants to do. I think he expects other people to approach it the way he does. It's not always a good thing."

Stories abound about how Manning's demanding personality can rub teammates the wrong way. There's a video of Manning screaming at his longtime center, Jeff Saturday, during a 2005 game after Saturday had the temerity to suggest a different offensive tactic than the one Manning had chosen. Before the Super Bowl three years ago, Manning pissed off teammates when he had the Colts ban hotel-room visits from relatives and friends the week before the game. "I don't want any crying kids next to me while I'm trying to study," he said during a team meeting, according to Sports Illustrated's Michael Silver.

Manning is also known for lighting into his line when things go awry. "For a guy who doesn't get sacked a lot, you don't want to hear it when he does," says Meadows, who left the Colts after the 2003 season and retired in 2007. Meadows says that during the 2000 season he was diagnosed with pneumonia on a Monday and had lost 14 pounds by the time he was able to practice again that Friday. Still ailing, Meadows managed to play that weekend. But after the team lost at New England, Manning ripped his performance: "We're paying you to be better than that."

Anecdotes like those are usually marshaled to demonstrate Manning's competitiveness and will to win. He makes up with teammates afterward, buying presents for his linemen and hugging and thanking them after the Colts' next success, as he does with Saturday in the 2005 video. What has rankled teammates in the past, though, is an insensitivity to life beyond football. Meadows says that he and Manning were close during the quarterback's first two years in the NFL. Then the lineman had his first daughter; he didn't want to talk protection schemes or stay late to watch film. When Meadows left practice early to attend the birth of his second daughter, he says Manning asked why he couldn't have babies in the offseason.

But as Manning has aged—he's 33, though still childless—some teammates say he's mellowed a bit. The rep as an insufferable workaholic? "I think that's a misconception about him," says Denver Broncos wide receiver Brandon Stokley, who played with Manning from 2003-06. Stokley said he's "never been around" any player as hardworking, intense, and committed as Manning—or one who can remember and process information as quickly or thoroughly. Stokley says that's not all there is to the quarterback, though—he's also a locker-room prankster and fun to be around. "It wasn't like he was just all football, all the time," Stokley says.

Whether or how much Manning lets loose is almost beside the point. As with most obsessive geniuses, the players around Manning are willing to be driven a little bit crazy because they admire his talent, goals, and results; none of the Colts complained about their empty hotel rooms after the team won the Super Bowl. "I loved the fact that he stayed until 10 on Mondays watching film and talking to coaches," says Steve McKinney, who played on Manning's offensive line from 1998-2001. "I had to be a dad and a husband. I couldn't go home and start watching the plays at home for two hours. Not only that, I didn't want to. Ten hours a day is enough."

So while Manning could be "just like a robot" and "a little overbearing," McKinney says he wouldn't have wanted to line up in front of anyone else. "You're the quarterback, brother; I'll support you 100 percent. I love that you care so much. Because I've been on the other side. I've played with quarterbacks who were last one in in the morning, first one out at night," says McKinney, who spent six years with the expansion Houston Texans. "Guess what? We sucked. We didn't win." Meadows puts it this way: "Down by six, a minute thirty on the clock, on our own 10-yard line, I want to play with No. 18." When Manning retires, he says, "you can make a case that he was the greatest player who ever played." The greatest ever? Sounds like a genius to me.

Slate V: If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl

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Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

On Thursday morning, President Barack Obama and the first lady joined various members of Congress for the annual National Prayer Breakfast. In 2009, Juliet Lapidos examined how breakfast became the choice meal for politically charged prayer sessions. The original article is reprinted below.

President Barack Obama will attend the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast on Friday. The event is one of many religio-political breakfasts held around the country—like the Greater Chicago Leadership Prayer Breakfast in December, the Minnesota Prayer Breakfast in April, and, most famously, the National Prayer Breakfast in February, attended by every president since Eisenhower. Why so many prayer "breakfasts"—rather than prayer lunches or teatimes?

Tradition. The prayer breakfast got started in mid-1930s Seattle, where traveling preacher Abraham Vereide held morning meetings for politicians and businessmen to pray about—and try to combat—poverty and the spread of communism. He decided on breakfast due to the Christian tradition of morning prayers and, it's said, as a nod to John 21—wherein Jesus appears to his disciples in the early morning by the Sea of Tiberias and helps them catch fish. Breakfast was also practical, since 7 or 7:30 a.m. meetings didn't interfere with the workday or with family obligations in the evening.

Vereide's informal prayer breakfast concept spread quickly, first through Seattle, then to San Francisco and Chicago and to Washington, D.C., in the early 1940s—where the preacher's disciples created weekly breakfast groups for senators and congressmen. The purpose of these meetings was to encourage personal relationships among religious politicians and to discuss the problem of poverty. Again, breakfast made sense for those with full schedules of legislative work and meetings. In 1953, members of these informal groups and Vereide initiated the first annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast, attended by Eisenhower, which was later retitled the National Prayer Breakfast. Although local politicos made up most of the guest list at the earliest of these breakfasts, nowadays they're also attended by business, social leaders, and foreign dignitaries.

The many present-day prayer breakfasts are modeled on the national one and thus play on the title, although the National Prayer Breakfast, the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast, and other large breakfasts are really conferences that can last two or three days—not just quick a.m. snacks. The main events at these conferences do tend to be morning meals, during which speakers address the crowd. At the National Prayer Breakfast, for example, guests sip orange juice and coffee and such while the president, and a keynote speaker, deliver addresses. (Click here to see a list of recent keynote speakers, including Tony Blair and Bono.)

Christians, Jews, and Muslims share the general tradition of morning prayer. Religious Jews recite the Schacharit prayer in the morning; in the Muslim custom, the first of five daily prayers is called the Fajr and is habitually recited by sunrise; Roman Catholics and Anglicans are supposed to say the Lauds or Matins near dawn.

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Former American Idol Ayla Brown

It's been a whole interminable week since the last installments of American Idol, but somehow I made it through bolstered only by the hundreds of Idol-related items peppering the news every day.

OK, the hundreds of items about "Pants on the Ground." By now, unless you're Regis Philbin, you've seen Larry "General" Platt demonstrate how "Pants on the Ground" is not the new instruction TSA agents are shouting at travelers, but rather the catchy culmination of one man's crusade to ensure the continued impact of the Civil Rights Movement. On pants. The song has an undeniable earworm appeal and even delivers an important message. Why, just today my own pants began slipping dangerously—damn you, stretchy jeans!—and I suddenly found myself humming a little self-chastisement for lookin' like a fool. But on a deeper level, this has been a tough one for me to get my head around—reading over and over about the General fighting hard American realities in the 1960s doesn't gel easily with his highly engineered appearance on a reality show in 2010. Is this what the Shangri-La of "post-racial" America will look like, former activists reduced to "novelty rapping" on Fox? And as much as I enjoy the song and am all for the employment of senior citizens, it unsettles me a little that this aired just before Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Where is my show that last year had its top finalists sing "A Change Is Gonna Come" and "What's Going On"? Well, I'm at least glad Paige Dechausse survived her childhood asthma to sing the Sam Cooke anthem at her audition.

I'm always talking about Idol and politics, but this week the show outdid itself in narrowing the ever-shrinking gap that separates it from the real electoral world. With the clip of Barack Obama's victory speech and the crowds of singers chanting, I kind of wonder whether producers chose Chicago just so that Ryan could co-opt the president's slogan for the "Yes we can"/"Yes they did'" wordplay. Otherwise, Tuesday's episode was mostly about messing with the rejects, Kara fan-girling about Shania Twain, and Shania Twain fan-girling about contestant John Park's "beautiful bottom end." Something (else) was wrong, though. I mean, I can suspend disbelief with the best of them, including Tiny Tim impersonator Brian Krause, but you will have to work pretty hard to convince me that when 12,000 singers auditioned in the city where gospel and house were born, the city that gave us Chicago blues and Chicago soul, in a state that calls its Department of Labor by the acronym "IDOL," producers could really find only 13 to send on to Hollywood. Maybe it was just pre-emptive revenge for the president's pre-empting speech next week?

But the Idol-politics interaction goes both ways, and the show has finally worked its way into an actual election. After his potential influence on health care reform, the most noted feature of Sen.-elect Scott Brown's special election has been his once-removed relationship to American Idol, through his (available) daughter Ayla. Back in 2006, Ayla Brown just missed the Top 12 lineup, ousted for her rendition of Natasha Bedingfield's then-recent release "Unwritten." "It wasn't you," Simon comforted her, dissing his fellow Brit Bedingfield, "it was the song." A lesson in politics for us all: Choose your song wisely.

Speaking of health care, this season's theme overwhelmingly appears to be the overcoming of physical challenges. Even down to the perfect theatrical faint Amy Lang executed before singing "Dr. Feelgood," the maladies are flying fast and sick. I mean thick. The American Idol Dream has always championed those who prevail over difficult circumstances, and lots of people always appear to develop a peculiar Simon-induced form of Tourette's, but there seems to be something more going on now. Whether inspired by the fan base that 2009 finalist Scott MacIntyre drew or by the recent British reality program(me) Britain's Missing Top Model, so far we've had multiple accounts of cancer, asthma, autism, Down syndrome, Rett syndrome (again—but don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for Angela Martin), and damage to the seventh intracranial nerve. More power to Shelby Dressel, singing in spite of that last one—the sort of nerve it takes to audition for American Idol appears to be completely unimpaired. More power to all of them, in fact. No matter how much we debate health care, some of these ailments are still all but invisible, and those who struggle with them are never part of the public vision of America. If Idol brings some acknowledgment, maybe that's not a bad thing. In any case it was a relief, after last week's egregious mockery of Jesse Hamilton's triple threat, to see the show return to sympathy and sad music for the near-death stories.

But last night, amid all the tragedy of what Ryan called the "most dramatic episode" to date, there were some real bright spots. Several boys with sweet voices, like Jermaine Purafoy and Seth Rollins, the subtle Fox product placement of the Glee theme, and Kristin Chenoweth! I almost wish Kristin were replacing Paula—she's even the right tiny size—though I was a little afraid of her "girl power" pact with Kara. I also enjoyed the newly diverse background soundtrack; I wonder whether the new partnership with Disney World in Orlando, Fla., got Idol a special deal on "When You Wish Upon a Star"? All in all it was a good, if irritatingly thought-provoking week, and I'm excited for the show to head out to California where, so I hear, your dreams … come … true!

Avril Lavigne with Simon Cowell on American Idol

After nearly a decade of watching American Idol auditions, I think I am finally close to mapping the genome of the ultimate contestant. And I'm convinced that deep in the bowels of Fox's secret laboratories, mad scientists are currently using DNA from this week's cast of characters to engineer the perfect Idol storm: a girl named Christian (No … no special symbolism, why do you ask?) from a Southern farm ghetto (because with the recession and all, it'll just be more efficient to have all the poor folks in one place) who has survived cancer, or at least a really bad papercut, and also the divorce of her gangsta parents to become a dock worker and "worship pastor" (Are there other kinds of pastors? Pastors for online shopping, maybe, or scuba diving?) raising her 14 beautiful children. Christian will have the voice of Melinda Doolittle, the legs of Carrie Underwood, and the eyeliner of Adam Lambert, and she will know how to work a hoodie with little devil horns.

We're already seeing hints of such an amalgamation, with this week's glut of curious portmanteau names—Todrick (both Tod and Rick! and a Broadway colleague of Fantasia!), Maegan, and Dawntoya—and that bizarre moment when Project Runway's Daniel Franco fantasized that he was the love child of Adam Lambert and Susan Boyle. Like everyone else, I am mystified as to what Daniel was doing auditioning for Idol, but he did make me think about how Tim Gunn would totally make it work if he replaced Simon Cowell. Even the judges' edges are starting to blur; last week, Kara appropriated Simon's "I'm not trying to be rude …" and yesterday Simon gave poor Julie Kevelighan a nostalgically familiar "Sorry, sweetheart." I hope he was just missing Paula as much as I am, because I don't ever want to hear him say, "Dawg, you can blow."

Julie's audition, a comeback she'd cultivated since her ridicule way back in that first Idol summer of 2002, nearly did my head in, but not because of her singing—I cannot properly wrap my head around the idea that this show has been part of our lives for nine years. Equally discomfiting were Tuesday's children, waiting around for their mothers or sisters to sing, who have never known life without Idol. One told Ryan that she would be a contestant when she reached 16. For her, American Idol is just a given, a constant like the sun rising and setting, or Ryan's tan. Better set your sights on X Factor 2018 instead, though, sweetie. And what about Maegan Wright's little brother, named Dawson? Is he the harbinger of a generation named after teen TV personas, a future in which the kindergarten teachers of 2014 will welcome a sudden slew of little Krises and Adams and Anoops? (Don't look at me; I'm naming my first three children Simon, Randy, and Paula. Paula Ryan.)

There's a lot in a name, and there were some standouts in the avalanche of "Yeses" with large and small y's. We heard Chris Golightly, whose effortless musicality did not prevent my mind from wandering to thoughts of breakfast, and then Tiffany's. His sincerely touching story, though, was jarringly dismissed by tiny, ruthless guest judge Katy Perry as a "Lifetime movie." Then there was Mary Powers—a solid, strong name and a voice to match—identified by that other tiny, ruthless guest judge Avril Lavigne as authentically punk rock, and that is a little like Joe Lieberman naming someone an authentic Democrat … but I like Avril, even if she seemed sort of embarrassed to be on Idol. Not embarrassed at all was Neil Patrick Harris, who enthusiastically filled in the first panel in Dallas and sent through "Overjoyed" Lloyd Thomas, jazzy Kimberly Carver, and Erica Rhodes, formerly part of Barney the Dinosaur's entourage and currently disguised as a refugee from some Rihanna show (because dominatrix is the opposite of childhood, and you would run as far from Barney as you could, too). Harris also helped along Dave Pittman, whose voice I loved, and I knew that Tourette's joke last week would come back to bite me. Of course it's a terrible and complicated thing to deal with, and I hope Dave is as successful as other singers I know who deal with it through music.

Though second-day judge Joe Jonas didn't add much to the audition process, he did offset the pop-princess callousness of Avril and Katy, and Kara has worked with the Brothers before, so they at least got along OK. Actually, this week everyone seemed pretty chummy, with Randy even defending Simon from Jason "I Touch Myself" Green, shouting, "Hey! Don't hit on my friend!" Ryan fended Jason off, too, and took a last panicky opportunity before Hollywood and the watchful eye of Ellen to reaffirm his heterosexuality, hastily passing on the flirty singer's phone number to someone else and then openly leering at the Cowboys cheerleaders. Twice. I'm hoping that Ellen's presence will put an end once and for all to Simon and Ryan's "You're gay! No, you're gay! And a girl!" shtick. Sadly, though, Simon has already made Ellen's shtick list, recently arriving 90 minutes late to the Idol set and earning the title "prima donna" from the newest judge. Don't tell Ryan, or we'll never hear the end of it.

And Ryan, it appears, will not be taking over for Simon in 2011—though at this point, rather than ask who might be in line for the soon-to-be-vacant judging seat, we might ask who is not. The list of speculative potentials has so far included everyone from Tommy Mottola to Madonna, Elton John, Ben Folds, Piers Morgan, Jamie Foxx, and, horrifyingly, destroyer of youth and joy Kanye West. But really, with all the network unrest, and a particular hire Fox made this month, it could be worse. Think on that, and I'll see you next week for Denver.

Denver auditioner Ty "Bikini Boy" Hemmerlng

Every Idol season, the Road To Hollywood is paved with good intentions, crocodile tears seeking attention, and some things I'd rather not mention. Oh, Lord. You know things have been dull when I resort to rhyming.

This week was more of the same—more "Pants on the Ground," in case it had slipped our minds for one blissful second; more childhood tragedies overcome with Idol therapy (don't think there isn't some fine print in the contracts requiring contestants to cough up a co-pay); and where there wasn't any drama, Idol, of course, created its own. Amanda Schechtman didn't really exhibit any exceptional theatricality, but maybe we missed something in the edit, because the judges thoroughly pronounced her "dramatic" before sending her on to Hollywood. We can only hope she's become Tatiana del Toro by the time we meet her there. Ryan voiced over a montage of the golden-ticket fakeout, that perennial prank in which contestants exit the audition room and meet their families frowning, only to suddenly whip out the yellow sheet of A4 with a shriek of triumph. And then there was the moment when Randy (Randy!) harassed accident survivor Casey James into undressing in order to show off his … personality. Victoria Beckham (again?) helped to push the singing to the back burner, too. Posh was all about the image this week, appraising dresses and hair and searching for "a definite look," while she herself sported a chignon so tight it doubled as a facelift device (or possibly some kind of vacuum that was trying to suck up her head).

Maybe she's onto something, though; voices are rarely the Idol newsmakers, never bringing the scandal the franchise thrives on. On that score, it seems we might be getting more ringers than singers lately; reports of audition crashers have been surfacing like Toyota defects. Doesn't this show have security? (Next week, the Salahis!) Tuesday's Bikini Boy, it turns out, was a radio station intern sent on an under(not much)cover mission, and Idol is just the latest stop on chipmunk-voiced Nicci Nix's American reality TV tour. I wonder if cosmopolitan Nicci has been collecting European shows, too—she gave us one of two moments this week that crossed the musical Atlantic, with Girls Aloud hit "Something Kinda Ooh." The other foreign object lodged in the golden throat of Jessica Furney—her clever song choice, "Footprints in the Sand," for which Simon claims a co-writing credit (and royalties). Don't look too deep for Simon's secret artistic abilities, though. He earned his credit just doing what he does best: spotting something with surefire marketing potential. He found that in 2008, when he suggested a charity single for Sport Relief named after the beloved Christian poem—I guess it's beloved; it has its own Web site—to be recorded by his former X Factor protégé Leona Lewis. It's that sort of altruism that may soon earn Simon his knighthood, you know.

To get to Hollywood, you really do have to find the repertoire that works for you, and Jessica wasn't the only one to get it right. Simon praised Aaron Kelly, a shy Archuleta-esque tween-heartthrob-to-be, for his choice of Miley Cyrus' "The Climb"—he already knows his Idol audience—and Randy heartily approved of the earnest graduation staple "I Hope You Dance" for Hope Johnson, who had gone hungry as a child so her little brother could eat. But the ambitious standout for me was Haeley Vaughn, the teenager aiming to be the "first black pop-country singer." Kara and I both loved Haeley instantly, with her grand Taylor Swift aspirations and her consciousness of race in the contemporary music industry. Victoria Beckham liked her dress.

In Wednesday night's roundup of otherwise unaired auditions, we flitted from city to city and back with abandon, while Ryan marveled at the hospitality of the crowds as if their unison welcoming cries were not 100 percent orchestrated. It was Idol unmoored, and it reminded me that Hollywood itself has always been more an idea than a place on a map. "Welcome to Hollywood," the judges shout from behind their desks in Orlando and Dallas and Denver—as if they are always already there, or as if they've brought Hollywood along with them, packed in their suitcases next to teeny Kristin Chenoweth. It's like the show is confirming what we're all afraid of, and sure of, deep down: that we're just watching the watchers on TV, and that Hollywood is everywhere, judging us.

We've all got audition fatigue, anyway (see above re: rhyming), and Hollywood Week is beginning to look like an oasis in the desert. Right now, we're in this frustrating limbo, caught in a sort of Idol Schrödinger state—that's the experiment with the cat in the sealed box, or was it the seal in the catbox—where the Top 24 have already been selected but we can't see them, and until Tuesday any one of the Golden Ticketed could still exist, or not, in Hollywood. (Well, we already know Michael Lynche won't be there.) Next week, we open the box, gauge the results, and find out whether Ellen is a cat person. THIS is American Idol: perhaps the greatest thought experiment in history. Welcome to Hollywood!

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At the corner of East Hastings and Carrall Streets in Vancouver, Canada, a raucous crowd milled around the sidewalk. Goods were on offer from a dozen sellers: hand tools, electronics, clothing, toiletries, all of uncertain provenance. There was a frenzy to make deals. A man opened a backpack filled with new tubes of toothpaste, smiling with stumps of teeth. Another sold cartons of orange juice out of a baby carriage. A shiny new mountain bike was on sale for $20. Below it all, a hushed chorus: "Powder. Powder." "Rock. Got rock." "Down. Need down?" This last is the local term for heroin, and there were capped syringes, tourniquets, and empty ampoules of sterile water scattered on the ground. In a shuttered doorway, a pale blonde girl in a dirty pink miniskirt, her thumb bruised black from constantly flicking her lighter, drew sunken-cheeked at a crack stem and looked up for a moment to ask, "You hooking?" A police car rolled slowly by but didn't stop.

The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver is a short walk and a world away from the glittering skyline of its business district, where a new billion-dollar convention center will soon welcome 400,000 visitors to the winter Olympics. Last year, the Economist magazine ranked Vancouver as the "world's most livable city." With a temperate climate and progressive mores, it has long been a destination for Canada's lost and dislocated. The Downtown Eastside, a dozen square blocks of dilapidated tenements and boarded storefronts, is home to one of the highest concentrations of drug addicts in the world. Scenes of open drug use recall the depths of the crack epidemic in New York City or the failed drug zone of Zurich's "Needle Park" in the early 1990's. An estimated 5,000 injection heroin and cocaine users live in the neighborhood, and the addict population suffers from HIV rates that are 30 times higher than the national average. Seventy percent have hepatitis C. Much of Vancouver's homelessness is concentrated in the neighborhood, as is 40 percent of the city's violent crime. The HIV incidence rate—the increase in new cases—hit 19 percent in 1996, the highest ever observed in the developed world. That's comparable to the situation in Botswana.

In the face of the developing crisis, the city turned to an unlikely coalition of politicians, scientists, a