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According to the latest poll numbers, Sarah Palin is nearly as popular as Barack Obama. Or maybe it's that Barack Obama is nearly as unpopular as Sarah Palin. At least that's how some commentators see it: As the Los Angeles Times' Andrew Malcolm noted Monday, "Sarah Palin's poll numbers are strengthening. And President Obama's are sliding." In Tuesday's Washington Post, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd wrote that "Palin's favorability numbers are a mirror image of those of Obama."

The problem is, they're comparing apples to oranges. Both columns refer to polls that show Palin's favorability rating at around 43 percent—mere points away from Obama's job-approval rating of 49 percent. But as Media Matters has pointed out, favorability and job approval aren't the same thing. A politician's favorability rating is a general sense of the public's feeling about him. His job-approval rating is an evaluation of the work he's doing.

When you compare favorability ratings—apples to apples—Obama still leads Palin by a distance. The latest Gallup poll puts Obama's favorability 16 points ahead of Palin's, ABC puts his lead at 18 points, and CNN says it's 18 points higher. (Only Fox has the gap in single digits, with a seven-point spread.) It's impossible to compare their job-approval numbers because, well, Palin doesn't have a job.

You'd think the two measurements would be roughly the same—but they're not. In general, politicians tend to have better favorability ratings than job-approval ratings. That has been the case with Obama since January, as it was with George W. Bush, who maintained high favorability (some might call it likeability) even when the public disapproved of what he was doing in office. There are exceptions: During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton had a lower favorability than job-approval rating. Many people who despised him personally liked where he was steering the country.

Still, the two numbers get conflated all the time. The problem is the fuzzy ways pollsters word their questions. "Pollsters love vague questions because they're easy to make comparable," says Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com. The more specific the questions' wording, the bigger the disparity. For example, a recent Quinnipiac poll explicitly distinguished between liking Obama "as a person" and liking "his policies." A full 74 percent of respondents said they liked him as a person. But of that group, a third said they didn't like his policies. The gap owes partly to the realities of governing: If you ask people how Obama is doing at his job, they're more likely to think of the 10 percent unemployment rate than if you ask about Obama in general. So when it comes to approval ratings, someone who doesn't hold office often has a built-in advantage over someone who does.

The job-approval rating also predates the favorability rating. Since the 1940s, Gallup has asked Americans how presidents are doing at their job. It wasn't until the 1970s and '80s that favorability ratings became popular. Favorability is especially useful for campaign pollsters, since it allows them to compare candidates who hold already office with those who don't.

Nor is favorability/job approval the only common conflation. People also tend to compare different types of job-approval questions—even when the questions yield very different types of answers. For example, some pollsters ask simply, Do you approve or disapprove of how Person X is doing? Others ask respondents to rate a politician's job as excellent, good, fair, or poor. The latter type of question tends to elicit a more negative response, because many people think of "fair" as a neutral, or even mildly positive, response.

Same goes for favorability polls. The Gallup poll goes for the simple binary: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the president? Others, like the CBS/New York Times poll, reflect more nuance: "Is your opinion of Barack Obama favorable, not favorable, undecided, or haven't you heard enough about Barack Obama yet to have an opinion?" The latter formulation produces lower favorability ratings. The reason, says Blumenthal, is a positivity bias. When respondents don't really have an opinion but aren't presented with a "don't know" option, they tend to answer positively—a phenomenon that's been dubbed satisficing. Hence the disparity between Obama's approval rating when respondents are given the option to say they don't know enough to decide (Quinnipiac and CBS News both put him at 50 percent) and when they aren't (Daily Kos, ABC News, and Fox News put him at 55 percent, 61 percent, and 54 percent, respectively).

Things get even murkier when you get into issue-based polls. A NBC/Wall Street Journal poll caused a stir over the summer when it changed the formulation of a question about the public option. Initially, the poll asked, "How important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance?" When 76 percent of respondents said it was "extremely" or "quite" important, supporters of the public plan celebrated. Three-quarters of Americans want a public option!

But when the pollsters reworded the question to be more straightforward—"Would you favor or oppose creating a public health care plan administered by the federal government that would compete directly with private health insurance companies?"—only 46 percent of respondents said they supported the public option. Liberals cried foul. But, of course, they are different questions. "It was silly to conflate them as if they had same meaning," says Blumenthal. "One was about the importance of having a choice. The other was asking them to react to a description of what the public option is." Add on the fact that only a bare majority of Americans even knows that a public option has something to do with health care, and it's easy to see why broad statements about public opinion on reform are so often misleading.

To make things even more confusing, Palin has her own ratings gap. Only 28 percent of Americans think she's qualified to be president, according to a CNN poll. But people admire her personal qualities. A majority of Americans thinks she's "honest and trustworthy" and "care[s] about the needs of people like you," and 64 percent believe she's "a good role model for women." It's this sort of disparity of views—hard to capture in a single number—that makes blanket dualities like favorable/unfavorable, popular/unpopular, and approve/disapprove, so limited.

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By the time President Obama landed back on American soil last Thursday, politicians on Capitol Hill were beginning to show the effects of a week without adult supervision. Two Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee greeted Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner by demanding his resignation—the same outlandish demand that Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio had made on MSNBC the day before. The House Finance Committee overwhelmingly passed a Fed-bashing amendment sponsored by strange bedfellows, Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Alan Grayson. The Congressional Black Caucus temporarily tabled one of the administration's top priorities, financial regulatory reform, to demand action on another top priority, jobs.

Over the weekend, the Obama administration scored a historic breakthrough when the Senate agreed to begin debating a health reform bill. How did the president's supporters choose to celebrate? Environmental activist Bill McKibben accused Obama of "fibbing and spinning" on climate change and wished he could be more like the president of the Maldives. William Greider chided Obama for "troubling similarities" to Hoover. Maureen Dowd whined that the president should be more like Sarah Palin.

Presidents get used to abuse from their enemies, and sometimes even welcome it. But when supporters start developing Palin envy, a president is right to wonder: With rants like that, who needs enemies?

Obama doesn't deserve all the whining. He's off to a good start and poised to rebound strongly. Like every one of his predecessors, he just temporarily set off Washington's most annoying political gyroscope. When a president's job approval percentage rating is in the 50s and 60s, everyone in Washington thinks his success was his or her idea. When the same president's approval rating dips below 50 percent, everyone in Washington thinks his or her idea is the president's only chance of survival.

In September 2008, I went to a breakfast meeting that the Obama campaign held for about 100 Washington insiders. Unfortunately for the poor staffers who had flown out from Chicago, the briefing took place during the only week all campaign long when Obama, not McCain, was the one below 50 percent. A parade of panicked politicos offered bad advice on how to right the ship. I left the meeting immensely reassured that the campaign hadn't been doing any of what Washington insisted it must do.

When political and policy challenges pile up, what administrations need—and often crave—is good advice. What supporters usually bombard them with instead is whining. One Huffington Post commentator urged sacking Geithner for being "Obama's Rumsfeld." Arianna herself just accused Geithner and Larry Summers of turning unemployment into "Obama's Katrina." In a Daily Beast post called "Amateur Hour at the White House," Les Gelb insisted that Obama's Asian trip was such a failure that the president should shake up his national security team and "take responsibility himself, as President Kennedy did after the Bay of Pigs fiasco."

To his credit, Obama hasn't taken the bait. In October, he joked about his supporters' impatience: "Why haven't you solved world hunger yet? It's been nine months." Like clockwork, a few days later, activists and members of Congress complained that the administration was moving too slowly on world hunger.

For the president's sake, let's hope that this Thanksgiving, supporters can stop the whinging long enough to be thankful for the progress they've made. By any objective measure, Obama has had a successful first year. He inherited an economy on the brink of depression; 10 months later, the economy is recovering, even if the job market is lagging. His economic plan has helped avert a series of disasters—from the automobile, housing, and financial industries going out of business to state and local government going into default. He has signed new laws on national service, equal pay, hate crimes, and many other overdue concerns; made real strides on energy; and launched a quiet revolution in education.

Not least, Obama's top legislative priority, health reform, is now almost close enough to smell the Rose Garden. After six presidents have tried, health reform may be just six weeks away from finally happening.

In the new year, Obama can channel the country's continuing hunger for change to good advantage. With the centerpiece of his 2009 agenda near completion, he can spend December preparing a plan to accelerate job growth and innovation and address the kitchen-table concerns of the struggling middle class in 2010 and beyond. Our national to-do list may be daunting and long, but that's what Obama meant by a new era of responsibility: more work, less whining.

All the historical comparisons should remind us of how much better off we are than we were not so long ago. Obama's first year—unlike JFK's—brought no foreign policy crises. His swift passage of the stimulus bill showed he was no Hoover. His deliberation over Afghanistan makes clear there will be no Rumsfeld. And every day of the Obama presidency, we can be thankful that on one point, at least, Maureen Dowd is right: He's no Sarah Palin.

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How is it possible to commit a violent crime while sleeping?

British prosecutors withdrew charges last week against Brian Thomas, a 59-year-old retired steelworker from Wales who strangled his wife to death as she slept in their camper van. Thomas claimed he was also asleep during the attack and imagined he was fighting off an intruder. Sleep experts believed him. How did they know he was telling the truth?

They watched him sleep, for starters. To determine whether someone suffers from a sleep-arousal disorder, or parasomnia, researchers often videotape the person in an attempt to record a mid-slumber episode. They also use a polysomnograph, which monitors several bodily functions, including breathing, eye movements, and brain-wave patterns. It's thought that homicidal somnambulism—killing someone while you're asleep—is related to night terrors. Both usually occur in the first two hours after someone has nodded off, during deep, slow-wave sleep. Dreams and nightmares, which are far more common than night terrors, occur during the lighter, REM stage of sleep—when people tend to be silent and immobile. It's a distinction lost on British tabloids, which dubbed Thomas "Dream Killer Dad."

Actually observing someone sleepwalking or experiencing night terrors in a laboratory is somewhat rare. Often, the episodes are brought on by a confluence of factors, like stress and sleep deprivation. Which is why one researcher argues for depriving the accused of sleep for 36 hours to see whether this triggers the behavior. But even if you do manage to get someone to sleepwalk in a laboratory, that doesn't prove that the person is potentially violent. To do that, researchers say, you need to provoke the sleepwalker during an episode—by touching him, for example, to see whether this prompts an aggressive response. That can be risky for all involved.

Thomas' story made sense, given what is known about sleep violence and night terrors. He was under stress just before going to bed. Several young men—British newspapers called them "boy racers"—had been driving their cars recklessly near where Thomas and his wife had parked their van. He says that when he was strangling his wife, he imagined he was defending her from the boy racers. The strangulation happened soon after they went to sleep. Finally, Thomas had a lifelong history of sleepwalking.

The evidence isn't always so compelling. In 1997, an Arizona engineer, Scott Falater, stabbed his wife 44 times before holding her head underwater in the family's swimming pool. He, too, claimed to have been asleep during the attack, and at least one sleep researcher who testified at the trial believed it was possible. Other experts, however, questioned whether his behavior, which included putting on gloves before pushing his wife into the pool, was too sophisticated for a sleepwalker. The jury didn't buy the defense's claim, and Falater is currently serving a life sentence. Similar questions were raised in the case of Kenneth Parks, an unemployed Canadian man who got up in the night, drove to his in-laws' house, and viciously attacked them with a tire iron. In that case, though, sleep experts and the jury believed that he really was asleep during the episode. His story was turned into the TV movie The Sleepwalker Killing, starring Hilary Swank as Parks' wife.*

Those who attempt to fake a sleepwalking defense sometimes get tripped up by recalling too many details about the murder. Normally, somnambulistic killers are confused and can't remember what happened. This was true of the deeply distraught Thomas, who told police, "I love her. What have I done? She's my world."

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

Explainer thanks Mark R. Pressman of Lankenau and Paoli Hospitals.

Become a fan of the Explainer on Facebook.

Correction, Nov. 24, 2009: This article originally misspelled Hilary Swank's first name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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It's Thanksgiving—which means it's just about time to start planning your Christmas shopping. At least some of your loved ones are no doubt maddeningly difficult to shop for, and many of us turn to what seems to be the perfect solution: the gift card. Not so fast, says Tim Harford in a 2007 article. Economically (and sentimentally) speaking, gift cards just don't make sense. The article is reprinted below.

Christmas is coming, so what do you buy the loved one who has everything? One possibility is the gift card, an electronic version of the traditional gift certificate that has taken the world by storm over the past decade. The popularity is odd: This is a gift that combines the can't-lose flexibility of a hideous cardigan with all the charm of a rumpled 10-spot slipped into a Christmas card.

Dismiss my complaints, if you will, as unwarranted generalizations from personal experience. I have had one instance of gift cards as a recipient and one as a giver, and neither was a success.

When my family lived in Washington, D.C., a lunch guest once handed us a gift basket that included a $50 gift card for Bed, Bath & Beyond. It was awkwardly generous—especially to Bed, Bath & Beyond. My wife and I never did find the shop. And when we gave Borders gift cards to a niece and nephew, we later discovered that the nearest Borders was an hour and a half's drive away from their home.

This is typical enough. Last year, the research outfit TowerGroup estimated that 10 percent of spending on gift cards in the United States was wasted because the cards expired or were lost without being redeemed. And it gets worse: Many cards are redeemed only after being sold at a loss by the original recipient.

Economist Jennifer Pate Offenberg has taken a look at the resale market on eBay. She concludes that a thriving resale market exists—but the typical seller accepts a 15-percent loss on the face value of the card, in addition to the cost and hassle of listing on eBay. Rather than give your loved one a $25 gift card, why not give them a $20 bill and flush the extra five bucks down the toilet?

Faced with facts like this, one cannot help but recall the economic discipline's most famous "Bah, humbug!" result: Joel Waldfogel's discovery, in 1993, that the typical $50 Christmas gift is valued by the recipient at between $35 and $43. It is this sort of finding, presumably, that accounts for the popularity of gift cards, which, according to Offenberg, are now the most popular gift in America.

But despite the fact that Waldfogel's "deadweight loss of Christmas" is dragged out each December like last year's decorations, it is rarely acknowledged that he explicitly excluded sentimental value from his calculations. The implication of his work is not that Christmas is worthless, but that if you're careless with your gifts, the sentimental buzz had better be pretty good.

It is not clear why gift cards—which seem to offer a comparable deadweight loss to regular gifts, and surely less sentimental value—have caught on. But if you must buy one, Offenberg has some advice.

She suggests choosing a card from a store at which almost anyone can find an excuse to spend money. Her eBay research found that cards from Office Depot, Wal-Mart, and Starbucks were highly valued on the secondary market. It might seem more romantic to proffer a gift card to buy slinky underwear or jewelry, but cards from Victoria's Secret and Tiffany bombed on eBay, reselling at roughly a 20-percent discount.

Better still, why not buy a thoughtfully chosen but modest present? If an inexpensive gift turns out to be the wrong choice, not much loss. And if you feel you should be spending more money, you can always slip a check into the package.

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Let's skip the green beans this Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving, vegetarians like me should politely deflect questions about why we don't eat turkey and instead exaggerate our pleasure when meatless sides come around. Like travelers to exotic foreign lands, we should feel grateful for whatever's strictly edible and put any higher-order choosiness on hold. So it's with shame—and some trepidation over my future treatment by Thanksgiving hosts—that I make the following request: Please stop serving green beans! They may be a holiday staple, but there's no place for them on the menu. No matter your talents, they wind up limp or waxy-tough. At best, they take on the flavor of whatever seasoning you happen to select.

I suspect that most families serve green beans to counteract the guilt that haunts all eating-oriented holidays. The host can rest easier knowing she's done her part for health. And the mere presence of this greenery makes everyone feel better about stuffing themselves with fattening pies. But even if I'm wrong—even if many Americans truly enjoy this particular side— there's another, more objective rationale for rescinding the green bean's invitation to the Thanksgiving feast. For the most part, Thanksgiving fits with the ever-growing emphasis on seasonal fare. Cranberries, yams, and pumpkins are all autumnal ingredients that pass the Alice Waters/Dan Barber freshness test. But green beans are a warm-weather crop, sensitive to cold and frost. They're planted in the spring or summer and peak from July through October in the South and from August to September up North. So by the fourth Thursday in November they're old—and ornery. Or as Slate contributor Sara Dickerman once put it, they're haricots not-so verts.

And it's not like green beans have history on their side. Although we don't know much about early Thanksgiving dinners, there's no evidence that our forebears ate green beans. According to the few descriptions that have survived, one 1784 menu cited by The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink mentions pigs, geese, turkeys, and sheep. By the early 19^th century, two-course meals were common. The Oxford Companion lists as possible first courses roast turkey, chicken pie, ham, beef, sausage, and duck accompanied by sweet potatoes, yams, succotash, sweetbreads, turnips, and squash. Next: pies, tarts and the like. Still no green beans. The writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who led the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, devotes a whole chapter to a Thanksgiving meal in her 1827 novel Northwood: A Tale of New England. Turkey, pumpkin, and cranberries are all in evidence. But no green beans.

This isn't to say that green beans were wholly absent from the celebratory spread—just that they weren't de rigueur. In 19^th-century accounts of the Thanksgiving meal, the stringy little items do make the occasional appearance. The December 1891 edition of Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, for example, includes this menu description: "There were turkeys. … [T]here were mashed potatoes, and canned vegetables, peas and string beans and such things; of course, you couldn't have parsnips and turnips then, —we depended a good deal on canned goods." The form in which the Overland Monthly writer consumed his beans—in cans—likely explains how they migrated into an otherwise seasonal meal. Since green items aren't easy to come by in late fall, families looked to canned goods. And by the late 19^th century, green beans were readily available from commercial canners. Got that? Our ancestors started eating green beans on Thanksgiving because it's possible to stuff them in an airtight container and forget about them until the apocalypse.

My guess is that we've got the Campbell Soup Company to thank for the limp bean's promotion from occasional guest to bona fide Thanksgiving mainstay. As is fairly well-known, the Campbell test kitchen (under the leadership of Dorcas Reilly) invented the green bean casserole in 1955. This near-instant meal consists of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, fried onions, and—of course—canned green beans. Although Campbell did not initially market the recipe as a holiday special per se, it became one by the 1960s. Now we can't get rid of it. This Thanksgiving, the soup giant estimates that 20 percent to 30 percent of American families will prepare the green bean casserole.

I'm told there are as many staunch defenders of this corporate invention as of the Phaseolus vulgaris itself. Mine is not a casserole family. But a few weeks ago, I overcame my aversion long enough to give it a chance. With all due respect for the usually superb culinary skills of the Midwestern friend who prepared it for me, the green bean casserole was a mushy, revolting mess. (My favorite part was the salt and pepper sprinkled on top.) And I contend that many otherwise sane Americans cling to this monstrosity only out of nostalgia. For proof of the casserole's objective nastiness, consider two lesser-known recipes that Ms. Reilly pioneered: a tomato soup meatloaf and a Sloppy Joe-like "souperburger."

At a loss for why the dreaded green bean continues to appeal, I emailed the editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit, Barbara Fairchild. She conceded that the peak season for green beans ends in October but argued that it's possible to obtain them fresh year-round. The magazine, she said, always includes a green bean recipe in its Thanksgiving issue (this year with lemon vinaigrette and walnuts) because the ingredient provides "texture contrast" to soft stuffing, mashed potatoes, and yams. The editor of the aforementioned Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, Andrew Smith, is also in the green bean camp. They're on his personal menu because they're traditional.

I did take heart, however, from my conversation with Chez Panisse sous-chef Nathan Alderman, who said the famous Bay Area restaurant does not serve green beans this late in November. He added that he won't be cooking green beans on Thursday, because even in California he can no longer find them at the farmers market.

Since I don't care to be remembered as the Grinch who stole the only healthy item from the holiday spread, I've come up with a couple of alternatives. The Brussels sprout is seasonal and quickly prepared. Try slicing the sprouts in half, dousing them in olive oil, and roasting them with grated Parmesan cheese. Another hardy green that can survive frost: kale. Boil it first, then sauté it in olive oil. Add garlic, shallots, and hot pepper.

I can't police the dinner menus of Slate's many readers, but I'll close with a proposition for my mother, who's hosting me this Thursday. If you do me the favor of subbing out the dish-I-can-no-longer-bring-myself-to-name and subbing in a more deserving ingredient, I promise to shut up about the marshmallow I discovered in last year's yams.

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt

Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt's doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument—and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt's death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.

FDR may have died more than 60 years ago, but these questions still matter. Not only does presidential health—and the public's right to know about it—remain a controversial issue, but in Roosevelt's case, the lies in question, if true, changed history. As neurologist Steven Lomazow and journalist Eric Fettman point out in a book coming out this January, FDR's Deadly Secret, widespread knowledge of Roosevelt's cancer would have prevented him from running in 1944 and thus likely altered the shaping of postwar Europe.

Roosevelt was in the business of concealing his medical afflictions. After a bout with polio in 1921, he never regained the use of his legs and used braces and a wheelchair, but he asked not to be photographed in ways that would reveal his disabilities.

Beginning in early 1944, the fact that Roosevelt had severely elevated blood pressure and congestive heart failure was also kept secret. These diagnoses were made by Howard G. Bruenn, a Columbia University cardiologist and Navy physician who became Roosevelt's primary doctor. When Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, early in his fourth term, Bruenn misleadingly analogized the bleed to a "bolt of lightning." Of course, he knew better: Very high blood pressure can cause bleeding in the brain.

It was not until 1970 that Bruenn came clean—or at least seemed to. In an article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, he described his heretofore secret efforts to treat Roosevelt's blood pressure and heart problems. The article became the definitive account of FDR's passing. However, according to Lomazow and Fettman, it was just another attempt to obscure the truth.

Over the years, other rumors about Roosevelt's health circulated, including the claim that he had suffered strokes. Most interesting was a 1979 paper in Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics by a surgeon and amateur historian, Harry Goldsmith, who noted that an enlarging skin lesion above Roosevelt's left eye disappeared in photographs after 1940. He theorized that the lesion was a melanoma, the deadliest of skin cancers, and that the disease had spread to Roosevelt's abdomen, causing him episodes of severe pain during the last months of his life.

Goldsmith's article received national attention, and he eventually self-published a book on Roosevelt's medical condition. But Lomazow and Fettman have greatly expanded Goldsmith's research. What they believe is that the melanoma spread not only to Roosevelt's abdomen but to his brain. The bleed that killed the president, they hypothesize, was due to the cancer, not the hypertension.

The most provocative evidence the authors present is that Roosevelt had a left-sided hemianopsia—a loss in vision—toward the end of his life. This indicated a mass in the right side of his brain. Lomazow and Fettman arrive at this conclusion based on an ingenious bit of research. On March 1, 1945, Roosevelt had given a speech to Congress, reporting on his recent trip to Yalta to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. During the speech, Roosevelt appeared confused: He skipped words in his prepared remarks, ad-libbed, and repeated several points. Critics later seized on this speech as evidence that the president was deteriorating mentally.

Lomazow and Fettman obtained both a video of Roosevelt giving the speech and the text he used. Comparing the two, they concluded that the president could not see the left side of the page. His seeming mistakes and confusion reflected his attempts to compensate. The authors also found evidence of similar behavior by FDR when he had read another speech for newsreel cameras. There are also several other reasons to suspect that Roosevelt had cancer: He appears to have made secret visits to at least two cancer specialists for evaluation of melanoma, possible prostate cancer, or both. He also lost more than 30 pounds during his last year of life. Although Bruenn suggested that the weight loss stemmed from dieting, Lomazow and Fettman believe that cancer—leading to abdominal pain and loss of appetite—makes more sense.

How plausible is this research? If Roosevelt indeed had a hemianopsia, it suggests a brain mass, and melanoma would be as likely a cause as any. Brain metastases from melanoma are known to bleed. Melanoma could also explain the abdominal pains and weight loss.

But all of these symptoms have other possible explanations, and there was never an actual tissue diagnosis of melanoma (though Lomazow and Fettman would argue that such a finding would necessarily have been concealed). It is also possible that Bruenn, a cardiologist, really did not entertain the notion that the eye lesion—if a melanoma—was wreaking havoc elsewhere in the president's body. Bruenn would not have been the first specialist to focus exclusively on the parts of the body that he knew best. Perhaps most important, there is no smoking gun: In all of the documents Lomazow and Fettman unearthed, neither Bruenn nor FDR's other doctors ever used the word cancer.

Still, Lomazow and Fettman's research is of great importance. It is the latest to demonstrate the conflicts of interest that presidential physicians encounter as they serve both their patients and the public: Woodrow Wilson's physician concealed his patient's debilitating stroke, and John F. Kennedy's doctor did not disclose a diagnosis of adrenal failure. Although it is now much more difficult to cover up presidential illnesses, some critics claim that Ronald Reagan's physicians concealed mental deterioration at the end of his second term. Others say candidate John McCain was not forthcoming enough during the 2008 campaign about his own battle with melanoma.

If Lomazow and Fettman are right, Republican Thomas E. Dewey or a different Democrat should have been elected president in 1944. In that case, Harry S. Truman, FDR's vice president, would almost certainly not have been commander-in-chief from 1945 to 1952. The Cold War and subsequent American history might have taken a very different path.

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"I could feel him smiling," said Felicity Dahl, widow of the great Roald, of her experience of viewing Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. "I was thinking, he'd love this." Well, she would know, I suppose. But what am I to do then with my conviction that her late husband would have loathed this? That Wes Anderson, with his glockenspiels and drolleries and minutely faceted interiors, has travestied the raucous spirit of Dahl? And that the ideal Fantastic Mr. Fox movie would be a work of slapdash animation, soundtrack by Mötorhead, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait? I'll just have to sit on it, I suppose.

Rarely can the movements of the muse be charted with any precision, but it appears that around 1959 the tutelary presence that handled Roald Dahl Inc. decided, with very little warning and no consultation, upon a major shift in direction. Ideas for the short stories with which he had made his name in the pages of The New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly dried up, and Dahl found himself temporarily at a loss. It was not a position to which he was accustomed. Long-bodied, dented, worldly, impatient, Dahl came from enterprising Norwegian stock and had been educated in the heart of the British establishment. He was a former WWII flying ace (he fought with the Royal Air Force in Greece and North Africa), a former spy (as an attaché to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., he had funneled political tidbits back to London), and the husband of screen goddess Patricia Neal. No literary career is easy, but his had gone pretty smoothly, relatively speaking: His first short-story collection, 1953's Someone Like You, had garnered him comparisons with Saki, Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry, and his second, Kiss Kiss, was selling nicely.

But a limit seemed to have been reached. Those grisly, sting-in-the-tail plotlets of his, each with the economy of a black joke—they weren't coming anymore, as he admitted to his publisher, Alfred Knopf. The one about the woman who beats her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then defrosts the murder weapon and serves it to the investigating police officers ("Lamb to the Slaughter") or the sickly baby dosed by her beekeeping father with the healthful secretions of the hive until she acquires "a powdering of silky yellowy-brown hairs" on her stomach ("Royal Jelly") ... now, for some reason, Dahl was writing page after page about a small boy, a group of talking insects, and an enormous airborne peach.

Knopf didn't blink, and James and the Giant Peach was published in 1961. The opening—"Until he was four years old, James Henry Trotter had had a happy life"—could have come from one of the short stories, but within a few lines little James' parents had been dispatched (day out in London, escaped rhinoceros) with a cruelty that was part folktale gruffness, part-Nabokovian élan. He had magically fused his New Yorker voice with one that seemed to issue from the blackest Norwegian forest: brisk, practical, unsparing, mildly atavistic, and quite at home in the bizarre. This was Dahl 2.0. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came next, and then, in 1970, Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Life, meanwhile, had missed few opportunities to pulverize Roald Dahl. In 1961 his 4-month-old son Theo was critically injured when his baby carriage was hit by a taxi. Olivia, Dahl's first daughter, caught the measles in 1962, slipped into a coma, and died. In 1965 Patricia Neal, pregnant, suffered a massive stroke: Much of Dahl's energy went into her subsequent years-long rehabilitation.

Fantastic Mr. Fox, coming at the end of this decade of punishment, was understandably not the tightest or most elaborate of his works for children. But then that's the foxy thing about it—the book gets by on a scrape of a plot, some top-notch Anglo-Saxon alliteration (Boggis, Bunce, and Bean: You can't beat that), and the charm of its leading man. Ted Hughes had come out with his classic The Iron Man a couple of years before, and there were elements in common: vengeful mechanized digging, for one, as both Mr. Fox and the Iron Man came up against the terrible tractors of postindustrial English farming. Dahl's tale, however, unlike Hughes', was free of mystical overtone. Mr. Fox is simply a dashing paterfamilias under siege, struggling to protect his brood and sustaining a fearful wound, a castration almost, in the form of his shot-off brush—that bleeding tail stump, "tenderly licked" by Mrs. Fox, providing one of the most shocking images in all of Dahl's work.

Can we separate Dahl the Pied Piper, the battered figure at the heart of 20^th-century children's writing, from Dahl the littérateur? The light thrown retrospectively on his early stories is revealing: Their tone of sinuous expertise now seems rather obviously that of an adult spinning naughty tales for an audience of juniors. (Adolescent readers, for example, have always particularly enjoyed them.) Post-Peach attempts to recapture this tone, to go grown-up again, would be unsuccessful: Once the muse had made her move, that was that. Switch Bitch, a collection of creakily pornographic stories that had appeared in Playboy, seemed a relic even in 1974. "She laid a lovely long white arm upon the top of the bar and she leaned forward so that her bosom rested on the bar-rail, squashing upward." (You can catch there a debauched echo of his early hero Hemingway—until the word "squashing," that is, which is pure Dahl.) A 1979 novel, the dreadful My Uncle Oswald, was low-intensity ho-ho smut of the sort that might have tickled his old friend and fellow roué, the world's laziest writer: Ian Fleming.

In the general economy of Dahl's art, however, these books perhaps served their purpose, burning off a spurious sophistication and allowing him to perfect his true style, which was scruff-of-the-neck storytelling. ("Listen very carefully," urges the narrator of The Witches. "Never forget what is coming next.") The slightly ponderous precision with which he had set up his punch lines in Someone Like You became a secret weapon when he wrote for children—an exhilarated, second-by-second focus on the matter at hand. No one who has read it, or had it read to them, forgets the moment in Danny, the Champion of the World when the 7-year-old hero drives a car down a dark country lane, exquisitely slow to begin with but picking up speed, going from first to second gear, and second to third, in a mounting mechanical ecstasy ...

Dahl was not religious by temperament or philosophy, and this seems important. Compare his bristling, stinking, unmetaphorical characters with the watery allegories of the Harry Potter cycle—and his prose with J.K. Rowling's—and you begin to see that a supernatural frame of reference might not always be such a wonderful thing. A good Roald Dahl sentence is a physical event: It can leave a child literally writhing with glee. "The hailstones came whizzing through the air like bullets from a machine gun, and James could hear them smashing against the sides of the peach and burying themselves with horrible squelching noises—plop! plop! plop! plop!" You don't need to know anything about Dahl's dogfights over wartime Greece to enjoy that. He was better at beginnings than endings—"The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" begins three times—but then aren't we all.

There will be kids, no doubt, who writhe with glee at Wes Anderson's Fox, and more power to them: It has plenty of marvelous qualities. But something grizzled, abrupt, and rough-humored is missing. Something warty. "You can smell the danger, watch your step/ See the friendly stranger, stretch your neck ..." One of Dahl's Revolting Rhymes? Not quite. It's Lemmy, from Mötorhead's "Die You Bastard." I think the two of them would have got along very well.

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In Joan Biskupic's new biography of Antonin Scalia, American Original, the justice wears a wreath of superlatives. He is the most quoted member of the Supreme Court and the one scholars write about most. He is the justice who writes the most concurrences—separate opinions that accept the holding of a majority opinion but usually part company with its reasoning. He is also the justice who prompts the most laughter at oral argument, according to two bona fide studies. Court observers pick Scalia as the most talkative. He disagrees with that one. They would probably call him the most argumentative. And he'd disagree with that, too.

Here's my superlative, to add to the pile: Scalia is the justice liberals most love to hate and conservatives most love. He is also the only justice to use the Sicilian finger flick in public or to say "quack quack" during a speech (after he was asked to recuse himself from a case in which Dick Cheney was the named plaintiff, because he'd gone duck hunting with the vice president). As Biskupic says, her subject is "a showman, a streetwise guy, and a pulverizer." The more I read about his penchant for battle, and in particular about his unrelenting pattern of pushing away other justices at critical moments, rather than compromising to win a majority, another label occurred to me: the alienator.

All of the excess and flamboyance, not to mention the sharply right-wing judicial opinions and the slash attacks on his colleagues, make Scalia the subject a somewhat odd match for Biskupic the biographer. She is an utterly fair-minded, diligent reporter who covers the Supreme Court for USA Today and has written an authoritative biography of the more temperate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. (I reviewed it here.) The Scalia book, too, will stand up over time. But it probably won't satisfy ardent Scalia lovers or haters. Biskupic calls her man out for lapses and inconsistency at some moments and mildly sympathizes with him at others. In other words, she delivers neither a knockout punch nor a bear hug. Biskupic tells you all you need to know to make up your own mind about Scalia's character, but perhaps not quite to judge the way he applies his signature and influential theory of constitutional law: originalism.

Antonin Scalia grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Trenton, N.J., that he would later call his "little platoon." He wasn't just an only child: He was "the only child of his generation from both sides of his family," which included myriad aunts and uncles. How many Italian Catholics of his time can say that? Somehow, despite all the attention, Scalia never learned the native Italian of his grandparents, an omission he says he's ashamed of and that disappointed his father. (The son calls him "severe" and "demanding"—no surprise.)

Slate V: Author Joan Biskupic discusses Antonin Scalia.

Scalia was rejected from Princeton even though he was a high-school valedictorian with a prized Naval ROTC scholarship. It was an early brush with the stifling forces of elitism he still sees himself fighting. Scalia went to Georgetown, where he says he learned "not to separate your religious life from your intellectual life," and then to Harvard Law School. I couldn't locate in these pages a light bulb moment of dawning conservative consciousness. Biskupic mentions an important lecture that took place while Scalia was at Harvard, by the scholar Herbert Wechsler, who criticized the Supreme Court's school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as lacking a "basis in neutral principles."

But Scalia doesn't remember attending. His traditionalism may simply be part of him, and it is certainly deeply felt: By the time he was raising his kids in the 1970s, he didn't let them wear jeans. His antipathy for a living, evolving Constitution—one that courts interpret differently over time—hasn't, well, evolved, either. Scalia's theory of originalist interpretation dictates that judges must give to the words in the Constitution only the meaning that the framers assigned to them. Nowhere in the document is that theory of interpretation written; still, Scalia is sure his is the single tool for understanding it. Even setting this quarrel aside, the question remains whether he is devoted to originalism first and foremost as a handy vehicle for reaching the results closest to his heart. Scalia's method of interpretation tethers the country to the past. It points away from a right to abortion, away from gun control, and toward the death penalty and religious monuments on government property. These happen to be positions Scalia passionately espouses.

In response to such a charge of convenience, Scalia gives us his vote, on the Supreme Court, for a right to free speech that encompasses flag burners. "I don't like scruffy, bearded, sandal-wearing people who go around burning the United States flag," he protests. Fair enough. But does Scalia's claimed consistency extend to the guarantee of equal protection in the 14^th Amendment? Most scholars think the amendment, passed in 1868, was concerned with racial justice but did not ban segregated schools. So would Scalia have dissented in Brown v. Board of Education? He has said no without explaining why. "His position on Brown is indefensible," says Harvard law professor Michael Klarman. Scalia also doesn't recognize that the 14^th Amendment does not cut against affirmative action; that is, it does not mandate color-blindness. Biskupic talks about Scalia's identification with "the Polish factory worker's kid" who he fears will bear the brunt of race-conscious preferences. But she doesn't delve deeply into how his approach to racial justice fails to treat the framers of the 1860s with the regard he accords to the framers of the 1780s.

Scalia moved to the bench in 1981, when President Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. (Disclosure: My grandfather sat on the court with Scalia. They were ideological opponents. For the book, I put Biskupic in touch with my grandmother, whom she quotes as remembering Scalia in the early '80s as jovial, clever, full of himself, and not obnoxious.)

On the bench, his slash-and-burn style came to the fore. Appellate judges cannot be solo operators, as Biskupic points out. Nothing they write has the force of law unless their colleagues sign on to it. And yet on the appeals court and even more clearly since he joined the Supreme Court in 1986, Scalia has never cared about playing nicely with others. He mocks and castigates them in dissent. He writes concurrences so he does not have to bend toward their views. He often refuses to compromise even a bit of his conservative position to win the five votes needed for a majority. "He's got to have the last word. But is it really worth it?" Justice John Paul Stevens muses to Biskupic.

For years, the answer was no. Being the alienator cost Scalia the effectiveness that comes with writing for the majority—and also, perhaps, the shot he might have had to sit in the chief justice's chair instead of Roberts. (Though as Biskupic also notes, he was also probably just too old.) But Scalia's rigidity looks different, more farsighted, now that Roberts and Samuel Alito have joined the court. Biskupic ends with Scalia's majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which killed off D.C.'s handgun ban and also resurrected the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right to bear arms. By the book's end, Justice Scalia has collected another superlative: most influential. Now that's one he wouldn't quarrel with.

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BIROBIDZHAN, Russia—Never have I heard so many snide comments about an upcoming trip. "Don't bother coming back," said a co-worker, laughing nervously. Birobidzhan has a way of making people laugh. Several of my colleagues were convinced I was joking. The word itself is not inherently funny, but the idea for which it stands is bizarre enough and its history is macabre enough that it makes people giggle. It is also ridiculously far away.

So, where am I? I am just about as far away from my home in Moscow as Moscow is from New York. To get here, I endured an eight-hour Aeroflot flight followed by two and a half hours aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway, finally disembarking less than 50 miles short of the Chinese border at tracks so poorly lit that I had to ask someone where the station was. When I finally found the station, I discovered it has two signs, one in Hebrew letters and one in Russian. The Hebrew faces the tracks, and though it is a fair bet that virtually no one on the Trans-Siberian can read it, it communicates all the necessary information. (I assume it says Birobidzhan, but I can't read it, either.) The Russian faces the town and says "Railroad Station," and this, too, is all anyone needs to know.

This part of Russia is hazy territory, geographically speaking. Have you ever considered where Siberia ends? Any Russian schoolchild knows that it begins at the Ural Mountains, but few have ever considered the other side of Siberia. But that is precisely where I am: on the other side of Siberia, in the Russian Far East, where the Jewish Autonomous Region was declared to exist in 1934.

I am here to write the history of the worst good idea ever. Autonomism was once the rational alternative to Zionism. Whoever came up with the idea of moving Jews to the Middle East, to live on arid land surrounded by hostile Arabs? Jews should live where they are, speak the language they speak, and enjoy the protection of an established military.

Jews never had land in Tsarist Russia. Specially formed committees began prospecting for an appropriate place for Jews almost as soon as the Soviet Union was formed, following the Russian Civil War, in 1922. They tried the Crimea and parts of Ukraine and found them too densely populated for the task of resettling a million or more people. And then they stumbled upon an underpopulated border region in the Far East. According to a prospecting report written in 1927, the area was distinguished by difficult terrain. The mountains, while not especially high, were formed by rocks meeting at such extreme angles that traversing the mountains, even on horseback, was prohibitively difficult. The terrain in the valley was mostly wetland. Life in the valley was made especially difficult by blood-sucking insects of several varieties. The prospecting committee reported that people wore nets and eventually adjusted to the insects, but the cattle suffered terribly. The locals tended toward a nomadic lifestyle, largely because of the difficulty of maintaining pasture. The locals, in any case, were few—mostly Cossacks forcibly exiled here in the 1860s in order to fortify the borders.

That's right. The rational Soviet alternative to the crazy concept of settling the Jews in a Middle Eastern desert surrounded by Arabs was to settle the Jews in Far Eastern swampland surrounded by Cossacks. "The locals can barely imagine life in a densely populated country," the prospectors warned, "and view the planned land settlement as a looming catastrophe."

Birobidzhan train station with bilingual signage

That it was. The first train with 600 new settlers from Ukraine and Belarus onboard arrived May 28, 1928. At what was then called Tikhonkaya (Little Quiet) Station, they were met by snow, which would soon be followed by torrential downpours—heavy summer rains were the norm, but this was extraordinary even by Birobidzhan standards. The land they planned to work was flooded for most of that summer, making planting impossible. Cattle were brought in for the new settlers, and an anthrax epidemic ensued. Whoever could manage it scrambled to return home.

Such were the beginnings of the Jewish Autonomous Region, which celebrates its 75^th birthday this year.

People waiting for the morning bus in the freezing Birobidzhad winter. Photo by Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos

BIROBIDZHAN, Russia—The original planners of the Jewish Autonomous Region hoped to attract hundreds of thousands of Jews to Birobidzhan; to build a modern, Bauhaus-style city (for if ever there was an idea Jews the world over agreed on, it is exposed concrete and low ceilings); and surround it with rolling fields of wheat cultivated by Yiddish-speaking collective farmers.

Cold, rain, and disease killed most of the crops year after year. The Bauhaus plans were scrapped, and the city grew haphazardly, with settlers living in identical two-story wooden barracks, one room per family, one outhouse per building. Settlers trickled in—never more than 10,000 per year—and many turned back within months of arriving. Two waves of purges—in 1937 and again in 1949—decimated the Jewish population. The party elite was targeted the first time around, and the cultural elite was rounded up in the second sweep.

Nominally, the Jewish Autonomous Region retains its ethnic identity today (it never had much of a religious character), but, bizarrely, a search for Jewish history in Birobidzhan is much like an attempt to locate Jewish history in a European city: a tour of the invisible. The Birobidzhan Jewish Theater, formed in the 1930s and housed in one of the few Bauhaus structures that were actually constructed, was shut down in the purges of 1949, much of its staff was arrested, and the building itself was disgraced by two pseudo-classical statues of Young Pioneers placed in front to signify that it now belonged to the children of the proletariat. A few years later, the building was razed. As, more recently, was the school in which the language of instruction was Yiddish—until 1949, when that practice was "exposed" as part of a nationalist conspiracy and banned.

Razing buildings is one of the most effective ways of obscuring memory. The mechanism is described in an old Soviet Jewish joke. "A man sees an acquaintance walking down the street and calls out to him, 'Hey, Cohen!' The second man doesn't answer, so the first man catches up with him and says, 'Hey, Cohen, why aren't you answering?' 'Because I am no longer Cohen. I changed my last name to Ivanov.' OK, taking a Russian-sounding surname to avoid anti-Semitism is reasonable enough. A year or so later, the same two men cross paths again. 'Hi, Ivanov,' says the first man. 'I am not Ivanov,' says the second man testily. 'I changed my name to Petrov.' Now our guy is puzzled: 'Why would you do a thing like that if you already had a perfectly good Russian name?'—'Because everyone kept asking what my surname used to be.' " So that's how it works: By the time you get a preschool that used to be the Palace of Young Pioneers that used to be the Yiddish theater, who will remember the theater?

I've been spending my days in various Birobidzhan archives. Each one is a study in methods of forgetting. Take the Oblast Museum, which is the best place of its kind here—that is to say it's the least offensive. Like all Russian local history museums, this one has an exhibition that starts with rocks. Local rocks, crystal formations, whatever. Rocks are profoundly ahistoric, which makes them ideal Russian museum exhibits: They don't talk, and they don't need to be rearranged in case of regime change. If you make it past the rocks and up to the second floor, you will find three rooms devoted to the human history of the Jewish Autonomous Region. Like all Russian history museums, this one reveals a split personality with two distinct voices: a heroic one reserved for the Great Patriotic War—aka World War II—and the other, a more narrative one, for the rest of the story.

The exhibition begins, poignantly, with a perestroika-era visit by some Birobidzhan researchers to a Ukrainian shtetl. Predictably enough, they found a cannery inside the old synagogue and a single elderly Jew who still knew how to put on tefillin and a prayer shawl. Birobidzhan, where a Yiddish-language paper was still being published back in 1989, looked like a fountain of Jewish life in comparison. The room contains photographs of the early settlers and some information on the first round of purges.

The next room, draped in red flags, drips with wartime patriotism. There are guns and German trophies and information on Birobidzhan's war heroes. There is, strangely, no mention of the Japanese front, which was practically next door—only the Soviet effort against the Germans.

The third and final room takes the visitor through Birobidzhan's brief postwar renaissance—in 1949, the region's Jewish population reached its all-time peak of 15 percent of the total, just in time for Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign—through the purges, on to the happy years of late-socialist stagnation, through perestroika, and ends with present-day Birobidzhan, which holds biannual Jewish culture festivals and even receives visitors from Israel. (There is no mention of the fact that most Birobidzhan Jews emigrated to Israel in the early 1990s.)

I had a very odd sense that something was missing. Something big. Something important. Something catastrophic. The Holocaust!

I had just taken a tour of a museum of 20^th-century Jewish history that did not mention the Holocaust. There was no explanation for the decimation of Ukrainian shtetls. There was no indication that the reason for the postwar wave of immigration was the destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It's as if it all just happened.

Actually, that's exactly the message. Thinking about history too hard raises too many questions—that is, of course, why the Holocaust never made it into Soviet history books, or even into this Jewish museum. The State Archive of Birobidzhan manages to walk this fine, mind-numbing line in its own little museum. Here is what it says about the 1949-53 campaign, which Western historians have called "Stalin's war against the Jews" and which saw the arrests and executions of every member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, among other atrocities: "An anti-nationalist campaign swept the country. It could not pass by the Jewish Autonomous Region." In other words, it just happened.

When I asked for documents on the 1949 purges, the librarian at the archives told me that particular file was currently unavailable. These kinds of files tend to be unavailable all over Russia these days: For years now, getting answers to questions about Stalinist purges has been progressively more difficult. I thought I had found a way to get around this barrier in Birobidzhan, though: I placed the minutes of a party personnel meeting on the long list of documents I was requesting.

"I'm afraid we cannot give you this file," the librarian told me.

"Why not?"

"It's a personnel file," she said. "It's confidential. People may be bothered."

Right. Wouldn't want the executioners—or their victims—turning over in their graves.

On my lunch break today, I slipped over to the slums of Birobidzhan, where inebriated creatures of indeterminate age and gender wander among the barracks, which are still standing. My destination was the film archive, where I could pick up some historical footage. The archive's director, a 60-ish heavyset woman with dyed blond hair, said she had something to tell me. Seriously, she wanted to talk? That would be refreshing.

"Things are fine here," she said. "I like my city, I like my country, I like my family. In other countries, people talk about being Jewish. But here," she said very, very loudly, "we don't talk about it!"

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On Thanksgiving Day, vegetarians generally stick to the side dishes. But it needn't be so. Last year, Juliet Lapidos decided to find the best faux turkey on the market. She sampled four types of veggie turkey so that you don't have to. The article is reprinted below.

For America's 7.3 million vegetarians, Thanksgiving is a day of thanks but no thanks. On this holiday built around meat-eating, it's difficult to avoid niggling questions about your diet from the cousin you've never met, the uncle who doesn't approve, or the grandmother who just doesn't understand. (For the last time: If you cook the vegetarian stuffing inside the turkey, it's no longer vegetarian.) Try as you might to enjoy your green-bean salad in peace, you end up spending half the meal explaining why you refuse even to try the bird that your selfless mom spent all afternoon preparing.

Under such intense pressure, convictions can crumble like an apple crisp. Years ago, when I was still new to the no-meat game, I gave in to the siren song of flexitarianism and helped myself to a drumstick. But I came to regret making this exception. Turkey is a gateway meat, and during a tryptophan-induced nap I dreamed of bacon.

This year, to withstand the seductive bird at the center of the table, I decided I need more than a steely will or a tasty side—I need a turkey substitute, a main course to call my own. I resolved to find the best faux turkey on the market.

Methodology

I had a simple but strict litmus test in putting together a list of products. Most families cook a whole turkey on Thanksgiving, so I decided to test imitation roasts rather than sampling vegetarian deli slices or ground meat. After perusing sites like VeganEssentials and the Vegan Store, I picked out four brands, two of which can be ordered online and all of which can be found at Whole Foods throughout the holiday season.

It's been nine years since I last ate meat, so I've developed strong opinions about what makes a good substitute. But asking a committed vegetarian to evaluate fake meat is like asking someone who's colorblind to comment on a landscape painting—she can say whether she likes it but not whether it's an accurate representation. So I recruited meat-eaters to serve as co-judges.

Each fake turkey could score a possible 25 points, with either 5 or 10 points assigned in the following categories:

Appearance (5 points)

The Thanksgiving spread, with its autumnal colors, can be as beautiful as it is tasty. Would the ersatz bird fit right in, or would it be an eyesore?

Meatiness (10 points)

Some vegetarians turn up their noses at imitation meat, preferring less aspirational fare—like carrots. But those who miss turkey as the centerpiece of the meal have a right to expect a convincing impression. The key to meatiness is texture. Fake turkey should be tender, not rubbery or spongelike.

Overall Taste (10 points)

Overall taste encompasses not just consistency but seasoning. This category comes down to a simple multiple-choice question—would I, or my fellow-tasters, be a) unwilling, b) willing, or c) eager to eat the un-beast again?

The results, listed from "Please pass the squash" to "Hands off, Grandma, you've got your own bird."

Field Roast Stuffed Celebration Roast, $8.99

Appearancewise, the Celebration Roast can't quite pass for turkey, but it might be mistaken for a small ham. The stuffing had a mashed, canned-cat-food quality, but my meat-eating friend and I agreed that the tawny brown, corrugated sheath coating the roast did look rather like crispy animal skin, while the wheat-protein-based "meat" resembled pâté. All told, it was easy on the eyes.

Our opinion of the Celebration Roast diminished rapidly, however, when we started eating it. The stuffing, ostensibly made from butternut squash, apples, and mushrooms, tasted like soggy breadcrumbs. The "meat" was pleasantly chewy, and, in that sense, turkey-ish, but it was too savory. I felt as if I were biting into a vegetable bouillon cube—onion, garlic, and salt were the dominant flavors. My test partner said it "tasted like smoke." To find out what we were eating, I peeked at the ingredient list, which read like an Army recipe for gussying up not-quite-USDA-prime meat: garlic powder, onion powder, garlic, natural liquid smoke (!), Irish moss extract (!!), and unspecified spices. If my Thanksgiving host had Celebration Roast on offer, I'd stick to the green beans.



Appearance: 4

Meatiness: 6

Overall Taste: 2

Total: 12

Quorn Turk'y Roast, $6.99

Uncooked, the Turk'y Roast looks like raw dough. Cooked, it resembles spam—a beige, tubular monstrosity. Determined to judge the Turk'y Roast not by the color of its skin but by the content of its character, I cut myself a slice. To my pleasant surprise, I didn't gag. The meat-eaters, for the most part, also overcame their initial prejudice. All but one conceded that, just like real turkey, the mycoprotein (read: fungus) roast was springy and pleasant to chew. Unfortunately, it was a bit too much like real turkey: It was dry and rather bland. Of all the fakes, the Turk'y Roast best captured the experience of biting into a bird prepared by a less-than-expert chef. It deserves high marks for mimicry but falls short in overall taste.

Appearance: 1

Meatiness: 9

Overall Taste: 6

Total: 16

Tofurky Roast, $15.69

What Kleenex is to tissues, Tofurky is to faux turkey. It's also the most aspirational brand. Quorn offers an unadorned loaf, Celebration Roast comes with stuffing, but Turtle Island Foods, maker of Tofurky, is big on trimmings. There's Tofurky Wild Rice Stuffing, Tofurky Giblet and Mushroom Gravy, even Tofurky Jurky Wishstix (imitation wish bones), all of which you can purchase together in a maroon box labeled "Vegetarian Feast." The company also provides customers with a promotional postcard depicting a happy interspecies family (that is, humans and turkeys), digging into a Tofurky Roast.

Tofurky gets full credit for appearance. Like the Celebration Roast, it closely resembles a small ham. In the oven it develops a brown sheen and the "meat" takes on a turkey-ish golden-brown tone. The wild rice stuffing looked not only edible but appealing.

At a school with moderate grade inflation, the Tofurky would earn a B for taste. While the stuffing was genuinely good, the "meat" (wheat gluten and tofu) was a little rubbery and had a disconcerting Asian tang—no doubt a result of the recommended basting concoction: soy sauce and olive oil. The meat-eaters and I agreed, however, that it was perfectly palatable and might even work well in a sandwich the next day.

Appearance: 5

Meatiness: 7

Overall Taste: 7

Total: 19

Gardein Stuffed Veggie Turkey Roast, $7.99 per pound

Perhaps it's unfair to compare Gardein's roast with the products above, because I found it in the hot foods section at Whole Foods, meaning I didn't have to prepare it myself. Whether the Whole Foods chefs or the culinary artists at Gardein deserve credit for the final product, I can't say, but the Veggie Turkey Roast was certainly the best fake of the batch.

Shaped like a Twinkie, with a crispy bread-crumb coating, Gardein's imitation bird doesn't resemble a roast, but it won't elicit any boos around the dinner table, either. And the "meat" itself (soy, wheat, peas, beets, and carrots) really does have the color and texture of a turkey. After my first bite, I felt a little anxious—I wondered briefly whether I'd mistakenly bought real turkey and glanced at my taste partner to see whether she, too, had a "Wait a minute" look on her face. She didn't. While she conceded that the Veggie Turkey Roast had a meaty quality, she argued that it wasn't, in fact, as convincing as Quorn's Turk'y Roast.

In evaluating the un-beast's taste, however, we had no disagreement. The Celebration Roast, Turk'y Roast, and Tofurky were all quite dry, but the Veggie Turkey Roast could almost pass for succulent. It wasn't too rubbery or too porous, too salty or too bland. If, come Thanksgiving, you place a Gardein roast next to the turkey, you may not win any converts, but you won't be tempted to defect.

Appearance: 4

Meatiness: 8

Overall Taste: 10

Total: 22

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If you're like the vast majority of Americans, you're looking forward to gorging yourself on turkey this Thursday. But what if you're an eco-minded poultry lover—what kind of bird should you serve? Two years ago, the Green Lantern tackled this very dilemma. The article is reprinted below.

I'm wondering how I might go about finding a green turkey to serve on Thursday night—or at least a greener turkey than the ones I've served in years past. Any tips? And please don't recommend tofurkey—my meat-loving relatives would never forgive me.

OK, so the Lantern will refrain from recommending the soy-based option, thereby guaranteeing that he'll receive at least a dozen incensed (albeit well-reasoned) e-mails from ardent vegetarians. (The passions evoked by this recent column were something to behold.) If you must serve a genuine turkey carcass—and the Lantern is planning to roast a garlic-rubbed 12-pounder of his own—then you can certainly try shopping for one that's a few shades greener than its peers.

The knee-jerk answer to any green eating question is usually, "Go local," and that would certainly seem to apply in your case. The logic is pretty straightforward: The fewer miles between farm and plate, the less energy that must be expended on transportation. Going local is easiest in the handful of states that produce the lion's share of U.S. gobblers: Minnesota, North Carolina, and Arkansas. But there are plenty of small operations willing to meet your Thanksgiving needs, regardless of your location; use this tool to find a turkey farmer in your area.

The caveat with locavorism, however, is that the equation isn't always simple. Assessing the environmental impact of food production requires complex life-cycle analysis, of which food miles are only one component. For example, the benefits of a shorter farm-to-market journey may be negated if the local operation isn't as energy efficient as its distant rival. And much depends on the mode of transport: Food traveling by train may have a smaller carbon footprint than food carried on diesel-guzzling lorries.

Last year, a controversial study argued that British shoppers would be environmentally better off buying lamb, apples, and onions from New Zealand than from domestic producers. The study's authors—themselves New Zealanders—contended that British lambs are less energy efficient because they require trucked-in feed, whereas Kiwi lambs typically graze in pastures.

None of this means that eating locally isn't a laudable goal. Reducing food-miles will help the environment in many cases, and the Lantern doesn't wish to be mistaken for a hardened skeptic on the matter. But your benefits may vary according to a range of hard-to-identify factors.

Organic turkeys, which haven't been given antibiotics, are a popular choice among green-minded consumers such as yourself (though apparently more due to the potential health implications than anything else). There is certainly a growing body of evidence that organic farming techniques may increase agricultural yields over the long haul, by maintaining soil and water quality. However, these findings apply primarily to crops, rather than animals. And you'll have to pay a significant premium to go organic: When shopping for his bird this past weekend, the Lantern was disappointed to find organic turkeys going for at least a dollar more per pound than their Grade A counterparts. (Slate's own Sara Dickerman discovered a few years back that the extra cost doesn't necessarily translate into a tastier turkey.)

If cash-flow problems put organic turkeys just outside your reach this November, you can still green your festivities by breaking slightly with tradition: Instead of serving turkey, serve a couple of nice chickens. According to a landmark Cornell University study from 10 years ago, it take 13 units of fossil fuel to produce a single unit of turkey protein; for broiler chickens, on the other hand, the ratio is a mere 4:1.

So, let's say everyone in the United States ate roast chicken instead of roast turkey this Thanksgiving—how would that impact the holiday's carbon footprint? According to the National Turkey Federation, 88 percent of Americans will eat turkey this Thursday, which translates into around 264 million people. Let's be conservative and estimate that each diner will consume 400 kilocalories' worth of turkey alone (a figure that doesn't factor in gravy or the butter used for basting).

There are approximately 1.5 million kilocalories in a barrel of oil. A quick calculation reveals, then, that filling America's collective gullet with turkey on Thanksgiving requires 915,200 barrels of oil. Satiating our poultry jones with chicken, by contrast, would consume only around 281,600 barrels of oil. Net savings: 633,600 barrels of crude, which translates into roughly 12,355,200 gallons of gas. Since a gallon of gas produces 19.564 pounds of carbon dioxide—yes, really—then we'd reduce Thanksgving's CO₂ output by about 109,641 metric tons.

Sounds great, huh? And it's certainly better than nothing. But that impressive-sounding figure represents about one-thousandth of 1 percent of the nation's annual CO₂ emissions. Which is a potent reminder of how hard it's going to be to right our environmental ship—and, in a strange way, why it's worth doing in the first place.

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



.

In church, you lay in a casket open to your waist

as if you were in a ticket booth tipped over on its side,

selling tickets for an unearthly show. Your domed, bald

head, smooth cheeks, globed eyes, and modeled chin

were frozen into ideal shape as by Parmigianino.

You, in life all smiling quickness, now slept severely.

You had completed your lesson plans, handed back all corrected assignments.

Your hands rested one atop the other on your chest

guarding your final assessments. We shuffled by but you ignored us

as you ignored the massed bouquets and the preacher's manic grin

when he declared that Heaven was a retirement home

with plenty of vacancies. In the graveyard, they had closed you up.

The undertaker flicked at your gleaming mahogany coffin with his hanky.

The pallbearers placed their red and white carnations. The prayers

went on, and then they didn't. We left the box

on a gurney perched over a green rug atop the grave. We were not to see

you descend. A train chugged by

the full length of the country graveyard by the stone wall and the line of oaks,

freight car after freight car huffing with afflicted lungs

hauling behind them a long, ribboning wail.

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Holiday shoppers on Black Friday

Black Friday is a treacherous time. Lured in by the promise of fantastic bargains, you flock to local big-box retailers, facing the threat of injury or even death to grab unbelievably cheap "doorbuster" gizmos. Even if you manage to get through the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping bonanza without physical harm, there's a good chance you'll suffer financial damage if you don't plan ahead.

As I pointed out last year, the biggest worry on Black Friday is that you'll buy stuff you don't need. For retailers, that's the entire point of Black Friday—they're hoping that, in your quest for bargains, you'll buy an electric toothbrush or radio-controlled rubber rat just because it's on sale.

Aside from that general warning to keep your head, there are some categories that you should avoid entirely on Black Friday. Keep this list handy when you're fighting your way through an early-morning stampede:

E-book readers: The market for electronic books sure is heating up. Barnes & Noble just unveiled the Nook, its stylish competitor to Amazon's Kindle. In December, Sony will add a new model to its line of e-book devices—the Daily Reader, which features a touch-screen interface and, like the Nook and Kindle, wireless book downloads. There's also a new reader from Irex and a slate of colored Cool-Er readers from the British company Interead.

This isn't a good time to buy any of them. For one thing, e-readers are too expensive. Though you might see a few small discounts over the holidays, you'll pay at least $250 for a model with wireless access. (The Nook and Kindle sell for $259; the Daily Reader and Irex DR800SG are $399.) At those prices, an e-reader makes sense only for commuters and frequent travelers—yes, e-books are cheaper than print books, but you'll only make up the difference if you buy at least a dozen or so books a year.

What's more, buying any e-book reader now is a gamble. Every model has access to a different catalog of books, some of which are restricted by copy-protection schemes. This leads to a classic early-adopter format dilemma: Say you've got 30 e-books on the Kindle you purchased two years ago. Now you're in the market for a new reader, and you're leaning toward the Nook because it lets you share books with your friends. Tough luck—those Kindle books won't work on your Nook. Or imagine you buy the Nook today, but by 2012 Barnes & Noble decides to quit the e-book business because it can't compete with Amazon. Too bad—your Nook will be about as useful as an HD-DVD player. (For this same reason, I cautioned against buying Blu-ray players last year, and I'm sticking with the same advice this year.)

And there's one more good reason to wait on an e-reader: Apple. Nobody knows whether Apple will ever release a touch-screen tablet PC, and if it does, nobody knows whether the mythical device will function as an e-book reader. But it could! Apple seems to be close to announcing a big-screen iPod Touch-like device, and given Steve Jobs' history of discombobulating the media markets he enters, it seems wise to wait for Apple to move before going for any of the e-readers now on the market.

A netbook: These tiny, cheap, low-powered laptops were a big hit during last year's holiday shopping season, and retailers are pushing them this year, too—depending on the screen size and hard drive space, you can pick one up for $200 to $300 on Black Friday.

Netbooks are great, but buying one of these tiny machines during a shopping stampede is a bad idea. Though their specs are largely the same (the vast majority run on Intel's Atom processor), netbooks vary widely in physical design. Before you buy, I'd urge you to test out a specific model's keyboard and pointing device. And if you do buy one, make sure the store has a good return policy, because it's not uncommon to get sick of such a tiny machine in a couple of days' time. (I've got a Dell Mini 9 that I never use because its keyboard is less comfortable than the touch-screen pad on my iPhone.)

Also watch for the operating system the machine is running. Most of the models on the market now come installed with Windows XP. This is fine, but if you hold off for a bit, you'll be able to pick one up with Windows 7, which is far better than XP. Don't get a netbook running Windows Vista—that OS is too bloated to work well on these small devices.

Expensive home theater cables: Hey, you're in luck—on Black Friday, Best Buy will sell this $70 4-foot Monster HDMI cable for only $50! At Sears, meanwhile, you can get 15 percent off Philips brand HDMI cables when you buy a TV—meaning you can pay $50 for this 4-foot cable rather than $60!

Don't fall for it. Unless you're buying a cable that's 15 feet or longer, you shouldn't pay more than $10 to $15 for an HDMI connection. It's true that HDMI cables—which give you a purely digital connection between your home theater components—come in different specifications and that the cheapest cables might not suit all needs.

For the most demanding applications—if you've got an HDTV with 1080P resolution and you want a great picture from your Blu-ray player—you'll want an HDMI cable labeled Version 1.3 and Category 2. But you don't have to pay anywhere near $50 for these cables! You can get a 6-foot HDMI cable from Amazon for $10, and a 15-foot version for $14.

But aren't some brands of cables better than others? Yes, but not enough to justify the price. Gizmodo tested cheap HDMI cables against Monster's HDMI cables in 2007 and found that for cables 6 feet or less, the cheap ones are just as good. Audioholics found pretty much the same thing in its tests. The only reason to worry about being cheap is if you're buying cables that are very long or that you plan to install in a wall, and therefore plan to keep for a very long time. That's because cheap cables seem to fail at lengths of 15 feet or longer or for input sources with extremely high resolutions that might be found on home theater equipment of the future. But if you have no interest in future-proofing your home, you'll be OK sticking with a $10 cable.

Extremely cheap inkjet printers: Last year I recommended that people avoid cheap photo printers. When you add in the cost of ink, pictures you print at home cost about 25 cents to 30 cents each, far more than you'd pay at online photo labs. But photo printers are just a subset of a larger scam: cheap inkjet printers that quickly consume many times their price in ink.

Check out this Epson Stylus printer that Best Buy will sell for $25 on Black Friday. Sounds like a good deal—until you read the customer reviews, many of which point out that the printer runs through ink cartridges every month or so. The cartridges range from $17 to $34, so it won't be long before your cheap printer becomes an expensive boondoggle. (If you already have one of these printers that's always asking for ink, check out my guide for prolonging its life.)

So what should you look out for on Black Friday? If you don't have a widescreen computer monitor, now's the time to get one. You can pick up a 22-inch screen for as little as $100—and I promise you, the extra space will make every moment in front of your computer more enjoyable. Also, get an external hard drive. Your data are the most precious things on your computer, and it's never been easier to back all that stuff up. You can get a 1 TB drive—likely more than enough room to store all your music and photos—for about $70. That's a deal you can't afford to miss.

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Like comets hurtling at one another from opposite ends of outer space, two different phenomena in different parts of the world soared into public awareness last week. Separately, they might not have had cosmic importance. Put together, however, they could prove to be an interesting sign of things to come.

In China, President Barack Obama met his counterpart, Chinese President Hu Jintao. He also met the Chinese premier, Wen Jibao. The former got more attention, but the latter was more interesting: According to Xinhua, the Chinese press agency, Wen told Obama that "China disagrees to the suggestion of a 'Group of Two.' " China is "still a developing country," he said, and "we must always keep sober-minded about it." China is delighted to continue its economic relationship with the United States, but China "pursues the independent foreign policy of peace and will not align with any country or country [blocs]."

Translation: China will not cooperate in placing sanctions on Iran, China will not hinder North Korea's nuclear missile program, and China will not help solve the problems of Afghanistan, the Middle East, or anywhere else. In short, China has decided that it will not become America's full partner in foreign policy.

At approximately the same time, the leaders of Europe were locked into proverbial smoke-filled rooms (nowadays empty of smoke) arguing over who should be granted the new job of "president" of the European Union and who should become Europe's new "high representative," or foreign minister. These talks represented the culmination of a decade's worth of diplomacy, debate, and national referendums, all designed to produce a more united European foreign policy and to give Europe a single phone number that Obama can call when he wants to chat. The result: The president of Europe will be Belgian Prime Minister Herman Van Rompuy, a politician unknown outside his own country. The foreign minister of Europe will be British official Catherine Ashton, a bureaucrat unknown even inside her own country. Candidates of far greater experience and influence—including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt—were rejected, apparently for fear they would have more experience and influence than the powers that be. Germany's Der Spiegel heralded this news with the headline "Europe Chooses Nobodies."

Translation: Europe might have a new phone number, but when Obama calls, the person on the other end of the line will still be unable to act. "Europe" will not be a unified entity capable of coordinating a unified policy in Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, the Middle East, or anywhere else anytime soon. Europe cannot, in short, become America's full partner in foreign policy.

And thus we are left with a curious situation: America no longer wants to be the sole superpower. The American president no longer wants to be the leader of a sole superpower. Nobody else wants America to be the sole superpower, and, in fact, America cannot even afford to be the sole superpower. Yet America has no obvious partner with which to share its superpowerdom, and if America were to cease being a superpower, nothing and no one would take its place.

This might not be the end of the world—there are quite a few trouble spots that could do with a long period of benign neglect—and it might not last forever. Europe, when counted as a single entity, is still the world's largest economy. China, whatever else it might be, is still the world's fastest-growing economy. Sooner or later, the simple need to defend their economic interests might persuade one or both to start taking the outside world more seriously.

This does mean that the Obama administration has a problem, however: Having come to office promising to work with allies, it may soon discover that there are no allies with which to work. Europe is still our best hope, because Europeans share most of our values. But organizing sanctions with a divided Europe—never mind a military operation—will continue to be a major chore. China, meanwhile, is acquiring vast foreign interests, trading in Africa and South America as well as Asia, and maintaining a vast army. But China appears uninterested in joining an international campaign against terrorism, nuclear proliferation, or anything else.

Global military and security thus look set to remain in the hands of the United States, whether the United States wants it or not. Halfway through his presidency, George W. Bush found he had to drop unilateralism in favor of diplomacy. Now one wonders: At some point in his presidency, will Obama find he has to drop diplomacy in favor of unilateralism?

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A recently laid-off worker receives a free Botox injection

If Americans were concerned about Congress getting its grubby hands on their Medicare, wait till it touches their breast implants. Among the ways the Senate health care bill pays for itself is a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgery like tummy tucks, face lifts, hair plugs, collagen injections, and any other nonrequired procedures—a proposal known as the "Botax."

Plastic surgeons, like many of their patients, aren't smiling. Industry groups like the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons have launched campaigns against the tax, arguing not only that it would hurt business during a recession—elective surgeries are down already—but that it doesn't target the high rollers Congress is aiming for. Furthermore, says Big Knife, taxing cosmetic surgery could sag the economy as a whole, just when it needs a lift most. (The tax would raise an estimated $6 billion.)

The tax seems like an easy populist sell. One imagines the main clientele of plastic surgeons as the cast of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. But the tax isn't as progressive as it sounds, say surgeons. According to a 2005 survey by the ASPS, one-third of people who get plastic surgery make less than $30,000 a year, 70 percent of clients make less than $60,000, 86 percent make less than $90,000, and only 13 percent make more than $90,000. (Of course, that survey was based on people planning to get elective surgery, not those who actually got it.) Indeed, cosmetic surgery is an industry supported largely by people who can't afford it—a full 85 percent of operations are paid for using credit, according to Middlebury sociology professor Laurie Essig. As a result, the tax would hit low-income consumers especially hard.

But the argument isn't just that taxing plastic surgery is bad for the economy. It's also that plastic surgery itself is good for the economy. Call it a … (rimshot, please) stimulus package.

It's well established that attractive people have relatively high incomes. A 2005 study by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis found that good-looking people make about 5 percent more money than their average-looking counterparts, who in turn make 9 percent more than people with below-average looks. Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, found similar results in a new study.

Assuming that cosmetic surgery on the whole improves one's physical appearance, which in turn correlates with higher income, it's not a stretch to conclude that going under the knife could make individual Americans better off, says Gordon Patzer, author of Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined. "Cosmetic surgery makes you more attractive, and it also increases self esteem, confidence, and persuasiveness," all of which make you a more productive and valuable employee, says Patzer.

Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately, for surgeons—numbers are hard to come by. No one really measures income levels before and after plastic surgery. But surgeons say there's plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that a larger cup size (or smoother nasal curvature or tighter buttocks) leads to a higher tax bracket. "People come to us between jobs or after losing their jobs to freshen up, look fresh, look alert—to be or at least feel more competitive, which makes them more competitive," says Steven Hopping, past president of the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery who now runs the Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Washington. Renato Saltz, president of the ASAPS, says he sees job improvements all the time: "A lot of these women are in their early 30s, have lost their self esteem, lost their spouse, they feel very insecure, they come in, have these procedures, and they immediately start losing weight, exercising, they are very proactive, many go back and get a job and become functional in society."

Hamermesh, who conducted the most-cited study on beauty and income, disagrees. Yes, his survey found that beauty does lead to higher wages. But he also says that attempts to improve one's attractiveness, whether with clothing, Brylcreem, or surgical intervention, make no difference when it comes to income. The reason, he says, is that people can tell the difference between natural beauty and artificial beauty. If you had a convincing facial overhaul, like John Travolta in Face/Off, you might get a raise. Otherwise, probably not.

Hamermesh also disputes the notion that better looks lead to better productivity: "Are they truly more productive, or just being favored relative to somebody else?" Of course, if the surgeons are right that nips and tucks boost confidence, perhaps their patients will become more productive. After all, Hamermesh's own research found that good-looking executives bring in about 10 percent in extra sales relative to their average-looking colleagues.

Big Knife would add that the only plan to tax cosmetic surgery so far, in New Jersey, has been a failure, costing $3 in administrative spending for every dollar of revenue. The main problem, apparently, has been the difficulty in defining "elective" versus "reconstructive" surgery. Who decides whether an operation to fix your nasal breathing, which also happens to make your nose look straighter, is functional or aesthetic?

If Congress really wants to learn about the economics of cosmetic surgery, they should commission a study. If it turns out there's no connection between surgery and increased productivity, the case for a tax might be slightly stronger. But if there is a connection, then taxing cosmetic surgery could turn out to be like the surgery itself: a superficial fix for a deeper problem.

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What is the single worst sentence in Sarah Palin's Going Rogue? According to Slate's Going Rogue index, it comes on Page 102: "As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times didn't have to read past the first paragraph for her nomination: "I breathed in an autumn bouquet that combined everything small-town America with rugged splashes of the Last Frontier."

These sentences have the markings of what might be called the high Palin style (her writing, as opposed to her speeches): multiple references to local flora and fauna, heavy use of PSAT vocabulary, slightly defensive tone, difficult-to-parse meaning.

Do you think you can write like Sarah Palin? If so, we want to hear from you. The goal is to write a sentence that could be mistaken for one from her book. Keep it to a single sentence of fewer than 150 words and send your entry to writelikepalin@gmail.com by Wednesday. We'll publish our favorites later in the week.

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Some of the 288,000 Sri Lankans displaced by the war with Tamils

Sri Lanka announced Sunday that it would release more than 130,000 people, mostly ethnic Tamils, who have been detained in camps since the country's civil war ended six months ago. What have the Tamils been doing all day, every day, for six months?

Waiting, mostly. Six months isn't a very long time to be detained, at least compared with refugees in other parts of the world. (The Tamils are not, in fact, "refugees," though they have been mischaracterized as such in many news stories. Because they have not crossed national borders, the detainees are, legally speaking, internally displaced persons.) Given the relatively short durations of their stays in the camps, most residents have neither the time nor the means to establish an economic or social life. A few hold jobs improving conditions in the camps—digging latrines, constructing tents, installing water-purification systems, or working in health clinics—and children are occupied in UNICEF-established schools. But, for the most part, the Tamils have no real property and need special permission to leave the barbed-wire-enclosed compound. They spend most of their days crammed into assigned zones waiting for weekly food-distribution trucks to hand out flour, lentils, vegetable oil, and sugar and for water bowsers to fill their jugs. Hepatitis and dysentery are common, and detainees have to wait in line for an average of six to seven hours to see a doctor.

Menik Farm, the largest of the camps, housed more than 280,000 people at its peak, nearly double its maximum capacity under international guidelines. (It also constituted Sri Lanka's second-largest town.) The government assigned 20 people to each toilet, but in practice, as many as 100 people shared a single latrine. Food and water were rationed, so residents had to queue up for their share, then wait in line again for access to cookware and an area to prepare their meals. (Chopping firewood was one of the few ways the detainees could work to fulfill their own needs.) Eventually, outside merchants began selling cookies, ice cream, and other luxury items from trucks, which also required buyers to wait in long lines. Ten to 15 people shared each five-person tent, so the Tamils sometimes had to wait in line just to get some sleep.

Menik Farm is by no means representative of the global refugee camp experience, which varies widely based on the permanence of the installation, its location, and the host government's attitude toward the refugees. Camps in Rwanda have been accepting a steady stream of Congolese Tutsis for over a decade, and they are unlikely to close in the foreseeable future. Newcomers are assigned a plot of land and asked to construct their own housing—usually fabric stretched across a wood frame. Some industrious long-term residents have reinforced their dwellings with mud. The settlements are divided into zones, and each has the chance to elect its own representative to a governing council. (Many camp politicians held positions of power in their pre-refugee days.) The council has little authority, but serves as a liaison between the host government and the refugees. While residents still get their daily rations through the U.N. World Food Program, many Tutsis farm small plots of territory and trade their produce with neighbors for soap or tailoring services, or sell it to the camp administrators. The fencing around the camps is spotty and relatively unguarded, but, since most settlements are located in remote and undesirable areas, opportunity for exchange with Rwandan towns is limited by distance and road conditions. Most people choose to stay in the camps.

Some camps remain open for several decades. The 1 million refugees who fled Afghanistan after the Russian invasion have been living in Pakistani refugee camps for more than 25 years. Islamabad has permitted many refugees to function as though they are permanent residents in the country: They have limited property rights, operate small retail shops, live in durable adobe-style housing, travel freely, and trade with neighboring towns.

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

Explainer thanks Monte Achenbach and Therese Gales of the American Refugee Committee.

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Though it doesn't claim as much, Dexter Filkins' article in Sunday's New York Times, headlined "Afghan Militias Battle Taliban with Aid of U.S.," may offer a clue to where President Barack Obama's strategic review of the war is going.

Or let's put it this way: If, in the coming days, Obama does decide to deepen America's involvement in Afghanistan, and if his strategy bears no resemblance to the approach Filkins describes, it is almost certain to fail.

Filkins, one of the most intrepid war correspondents, reports that special-operations forces have begun to help anti-Taliban militias in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where the insurgents are concentrated. These militias have risen up spontaneously in certain tribal groups, but U.S. commanders hope that they can use the example of these revolts "to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland."

The interest, even excitement, in this development stems from two sources. First, it is reminiscent of the Anbar Awakening in 2006-07, when Sunni tribal leaders in western Iraq formed alliances with U.S. forces—whom the Sunnis had been shooting just months earlier—to beat back the bigger threat of al-Qaida.

Second, it has drawn high-level attention to a 45-page paper by Army Maj. Jim Gant, the former team leader of a special-ops detachment stationed in Konar province. The paper, called "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan," recounts his experiences with organizing "tribal engagement teams" to help local fighters beat back the Taliban—and it spells out a plan to replicate these teams across the country.

One measure of the interest in the paper is that Maj. Gant, who was about to be redeployed to Iraq, has been sent back to Afghanistan instead to help set up more of these teams.

The premise of his paper is that Afghanistan "has never had a strong central government and never will." Rather, its society and power structure are, and always will be, built around tribes—and any U.S. or NATO effort to defeat the Taliban must be built around tribes, as well.

The United States' approach of the last seven years—focusing on Kabul and the buildup of Afghanistan's national army and police force—is wrongheaded and doomed. The tribal approach also has many risks. But the case for it, Gant argues, is this: "Nothing else will work."

There are signs that Obama has been mulling over something like Gant's strategy. At one of the seven meetings Obama has held with his national security advisers (the ninth, and perhaps final, session takes place tonight), he asked for a breakdown of which Afghan provinces could provide their own defense, which need our help, and to what degree. He also told ABC-TV's Jake Tapper, in an interview earlier this month, that he and his advisers were focusing on "not just a national government in Kabul but provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now."

A tribe-centered strategy may appeal to Obama in several ways. First, it keeps the Afghan people, not American occupiers, at the center of the operation. The U.S. soldiers live alongside the tribes, build trust, train them, supply them, gather intelligence from them, and fight with them. We are supporting players, not the lead.

Second, these teams of U.S. soldiers are small. As Gant puts it, the approach requires a lot of time—many months to gain a foothold, years to make the bonds stick—but not a lot of manpower.

If Obama is looking for a way to counter the Taliban and build Afghan security without sending all 40,000 troops that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has requested, this is one such way.

Third, the strategy makes military success less dependent on the political fortunes of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Counterinsurgency campaigns work through local authorities; if the authorities are seen as corrupt, the campaign can't succeed. Karzai has promised reforms, which may boost his legitimacy among the Afghan people. But it he doesn't follow through, or if his efforts have scant effect, it won't matter so much with Gant's strategy, because the key authorities are the tribal leaders, not the central government in Kabul.

Gant has no illusions about the difficulty of working with tribes. He spells out the risks of getting enmeshed in internecine feuds. Several times during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, our guerrilla allies called in U.S. air and artillery strikes on what they said were "Taliban targets" but in fact turned out to be gatherings of rival tribes.

An explicit and essential part of Gant's strategy is to draw the individual tribal teams into a network of tribes—first across the province, then the region, then the nation—tied in to the Kabul government through a web of mutual defenses and the supply of basic services. He's less clear on the mechanics of how this "bottom-up" approach to national unity takes hold, but he recognizes that without it the Taliban can gain advantage by playing the tribes off against one another.

Nor does he contend that the Taliban can be countered by a tribal strategy alone. The officers who have been circulating Gant's paper, and discussing it in closed-door meetings, don't think it can be anyway.

Two weeks ago, asked about the continuing internal discussions on the subject, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters that President Obama was asking how to "combine some of the best features of several of the options" that his advisers had put on the table.

Obama is likely to announce his decision—on a strategy and on how many, if any, more troops it will require—soon after Thanksgiving. A key question to ask, in examining this mix, is how prominently it features the tribes

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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.)

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In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca discuss soccer's MLS Cup finals, the Ireland-France handball imbroglio, NASCAR's Jimmie Johnson, and baseball players who study advanced stats.

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



Real Salt Lake beat the L.A. Galaxy on penalty kicks in the MLS Cup final.

Landon Donovan discusses his penalty kick strategy with ESPN's Bill Simmons.

The MLS Cup drew a crowd of 46,000 to Seattle's Qwest Field.

CNN calls Seattle "America's soccer city."

FIFA decrees that France and Ireland won't replay their controversial match.

Bahrain and Uzbekistan replayed a World Cup qualifier in 2005 due to an officiating error.

Arsenal and Sheffield United replayed an FA Cup match in 1999.

Jimmie Johnson wins his fourth straight NASCAR title.

Johnson ranks behind Dale Earnhardt Jr. in merchandise sales.

Sports Illustrated's Lars Anderson on why Johnson should be Sportsman of the Year.

Profile of Jimmie Johnson by SI's Joe Posnanski.

New York Times article on how Zack Greinke uses advanced statistics.

ESPN's Rob Neyer celebrates Greinke's Cy Young win as a victory for the nerds.

Baseball Prospectus explains Fielding Independent Pitching, or FIP.

Prospectus Q&A with Greinke's teammate Brian Bannister.

Michael Lewis' New York Times Magazine article about Shane Battier.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly restrictor plates:

Mike's restrictor plate: Massillon's win over McKinley in the Ohio state football playoffs.

Stefan's restrictor plate: the sports world's Flat Earth Society—Murray Chass and Tony Dungy.

Josh's restrictor plate: the rebirth of Piedmont High School's A-11 offense.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

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

Posted by Josh Levin Nov. 23 at 5:40 p.m.

Nov. 16, 2009

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

In this week's episode of Slate's sports podcast, Hang Up and Listen, Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca discuss the Colts' tight win over the Patriots, college football's BCS rankings, and the Larry Bird/Magic Johnson book When the Game Was Ours.

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

The Milwaukee Bucks' Brandon Jennings scores 55 points against the Warriors.

The Colts beat the Patriots 35-34.

Video of the Colts' fourth down stop.

The site Advanced NFL Stats argues that Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fourth down was mathematically correct.

The Advanced NFL Stats chart on when teams should go for it and when they should punt.

David Romer's paper arguing that NFL teams don't go for it enough on fourth down.

Belichick and Mike Shanahan are among the coaches who go for it on fourth down most often.

Belichick successfully pulled off the same maneuver against the Falcons earlier this season.

A high school football team that never punts.

The New York Times on a study about golfers settling for par.

The top eight teams in college football's BCS standings stayed the same.

USC falls and Stanford rises in the college football rankings.

Notre Dame lost to Pittsburgh, in part due to a controversial instant-replay reversal.

SI.com's Stewart Mandel on college football's replay problems.

College replay officials don't have HD screens.

The Magic Johnson and Larry Bird co-autobiography When the Game Was Ours.

An NPR interview with Magic and Larry.

Isiah Thomas' reaction to Magic Johnson's allegations in When the Game Was Ours.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly sky hooks:

Mike's sky hook: George Blanda's record for most interceptions in a season: 42.

Stefan's sky hook: Captain Morgan's failed NFL guerrilla marketing campaign.

Josh's sky hook: The Anna Maria Amcats, college football's 715^th best team.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

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

Posted by Josh Levin Nov. 16 at 4:18 p.m.

Nov. 9, 2009

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

Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. (Audiobook of the week: Positively Fifth Street, written and read by James McManus.)

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 discuss the best (Saints, Colts) and worst (Redskins, Browns) teams in the NFL, CBS's foray into mixed martial arts, and Bill Simmons' Book of Basketball.

Also, don't forget that next week we'll be discussing When the Game Was Ours by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird (with Jackie MacMullan).

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

The Saints and Colts remain undefeated.

The Washington Post's Dan Steinberg profiles the founder of Redskins Fans Against Daniel Snyder.

Snyder's apology to fans about the team's poor start.

Redskins legend John Riggins says Snyder has a dark heart.

Cleveland Browns owner Randy Lerner meets with angry fans.

Lerner's Q&A with the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

An Associated Press story on mixed martial arts returning to CBS.

CBS drew an estimated 3.79 million viewers.

The blog Bloody Elbow analyzes the fight between Brett Rogers and Fedor Emelianenko.

In Slate, Tim Marchman asks whether the UFC can survive without Emelianenko.

Also in Slate, Matthew Polly hangs out with Emelianenko in Russia.

Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball on Amazon.

Excerpt about Isiah Thomas and "The Secret" from the The Book of Basketball.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly shin splints:

Mike's shin splint: Why is Brandon Jennings playing better in the NBA than he did in Italy?

Stefan's shin splint: New Mexico's Elizabeth Lambert kicking, punching, and yanking ponytails on the soccer field.

Josh's shin splint: the mixed message on firecharlieweis.com.

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

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

Posted on Nov. 9 by Josh Levin at 5:03 p.m.

Nov. 2, 2009

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

Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. (Audiobook of the week: The Given Day, written by Dennis Lehane and read by Michael Boatman.)

Become a fan of Hang Up and Listen on Facebook. Leave us a note, recommend topics of conversation, 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 discuss the World Series, Brett Favre's return to Green Bay, and revelations in new books by Andre Agassi and Tim Donaghy.

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

Jayson Stark's hyperbolic take on Johnny Damon's steals.

Damon's inspiration: Brandon Phillips stealing two bases on the same play against the Nationals in 2007.

Brad Lidge's ninth-inning implosion.

Alex Rodriguez's Game 4 heroics.

The secret behind Chase Utley's hair.

Sports Illustrated's Peter King on Brett Favre's return to Green Bay.

A federal appeals court ruled that the NFL couldn't suspend the Vikings' Kevin Williams and Pat Williams for taking a banned substance in a supplement called StarCaps.

A legal analysis of the StarCaps case.

The House energy and commerce subcommittee is holding a hearing this week: "The NFL StarCaps Case: Are Sports' Anti-Doping Programs At A Legal Crossroads?"

Andre Agassi's autobiography Open.

An excerpt from Open featured in this week's Sports Illustrated.

Agassi's ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.

Huan Hsu's Slate article on insane tennis parents.

Excerpts from Tim Donaghy's book Blowing the Whistle.

The NBA will look into Donaghy's allegations.

Hang Up and Listen's weekly passed balls:

Mike's passed ball: An appreciation of ex-Titans defensive lineman Albert Haynesworth.

Stefan's passed ball: Larry Johnson's anti-gay slurs and the coming out of Irish hurler Dónal Óg

Cusack.

Josh's passed ball: Ron Artest's new song "Afghan Women."

Podcast production and edit by Abdullah Rufus.

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

Posted by Josh Levin on Nov. 2 at 4:52 p.m.

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Nancy Pelosi

On Nov. 20, when all eyes were on the Senate in anticipation of its vote to proceed with debate on health reform, a significant development in the House went largely unnoticed: The 10-year price tag for its bill dropped by $29 billion.

This might at first seem a trivial change, considering that the Congressional Budget Office estimates the House bill to increase federal spending by more than $1 trillion over 10 years. By contrast, CBO estimates the Senate bill to increase federal spending by a mere $848 billion. Those comparative figures, combined with the presence in the Senate bill of various cost-saving features absent in the House bill, have led many commentators to state that the Senate bill does a better job than the House bill of controlling medical inflation.

That may still be true with regard to the private market. But when it comes to the federal budget (which 95 percent of debate surrounding the bill focuses on), it isn't true. The House bill, superior in nearly every respect to the Senate bill—its abortion ban being a notable exception—turns out to be better for the deficit, too.

The mathematically inclined may ask: How can this be? Subtract $29 billion from the House's $1 trillion price tag and you still get $971 billion. That's more, not less, than the Senate's $848 billion price tag. Ah, but that's working from the wrong set of figures. By peculiar convention, most discussion of health care reform is focused on the gross (new spending), not the net (new spending minus planned spending cuts and tax revenues). CBO's estimates of the health reform bills' savings and tax revenues are widely judged by noneconomists to be too high, but if anything, they're probably too low. That's because CBO has a history of low-balling projected savings from health care legislation.

CBO's net calculation on the Senate health reform bill is that, when you consider new spending, planned spending cuts, and tax revenues, it will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over 10 years.

The corresponding net calculation on the House health reform bill has bounced up and down a good deal. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., introduced her "blended" bill, CBO calculated that it would reduce the deficit by $104 billion over 10 years. When the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., introduced a manager's amendment altering the bill in various ways, CBO crossed out $104 billion and scribbled in $129 billion. Better! Then Dingell revised his manager's amendment, prompting CBO to cross out $129 billion and scribble in $109 billion. Worse! No subsequent change to the House bill had any significant bearing on its cost. After the House bill passed, CBO was still projecting it would save $109 billion over 10 years.

Then, on Nov. 20, CBO announced it had made an error regarding the cost of Community Living Assistance Services and Support, a new, voluntary insurance program to cover nursing-home and other long-term care for the elderly and the disabled. The provision, which was championed by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, requires participants to pay premiums for at least five years before they become eligible to receive benefits. Consequently, the program will in its early years reduce rather than increase the cost of health reform.

(Over the long term, CLASS is supposed to break even—the legislation mandates that premiums, plus accumulated interest on those premiums, cover the bill's full cost—but current projections have it losing money after the 10-year window, perhaps as early as 2025. Barring a spectacular bull market, this will compel a future premium increase. But I digress.)

Originally, CBO projected that over the next 10 years, CLASS would reduce the deficit by $72 billion. That calculation overlooked the likely participation of nonworking spouses in the program. This oversight caused CBO to calculate the average monthly premium at $123, when really it should have calculated it at $146. Corrected for this error, CLASS would reduce the deficit not by $72 billion but by $102 billion. This $30 billion difference translates into a reduction of the House health care bill's 10-year cost by $29 billion. So instead of saving $109 billion, CBO now says the House bill would save $138 billion. (Yes, that leaves $1 billion unaccounted for. If you happen to find it, please send it back to the Treasury.)

CBO estimates the Senate bill will reduce the deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years. It is now saying that the House bill would reduce the deficit by $8 billion more than that. Granted, that's not a huge difference. But for months, fiscal conservatives have been taking the Senate bill much more seriously the House bill. Time to reconsider.

Update, 4:30 p.m.: I may be overestimating the degree to which anyone is willing to discuss these numbers rationally. Brian Beutler reports on Talking Points Memo that Republican senators like Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.m Judd Gregg, R-N.H., and John Ensign, R-Nev., are running around saying health care reform will cost $2.5 trillion. That's twice what CBO estimated the House bill's gross spending total to be (before it calculated that taxes and spending cuts would reduce the bill's 10-year net cost to negative $138 billion). Beutler makes an earnest attempt to figure out what McConnell and Co. are talking about before concluding that their number is "made entirely out [of] whole cloth."

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

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Emily Yoffe, aka Dear Prudence, is on Washingtonpost.com weekly to chat with readers about their romantic, family, financial, and workplace problems. A transcript of this week's chat is below. (Read Prudie's Slate columns here.)

Emily Yoffe: Good afternoon, everyone. I assume many of you are elbow deep in cranberry sauce.

_______________________

Washington, DC: For the past few years, I've celebrated Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family, which includes his ailing, elderly grandmother. But this year, his family is demanding that we pay a cover—we're each being charged $40 per person for a standard Thanksgiving dinner (not catered). Both my boyfriend and I are outraged. Don't get me wrong. I'm not a freeloader. I'd be happy to cook a dish (or eight dishes!) and bring those to dinner. But paying $40 for a Turkey dinner with family? That's ridiculous, especially since I'm a graduate student, and money is always tight.

Unfortunately, my boyfriend has agreed to suck it up and cough up the $40. He hates that he has to pay a fee, but he refuses to stand up to his family. Meanwhile, he feels like he has to go to the dinner, because he doesn't want to hurt his grandmother's feelings by skipping out on Thanksgiving.

My question is this: Should I suck it up, too, and pay this fee? And, aside from boycotting the meal, what can I do to communicate to the family that making money off of us at Thanksgiving is unacceptable?

Emily Yoffe: I guess this year you can be grateful that your boyfriend's family is not demanding you pay $80 a head for Thanksgiving. Putting in place a cover charge is not the way to engender good feelings. And unless his family is getting the meal catered, $40 a person sounds like a lot for white meat and sweet potato casserole. The obvious answer was to have everyone bring something so that no one's cost was significant. On the other hand, maybe the burden of the meal usually falls on one family member, and he or she can't handle it. In that case, there's nothing wrong with people contributing so that no one goes broke for a family event. But you don't do it by announcing a cover charge. Your boyfriend should explain that he'll pay the full freight and something to cover your meal but that your finances are too tight to pay the listed price. I hope that means you still get to put whipped cream on your pumpkin pie.

Dear Prudence Video: Go Ask Your Own Doctor!

New York: Every year my husband and I host Thanksgiving, but with the economy in a bit of a crunch, we would like to cut back this year and pass on the hosting duties. How can we let family and extended family know without offending anyone?

Emily Yoffe: The answer: cover charge! Just kidding. But today is Monday, and Thanksgiving is Thursday, so isn't it a little late to say that everyone needs to heat up their own Swanson's dinner because you can't afford to feed them anymore? But family gatherings are supposed to be joyous, not ruinous, so you need to send out an SOS. The act of hosting shouldn't cost much, but feeding everyone does. So, as per the letter above, let everyone know that Thanksgiving will either be potluck this year or that you'd deeply appreciate a contribution from each family that can't supply a dish. Do it today, while there's time for everyone to still pitch in and not gripe that you ruined Thanksgiving.

_______________________

Family Time: My brother grew from a sweet and thoughtful boy to a bullying and very unhappy young man. There have been holidays in the past where I have not gone home just to avoid being the target of his wrath. He has a wonderful girlfriend now but still sometimes gets in his moods.

When he gets on a rant, I usually just walk away without comment. Is there something I can say instead that will cut off his rants and allow the rest of us to enjoy a nice meal together? I don't want to accommodate his angry behavior but would like an appropriate response that won't antagonize him. Thanks!

Emily Yoffe: It's one thing for a sweet boy to become a difficult teenager, but it is alarming that your thoughtful brother is an angry, unhappy man. I hope he has gotten a thorough physical and mental health evaluation because this is not a normal progression. There is no magic word that stops a bully from ranting. Your walking away is a good idea—that ends it. You could do him the courtesy of saying calmly, before you turn away, "Bobby, I've heard your point, and I don't want to continue the discussion." The fact that he has a wonderful girlfriend is a good sign of progress—let's hope there's a happier future for him.

_______________________

Anytown, Calif.: I desperately need advice. I have had no communication with my father for 10 years. He and my mother divorced when I was 19, and we've never spoken since then. His stated goal had always been to leave when I turned 18, and his "obligation" [was done]. So this was not a case of "I still love you; it's just that me and your mom have problems." My father made me feel worthless my entire childhood, something I am just overcoming now. I have no interest in resuming contact with him, but everyone in my family is pressuring me to do so. Telling me "he misses you." Although I have no desire, do I have an obligation, either to myself or to my father, to resume a relationship with this man who I was very, very glad to see walk out of my life those years ago?

Emily Yoffe: He made you feel horrible for 19 years, then he vanished for 10, and now he "misses" you? It would be one thing if you'd had a longing to connect with him all these years, or you felt a need to talk to him about your childhood, or you wanted to see if things could be different. You don't. It doesn't even sound as if you're curious. Tell your family you have heard their arguments, but that life without him has been better than life with him. Say you're still working through the pain he inflicted, and you don't wish to open yourself to more. Then when they bring this up again, say you've said all you have to say and the subject is closed.

_______________________

Family cover charge: I don't care if the boyfriend stands up to his family or not, but he should pay for any per-head cover charged to his girlfriend.

Emily Yoffe: Unless they serve really, really good wine for Thanksgiving, $40 seems like a lot for a home-cooked meal—particularly if people contribute side dishes. Sure, if he's able to foot the $80, he should do it. But post-holiday, this family needs to figure out something more equitable for Christmas.

_______________________

Holiday parties and coworkers: I'm sure I won't be the only person asking this. ... I work in a fairly small department. I socialize with some people in the department (lunches and occasionally outside of work). I was considering asking those I socialize with to a holiday party but don't want to possibly create ill will in the department. For holiday events with co-workers, is it better to invite all or invite none, or can it be assumed that as it is known that some of us engage socially outside of work, I can invite only those I am social with?

(For what it's worth, there are not space limitations, it's an open house, and I doubt the folks I don't socialize with would come, but I don't want to have to baby-sit people who don't know other friends; and the people I do socialize with know my other friends, too.)

Emily Yoffe: At my daughter's elementary school, there was a birthday party rule that either you invited everyone or you invited fewer than half the class. That seems like a good way to go here. If you only have a few work friends who are also social friends, then just invite them, but send the invitation to their homes and don't discuss the party at work. However, since you work in a small department, if you are going to invite a significant number of people, go ahead and invite them all, especially since it's an open house. Then don't worry about baby-sitting anyone. Be a gracious hostess and introduce them to new people they might like, then leave them to act like well-socialized adults.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: My boyfriend and I have been together for a year, and things are great.

BUT ... I'm having trouble with something, and I know it's me not him and I need help getting over it.

His ex-girlfriend (from a few years ago) is one of the most gorgeous people I've ever seen in my life. I'm cute and in good shape, but I happened to be at the same gym as this girl, and she has the sort of body that I didn't really think was possible. And super pretty too.

They're not friends anymore, and he never mentions her at all, so I know this is dumb, but I just can't get past the thought that there's no way he'll ever stop thinking about this girl's body because I know, after having seen it, I can't stop thinking about it, either!

Emily Yoffe: He was with her; now he's with you. He had a go with Helen of Troy, but he prefers someone cute but wonderful. It turns out even if you're with someone really gorgeous, unless you're getting along, the good looks are meaningless (see: Prince Charles, Diana, and Camilla). However, your relationship can be ruined if you turn from the delightful person you are into a jealous obsessive who puts herself down. Keep going to the gym, staying in shape, and ignoring her; and keep reminding yourself that he doesn't want her, he wants you.

_______________________

Turkeys in the kitchen: I serve a full turkey dinner at Christmas to eight people, and my grocery bill, including the bird, is $250. Girlfriend should toss $10 into the hat and bring her own bottle of wine.

Emily Yoffe: I wonder if they'll say, "Sorry, no seconds for people who didn't pay the full cover!"

_______________________

San Diego, Calif.: No, no, no, do NOT ask your co-workers to your holiday party. Trust me, someday (sooner than you expect) you will regret asking them over so they can examine your medicine cabinet ...

Emily Yoffe: When you entertain, anyone can look in your medicine cabinets. Instead of the marble trick (load the medicine cabinet with them so they fall with a crash on the nosey guests), just stash your medicine and your easily accessible financial records, etc., somewhere inaccessible when company calls.

_______________________

New York, N.Y.: Just a quick etiquette question for you. ... I was in a packed movie theater last night, and I had two adolescent boys behind me. One of them had seen the movie already, and one had not. How do I know this? Well, they talked incessantly the entire time. It tapered at times, but I could still hear rude boy No. 1 explaining things to rude boy No. 2 most of the time. It was so distracting, and as it continued, infuriating. I did the requisite half-turn-around so they would see that I could hear them and found it annoying. That piped them down for a bit. Then they ramped it up for the closing 2-3 minutes! I was so pissed, it took every fiber of my being to not turn around and curse them ad nauseam. When it was over, I had to leave immediately, lest I become my mother and lecture them on the spot about how rude they were. I also sensed it would have done no good, being that they seem to be in their "I'm-such-a-cool-smartass" years. How should I have handled it?

Emily Yoffe: You're right, what would a post-movie lecture from "Mom," accomplish? When the half-turn evil eye doesn't work, you need to address the problem more directly at the time. You should have turned around and quietly said, "Gentlemen, you're ruining the movie for us and we need you to please stop talking." Beyond that, there's not much you can do, except join Netflix.

_______________________

San Francisco: I've got really rude in-laws, and they drive me crazy. Now, they are nice and well-intentioned people who raised my wonderful husband ... but, they somehow missed the memo on basic communication and manners.

Recently they were invited across the country to visit our newborn (their granddaughter), and they took the opportunity to invite their California friends (a couple) up to our house for a couple of nights without asking me. They just informed me that so-and-so were coming. They also brought their puppy.

This is just one of MANY unthoughtful gaffes they have made that drive me crazy. Well-intentioned people usually have my sympathy ... but in this case, wouldn't it take a real buffoon to not see that I have a newborn (no nannies or anything, just me) and might appreciate a phone call if a houseful of people are going to arrive?

I went over the edge the last time my husband and I were talking to MIL and she mentioned her dog can't wait to come back and see us ... AFTER it spent two weeks aggressively chasing our cat and waking the baby!

Yes, she was serious.

How do you handle clueless and insensitive behavior when you don't want to alienate the people who are doing it?

Emily Yoffe: You ask your husband to clarify some things so that when they visit it will be pleasant for all. Number one, no dog. You've got a baby and a cat, and it's too much to throw a puppy into that mix. If they say they won't travel without the pup, then suggest they find somewhere nearby to board it when they're over, or explain that unless they leave the dog at home, you can't have them. Also explain quarters are cramped and life is stressful, so when they visit, you cannot play host to any of their friends. If extra people show up, you will give them a list of nearby motels, but you can't put them up. Then they either start behaving, or they stop coming—that sounds like a win-win.

_______________________

Midwest: I'm about five weeks pregnant. My family will sense something is up the second I decline the wine at Thanksgiving dinner. But I don't really want to tell the world unless/until I hear a heartbeat, which won't be for awhile yet. Help!

Emily Yoffe: Congratulations! If you really are having Thanksgiving with such a bunch of Sherlock Holmeses, take the wine, saying, "Not a full glass for me, thanks," and don't drink it. Casually get up from the table with the wine, and pour some in the sink when no one's looking. You can do the same thing at Christmas, unless by then you feel ready to announce your wonderful news.

_______________________

Boston: About a year ago, I started writing for my college newspaper. The editor of the paper, "Alice," is leaving for a semester to study in Europe. The problem? While we have always been friendly and gotten along great (at least professionally), I have found myself increasingly attracted to her and have often wondered about asking her out and seeing if we could possibly connect on a more romantic level. Since she is leaving for six months, as well as the fact that she is my superior, do you think I should ask her out and see what happens, or just accept that I am a victim of bad timing and bad circumstances and move on?

Emily Yoffe: The flip side of beneficial restrictions on intraoffice romances is that they may put the kibosh on the chance to find mutual romance with a person who you know shares your interests. This is a college newspaper! Your supervisor is not a faculty member, but a fellow student. If you two can't romantically connect, how are we going to create the college newspaper reporters of the future? You don't know if she feels as you do, so before she takes off, take a risk and ask her out. If she says no, take comfort that by the time she returns, you'll be over her.

_______________________

Portland, Ore.: I am a happily married thirtysomething woman. About a year ago, my mother found an old notebook of mine in my old bedroom. She read it cover to cover—it unfortunately included some unsavory thoughts about my brother. At the time, he and I did not get along, and I considered him the bane of my existence. You could imagine some of the things an unhappy, angsty teenager could come up with. When my mother informed me that she found this notebook, she also told me she shared it with my brother—horror! I would hope she would respect my privacy and his feelings more than that, but she didn't. Not knowing how to address this, I simply ignored the problem. Now, a year later, I wonder if my brother holds the things I said about him against me. Should I apologize? Should I let sleeping dogs lie?

Emily Yoffe: Mom should have been grounded for life for that one. You don't mention she's crazy, so I'm having a hard time understanding why she would want to open up such a wound. I hope you told her what a violation this was. Good for your brother that he's acted as if he never heard about this. The two of you sound a lot more mature than Mom, and maybe he realized how meaningless your long-ago teenage thoughts were. However, since you know he read it, you could pull him aside privately at Thanksgiving and say you've been troubled for a long time about your mother's actions, that you hope he understands he was reading ancient history from an unhappy adolescent, and how grateful you are that you now get along and that you hope he knows you love and admire him. Then check out your family home and remove any more incriminating evidence from Mom's clutches!

_______________________

Missoula, Mont.: My husband and I are having Thanksgiving dinner at our dearest friend's house with him and his partner. We did this last year, and it was lovely except for one weird exchange with the partner. I asked last year what we could bring, and he said bring whatever we wanted. So I made my favorite stuffing to serve as a side dish (it's a family recipe and very dear to me). Partner was extremely upset because he had already made stuffing and felt like I was trying to outdo him, or take charge, or something. He was pretty passive-aggressive about it the whole evening, making comments about how it took up too much space or was redundant. This year, I asked what to bring, and he said to bring a side or, again, "whatever I wanted." How do I avoid a scene again? Do we just show up with a bottle of wine? I feel like it's important to contribute but don't want the drama.

Emily Yoffe: He obviously should have graciously served your stuffing and said how delicious it was. However, unless you say, "Can I bring stuffing?" it seems like a bad choice for Thanksgiving. You wouldn't show up with a plate of turkey legs, either. So decide what you'd like to bring—then check it out with them. Say, "I was thinking of green beans with almonds or brownies, which would you prefer?" If even then he won't give you hint and he has a snit this year, be grateful you don't have to live with him.

_______________________

Olney, Md.: My husband and I are treating two of our daughters, their husbands, and our granddaughter to Thanksgiving dinner at a nice restaurant (third daughter is having dinner in Florida with her husband and his family). I'm happy that we can afford to do this for them, and I'm grateful for our wonderful family.

Emily Yoffe: You aren't charging everyone? You aren't making a scene? You aren't revealing your children's secrets to the table? You're just grateful to be with your loving family? What are you doing in this chat?!

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Md.: My brother-in-law has lived a mile away from us with my in-laws after a divorce several years ago. He stopped speaking to my husband and me after my husband refused to allow him to invite his EX-wife to our wedding earlier this year. We have not been included in family holidays at the in-laws' since the argument (Easter and now Thanksgiving). Essentially, my husband is told we are welcome to come by, but no direct invitation is ever issued to me, nor a dinner invite for both of us. This is unbelievably hurtful to me, as I have no family in the area. Luckily, dear friends have invited us for the holidays. There is no chance of Brother-in-Law leaving home anytime soon since he has been unemployed for more than a year. Husband continues to cut his parents' grass and visits them regularly. They claim we are welcome to come over, but visits have to be scheduled around Brother-in-Law. Any advice you can provide would be wonderful...thanks!

Emily Yoffe: There are lots of ways to interpret "welcome anytime." It could mean "Don't set foot here," or "We wish you would make the next move," or "We know we've been wrong, but no way are we going to acknowledge that."

On his next visit, your husband needs to make the next move. He should sit down and have a serious discussion with his parents and brother. He can be the big one and apologize for the hurt feelings over the ex-sister-in-law. He can say that the invitation wasn't extended since she was an ex, but he sees now how much this meant to your brother, and if he had it to do over, he would include her. But now this estrangement is making his own wife feel unwelcome in the family home, and he wants to get past this. He can suggest all of you go out for a peace-making dinner. That way, things should be back on track for Christmas.

If, however, your husband's family wants to continue to punish both of you, maybe they need to find an alternate lawn service.

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Fo, OD: Green beans with brownies—YUM!!!

Emily Yoffe: It's my specialty.

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Surviving Thanksgiving Suggestion: Since it seems like a fair number of your readers are girding their loins for some less-than-fabulous Thanksgiving dinners, I thought I'd offer up a suggestion folks can try for next year, one that makes our holiday much more bearable. Every year we host a dinner the Sunday before Thanksgiving and invite all the people we would have around our table on the big day if we didn't head off to the hinterlands to do the family thing. Everyone is asked to bring a dish, something they would love to serve for Thanksgiving but don't, either because they are still perfecting the dish or because they think their fellow diners would turn up their noses. I make the main course, which sometimes is a turkey but not always. We end up with lots of interesting food, great conversation, and enough good spirit to carry us through the week. It's the highlight of our holiday season!

Emily Yoffe: What a great idea for the holiday season, although any time of year, casual, convivial entertaining makes life more fun. However, it sounds a little dangerous to specify dishes one's family is sure to reject!

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving, full of dishes everyone loves, and gratitude for the imperfect families we have.

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TK

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Timothy Geithner

The issue has been festering for months: Why were AIG's counterparties—including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS—paid 100 cents on the dollar when the feds rescued the insurance giant, helping raise the cost of the bailout to nearly $200 billion? A new report issued by Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky now reveals that government officials, notably then-New York Fed President and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, grievously damaged the nation and capitulated to the very banks they should have been supervising.

Barofsky's report reads like a case study in failed negotiation. The New York Fed didn't have the backbone to stand up to Wall Street, didn't understand its capacity to protect taxpayers, and didn't appreciate that its responsibility was to taxpayers.

Geithner and the Fed have proffered a series of spurious reasons for their willingness to pay AIG's counterparties—the leading Wall Street banks—in full while demanding concessions from every other entity with whom the Treasury or the Fed dealt. Geithner suggested he could not use the threat of AIG's default in the absence of a federal bailout to get concessions from AIG's creditors. Why not?

That is exactly what the government did with the auto industry, and rightly so. The entity providing financing to a near-bankrupt institution must always seek contributions from everyone else at risk. The fact that the Fed had a strong predisposition against letting AIG go into bankruptcy didn't mean the Fed shouldn't have used every opportunity to wrangle concessions from the other parties. For Geithner to say it would have been "unethical" to negotiate for concessions is sheer silliness. It is akin to saying that having decided that you are willing to pay up to $250,000 for a house, it is unethical to negotiate to buy it for $225,000.

Geithner also claims that using the possibility of AIG's default as a negotiating opportunity would have cast doubt on the government's commitment to financial stability. What? Seeking to get other parties to share the burden demonstrates a lack of commitment to restoring financial stability and market-based realities? Pressuring Goldman and the other counterparties to offer concessions would have forced them to absorb the consequences of making suspect deals with an insurance company that was essentially a Ponzi scheme. Forcing them to give concessions would have been one small step toward ending the moral hazard the Fed had allowed to flourish for years.

Geithner also claims that refusal to pay 100 cents on the dollar might have been misinterpreted by the rating agencies and so cast a shadow on AIG's credit rating. Huh? AIG was flat-lining. The only way to restore its credit rating was for the government to bail it out—and to negotiate the best possible deal while doing so.

Perhaps most remarkable is that Geithner claims the "sanctity of contract" prevented renegotiating with the counterparties. But the government wasn't a party to these contracts! The government was stepping in with taxpayer money to save a broken company on terms to be set by the government. The counterparties had the contractual right to refuse the terms, throw AIG into bankruptcy, and suffer the consequences. In a workout context, the entity with cash—here, the government—can set the terms, and the other parties can either accept those terms or walk over to bankruptcy court. The government had absolutely no contractual obligation to do anything.

Also amazing is Geithner's assertion that he and the Fed were acting on behalf of AIG. Perhaps nothing is more fundamental than knowing whom you represent. Geithner and the Fed were supposed to be acting on behalf of taxpayers and citizens, not AIG. Their effort was supposed to get the best result for taxpayers: preserving the structure of the economy and stopping a free fall. That—not preserving AIG's market value—was the rationale for intervention. Once tax dollars were at stake, Geithner should have been asking how to achieve the best economic result while minimizing taxpayers' exposure.

Geithner has tried to deflect some of this criticism by suggesting that it is "untainted by experience." I would suggest that it is Geithner who displays lack of experience in his dealing with the financial community. He doesn't know how to negotiate, doesn't understand what cards he holds, and doesn't understand the need for fundamental reform.

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This fall, there is no other ingredient working it quite as hard as pumpkin. With little concern for overexposure, it makes appearances everywhere, from cocktails to dessert. Thanksgiving, of course, kicks off a few weeks when normally tempered appetites turn to splurges; and food professionals are eager to use pumpkin's nostalgic charms to drum up holiday overindulgence, adding it to everything from ravioli to brewskis. By the end of November, pumpkin's been so overhyped, it's practically a Kardashian.

Its omnipresence is understandable, in some ways. Pumpkins are jolly, bright, and quintessentially autumnal. Every child looks a little cuter photographed in a pumpkin patch. Pumpkins conjure a jack-o'-lantern's smile, and they lend a cheery spray-tan glow to whatever they are blended into. These days, our pumpkin appetites are whetted as early as September, when drugstores display their plastic pumpkins, and quirky heirloom rouge vif d'etampes pumpkins pile up on well-appointed porches.

Pumpkins, which are a subcategory of squash, are the quintessential New World food. Historians believe they were first grown in Central America, five millennia BCE, and thanks to their versatility and long-term storability, they spread widely throughout the continent. Soon after Columbus led European adventurers to the New World and back, pumpkin vines twined their way into European gardens, and the squashes were prevalent in Europe decades before the Pilgrims first gave thanks in Massachusetts.

Pumpkin pie, with its sweet spicing, is the true star of the pumpkin world, and it shares a flavor profile with older sweetmeats like gingerbread and mince pie. Though the Plymouth colonists likely ate pumpkin at early harvest celebrations, pumpkin pies weren't on the first Thanksgiving menus (no ovens, for starters). Versions of it did show up in European cookbooks in the 17^th century, and a 1796 version of the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons' American Cookery, included a "pompkin" pudding that was baked in a dough crust. Today, of course, pumpkin pie is a near-requisite dessert on the Thanksgiving table, and the Libby company, a subsidiary of Nestle, plants approximately 5,000 acres of pumpkins to fill its cans of pumpkin puree. (Last year, by the way? Terrible for pumpkins. You'll be spending a little more on your canned pumpkin this year.)

But as fond as we all are of pumpkins, they can be a problematic ingredient. Jane Grigson, the seminal British food writer who was always frank about an ingredient's shortcomings, wrote that "careless cooking can make it seem wet and pointless as a form of nourishment." Undercooked or raw pumpkin can have a weird tooth-gripping tannic quality. In the ultimate blow, last year Cook's Illustrated decided that pumpkin alone couldn't carry off an ideal pumpkin pie. In order to truly shine, Cook's concluded, it needed a hidden foundation of candied yams.

Used well, however, pumpkins can bring a lot of pleasure. I spent two weeks saying yes to pumpkin in almost every form (both homemade goods and store bought) to determine the best ways to channel our Thanksgiving-tide enthusiasm for the squash. Herewith, my findings.

Don't fret about the can.

Recipe writers often claim canned pumpkin does quite nicely—certainly much better than the wet and stringy pulp of a decorative Jack-o'-lantern pumpkin. (Libby uses a decidedly homely, dun-colored pumpkin breed, Select Dickinson, for its canning purposes.) I double-checked this assertion by making side-by-side pumpkin pies, one with a puree of a roasted "cheese" pumpkin (considered a fine cooking pumpkin), and one with a can of pre-processed puree. And, in fact, the canned pumpkin was more charismatic in flavor and hue. The main exceptions to the go-with-the can rule are recipes, particularly savory ones, where you might want a little more body from the squash: gratins, soups, or ravioli. (In these cases, I'd actually be more inclined to use a different squash altogether—Hubbard, buttercup, or butternut—and call it pumpkin for festive purposes. Don't worry; plenty of chefs do the same thing).

Do use pumpkin as a savory ingredient.

European cooks have a lot of dynamic pumpkin recipes that rely less on sweet spice and more on the pumpkin's own sunny flavor: Think of the stuffed Mantuan pasta that Mario Batali popularized at Babbo. Filled with pumpkin and seasoned with sage and the bitter almond taste of amaretti cookies, it's a dish that, when well-made, dances nimbly between sweet and savory. Sage is indeed a brilliant friend to pumpkin, as are cheese, ham, and/or a little bit of chili spice, combinations that can easily be worked into a soup. If you're looking for a less traditional pumpkin side dish for your Thanksgiving table, I love to add little bits of roasted pumpkin (or other squash) to a green salad, especially if I throw in some pomegranate seeds or fuyu persimmon as a tangy-sweet counterbalance. In my weeks of pumpkin proliferation, I also had good luck with prosciutto-pumpkin gnocchi and, even better, a leek, pumpkin, and cheese gratin from Richard Olney's Provence: The Beautiful Cookbook that even won over my squash-averse husband. It, or a similar casserole like this tian of pumpkin, would make a swell Thanksgiving side dish.

Don't overdo the spice.

My theory is that people don't actually like the flavor of pumpkin quite as much as they love Thanksgiving itself, and the aroma of the sweet spices—ginger, cinnamon, and clove—used in traditional pumpkin pies. As such, many pumpkin specialties and recipes add so much spice to the mix that they both drown out the pumpkin and add an acrid flavor to the item in question. If you see a recipe with more than a teaspoon or more of cinnamon, be wary.

Don't overdo the cream.

A huge number of new-school pumpkin desserts that have found their way into Thanksgiving recipe compilations—flans, crème brulées, mousses, and cheesecakes—try to make pumpkin lighter in texture and richer in mouthfeel by piling on the cream and eggs. I made as sophisticated a pumpkin cheesecake as possible (from cake guru Rose Levy Berenbaum's new book, Rose's Heavenly Cakes), but as elegant as the texture was, I felt the pumpkin was lost in all the unctuous dairy—the squash was essentially a sunny food coloring. I tend to prefer pumpkin desserts that have at least as much pumpkin as cream in them—like Claudia Fleming's pumpkin clafouti. (When I made it, I actually goosed the quantity of pumpkin puree by another one-third of a cup.) It has an old-fashioned vibe that seems right for the potbellied squash.

Sugar, on the other hand, is good.

Pumpkin preserves are a little-explored territory, but they are among my favorite ways to get a sweet autumnal flavor hit. I cooked up a couple of jars of French pumpkin-lemon jam, which pits tiny cubes of pumpkin against the bright tang of lemon zest, flesh, and juice. (Mine was from an old French cookbook, but similar to this recipe.) In a darker mode, there is a Mexican spoon sweet made with pumpkin, raw sugar (piloncillo), and anise seeds, which is dark magic served over ice cream. (If you don't feel like cooking it yourself, you can find a similar flavor in arrop, the Spanish pumpkin preserve.)

In general, don't drink pumpkins (with one exception).

American microbrew drinkers seem to go nuts for a seasonal ale, and I tasted three pumpkin beers over the course of the week (this Elysian one was my favorite, if you can call it that). While I didn't hate any of them, they had a sort of tinny vegetal backnote that turned me off (and I found the inevitable spices a little distracting). But the pumpkin brews were nectar compared with my one and only pumpkin latte from Starbucks, a sweet, frothy, orange affair that tasted sugary and pinched at the same time, like a potable scented holiday candle. There is one exception to my liquid pumpkin rule: It actually works in smoothies. I tried a commercial pumpkin protein drink after a long run and didn't hate it, despite my historic disdain for sports beverages. Even better was the one I made for myself out of canned pumpkin, plain yogurt, maple syrup, milk, and a whisper of nutmeg.

Pumpkin bread will change your life.

OK, that may be overstating it, but for me, pumpkin shines most in a slightly sweet bready environment (including cakes). I whipped up this teacake/bread recipe from a terrific Seattle bakery, and it was so good—really squashy, just the right amount of sweet indulgence, and lots of crunchy nuts and seeds to glam it up. I also loved slightly sweet, yeasted pumpkin dinner rolls from one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors, Bert Greene. (Here's a similar recipe.) Fortified with pumpkin, a dash of whole-wheat flour, and maple syrup, they had a more muted pumpkin presence, but they were jolly, fragrant, and warm. They are such an inessential but delightful little treat that they might be the ideal gift-in-hand for the Thanksgiving host who has taken on the rest of the meal unassisted.

Don't overlook the seeds or oil.

Toasted pumpkin seeds bring green color and crunch to granolas, breads (like the ones above), soups, or an empty snack bowl. I recently had a spectacular pumpkin danish at New York's Bouchon Bakery that fairly bristled with seeds. And loden-green pumpkin seed oil is a fancy Austrian specialty that adds a distinctive brooding nuttiness to salads or bread.

Don't take pumpkin too seriously.

I am not usually a consumer of whoopie pies, the Northeastern cookie sandwiches filled with marshmallow icing, but spiced-pumpkin whoopie pies, like these from Two Fat Cats Bakery in Portland, Maine, have been making the rounds at trendy bakeries of late, and I had to try them. Even this classier version with delicately spiced cakey pumpkin cookies, and a filling made of butter instead of shortening, was a little toothache-sweet for my taste. But it made me very popular at the party I brought them too. And so perhaps the ultimate pumpkin rule: Have fun with it, since everyone loves the pumpkin.

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It's both amusing and educational to observe a consensus when it suddenly starts to give way at all points without yielding an inch. A couple of weeks ago, the consoling view was that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a man more to be pitied than feared, a full-blown officer in the U.S. armed forces who was too shaken up by the stories of returned veterans to be able to function properly, and a physician too stressed-out to bear in mind that there was such a thing as a Hippocratic oath. Why, even the FBI had interpreted his e-mails to Anwar al-Awlaki as quite "consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan in his position as a psychiatrist at the Walter Reed Medical Center."

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

That latter finding does not stack up very well with the disclosure that the major was imploring Awlaki's spiritual advice some time before the online imam issued a finding of his own to the effect that bullets discharged at American soldiers were fired in a holy cause. The Washington Post and ABC News, which drew well ahead of the consensus in their reporting, also unearthed e-mails from Hasan to the Yemen-based preacher, asking when jihad tactics might be justified, what were the circumstances that would license the killing of innocent bystanders, and expressing the hope that the e-mailer and his respondent might one day be united in paradise. Since Awlaki was only in Yemen in the first place because he'd found the United States an inconvenient domicile (after having had direct contact with three of the 19 air pirates and mass murderers of Sept. 11, 2001, or "9/11 hijackers" as they are now euphemistically termed), we can apparently congratulate ourselves on paying for an FBI that lacks the nasty and suspicious mind that spoils so much police work in "the community."

Very well, then; the case for Maj. Hasan the overburdened caseworker seems to have evaporated. Robert Wright, among others, is big enough to admit as much. Wright, now emerging as the leading liberal apologist for the faith-based (see his intriguing new book The Evolution of God), now proposes an alternative theory of Maj. Hasan's eagerness to commit mass murder. "The Fort Hood shooting," says Wright, "is an example of Islamist terrorism being spread partly by the war on terrorism—or, actually, by two wars on terrorism, in Iraq and Afghanistan." I know that contributors to the New York Times op-ed page are not necessarily responsible for the headlines that appear over their work, but the title of this one—"Who Created Major Hasan?"—really does demand an answer, and the only one to be located anywhere in the ensuing text is "We did."

Everything in me revolts at this conclusion, which is echoed and underlined in another paragraph of the article. Why, six months ago, did "a 24-year-old-American named Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad—Carlos Bledsoe before his teenage conversion to Islam—fatally shoot a soldier outside a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark.? ABC News reported, "It was not known what path Muhammad … had followed to radicalization." Well, here's a clue: After being arrested he started babbling to the police about the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan." Wright describes this clue-based deduction of his as an illustration of the way that "an isolated incident can put you on a slippery slope." Though I can't find much beauty in his prose there, I want to agree with him.

For a start, did Hasan or Muhammad ever say what "killing" of which "Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan" they had in mind? There isn't a day goes by without the brutal slaughter of Muslims in both countries by al-Qaida or the Taliban. And that's not just because most (though not all) civilians in both countries happen to be of the Islamic faith. The terrorists do not pause before deliberately blowing up the mosques and religious processions of those whose Muslim beliefs they deem insufficiently devout. Most of those now being tortured and raped and executed by the Islamic Republic of Iran are Muslim. All the women being scarred with acid and threatened with murder for the crime of going to school in Pakistan are Muslim. Many of those killed in London, Madrid, and New York were Muslim, and almost all the victims callously destroyed in similar atrocities in Istanbul, Cairo, Casablanca, and Algiers in the recent past were Muslim, too. It takes a true intellectual to survey this appalling picture and to say, as Wright does, that we invite attacks on our off-duty soldiers because "the hawkish war-on-terrorism strategy—a global anti-jihad that creates nonstop imagery of Americans killing Muslims—is so dubious." Dubious? The only thing dubious here is his command of language. When did the U.S. Army ever do what the jihadists do every day: deliberately murder Muslim civilians and brag on video about the fact? For shame. The slippery slope—actually the slimy slope—is the one down which Wright is skidding.

It is he, who I am taking as representative of a larger mentality here, who uses equally inert lingo to suggest that Maj. Hasan was "pushed over the edge by his perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars." That's a nice and shady use of the word "perception." Might it not be equally true to say that Hasan was all-too-easily pulled over the edge, having already signaled his devout eagerness for the dive, by a cleric who makes a living by justifying murder of Muslims and non-Muslims alike?

In many recent reports of this controversy one has seen reporters from respectable papers referring not just to generic, uniform "Muslims" but even to the places where they live as "Muslim lands." If you would object to seeing the absurd term "Christendom" in your newspaper as a description of Europe, let alone to reading about "Jewish land" on the West Bank, then please have the fortitude to complain next time violent theocracy is smuggled into the discourse under the increasingly feeble disguise of multicultural masochism.

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Clearly, there's a lot of demand for turkeys on Thanksgiving. What's less obvious is how turkey suppliers meet such massive, single-day demand for their not-usually-that-popular product. In 2008, the "Explainer" probed the world of turkey economics, discovering how farmers cope with the holiday. The article is reprinted below.

If last year's numbers are any indication, some 46 million turkeys across America will be trussed up for Thanksgiving dinner this Thursday. That's about 17 percent of all turkeys raised in the United States in a given year. How do turkey farmers meet the huge single-day demand for their birds?

They plan ahead. Major commercial turkey brands, like Butterball, Hormel, and Cargill, produce two kinds of whole bird: frozen and fresh. Turkeys destined for the freezer are produced year-round—once these birds reach the proper size and weight, they're slaughtered and blast-frozen at minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point they can be stored all year in preparation for the holiday poultry frenzy.

Producing fresh turkeys takes more planning. Market leader Butterball, for example—which grows about one fresh bird for every nine frozen ones—has already begun the production cycle for next year's holiday season. Eggs for breeder birds have been purchased from one of the world's two major genetic suppliers, Hybrid and Nicholas. Those eggs will then be hatched and placed in turkey farms so that they can grow and become sexually mature during the winter. (Butterball needs roughly 28,000 laying hens and 1,700 "stud" toms each year to produce the right amount of fresh turkeys.) Come springtime, these birds will produce the eggs that are destined to become the turkeys we actually eat. Hens produce eggs in 25-weeklong cycles: The first five weeks' worth go toward fresh turkey production, the rest toward the frozen turkey market. Breeder hens are normally used for a single cycle before being slaughtered and processed themselves.

The eggs laid next spring will be incubated for 28 days and then, after they hatch, the resulting turkeys will spend about 10 to 18 weeks on a farm before they're brought into the processing plant in late October and November. The birds are slaughtered, quickly chilled to between 40 and 26 degrees Fahrenheit, and then shipped out to retailers, usually all in the same day. (Some fresh birds have to go to market a little early because the plants can't process all of them in mid-November, even working at full capacity.) Poultry companies can also shuffle their production to meet increased demand, routing some of the birds that were meant to be turned into lunch meats, fresh breasts and legs, or ground turkey back into whole bird processing.

Bonus explainer: How do turkeys breed? With a little help from their human friends. The vast majority of turkeys sold in the United States are of the white broad-breasted variety. These birds have been bred to produce as much white breast meat as possible, resulting in males so large and unwieldy that they can't properly mount the females. Toms therefore have to be manually stimulated and "milked" for their semen, which is then inserted into a hen using a syringe. Some have decried the assembly-line-like process as inhumane—at the very least, as chronicled in this not-entirely-safe-for-work clip from Discovery's Dirty Jobs, it is extremely messy. Farmers also use artificial lights to trick birds into thinking that it's spring—their natural breeding season—all year-round, thereby increasing their production.

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

Explainer thanks David Anderson and Kip Bodnar of Butterball and Michael Davis of Texas A&M University.

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Three Gorges Dam

China may be taking baby steps to develop a consumer-based economy, but it's pretty clear that business of the nation is still business. The needs and comfort of individuals are routinely subordinated to economic development. Much of China's commercial infrastructure—airports, bridges, shipping terminals, office buildings—is state of the art. But the intercity roads are for trucks and buses, not for passenger cars. The airports are designed to accommodate globe-trotting business travelers, not a mass market of local tourists. And while they may be lovely, the green waters of the Yangtze River—and the stunning amounts of concrete that have been poured into them—are intensely commercial.

This was driven home during a six-hour trip down the river from Wanzhou (population 1.7 million). It is a city large enough to have a Wal-Mart and McDonald's in its downscale downtown and yet sufficiently provincial that the sight of an American buying breakfast buns from a street vendor was an occasion for double-takes. As was the case with many other cities in the flood plain of the Yangtze River, a chunk of this river port was essentially rebuilt on higher ground as part of the relocation efforts stemming from the Three Gorges Dam project.

I'm traveling with a group of journalists through China, and the vessel we boarded had been advertised as a flying jet boat. A bit of an overstatement. It was a low-slung, Russian-built boat that spewed noxious fumes as it idled. And, as expected, conditions onboard were borderline Soviet. The first-class cabin had aggressively uncomfortable seats, an iron bar positioned to produce maximum damage to the passenger's lower back. An inane Hong Kong cop-gangster comedy caper blared from the television. On deck, crew members prepared lunch. One sat hunched over a battered wok and fried eggs in a pool of oil, while a colleague spooned rice and vegetables into Styrofoam containers. (It was the closest thing we've had to American-style Chinese food all week.)

We made good time over the placid waters, marveling alternately at the scenery and at the modern infrastructure that has been imposed upon it. The wide river carved an occasionally dramatic course through green hills. But the water level is about 500 feet higher than it had been before the Yangtze had been dammed downriver, which meant you had to imagine how much more dramatic the soaring mountains must have seemed pre-dam. Overhead, new bridges spanned the water, all of them less than 15 years old. (I stopped counting after a dozen.) Every hour or so we'd pass another city or town, a huddle of white concrete structures climbing from the new waterfront up the hills. There were no pleasure boats on the river. But we passed plenty of ships moving both directions carrying coal and containers. The most modern were large car-carrying boats, which looked a bit like Mississippi River paddleboats, bringing hundreds of vehicles made at the Chang'An factory in Chongqing downriver to the coast.

The controversial Three Gorges Dam project, which flooded hundreds of square miles of land and required the relocation of more than 1 million people, was promoted as an effort to improve human welfare. No longer would the Yangtze's periodic floods kill large numbers of Chinese. And the vast quantities of electricity to be generated by the dam would mean China could continue to electrify without having to rely entirely on coal-burning plants. But the dam was a blunt instrument. Its construction meant many existing towns were simply flattened or submerged. A fellow passenger on the boat had been relocated from his village of 180 people. His life was now more comfortable, he conceded, but he missed the village, and the relocation money he received from the government wasn't enough.

When we docked below Yichang, a rickety cable car conveyed us up the hillside, and we trudged through a dusty terminal before boarding a bus that whisked us to the Three Gorges Dam. As we saw during the Olympics, the Chinese are enormously proud of their heroic feats of engineering—proud that they can afford to build them, proud that they can carry them out quickly, and proud that they seem to work. While the construction of this complex was hugely labor intensive, the dam is highly efficient and mechanized. Ships idled at the bottom, waiting to enter the locks that would convey them to higher water. Embedded in the walls of the dam are turbines with capacity to generate 22,500 megawatts of electricity. We took an elevator into the bowels of the dam, through an immaculate cavernous space that housed the turbines, and into the control room. When the guide pushed a button, the opaque glass cleared, and we watched three engineers monitoring an electronic array. In a frenetic country, here was one of the most placid power plants you'll ever see—buried in the new Great Wall of China.

I have just a few days left in China. I'm hoping a Slate reader can answer this question before I depart. I have yet to see a chocolate bar in China. Why? Please send answers to moneybox@slate.com.

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The 49ers play the Bears

Later this week, families across the country will sit down for their annual turkey dinner. In many households, this will be followed immediately by another Thanksgiving tradition: switching on the TV to watch grown men bash one another to near-unconsciousness on the football field.

That this ritual may be hazardous to the players' health is obvious, but new research reported in a National Bureau of Economic Research study argues that just watching football can be harmful to fans and their families. Based on domestic violence police reports from the years 1995-2006, the report finds that when an NFL game ends in an upset, the home state of the losing team experiences a sudden, brief uptick in domestic violence.

There are two main schools of thought about how domestic violence happens, and they are by no means inconsistent with each other. Such acts may be the explosive result when years of simmering tensions finally come to a boil. Or they may be an impulsive lashing out at whichever victim is close at hand in a moment of anger (perhaps followed shortly by shame and regret). To the serious football fan, a painful loss may trigger just such a moment of anger.

To assess the football-violence connection, economists Gordon Dahl and David Card collected 12 years' worth of NFL game histories, matching up the teams' records to data on "intimate partner violence" from the National Incident Based Reporting System. The NIBRS data, which include information on all crimes reported to the police, are often only available state-by-state. So the researchers focused on states where there is only one "local" team, to avoid confusion over what happens in California when, say, the 49ers win and the Raiders lose. After further limiting their analyses to states for which there's adequate crime data, the researchers ended up with six teams: the Carolina Panthers, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, Kansas City Chiefs, New England Patriots, and Tennessee Titans.

How much grief would we expect each loss to give its fans? If the loss is entirely expected, probably not much: For this year's 1-and-8 Lions, each new loss is received with resignation. By contrast, last week's loss by the Steelers, favored by a seven-point margin over the Bengals, probably rankled many fans in Pittsburgh. To quantify fan rage, Card and Dahl collected the Vegas point spread, which provides an indication of which side was expected to win and by how much. A less-expected loss equals angrier fans. They classify teams with a spread of three or more points as favored to win.

Card and Dahl found that on Sundays during the regular season, losses by favored teams—that is, painful losses—are associated with an 8 percent increase in intimate partner violence. (For, say, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with a population of nearly 6.5 million, this translates into an extra seven incidents on a Sunday when the Patriots unexpectedly lose.) These extra cases appear in the hours immediately following the game—3 to 6 p.m. for games with a 1 p.m. start time, and 6 to 9 p.m. for those with a 4 p.m. start—further bolstering the case that postgame rage may take the blame. The spikes in violence are nearly twice as big in emotionally charged matchups between traditional rivals, like the annual Bears-Packers matchup, and also in games with lots of turnovers and penalties.

It's important to note, however, that Card and Dahl's findings don't necessarily imply that football games increase violence overall. In earlier work, Dahl, together with Berkeley economist Stefano della Vigna, found that violent crimes actually decrease when graphic movies like Hannibal and Scream 2 are released. They argue that this is the result of would-be aggressors spending the night at the movies rather than out on the streets committing felonies. If the NFL also has its share of violent fans, football may keep potential criminals off the streets for at least a few hours on Sunday afternoons. It's possible, in other words, that football leads to spikes in domestic violence but dips in other kinds of violent crime.

And while a tough loss for the home team may touch off abuse, that doesn't mean football is the root cause of postgame violence. More likely, the loss merely serves to set off an attack that was already waiting to happen. In a world without football, acts of abuse might merely get postponed, only to be brought on later by some other source of anger. In the long term, rather than blaming football, we may be best off focusing on addressing the more fundamental problems underlying abusive relationships.

Recent work by Brown economist Anna Aizer points to one possibility. In a study forthcoming in the American Economic Review, Aizer shows that potential female earnings are a critical determinant of spousal violence. Such violence declines as wages in female-dominated sectors—such as hospitality services—increase relative to male-dominated ones (e.g., construction). Aizer argues that high-earning women feel more empowered to walk out on potential abusers, since they're less dependent on a man's paycheck to get by. (Men will also be less inclined to chase away an extra breadwinner.) Providing a way out for battered women—through the support of shelters or direct financial assistance—would similarly provide an escape from imminent abuse, not just shift it to a later date. And, like higher wages, these measures would also make the threat of departure more credible, causing potentially violent partners to think twice before lashing out impulsively. Still, as I settle in to watch a little post-turkey football on Thursday afternoon, I'll be rooting for Green Bay over Detroit and hoping that—whatever the outcome—fans remember that it's only a game.

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"Health care reform must build upon what works and improve inefficiencies. Individuals should be able to choose from a range of quality health insurance plans. Options should include private plans as well as a quality, affordable public plan or non-profit plan that can accomplish the same goals of a public plan."

—Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D.-Ark., "Issues and Legislation: Health," Senate Web site.

"Lincoln said that after today's procedural vote, the Senate will face additional hurdles to move this process forward that also require 60 votes. She stated that she would not help move the bill past the next stage if a government-run public option remains part of the legislation.



"'Rather than create an entirely new government-run health care plan to compete with private insurers, I support health insurance reform that focuses on changing the rules of our existing employer-based private health insurance system.'"

—Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D.-Ark., Newsroom: "Lincoln Committed To Shaping Senate Health Bill To Benefit Arkansans."

(Thanks to Igor Volsky, the Wonk Room.)

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Do you have a daughter who thinks feminists are dowdy man-haters who don't shave their legs? A single friend who blames the women's movement for her lack of a husband or children—or a married one who thinks it's Gloria Steinem's fault that she has to earn a living? I'm guessing that, unlike me, you don't know any radical feminist activists from the 1970s who feel they've made virtually no difference in American women's lives—but you may well know women like a writer acquaintance of mine who confessed, a few years ago, that she'd rather not fly in a plane with a female pilot.

All of these women—and comparable men—need very much for you to make them a holiday gift of Gail Collins' exhilarating, accessible, and inspiring saga of women's progress to equality over the last 50 years. Part social history, part reportage based on wide-ranging interviews conducted by Collins and a busy team of researchers, When Everything Changed fills a major gap on the big shelf of books about modern feminism. Crammed with works for specialists, scholars, activists, and enthusiasts, that shelf has lacked, up until now, one book that captures the sweep of the whole story for the general reader.

If there's one word to sum up the startling changes Collins recounts, it may well be "pants." "Do you appreciate you're in a courtroom in slacks," magistrate Edward di Caiazzo thundered at Lois Rabinowitz, an 18-year-old secretary who showed up before him in Manhattan traffic court to pay a ticket in the summer of 1960. The judge sent her home to put on a skirt and told the press, "I get excited about this because I hold womanhood on a high plane and it hurts my sensibilities to see women tearing themselves down from this pedestal." (To Lois' husband he was more forthright: "[S]tart now and clamp down a little or it will be too late.")

Respectability, subservience, and rigidly enforced gender differences—to say nothing of the discomfort of girdles and garter belts and the general difficulty of moving about in full ladylike regalia—were all bound up together in a way that, in 1960, seemed immutable. In 1960, women were treated like children in many more crucial ways than being told what to wear by officious men. Job discrimination was both legal and rampant, and so were the tiny quotas—or outright bans—on women in law and medical schools. Unless they happened to be congressmen's widows, women played almost no role in government. Women needed their husbands' permission to start a business, get a credit card, or even rent an apartment as a separated spouse. In some states, women were barred from serving on juries. (After all, as Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was advised in a memo from his clerk, letting women serve "may encourage lax performance of their domestic duties.") Marital rape? Legal. Sports for girls? Forget it. That women were the weaker, dumber, more boring sex was a given.

This elaborate structure of law and custom had been in place seemingly forever. And yet within a few decades it was shattered so completely that young women today can be forgiven for thinking it sounds like some science-fiction dystopia. Collins does a very good job of presenting the underlying economic and social conditions that let the women's movement take off—rising prosperity, home appliances, the influx of women into the workforce during the 1950s and '60s, the pill, the civil rights and anti-war movements. She reminds us of the frustrations that bubbled just under the surface: "I was hanging clothes on the line with tears just streaming down my face," recalled a rancher's wife and mother of three.

But what really excites Collins, and what will give many readers a jolt, is the collective and individual heroism of the women who made it happen. When Everything Changed captures better than any other book I've read the daring, the brio, the intoxicating release of powerful creative energies that began in the 1960s and exploded in the early 1970s. "We were totally confident we were making history," said Muriel Fox of the early days of NOW, and Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and other famous activists get their predictable dues. But so do forgotten figures like Esther Peterson, the much-thwarted head of the Women's Bureau in JFK's Department of Labor, who organized the president's Commission on the Status of Women.

Peterson, who believed in protective laws for women workers, intended to use the commission to muffle supporters of the ERA; instead, it produced a network of proto-feminists that would have lasting impact. In another of history's little jokes, Rep. Martha Griffiths, the only lawyer among the very small female contingent in Congress, shrewdly managed to keep women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, where they had been inserted as a poison pill, to much hilarity, by the racist Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia.

The best stories, though, are those of ordinary women. The stereotype of feminism is that it was only of interest to educated middle-class whites, but Collins shows that some of the most important battles were fought by, and benefited, working-class women. Lorena Weeks, a Georgia phone-company clerk, battled Southern Bell for years to get a much higher-paying and more interesting job testing equipment. ("The man is the breadwinner in the family and women just don't need this type of job," the head of her union told her.) Her victory in Weeks v. Southern Bell is why there are women in good blue-collar jobs today.

Collins skillfully conveys how wide, and how deep, the women's movement and its ripple effects have been. She makes important connections, for instance, between the women's movement and major civil rights figures like Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Ella Baker, who are not usually discussed in this light. But as the book goes into the 1980s, the arc of the narrative takes a downward turn. The movement culture dissipates, the ERA is defeated (Collins gives Phyllis Schlafly all the credit for that dubious achievement), the sour economy pushes into the workforce women who don't want to be there. Soon feminism is popularly understood as professional women trying to "have it all"—and, before you know it, it's the 1990s and women are, maybe, resigned to "settling for less." And that is where many still are today.

So what happened? Why didn't the women's revolution more completely remake the way we live? Collins' focus on individual women as agents of change makes it hard for her to grapple with this question in an analytical way. She points to the difficulties of combining paid work with motherhood, the inflexibility of the work place, the resistance of many men to genuine equality in the home. The backlash in the media gets a mention—remember the famous 1986 Newsweek story warning educated women that their chances of marrying after 35 were comparable to being killed by a terrorist?—and probably should have gotten more space, when you consider how many times the press has announced the death of feminism and the swamp of misogyny that is talk radio and pop culture.

But there's another way to look at the sputtering progress of women. As the 1960s faded, feminism came up against the aggressive rise of the right, in which anti-feminist Christianity united with a broader hostility to "big government." By appealing to American principles of fair play and individual merit at a historical moment of unusual openness to liberationist ideals, feminists were able to knock down formal, legal barriers in a very short period of time. But what they couldn't do—and it wasn't for lack of trying—was to enlarge the social-welfare state.

American women, alone among those in Western industrialized nations, have no paid maternity leave (let alone parental leave) or (as of yet) national health care. Care of dependent family members—children, the elderly, the sick—is women's unpaid labor. Workers have few rights. Aid to poor families—including mothers and children temporarily poor due to divorce—is humiliating and stingy. Feminists have not even been able to eliminate the sexism embedded in the minimal welfare state we have: Unemployment insurance, the income tax, and social security are all structured around dated ideas about gender and work that disadvantage women. Moreover, as Republicans strengthened their hold on government, the legal gains women had made were undermined by judicial decisions, bureaucratic fiat, and simple lack of enforcement. Under George W. Bush, for example, the EEOC switched its focus from race and gender to religion.

Americans, including many women, might recoil from "government spending" and "bureaucracy" and scorn as anti-meritocratic proposals to use quotas to increase the number of women political candidates or corporate board members. Such measures, though, go far to explain why Scandinavia always comes out on top of those international surveys of women's equality and why the United States is stuck in the middle of the pack. The struggle over health care reform, with or without the Stupak amendment banning federally funded abortion coverage, shows how difficult it will be to move up on the list.

The hidden hinge of Collins' narrative might well have been the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which was, amazingly, passed by both houses in 1971 and established a federally funded system of quality child care. Nixon appeared to be undecided about whether to sign it—he actually had two speeches drawn up, one for acceptance, the other for rejection. But in the end, possibly to placate conservative critics of his trip to China, he vetoed it, slamming it as "radical" and "communal." Subsequent attempts went nowhere, done in by the price tag and by furious rightwing and fundamentalist-Christian opposition. That was as close as American women ever got to affordable, accessible, quality childcare, a measure that would have greatly reduced the tensions, conflicts, and guilt that vex feminism today.

To end on a note that chimes with Collins' can-do, optimistic spirit, you could say it's amazing women have come as far as they have.

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Health care reform limped to the Senate floor on a party-line vote, 60-39, after Democratic Sens. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska gave their reluctant consent. (Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio, who opposes the bill, was not present.) Statistically, the Congressional Research Service has found that 97.6 percent of all Senate bills that cleared this procedural hurdle during the past 10 years eventually won final Senate passage (though some would surely argue that unique circumstances make health reform an excellent candidate to become one of the 2.4 percent of all such bills that do not). Senate Democrats now risk finding themselves in the position of a dog that, after chasing a car, finally overtakes it. When the Senate returns from a Thanksgiving recess, it will be to reform health care in the United States. Er, how?

A few suggestions:

Keep the public option. On ABC News' This Week on Nov. 22, Nelson said, "[W]e could negotiate a public option of some sort that I might look at, but I don't want a big government, Washington-run operation that would undermine the private insurance that 200 million Americans now have." (In her statement explaining her vote to proceed with debate, Lincoln said she, too, would not abide a "new government-run health care plan.") What sort of public option was Nelson talking about? Possibly he had in mind a convoluted plan by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., to require states that fail to meet an affordability standard to include a nonprofit public option over which the president, the Senate, and the Health and Human Services Department would have some vaguely defined control.

At its worst, the Carper option would combine the lame "trigger" scheme of Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, which Landrieu has signaled she might support, with the lame "health cooperatives" scheme of Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D. At its best, the Carper option might serve as a Trojan horse for creation of a more robust public option down the road. But if that's the case, won't Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, and the redoubtable Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, sniff that out? Better to just leave the public option as it is, which is a pretty sad and withered thing already.

I don't actually believe that will happen. I think the Senate will end up stripping out the public option altogether. But it shouldn't.

Leave the abortion language as is. Another deal-killer for Nelson. The Senate bill basically revives a compromise reached in the House before Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and the U.S. Conference of Bishops inserted tougher language virtually forcing private insurers operating in the newly established exchange not to cover abortion. The Senate language requires any plan offered in the exchanges to establish elaborate procedures to segregate federal funds, which may not pay for abortions, from funds raised from premiums, which may do so. It's analogous to a compromise that 17 states have enacted in allowing the state-federal Medicaid program to cover abortions with specially segregated state funds rather than federal funds. The Health and Human Services Department, which funds Medicaid, is forbidden to pay for abortions under the 1976 Hyde amendment.

I don't expect to get my way on this one, either.

Tweak the Medicare tax. The Senate bill raises the Medicare tax, which currently is a flat 1.45 percent for everybody, to 1.95 percent for families earning more than $250,000. Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution points out that this could distort compensation by encouraging a shift to nonsalaried forms of pay like stock options. "I would rather see Congress rely on broad tax instruments like the income tax," he told the Wall Street Journal. The House bill already does that by imposing a 5.4 percent surtax on family incomes above $1 million. That remains the best option of all. But assuming it's unsellable in the Senate, then perhaps Reid could extend that 1.95 percent Medicare tax for families earning more than $250,000 to cover investment income, too. Merely extending the current 1.45 percent tax to cover investment income would raise $160 billion through 2019, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, a labor-affiliated nonprofit. That's more than three times the $54 billion that the current Medicare tax proposal would raise. Add in that $54 billion and the difference between 1.45 percent and 1.95 percent, and the new Medicare tax could raise well over $200 billion.

A political problem with what I suggest is that it risks riling the elderly, who are likelier to depend more on unearned income than the non-elderly and are already edgy about any savings in the bill that include the word Medicare. But as I've noted before, elderly people earning more than $250,000 are pretty well off, especially if most of that $250,000 is earned from investments.

Tweak the tax on "Cadillac" health insurance plans. Reid accommodated labor unions by raising the threshold on the value of health insurance subject to taxation from $21,000 to $23,000. That doesn't address an objection raised against the provision when it was added to the Senate finance bill—i.e., that some people have expensive health insurance policies because they perform dangerous work. To accommodate this possibility, the Senate finance bill raised the threshold for such people. But it defined the "dangerous work" group too narrowly, and the Reid bill is similarly narrow, including those engaged in police work, firefighting, emergency medicine, construction, mining, agriculture, forestry, and fishing, but not, for instance, in heavy industry. That needs to be remedied.

Fix the "employer responsibility" provision. The House bill has a straight-ahead "employer mandate," requiring all except the smallest businesses (defined as those with payrolls under $250,000) to offer health insurance for their workers or pay a penalty up to 8 percent of payroll. The Senate finance committee flinched at imposing an employer mandate and instead concocted an elaborate workaround requiring employers to reimburse the government up to $4,000 or more for any subsidies their employees might receive to purchase health insurance in the exchanges.

A big problem with that approach was that it gave employers a powerful disincentive to hire low-income people. The Reid bill mostly fixes that problem by saying that if even one full-time employee receives such a subsidy, then the company must pay a fine equivalent to $750 for every one of its full-time employees, whether they receive subsidies or not. That's a powerful club to force employers to provide health insurance coverage. But the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit that specializes on how the federal budget affects low-income people, notes a couple of (admittedly smaller) problems. Firms might evade or minimize the penalty by making full-time employees part-time employees instead. (If an employee works fewer than 30 hours per week, he isn't included in the head count for the fine.) This could be fixed by making the fine equivalent to $750 for every employee, full-time or part-time.

Another problem noted by CBPP is that the Senate bill retains a finance committee provision allowing some employees to purchase health insurance on the exchange, even if their employers already offer health coverage, if it's a crap plan (i.e., one that requires the employee to pay more than 10 percent of his income in premiums or fails to meet a minimum coverage standard). If an employee chooses to bypass his crap employer-sponsored plan and receives a federal subsidy to purchase insurance on the exchange instead, then the employer is fined $3,000. But this scheme creates a disincentive for firms offering crap health insurance to hire low-income people who might be eligible for the exchange subsidy. The solution proposed by CBPP is to impose basic standards on the quality and cost of all employer-sponsored health insurance, as the House bill and the version of health reform passed by the Senate health committee both do. No more crap plans!

Adopt the Wyden amendment. I've been skeptical about Sen. Ron Wyden's voucher solution to the health care crisis, mainly because I think it puts too much faith in private health insurance. But he's right that if you're going to create a health insurance exchange, you want it to serve as many people as possible. Currently under Reid's bill, some families' employer-sponsored premiums would be high, but not quite high enough to qualify them to buy health insurance on the exchange (i.e., their premiums would be 8 percent to 9.8 percent of their income, not 10 percent). Reid has agreed to support an amendment that would allow those families (provided their incomes are less than $88,000 for a family of four) to convert the federal tax subsidies they would receive for their almost-crap employer-sponsored health insurance into vouchers to purchase health insurance on the exchange. This would work a lot better if a public option were included in the final bill. But even if it isn't, it's worth trying.

Increase subsidies. Remember all that revenue that could be generated by altering Reid's Medicare tax? Some of those proceeds should be used to increase subsidies to lower-income people to purchase health insurance on the exchanges. The subsidies in the Reid bill are less stingy than in the Senate finance committee bill, but they're still inadequate. For example, CBPP notes that a family of three living on $25,000 a year would pay more than $1,000 in premiums under the Reid bill; under the House bill, it would instead be made eligible for Medicaid. One particular problem is that, compared with the House bill, the Reid bill shifts subsidies from low-income people to middle-income people who are likelier to vote. Subsidies ought to be brought up to the levels in the House bill. This isn't simply a matter of being more compassionate. If Congress makes people purchase health insurance and then doesn't give them enough money to do so, a lot of Democrats will be turned out of office.

I'm sure there are more changes that ought to be made, but these are the ones that come to mind immediately.

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

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Pop quiz: Which of the following names represents a nonsectarian, universal deity? Allah, Dios, Gott, Dieu, Elohim, Gud, or Jesus?

If you answered "none of the above," you are right as a matter of fact but not law. If you answered "Allah," you are right as a matter of law but not fact. And if you answered "Jesus," you might have been trying to filibuster David Hamilton, Barack Obama's first judicial nominee.

Hamilton, nominated last March, has seen his confirmation stalled until last week in the U.S. Senate, in part because his opponents claim he's a judicial activist for an opinion he wrote about God's proper secular title. In a 2005 case, Hinrichs v. Bosma, Hamilton determined that those who pray in the Indiana House of Representatives "should refrain from using Christ's name or title or any other denominational appeal," and that such prayer must hereinafter be "nonsectarian."

Bosma questioned the practice of opening state legislative sessions with sectarian Christian prayers that included a prayer for worldwide conversion to Christianity. Hamilton found this to be a violation of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause because it was government speech that favored one religious sect over another. In a post-­judgment order, Hamilton also wrote that the "Arabic word 'Allah' is used for 'God' in Arabic translations of Jewish and Christian scriptures" and that 'Allah' was closer to "the Spanish Dios, the German Gott, the French Dieu, the Swedish Gud, the Greek Theos, the Hebrew Elohim, the Italian Dio, or any other language's terms in addressing the God who is the focus of the non-­sectarian prayers" than Jesus Christ. Hamilton, himself a Christian, also added that "if and when the prayer practices in the Indiana House of Representatives ever seem to be advancing Islam, an appropriate party can bring the problem to the attention of this or another court."

For these words of clarification, Hamilton has been pilloried for months as a judge determined to chase Christians out of the public square in order to make more space for Muslims. In an interview last spring with Christianity Today, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Hamilton had ruled that "saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK." That's factually true but hopelessly misleading, which was of course the point. But as a result, Hamilton for months awaited an up-or-down vote despite a distinguished record as a U.S. district judge in Indiana for more than 15 years, the highest ABA rating, as well as endorsements from the president of the Indianapolis chapter of the Federalist Society and his home-state Sen. Richard Lugar.

The real problem here isn't Hamilton but the fiction, built into the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, that there can be such a thing as a neutral, non­sectarian religious invocation that will make everyone present feel both included and respected. It has led to a crazy quilt of Establishment Clause doctrine that, depending on the judge and the weather, permits public Christmas displays of secular religious symbols (Santas, reindeers, teddy bears in Santa hats) so long as they have been drained of any strong sectarian meaning. This compromise leaves both deeply religious and deeply skeptical Americans outraged in about equal measure. It also leads to bizarre claims about secular religious symbols, such as Justice Antonin Scalia's insistence at a recent oral argument that it's "outrageous" to conclude that "the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead." In his view, a Christian cross on government land honors Christians and non-Christians alike. It's a secular symbol, in his view, because it doesn't offend him.

The Supreme Court has sliced and diced religious symbols and prayers into the impossible-to-apply paradoxes of ­secular-­religious and ­heartfelt-thus-unconstitutional. For the millions of Americans, both religious and secular, left standing out in the public square with just a teddy bear in a Santa hat, this is an insult.

Opponents of Judge Hamilton should acknowledge that he was not privileging Allah over Jesus. He was trying to thread the constitutional needle that deems God's name—whatever the language—secular, but Jesus' name sectarian. The truth is, Hamilton has gone out of his way to impose a constitutional test that defies both logic and common sense. That makes him more "neutral umpire" than "judicial activist" by my lights. It takes a brave man to impose a test guaranteed to promote the unpopular fiction that America is one nation, under a secular deity to be named later, indivisible.

A version of this article also appears in Newsweek.

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These are grim times for American executives. The public is angry, and consumers are holding on to every nickel. It's hard to escape the sense that the economic future may be less comfortable than the past. But not all American managers are gloomy. "Optimism is higher than it was last year," says Brenda Lei Foster, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. A survey of its 370 members found that more than 90 percent are optimistic about the next five years. The reason: Instead of simply shipping goods made in China back to the United States, "companies here [are] focusing on the Chinese domestic market."

Shanghai, where I landed on the same day as President Barack Obama, is no more representative of China than New York is of the United States. But this supercharged financial center offers a glimpse of China's consumer-oriented future. When Stephen Green, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank, first came to Shanghai in 2000, the foreigners were rich. "Now the Shanghainese are rich, and the foreigners are poor by comparison," he says. The biggest change over the last several years: "More Porsches."

Shanghai's economy grew at a 12 percent clip between 1993 and 2008. And in the wake of the global financial meltdown, while exports fell, the economy continued to expand—largely because of local demand. Xinitiandi Street, home to the building where the first Communist Party Congress was held, has evolved into a place where the bourgeoisie come to spend their money. There are jewelry shops, a Starbucks, and, around the corner, a Rolls-Royce dealership.

Companies that initially came to China to manufacture products for export are now focusing their attention on the rising domestic market as a large middle class takes shape. A sizable portion of the world's toys are made in China, but Toys "R" Us now has 15 stores—small ones, not big boxes—in the country, too. Best Buy, which has been importing electronics from the region for years, is deploying its Geek Squads to several stores in Shanghai. They came for the cheap labor, but they're staying for the spending power.

In addition to making anti-aging creams in China, Mary Kay, the all-American direct-sales cosmetics operation, is now selling them there. With 200,000 women hawking its wares, Mary Kay has seen its sales climb 20 percent so far this year. Like many other U.S. brands—KFC, McDonald's—Mary Kay has shifted from being a down-market domestic brand to an aspirational foreign one. "We're a premium brand, like Häagen-Dazs or Starbucks," says Paul Mak, president of Mary Kay China.

While U.S. banks are reining in lines of credit, Bank of Communications—a large Shanghai-based lender in which British giant HSBC owns a large stake—is just now beginning to roll out credit cards. But the concept of buying stuff you can't pay for is still alien to many Chinese consumers; 80 percent of cardholders pay off their balance each month. That's changing, though. While older and poorer Chinese people still save up to one-third of their income, those who came of age during China's economic boom are becoming spenders. "Anyone born after 1980 behaves like an American," says Stephen Green.

The historical habit of saving and the rising propensity to spend are precisely why President Obama came to China. "We do not seek to contain China's rise," he said in a meeting with students in Shanghai—his first stop. And why would we want to? China now offers Americans two things we dearly need: a supply of cheap credit to fuel our deficits and recovery efforts and a growing market that is receptive to American goods and brands.

Obama isn't the only world leader taking a fast plane to China. At a hall promoting Expo 2010, the massive world's fair Shanghai is hosting next year, a stunning 3-D video shows the futuristic pavilions nations are planning to erect as part of the spectacle. (Luxembourg's seems larger than the country itself.) Shanghai is ready for the influx. Shanghai Pudong International Airport is a vast, hushed, cathedral-like space, since flying is still beyond the financial reach of many Chinese citizens. And the maglev train, the world's fastest, stands ready to whisk visitors to town. As the train reaches a maximum speed of 267 miles per hour, the carriage is so smooth and steady, you can stand. The 25-mile run is over in seven minutes. When it passes its outbound counterpart in a whoosh and a blur, you can catch a fleeting glimpse of the Pacific Century.

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Sarah Palin

The future of the Republican Party will be shaped by a governor—but it's not likely to be Sarah Palin. The twin poles of the Republican Party were on display this week. One was at a Republican Governors Association meeting in Texas. The other was on the airwaves across the country as Palin methodically went rogue.

Palin was certainly the bigger sensation. News about the meeting of Republican governors was lucky to make it to Page A13 (or, alternatively, sites like this). But the less-flashy bunch has more of what the party needs if it wants to remake its national image. At the RGA they were stressing their pragmatic, results-oriented approach to governing and ducking the chance to beat up on the president.

These are the qualities required of a majority party trying to attract suburban women, young voters, and independents.

Republicans have to look to their governors by default. Republicans in Congress have a roughly 60 percent disapproval rating. Governors also have a natural advantage because they have to actually, you know, govern, as opposed to Republicans in the House and Senate, who struggle in the minority. This means they might have actual results they can run on.

Regardless of whether a governor becomes the national standard-bearer, governors can help the brand. If Republicans can point to electoral success and progress in statehouses, it helps beat back the notion, conveyed by many Republican congressional leaders, that the party is only about obstruction—or worse, obfuscation.

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. For all of the hoopla, she is a limited politician. She's a force among a group of conservatives, but so is Rush Limbaugh. (And even Rush couldn't get John McCain defeated in the Republican primaries despite his best efforts.) Speculation about her political future has to be put in perspective. First, we're a long way off. Anything can happen. Most of the 2012 landscape will be determined by what Barack Obama does. But everyone's speculating about 2012—and Palin is being coy—so we'll briefly join in.

Of course Palin says she's keeping her options open about running in the future. It helps keep her speaking fees high and keeps her supporters excited. She's shrewd. Why close off any options? Besides, she appears to be enjoying finally doing things her way after a campaign where she felt cooped up.

Her abettors in this speculation are the Democratic National Committee and the media. The DNC wants Palin to be the face of the Republican future because Democrats think she's a clown. The media has an interest in portraying Palin as a viable political candidate because that justifies endless coverage. She'd still be worth covering if she were just a political personality, but at some point the coverage would wane. Considering her as a serious contender gives a pretext for more coverage—which is good for ratings. Just ask Oprah: Her show with Palin was Oprah's highest-rated since 2007, when 100 members of the Osmond family appeared. (For numerologists, that's 1 Palin = 100 Osmonds.)

But popularity has its limits. According to Pollster.com's average, 38 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of her, while 49.2 percent view her unfavorably. When Hillary Clinton had similar (but better) numbers, Karl Rove argued that it made her a "fatally flawed" national candidate.

Palin certainly taps into frustration with the federal government, a frustration that goes beyond the "wing-nut base," as some liberals might like to call it. She's also anti-media and anti-smarty-pants elitists, which are also appealing qualities. But it takes more than tapping into frustration, and even channeling it, to win elections.

To win a national election, a politician needs to appeal to voters beyond her base and offer more than paeans to family and the military. Couldn't Palin grow her support? She's limited there, too. Since she's no longer a governor, she's traded away her ability to attract non-base voters by pointing to accomplishments. This is why it was so hard for Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi to answer when asked if she was qualified to be president. One of the smoothest talkers in politics, he said he didn't know anything that "disqualified" her from office.

Barack Obama didn't have a lot of bread-and-butter accomplishments to point to, either. He had, in fact, less governing experience than Palin already has. So experience can be gotten around. But to win the middle-class and suburban independent voters who were attracted by Barack Obama's promise to change the partisan ways of Washington would presumably require a softer tone. Palin shows no sign of going that route. Her most recent remarks about health care rationing may appeal to her base, but they're full of the jargon of talk radio. It gets people heated up, sure, but it's not the kind of language that national candidates usually use in order to court swing voters.

Then there's the baggage. Palin already has to fight the quitter rap. The book has also created a long list of questions about her credibility. It's not just that former McCain staffers challenge her accounts—that can be written off as the he-said/she-said that attends any campaign—Palin has credibility problems, at times, with her own version of events. These are liabilities that will be exploited not by the "lamestream media," as she calls it, but by any opponent she would have in a Republican primary.

In the end, the Republican Party does not face a binary choice between Palin or Not Palin: There are ways to appeal to her voters and also show the qualities of day-to-day governing the Republican governors are trying to highlight. Now all the Republican Party has to do is figure out who that person is going to be.

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Cabernet sauvignon—and particularly the cabernet produced in California's Napa Valley—is the signature American wine. When a Napa cab, the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, beat out some leading French wines in the Judgment of Paris, it heralded the coming-of-age of American viticulture and gave the phrase Napa cabernet international cachet. Nowadays, however, that phrase is more apt to elicit snickers than praise; in the minds of many consumers, it has become synonymous with overwrought, overhyped, and overpriced wines. Indeed, scorning Napa cabernets is almost as fashionable as dumping on California chardonnays. Plenty of Napa cabs deserve the derision, but even as the valley suffers through a richly deserved reversal of fortune, there are still producers turning out honest, delicious wines that demonstrate why people got excited about the valley in the first place. And if you are currently in the market for something homegrown and fowl-friendly to drink on Thanksgiving, these attitude-free Napa cabs will make fine choices.

The mood among Napa vintners is not exactly festive at the moment, and the more expensive their wines, the unhappier they're likely to be. Retailers, sommeliers, and wineries all tell the same story: Napa cabs that cost more than $50 are exceedingly difficult to unload these days. The category has "fallen off a cliff," says Mark Wessels of MacArthur Beverages, one of Washington, D.C.'s top wine shops; he estimates that sales of premium Napa cabs at MacArthur have declined by at least one-third over the last few years. Wessels says that while high-end wines have generally become much harder to move amid the economic slowdown, many Bordeaux, Burgundies, and even Rhône wines continue to fare reasonably well. By contrast, the store has struggled to find takers for Napa cabs even when it has slashed prices by 25 or 30 percent. "It just seems nobody cares about these wines now," says Wessels.

Napa's woes can be boiled down to two things: taste and perception. There has been a stylistic shift in Napa over the last 15 years or so toward plumper, more alcoholic wines. Various factors have been at play, but surely the biggest reason for the change has been the deliberate pursuit of extremely ripe fruit. Grapes are coming in with dramatically higher sugar levels than in the past, yielding wines that are well above 14 percent or even 15 percent alcohol and that exhibit a thick, jammy texture consistent with over-maturity. They are also invariably tarted up with lots of new oak. It is no mystery why this genre has become so prevalent: Certain influential critics adore it, and tend to lavish huge scores on wines made this way.

But if you are actually drinking these cabs, as opposed to just swilling and spitting them, they can seem overbearing and also distressingly similar to one another. The sense among merchants and sommeliers is that consumers have grown bored. "It is recipe winemaking," says Kyle Meyer of Wine Exchange, a major southern California retailer that has experienced a steep decline in sales of luxury Napa cabs.

Napa also has an image problem: It is seen as another symbol of the sandcastle economy that has now collapsed. In the late 1990s, the so-called "cult cabernets"—wines like Harlan Estate and Screaming Eagle—eclipsed Napa's old guard and became, for a time, among the hottest wines on the market, fetching prices that rivaled or exceeded those of even the most acclaimed Bordeaux. This, in turn, encouraged an influx of wealth into the valley, and many of the newcomers set out to produce trophy wines of their own. Suddenly, the world was awash in $100 start-up cabs from Napa, bottlings that emitted an unmistakable whiff of vanity and bling. Amid the Great Recession, demand for these Gatsby wines has evaporated and Napa's reputation has also taken a knock. "There is resistance to this culture of excess—the need to build the biggest, shiniest winery, to hire the fanciest consultants and to charge the fanciest prices," says Wessels.

Napa Valley may seem more like an abyss at the moment, but a little perspective is in order. The region is home to extraordinary vineyards, and it has turned out many spectacular wines dating back quite a few decades—further than you might imagine. Not long ago, I had the pleasure of drinking a 1947 Louis Martini cabernet, and it was spectacular; in a blind tasting, it would undoubtedly have humiliated more than some big-name Bordeaux. There are a number of Napa cabs from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s that were sensational young and that have aged gloriously. They are big, sun-splashed reds, but the fruit is fresh, not stewed, and they possess a terrific sense of proportion and harmony. For consumers who only know the Rolling Thunder style of Napa cab, these wines would come as a revelation.

However, you don't need to hunt down a '47 Louis Martini to experience this other side of Napa; there are a few producers in the valley who have resisted the bigger-is-better trend and who continue to make wines with the kind of restrained opulence that was once Napa's hallmark. These winemakers have sought to keep alcohol levels in check, to preserve freshness and acidity, and to craft cabernets that emphasize finesse as much as power. Above all, they adhere to the quaint notion that the point of winemaking is not to win points or to earn bragging rights; it is to make a pleasurable beverage that marries well with food. Some of them receive favorable reviews, but the type of cabernet that they specialize in has not been the flavor of the month for many months. As a result, their wines, though by no means cheap, also offer good relative value. And the fact that you can still find Napa cabs made in this more subtle, distinctive manner certainly strikes me as a reason to give thanks.

In an ironic twist on recent wine history, some of the finest cabernets coming out of Napa these days are the work of a Frenchman, Christian Moueix, whose family owns a clutch of venerable properties in Bordeaux, notably Château Pétrus. In the early 1980s, Moueix took in a stake in Napa's acclaimed Napanook vineyard and began producing a wine called Dominus Estate, which has since established itself as one of the valley's best. The 2006 Dominus ($110) is a great cabernet—it is a voluptuous wine bursting with rich, warm flavors but has ample structure to parry the fruit and demonstrates an almost balletic poise. It is a testament both to the quality of the terroir and to Moueix's formidable talent. Dominus also makes a second wine—think of it as the JV offering—and the 2006 Napanook ($43) is a gem in its own right. While it doesn't have the depth of the grand vin, it is an exquisite cabernet that is vastly superior to many Napa wines selling for double, even triple the price. Message to reader: Buy this wine.

The top white wine at the Judgment of Paris was the 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay, but Montelena is better known for its legendary cabernets. The 2005 Chateau Montelena the Montelena Estate Cabernet Sauvignon ($105) is another winner in a long hit parade, a sumptuous wine that blends black-currant fruit with a silky texture and an appealing mineral edge. A classic Napa cab, it exudes elegance and completeness. Like Dominus, Montelena also makes a second-label cabernet, and while the 2006 Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon ($45) is not at the same level as the Napanook, it is a supple, very satisfying red that is also attractively priced as Napa cabs go.

Randy Dunn is an iconic figure in Napa, famed for his muscular, long-lived Cabernets. Lately, he has been an outspoken critic of the trend toward high-alcohol wines. The 2005 Dunn Vineyards Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon ($100) is listed at 13.8 percent alcohol and is an excellent wine. It has a textbook cabernet nose, redolent of black currants, violets, and bell pepper, and while the tannins are big, they are plenty ripe and perfectly integrated; a really impressive effort. Smith-Madrone Vineyards and Winery, located in Napa's Spring Mountain district, is the best California winery that you've never heard of, turning out exemplary cabernets, chardonnays, and rieslings. With its purity of fruit and impeccable balance, the 2004 Smith-Madrone Cabernet Sauvignon ($37) is a radical and thoroughly toothsome departure from your garden-variety Napa cab. It is also a bargain, a word not often heard along Highway 29.

There are some other Napa estates whose cabernets are also worth seeking out. In no particular order, they are: Corison Winery, Mayacamas Vineyards, Clark-Claudon Vineyards, Spottswoode Estate Vineyard & Winery, and Frog's Leap Winery.

A few things to note: It would be a good idea to decant all of these wines for an hour or two before serving, and some of them can probably be found for better prices than I have listed here. If you feel like shopping around, Wine-Searcher.com is a good place to do it. And if all of these cabernets are too rich for your wallet, I've got two noncabernet, non-Napa suggestions for Thanksgiving: The 2007 Ridge Vineyards Three Valleys Zinfandel is a delectable wine that can be picked up for under $20, as can the 2007 Marcel Lapierre Morgon, a lovely Beaujolais from a brilliant winemaker.

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The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

The Suite Life on Deck (Disney Channel, Fridays at 8:30 p.m. ET) is a follow-up to The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, itself a kiddie sitcom about identical-twin boys kicking it Eloise-style at a Boston hotel. Last week, the sequel ranked as the No. 4 show on cable and No. 1 overall among children ages 6 to 11. Should children actually be watching The Suite Life? This columnist does not pretend to offer parental guidance and, as far as he knows, does not have any 6-year-old kids. But there's an outside chance that he'd prefer to plop his imaginary, rhetorical-device-type offspring in front of Law & Order during the time slot in question.

Zack and Cody Martin, played by heartthrob monozygotes Dylan and Cole Sprouse, are high-school students now in their second season of spending a semester at sea on a luxury liner. Cody, who is bright and occasionally overbearing, spends week after week nursing an innocent crush on a hayseed shipmate. Zack, an unimpressive student, devotes his mental energies to pulling pranks and trying to score chicks, or whatever the TV-G-rated equivalent of scoring chicks is.

The Suite Life is of course mild in its sexual content, offering double entendres-once-removed and gentle references to oiling up bikini models and such. How did the protagonists' rock-star father meet their lounge-singer mother? It is strongly implied that she threw her underwear on stage, or so Dad claims. It takes a little effort to get one's own panties in a bunch over a kids show employing material like that, but it's a snap to feel unqualified disgust for the way the show giggles at Zack's crass predations. In one episode, a new passenger turns his head, but he's turned off by her baggage, her literal baggage. The luggage locks are a bad sign. "That means she's suspicious and cautious," he says. "I'm looking for naive and vulnerable." Cue the laugh track. Elsewhere, he describes part of his philosophy of life to a pal: "There is nothing—nothing—better in this world than an unhappy hot girl." In watching eight episodes of the show, I haven't seen Zack achieve any romantic success, but nor have I seen him receive any proper sanction. Thus do I eagerly await Walt Disney's presentation of a feature-film spinoff titled Zack & Cody's Rockin' Roofie Frat Party.

As if to mitigate the noxiousness of this material, the show gives us a naive-but-tough female lead in Cody's love interest, a winsome yokel named Bailey Pickett who has come to the high seas from Kettlecorn, Kansas. Bailey is all the more appealing for being presented in contrast with her roommate, a high-heeled hotel heiress drawn as a caricature of Paris Hilton, as if Paris weren't already a caricature of herself. The show intends to mock the fictional ditz, London Tipton, for her compulsive shopping and repulsive frivolity, and indeed it does. Still, there is something a trifle depressing in the way Suite Life milks her money and glamour for all the cutesiness they're worth. This is the kind of show that takes a nonjudgmental attitude toward marrying for money. Don't get me started on the ship's mincing black chaperone, Mr. Moseby, emasculated in his Bermuda shorts. He gets one of the series' least-age-appropriate laugh lines: During a shipboard beauty pageant—arranged by Zack for the purpose of scoring chicks—one young lady comes out for the talent competition wearing an Abe Lincoln beard and stovepipe hat and proceeds to skip rope while reciting the Gettysburg Address. Annoyed by the quality of the performance, Moseby despairs, "Where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?"

But what I find most bothersome about The Suite Life on Deck—more troubling, even, than the way it forces me to align myself with horrible uptight PC scolds—is its infatuation with showbiz itself. As noted, Zack and Cody are the children of professional musicians. Another shipmate is a former professional singer. (His stage name—give the show some credit for wit—was Li'l Little.) London hosts a Web series, titled Yay Me!, which actually exists on the Disney Channel's site. Of course, TV would be nowhere without the backstage doings of Monkees and Partridges, of Liz Lemon and Desi Arnaz and all the rest. But really. In common with such other Disney fare as Jonas, Hannah Montana, and Sonny With a Chance—and also iCarly, the big Nickelodeon show of the moment—Suite Life can see no further than the camera. Right now, a startling volume of tween culture is devoted, directly or indirectly, to puttin' on a show in the manner of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. It seems important to remember that things didn't work out too well for Judy in the long run.

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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 Nov. 20 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.

Gabfest sponsor Audible.com is offering a special Thanksgiving gift to Slate podcast listeners. If you aren't currently an Audible member, you can visit a special Web site between Nov. 22 and Nov. 26, 2009, and download a free audiobook with no credit card required. Visit Audible's Thanksgiving Free Audiobook Giveaway site for more details and a list of available free titles.



And if you'd like to sign up for a monthly membership, you can get your free 14-day Audible trial, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. This week, listener Alissa Perlman recommends Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. 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 the planned trials of five terrorists in New York City; the confusing, conflicting new information about mammograms; and Sarah Palin's effort to turn a new page.



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



David Feige's piece in Slate on why civilian terrorist trials could set bad legal precedents.

Jake Tapper's ABC News article about President Obama's bow in Japan.

John Dickerson's piece in Slate about political deadlines.

Emily chatters about an article in the Wall Street Journal about Goldman Sachs' profiteering during the recession.

John references Eliot Spitzer's piece in Slate from March in which he details AIG's relationship to Goldman Sachs.

David chatters about the CALM Act, which requires commercials to be quieter than the programs during which they are aired.

John chatters about new hunger statistics.

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

Posted on Nov. 20 by Amman Sood at 5:15 p.m.

Nov. 12, 2009

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 Nov. 12 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 audiobook. Listener Karen Iker gives us two recommendations this week. Her recommendation for children is Henry and Ribsy by Beverly Cleary, narrated by Neil Patrick Harris. Her other more adult-friendly recommendation is Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs. You'll find links to this and previous Gabfest recommendations on our new Audible RSS feed.

On this week's live Slate Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz dissect health care reform, the Obama presidency, and the shootings at Fort Hood.

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

Arianna Huffington's piece about David Plouffe's The Audacity To Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory.

Bob Herbert's column in the New York Times regarding President Obama's misplaced priorities.

President Obama's speech at Fort Hood.

David Brooks' column in the New York Times about the "shroud of political correctness" around the Fort Hood shooter.

Dorothy Rabinowitz's column in the Wall Street Journal about the Fort Hood shooter.

Emily chatters about the biography of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Joan Biskupic.

David chatters about a personal ethical dilemma. Listen in for more details.

John chatters about an interesting tidbit from David Plouffe's new book where it's revealed that the Obama campaign leaked news of John Edwards' $400 haircut to the press.

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

Posted on Nov. 12 by Amman Sood at 4:27 p.m.

Nov. 5, 2009

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.

We'd like to invite all readers to a special, live taping of the Gabfest on Tuesday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m. The event will take place at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in Washington, D.C.

We'll discuss the one-year anniversary of President Obama's historic election, what the president has accomplished and what he hasn't, and the hot stories of the week. There will be cocktail chatter (of course!) and a vigorous conversation between the Gabbers and the audience. And there will be surprises! Reserve your tickets now at the Sixth & I Web site. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door. Please join us!

Listen to the Gabfest for Nov. 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.

Get your free 14-day trial membership of Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook. We've got two recommendations for you this week. The first comes from listener Jim Bosiljevac recommending Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter, which tells the story of a woman who turned a small garden in a vacant lot into a working farm with its own slaughterhouse. The second recommendation comes from Robert Sloan, who suggests Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, narrated by the wonderful Juliet Stevenson. 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 dissect Tuesday's election results from New Jersey, Virginia, upstate New York, and Maine and tell us what it all means.

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

John's piece in Slate about how this week's elections reflect on Obama.

Politico on how most members of Congress being investigated by the House ethics committee are black.

Emily chatters about the Supreme Court hearing two cases involving juveniles who were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

David chatters about a new HBO documentary called By the People, which David found to be one of the worst pieces of film he's ever seen.

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

Posted on Nov. 5 by Amman Sood at 2:15 p.m.

Oct. 30, 2009

Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 30 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. This week's recommendation comes from our very own David Plotz, who enthusiastically endorses Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The novel tells the story of the pragmatic Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's right hand man. 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 how health care reform is limping forward, how much damage (political and otherwise) the shortage of swine flu vaccinations is creating, and marriage and basketball in the Obama White House.

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

Timothy Noah's piece in Slate about "trigger options."

The Obama marriage as portrayed by Jodi Kantor in the New York Times Magazine.

Mark Leibovich on the "boys club" of the Obama White House in the New York Times.David chatters about Adrian Chen's piece in Slate on "graving."

Emily chatters about how kids find debunking magic tricks more interesting than the magic itself.

John chatters about former Obama political strategist David Plouffe's book about the 2008 Obama presidential campaign.

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

Posted on Oct. 30 by Amman Sood at 7:37 p.m.

Oct. 23, 2009

Listen to the Gabfest for Oct. 23 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 to Gabfest sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book. This week's recommendation comes from listener Nate Shivar, who recommends 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks. Shivar calls it "It is a fun and wonder-ful exploration of the 13 big anomalies in science that are most likely to yield an Einstein or Copernicus-level breakthrough." You can find previous Audible recommendations on our new RSS feed.

This week on the Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and special guest Bill Smee discuss Afghanistan (and New York Times reporter David Rohde's kidnapping there), new limits on Wall Street compensation, and the New Jersey governor's race.

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

David Rohde's spellbinding series about his seven months as a Taliban hostage.

Nicholas Kristof on Afghanistan.

Matt Bai's profile of New Jersey governor John Corzine's reelection effort.

Bill Smee chatters about a strange outburst against Jews by two South Carolina Republicans.

David chatters about how rising tuition at colleges may be linked to their apparent arms race for the most amenities.

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

Posted on Oct. 23 by Andy Bowers at 1:16 p.m.

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In the annals of stupid drug reporting, a special commendation must be reserved for NBC's Today show, which on Nov. 19 aired (video) one of the stupidest drug stories in broadcast news. The program, which specializes in terrorizing mothers with sensationalist stories, discovered that today's kids are "huffing" inhalants from hair spray and air duster cans.

See video of the Today segment here:

Today co-host Meredith Vieira called the huffing of inhalants "a deadly trend among tweens" before handing it off to reporter Jeff Rossen, who claimed that "new numbers show this is now the 'it drug' for young kids." He continues, "This quick high, all the rage among high school kids, is now invading elementary and middle schools. Now more eighth graders abuse household cleaners than marijuana, cocaine, and hallucinogens combined."

The picture Today and Rossen paint of the prevalence of inhalants is enough to convince parents to ship their kids off to a minimum-security prison for their own safety and not release them until they reach the age of 25. But the segment completely overstates their use. The inhalants fact sheet provided by the government's National Institute on Drug Abuse states that "more 8th-graders have tried inhalants than any other illicit drug," which is very different than Rossen's formulation that more eighth graders use inhalants "than marijuana, cocaine, and hallucinogens combined."

The NIDA page cites the research done by the University of Michigan's well-regarded Monitoring the Future survey, which has been querying students about their drug use since 1975. The most recent Monitoring the Future numbers (PDF), which come from 2008, show that 15.7 percent of eighth graders said they'd used inhalants at some point in their life, compared with 14.6 percent for marijuana/hashish, 3.3 percent for hallucinogens, and 3 percent for cocaine.

Those number are enough to horrify any parent, but do they show that inhalants have really become the "it drug" for kids?

No.

If you dial the Monitoring the Future study back to 1991, you find that more eighth graders were reporting that they'd used inhalants at some point in their life (17.6 percent). The lifetime prevalence number rose to 21.6 percent by 1995 but has basically been declining ever since.

The study's 2008 findings also show that more eighth graders reported using marijuana/hash annually (PDF) (10.9 percent) than inhalants (8.9 percent). Similar results are found when you look at 30-day (PDF) prevalence of use in 2008—5.8 percent for marijuana and 4.1 percent for inhalants.

The Today segment hits one of its many low points when its reporter asks a teenaged former user if she thought inhalants—specifically canisters of "air duster"—were "completely harmless." "Yes," she responds. "You don't get arrested for it, you don't go to rehab for it. People just kind of—they don't really think anything of it."

But Monitoring the Future's surveys argue against the notion that most kids think that inhalants are harmless. Since 1991, between 33.9 percent and 45.6 percent of eighth graders surveyed have believed that there was "great risk" (PDF) from doing inhalants once or twice, and between 59.2 percent and 71.6 percent have acknowledged the "great risk" in consuming the compounds regularly. In other words, the eighth graders represented in the Monitoring the Future survey are more savvy about the dangers inherent in inhalants than Meredith Vieira, Jeff Rossen, and the entire NBC team combined.

I could go on and on about the awfulness of the Today segment. I could write an angry paragraph about the hackery of playing "sad" music on the soundtrack as its reporter narrates the story of a 14-year-old who killed himself by inhaling Dust-Off. I could rail about the absence of any numbers to prove its assertion that huffing is a deadly trend. (It would be useful to know if more or fewer kids are killing or damaging themselves with inhalants than in previous years.) I could gripe about Today's failure to distinguish among the different kinds of inhalants (volatile solvents, aerosols, gases, nitrites, etc.) and the absence of any discussion of the nonlethal health dangers posed by the compounds. And I could close with a complaint about its hidden camera "gotcha," in which two child actors were video recorded buying inhalants in New York City stores.

I hope that few kids viewed Today's segment. Its tabloidy salaciousness is enough to give the impressionable—or the death-defying—the idea that they should try inhalants.

******

Don't do inhalants. They are an incredibly dangerous way to get high. (The Drug Oracle has spoken.) Thanks to reader Rob Lapp for alerting me to the segment. For a little ancient history on inhalants, see this chapter from Edward M. Brecher's 1972 book Licit and Illicit Drugs. Brecher was a wise man, and I still find his book valuable. I read all e-mail sent to slate.pressbox@gmail.com, and if you're as sharp as I think you are, you're already following 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.)

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This week, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that most women begin regular mammograms starting at age 50 instead of 40. Days later, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists revised its guidelines on cervical cancer screening: Now it suggests women receive their first Pap smears later than previously recommended and, depending on certain risk factors, get them less frequently. The move to reduce unnecessary screening has some critics of health care reform suggesting that America is moving headlong toward rationing care. In a Facebook note today, Sarah Palin wrote, "We need to carefully watch this debate as it coincides with Capitol Hill's debate and determine whether we are witnessing the early stages of that rationed care before the Senate bill is rushed through as well." After chief political correspondent John Dickerson sent Palin's note around, Slate staffers began debating what, exactly, rationing is; the value of screening; and the relationship between patients and the medical community. An edited transcript of the discussion is below.

Daniel Engber: This is crazy. What incentive would the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—or any other doctors' group—have for controlling costs? Healthy women go to the doctor more often than healthy men, so there's a gender-weighted market for unnecessary screening procedures.

John Dickerson: Another thing here that's obvious but seems newish is that Palin and the rest of the conservative base making these claims about rationing are turning everyday debate in the medical community over care into signs that rationing is inevitable. Any finding that suggests more treatment might not be great or a certain kind of treatment might not be great = rationing. This seems rather powerful (and potentially pernicious). It hooks up people's general view that medical advice is always shifting and unknowable, which is merely irritating, and turns it into a government-fueled plot to deny them health and, ultimately, their lives.

Palin's Facebook posting echoed from an e-mail I just received from a conservative organization:

Health care rationing getting less subtle almost by the day. Now ACOG recommendations for less frequent pap smears on the heels of the HHS recommendations on mammograms that got breast cancer advocates up in arms. This is all straight out of the UK rationing playbook. In the UK, no mammograms until age 50, and as for pap smears here's CPR's vignette with Katie Brickell who asked Britain's National Health Service for a pap smear at 19, was told to come back at 20, came back and was told the minimum age had been changed to 25, and then she contracted cervical cancer. Interviewer is former CNN anchor Gene Randall:

This seems ripe for one of you who actually knows about science and medicine and facts and stuff.

William Saletan: It's the mirror image of the Democratic rants about HMOs and evil insurers. Everybody wants cheap health care without cost controls.

Rachael Larimore: How did the task force possibly not think this was going to happen? It's an organization whose guidelines are often followed by Medicare and insurers. In the middle of a huge national debate about the role government plays in health care, it comes out with guidelines that almost mirror the British NHS, which has been a favorite target of Conservatives for Patients' Rights and other health care skeptics. How is that not going to be seen as rationing?

Torie Bosch: It was a no-win situation. Had they sat on this until after the health care reform dust settled to make the announcement, the task-force members would have been accused of letting politics influence their recommendations.

Engber: A main selling point for reform is that preventive care = better care = lower costs. Now we've got this screening stuff, which breaks the equation both ways: preventive care = worse outcomes = higher costs.

Emily Yoffe: For years there has been a growing chorus that it's a mistake to go looking aggressively for cancers. Spiral CT scans for smokers were supposed to be the way to find lung cancer tumors early, before they became deadly. It turns out when you do mass screening for lung cancer, you find lots more tumors, but given the actual incidence of lung cancer deaths, it turns out the technology picks up tumors that would never progress. This isn't just "anxiety"—this is finding real cancer that you then have to treat but that you probably should not have looked for. That's why it's too bad this mammogram recommendation will be so politicized when we really need rational, thorough discussion and analysis of how much screening is a good idea. The Republicans have turned this into the harbinger of British-style health care rationing. But Obama has been touting the "preventive care" mantra—so now he's stuck. Witness the administration cave on the task-force mammogram recommendations.

Engber: Forget screening—shouldn't we be having a rational discussion of whether Obama's "preventive care" mantra makes any sense? If it's bullshit, then reform will be a lot more expensive than we've been led to believe.

Yoffe: Why forget screening? Isn't that a major part of preventive care? Taking out screening, what's meant by preventive care? Annual checkups? Everyone on cholesterol medication? Lectures about diet and exercise? I agree we need a discussion of what these things are and whether they're effective.

Saletan: I don't think screening is what the cost-containment advocates are talking about when they talk about preventive care. But to the extent they do (presumably to exploit women and families with cancer), this is a good opportunity to kick them in the ass.

Larimore: I think it's fascinating that we're figuring out that there are cancers that won't progress, and I liked the "XX Factor" post saying we need a Pap-like test for breast cancer. (At least until they start rationing those! Kidding.) But until we know more and until there are better tests, it feels like we're reducing our best methods for preventative care without anything to replace them.

Emily Bazelon: But the thing is, these aren't our best methods. That's what the evidence-based findings show. They're just the methods we're used to. And the reason the federal task force was taken by surprise is that politics isn't what it was designed for when it was set up back in 1984.

Hanna Rosin: If you were going just by the science, you would do a lot less screening. Mammograms are a perfect example. The mammogram's utility should be judged by how well it prevents deaths in a large population. Instead, we judge it by how accurately it picks up cancer in one individual. The former would, in fact, be an argument for rationing. The latter leads everyone to want a mammogram, though it is irrational and unhelpful. Ditto for prostate screenings.

Bosch: The problem is bridging the divide between the push for science-based medicine and the way patients are encouraged to be their own advocates—from marking your thigh with a Sharpie before surgery to ensure the surgeon amputates the correct leg to questioning the medication dosages your doctor prescribes. We've backed away from the idea that every doctor is omniscient, but we seem to have gone too far in the other direction. The patient-as-advocate model is also what's partially responsible for "adjusted" vaccination schedules, overprescribing antibiotics, etc. The shift in power has thrown things off-kilter.

Bazelon: Why do many women seem susceptible to the fear-mongering? Why is it hard to see that the costs of overscreening can outweigh the benefits of early detection? These recommendations ask us to give up a couple of myths we hold dear. The first is that saving one life is worth any amount of trouble or money. "One life out of 1,904 to be saved," Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison said of the stats about getting mammograms in your 40s. Right, and the point should be, that's not much bang for the buck. But what if it's your life, your bang? We seem frozen on that question, unable to have the deeper discussion that should follow from it.

The second myth we've grown attached to is that more tests and screenings equal more control. If you get regular mammograms and Pap smears, then you're protecting yourself. It's a kind of talisman: You won't get cancer, or at least you won't die of it. Cut it out early and fast! Now we have to absorb the idea that some slow-growing cancers are better left alone. We have to let go of the illusion that testing guarantees wellness and confront the far less reassuring reality that false positives lead to unnecessary interventions that can hurt us—biopsies and radiation treatment and removal of relatively harmless growths. Remember the adage that the cure can be worse than the disease? It's unsettling. But also true.

Saletan: Well said. Cost control means some people will die, and medicine without cost control is financially unsustainable. Palin is just playing to Americans' age-old denial of this reality.

Dickerson: There's not a lot of cost containment that comes from preventative care in the bills we're talking about. The Congressional Budget Office scores preventative measures as costing money, I believe. So there aren't claims being made about the power of preventive care to save big money. When Obama talks about preventive care, he's talking about how it's better to have an annual checkup to find out that you have diabetes than waiting until you're so sick you have to go to the emergency room.

In terms of prevention, he also lists mammogram screening—not because he's got a particular jones about the science but because his plan tries to give people access to whatever the basic set of preventive measures are as an act of fairness. If those measures change over time, fine. That's the whole point of comparative effectiveness, the other thing that the president talks about and that critics immediately claim is rationing. Presumably, if doctors decided that what was once considered preventive is now expensive and full of false positives and bad health outcomes, a well-functioning comparative-effectiveness system would spread the word so that doctors could make intelligent decisions with their patients based on the latest research. This comparative-effectiveness scheme would guard against a mindless mantra in favor of or against preventive measures and base decisions on actual studies, ultimately leaving the decision to the doctor and patient. Critics, of course, claim that spreading information about studies immediately equals rationing.

And here comes the White House on this topic.

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Rep. Joe Wilson

In his Sept. 9 speech to Congress on health care, when President Obama said, "The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shot back: "You lie!" What Obama meant was that health care reform would not extend government subsidies to illegal aliens to purchase health insurance. What Wilson meant was that health care reform would nonetheless allow illegal immigrants who were uninsured to purchase unsubsidized health insurance through the exchanges that reform would create. Indeed, to whatever extent the government could track down uninsured illegal immigrants through the tax system, it would compel them to buy health insurance. This was unacceptable to Wilson and other conservatives—not because they felt illegal immigrants should be left in peace, but because they felt illegal immigrants should be excluded entirely from whatever superstructure would be created by health care reform.

It was an insane argument on more than one level. Illegal immigrants are currently permitted to purchase a quart of milk at the corner grocery. Should that activity be banned, too? If an illegal immigrant showed up at an emergency room with a burst appendix, should that person be left to die? But the Senate finance committee (probably at White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's insistence) took Wilson's rude outburst seriously enough to insert language into its version of the bill barring illegal immigrants from participating in the exchanges at all. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., followed suit in the "blended" bill now before the full Senate. If this remains in the bill, those of us who aren't illegal immigrants will end up paying for the health insurance of those who are. Call it a nativism tax.

Here's how it works.

Currently, if an uninsured illegal immigrant (or any other uninsured person) shows up at an emergency room with a burst appendix, the hospital typically will not leave that person to die. It will treat that person, squeeze that person for some portion of the cost, and then pass the remaining cost onto the federal government, to state government, to charities, and to private insurers, who in turn will pass it onto taxpayers, to charitable givers, and to policyholders.

According to a May 2009 study by Families USA, a nonprofit consumer group, the annual cost of uncompensated care is about $73 billion, of which $30 billion is paid by government and charity. The remaining $43 billion is passed onto health insurers, thereby raising the average family insurance premium by $1,017 annually, about 8 percent of the average family premium. Families USA calls this a "hidden health tax."

An August 2008 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation crunched the numbers a bit differently, calculating the annual cost of uncompensated care at a more conservative $56 billion annually. The Kaiser study found that only about 2 percent of uncompensated care was passed through to insurance policyholders, as against Families USA's 8 percent. But this was cold comfort to anti-government opponents of health reform, because Kaiser also found that the cost to government of uncompensated care was $43 billion, as against the $30 billion that Families USA calculated for both government and charity. According to Kaiser, fully 75 percent of the cost of uncompensated care gets billed to taxpayers. Spread evenly among the roughly 138 million taxpayers in the United States, the uninsured cost the average taxpayer about $312 annually.

The St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact.com examined both the Families USA study and the Kaiser study and was unable to reconcile the different findings. "Barring new evidence," it said, "this seems like a genuine disagreement between experts on a complex issue." (Among other challenges, the government fluctuates in its commitment to paying this cost. From 2004 to 2008, for instance, it spent $250 million per year to reimburse hospitals for the treatment of illegal aliens. Then it let the program expire.)

The larger point remains: Through some combination of higher taxes and higher premiums, the rest of us end up paying for the uninsured—either $43 billion in higher premiums or $43 billion in higher taxes.

Illegal immigrants represent about 15 percent of the uninsured, but for various reasons (they're younger, they lack access to government programs) they don't represent 15 percent of uncompensated care; it's more like 10 percent, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit research group. Using the Kaiser data, the center calculates that providing uncompensated care to illegal immigrants costs taxpayers $4.3 billion annually. Had the center used the Families USA data, it would have calculated that providing uncompensated care to illegal immigrants costs policyholders $4.3 billion annually. That comes to either $31 for the average taxpayer or $100 for the average policyholder.

By excluding illegal immigrants from the new health insurance exchanges, the Senate health care bill passes up an opportunity to relieve taxpayers and/or policyholders of this cost. They are literally denying uninsured illegal immigrants the opportunity to pay for their own health care by purchasing health insurance. Wilson's nativism has added $4.3 billion to the cost of health care reform. Now that's he's won, will he vote for final passage? Don't hold your breath.

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

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Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

This review only needs to consist of six words: Werner Herzog. Nicolas Cage. Bad Lieutenant. Not every one of those elements (with the possible exception of Herzog's name) is enough to sell a movie on its own, but the combination? Most definitely. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Edward R. Pressman Films) isn't really a remake of Bad Lieutenant, Abel Ferrara's 1992 exploration of a crooked cop's journey through the depths of spiritual debasement. It's more like a dream one might have after watching the original Bad Lieutenant, doing three lines of cocaine, staying up all night, and collapsing on some none-too-clean sheets in a seedy New Orleans motel. The main thing the two films share is a fascination with abjection—these aren't just bad lieutenants, they're baaaad lieutenants. It's a fascination so extreme and so systematic that it exists at the permeable border between high drama and low comedy.

Ferrara's cop, played with feral rage by Harvey Keitel, was a fallen Catholic in New York City. Herzog's creation, Terence McDonagh, is less religious than his predecessor, and so is the movie. Instead of trying to solve the rape of a nun, McDonagh is investigating the mass murder of a Senegalese immigrant family. As the movie begins, McDonagh, already in deep gambling debt, sustains a back injury while saving a man from drowning in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He gets hooked on painkillers after the accident, an addiction that soon leads to harder drugs. (While arresting a suspect for crack possession, McDonagh gets down to brass tacks: "Where's the rock at? Come on, come on, who's got the kibble?") McDonagh also has a prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) whom he's not above pimping out for spare cash.

A drug lord, played by the rapper Xzibit, is the prime suspect in the Senegalese murders, but he's gone underground. There are witnesses to be interrogated and superiors to report to—superiors who are beginning to wonder why McDonagh is getting dunned by his bookie (a weirdly amiable Brad Dourif) at work. As a viewer, it's best to let the procedural details wash around you like so much brackish swamp water and to experience Bad Lieutenant through the bloodshot eyes of its tripped-out hero. At one point, he thinks he sees a pair of iguanas that are invisible to the other cops in the room (but not to the audience, McDonagh's partners in insanity). In what may be the most quotable of the many lines of dialogue destined for cult glory, Cage wonders aloud, "What the fuck are these iguanas doing on my coffee table?" The reptiles get a long handheld close-up, while on the soundtrack, Johnny Adams croons, "Please release me/ Let me go. …" What the fuck are those iguanas doing on his coffee table? Who knows? Maybe it's just Herzog the nature documentarian (Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World) indulging his fascination with nonhuman life-forms. But whatever it is, that moment is marvelous.

Since Nicolas Cage first peeked over the top of a shower curtain in Valley Girl, he's been a one-of-a-kind presence on-screen. For all the terrible career choices he's made—his drive to succeed as an action hero seems to come from someplace even deeper than the desire for a huge paycheck—Nic Cage is unparalleled when it comes to playing self-destructive loons, men so uncomfortable with life they want to shed their own skin. As in Leaving Las Vegas and Adaptation, Cage's performance is funny, haunting, and genuinely bizarre. He hunches. He winces. He cackles explosively. As his character gets more and more strung out, his voice changes, growing louder, more pinched and nasal. (Mercifully, he never attempts a New Orleans accent.) He's forever inventing weird little bits of stage business: Before interrogating a witness, he takes an electric razor from his pocket and gives himself a five-second shave. Cage clearly enjoys the chance to play a role this over-the-top. "Right now I'm working on about an hour and a half's sleep," he warns a wheelchair-bound old woman before blocking off her breathing tube to maximize the effectiveness of his interrogation. But he also invests this doomed character with real pathos and never goes for deliberate camp. Whatever sick joke this movie's telling, Cage is in on it.

Bad Lieutenant has an unpolished, almost amateurish rawness about it. The language of the crime thriller is clearly a foreign tongue to Herzog (though he's working from a script by the veteran TV crime writer William Finkelstein), and the movie's pacing is often erratic. A few really well-cast actors: Val Kilmer as McDonagh's fellow bad cop, Jennifer Coolidge as his foulmouthed stepmother—are sadly underused. The movie may be too gritty for art-house audiences and too idiosyncratic for action fans looking for the next Gone in 60 Seconds. But it's that neither-fish-nor-fowl quality that makes it so unsettlingly watchable. Though it was filmed on location in the ravaged city, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans isn't particularly concerned with social commentary or local color. But like the water snake that slithers by during the opening credits or the baby crocodile from whose point of view we observe one roadside scene, this movie is a freaky little swamp thing.

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The vice president did not produce any new Bidenisms this week, but we've dug one out of the archives in honor of his 67^th birthday today. 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."

"Oh, God … [laughter] … I wish I had that much hair … [laughter] … These guys are incredible … [laughter] … I don't know what to say … [laughter] … I had watched it before … [laughter] … But every time I watch it … [laughter] … They are good man, they are so good. And I turned it on, and I actually thought, I thought that the actress was actually Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. She is so good, both of them … I mean … [laughter] … Anyway, they're … they're … it's funny … [laughter] … Oh, God."—Responding to a question about Saturday Night Live's impersonation of him with seemingly uncontrollable laughter during interview with ABC's Good Morning America, Wilmington, Del., Oct. 8, 2008



Click on the video for a better sense of its Bideny goodness.

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The Blind Side

Michael Lewis' book The Blind Side tells the true story of Michael Oher, a poor black kid who gets adopted by a rich white family and transforms himself into a football star. The movie version zooms in on Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), the woman who gave the hard-up prodigy the care and feeding that he needed to become a man and an NFL draft pick. This feels less like an artistic choice than an economic one. The Blind Side plays like filmmaking by focus group, a movie that aims to please and ends up condescending to its audience.

By definition, an inspirational sports movie tells a story that's almost too good to be true. Michael Oher's escape from homelessness and illiteracy certainly hits that mark. "Big Mike" (played by Quinton Aaron) shuffles around Memphis, Tenn., with his head down, looking sad and saying not much at all. Once he moves in with the Tuohys, the humongous cipher slowly opens up—he prefers to go by "Michael," he confesses—thanks to the love of the first real family he's ever known. At the same time, the 345-pound behemoth taps into a heretofore unknown ability to smash and bludgeon on the football field, leaving college recruiters frothing at the mouth over his potential as a left tackle.

The problem with a story that's almost too good to be true is that someone in Hollywood will try to make it better. Writer-director John Lee Hancock, a veteran of the swelling-music-at-the-big-game genre—he helmed Disney's The Rookie (2002), the feel-good account of an old guy who becomes a major-league pitcher—compensates for the nonverbal behemoth clogging the center of his story by embroidering the edges. Oher's adopted sibling, Sean Jr. (Jae Head), becomes a Lipnicki-esque scamp who—when he's not making an adorably sassy remark—puts his big bro through the paces on the football field. Oher's high-school coach, Hugh Freeze, who in Lewis' book comes off as a gridiron savant, is depicted as a whistle-blowing boob, a foil for Leigh Anne Tuohy's more emotionally attuned pedagogy: "This team is your family, Michael."

A movie based on real events should be allowed some creative license. It's no high crime, for example, that the filmmakers skip over the fact that Oher became eligible to play college ball by padding his GPA with correspondence-course credits. The cheap grabs for emotional resonance in The Blind Side's screenplay gall far more than the film's elision of minor details. In real life, Oher pushed a trash-talking defensive lineman so far off the field of play that he was penalized for "excessive blocking." In the movie, the bile-spewing opponent comes with a racist, heckling dad, the better to give Bullock's Leigh Anne an opportunity for righteous indignation.

There's talk of Bullock finagling an Oscar nomination for her role here, and for good reason—The Blind Side appears to have been engineered with precisely that goal in mind. The rom-com queen does indeed stand out as a willful, compassionate mother hen, but she doesn't come across as a real woman. Leigh Anne is a movie mom, and The Blind Side is essentially a series of set pieces—a parking lot showdown with lowlife hoods, a how-dare-you-judge-me confrontation with her upper-crust ladyfriends—designed to let Bullock earn her top billing.

For all The Blind Side's flaws, it's impossible not to get caught up in Michael Oher's life. (And if you're a sports fan, there's also some perverse pleasure to be had in watching the nation's leading college football coaches—Nick Saban, Lou Holtz, Phil Fulmer, and more—labor to play themselves. If you've never heard former Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron speak, you owe it to yourself to hear the unintelligible Cajun say, "I hear that kid can really pepper the gumbo.") You're rooting for Oher to make something of himself, for him to succeed on the field, and for him to find happiness with his new family. But most of all, you're rooting—praying, hoping—for his story to be told in a movie that wasn't made for Sandra Bullock.

Slate V: The critics on The Blind Side and other new releases

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A new report from AAA, the car association, predicts that 33.2 million Thanksgiving travelers will be driving at least 50 miles to their holiday destinations this year. Another 2.3 million are expected to fly somewhere for the weekend, and many more will be riding intercity buses and trains. Last year around this time, the Lantern looked at the carbon emissions associated with these various forms of travel. The column is reprinted below.

On Wednesday, I'm heading back to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving via Amtrak. (They live near Philadelphia, I live in Boston.) Compared with the alternatives—either flying or braving the holiday-weekend traffic—I imagine this is the greenest way to go, since the trains will be packed. But it got me thinking: A few weeks from now, the train will have many more empty seats. Will it still be a more eco-friendly way to travel?

Last year, the Lantern pondered how you could make your turkey dinner greener—and even contemplated the heretical idea of eating Thanksgiving chicken instead. But while cooking a more carbon-conscious meal is a good step, the steps you take to get to the table in the first place can have a much greater environmental impact.

To answer the question of how to best make your trip home, the Lantern calls your attention to a recent study conducted by Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath, researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. When we typically think of the environmental impact of driving, we focus on the energy and emissions associated with moving a car, say, 30 miles. In reality, that sort of analysis is incomplete: How the car is made, how the road is built, and even whether the roads have been salted because of ice all have some effect, too. And while those effects are spread out over many cars and many different trips, they still take a toll. When we start thinking about train travel, the infrastructure matters even more, since getting a rail line up and running requires enormous amounts of construction and manufacturing.

The UC-Berkeley analysis tries to get a more complete picture of how we travel by taking all these variables into account—down to the impact of planting grass on the side of the road. Chester and Horvath's data suggest that riding in the average train is a significantly greener choice than the average car or plane. For example, they find that Caltrain (a system similar to Amtrak, averaging 155 passengers per train) produces less than half as many greenhouse-gas emissions or particulate matter per passenger mile compared with driving a sedan (average passengers: 1.58).* (The sedan comes out better when it comes to sulfur dioxide but much worse on volatile organic compounds.) And on Thanksgiving weekend, when trains are certain to be full and cars are likely to spend a long time idling in traffic, rail is easily a better option.

But you can come up with examples in which driving a car looks better. A train produces more emissions per trip than any car, bus, or truck; it makes up for that fact environmentally because it carries a lot more people. It stands to reason, then, that if you ride in a full sedan on a day when the train is pretty empty—and, in particular, if you are in a fuel-efficient car—the car could conceivably be greener per passenger mile. (The study says a car would need to have about three passengers—double the average—to break even environmentally with the typical train.) The numbers are even more striking for buses, which can experience extreme variability in ridership between peak and nonpeak hours. At peak hours—with 40 riders onboard—the Berkeley researchers find that buses often look like the greenest option, producing fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than even the average train per passenger mile. At off-peak hours, a bus looks a lot worse, performing even more poorly than a gas-guzzling pickup truck.

Does that mean we shouldn't run buses or trains during off-peak hours? No. If you want people to ride public transportation at rush hour, you need to make it possible for them to get around the rest of the day, too. (Not to mention the fact that some people—for either physical or economic reasons—simply can't drive.) And as long as those buses and trains are kept running, it's better—environmentally speaking—to take public transportation, since the marginal impact of your trip will be very low. (For more on this point, click here.)

Like any sophisticated environmental accounting, these evaluations have pitfalls. They rest on a lot of uncertain assumptions—how long a vehicle will last, for example—and require using data from a wide range of sources that may not always be reliable. (It's also worth noting that the Berkeley center where this research was conducted is sponsored by a Volvo-funded foundation, although that funding isn't directed toward specific projects.) Depending on the assumptions you make, similar data can be used to make contradictory arguments—see, for example, these arguments for (PDF) and against expanding rail systems.

But the Lantern thinks there are a few basic lessons that these life-cycle analyses can teach us. First, no matter what data you use, two very simple variables make a big difference: how far you travel and how many passengers are in your vehicle. Air travel is much maligned as a source of CO₂ emissions, and the Berkeley research confirms that airplanes do emit more than trains or buses per passenger mile. But the differences aren't as large as you think, and the real reason air travel contributes so much to our collective carbon footprint is that we use planes for longer trips. That's not to say you shouldn't go to your Grandma's house for Thanksgiving, but if she lives across the country, any means of getting over the river and through the woods is going to have a hefty carbon footprint. Likewise, designing bus routes and train schedules that fit rider demand—along with encouraging urban development that gives transit more appeal—makes a big difference, owing to the environmental downsides of traveling alone.

Secondly, you can't discuss the environmental impact of getting around without considering the infrastructure that makes travel possible. We have a tendency to focus on the environmental impact of the things that move—the cars, trains, and planes we see getting from point A to point B. But Chester and Horvath found that in some cases, construction is the biggest polluter. Roads were responsible for more particulate matter than tailpipes, for example. For rail travel, operating the trains actually accounts for less than half of a system's greenhouse-gas emissions. The implication: Making concrete and asphalt in a more environmentally friendly way can be just as important as getting vehicles to run more efficiently. In other words, it's not just the road you take, but what it's made out of, too.

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.

Correction, Nov. 25, 2008: This article originally misstated the relationship between the emissions produced by Caltrain and those produced by a sedan. The train generates less than half as many greenhouse-gas emissions or particulate matter per passenger mile as a sedan, not less than twice as much. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Return to article

It's possible to figure the environmental impact of public transportation in two different ways. So does it make more sense to focus on the average environmental impact of an additional rider (which basically entails dividing the total impact of public transportation by the number of riders) or the marginal environmental impact (which would mean calculating how much more energy is required or pollution is created when one more person gets on the bus)?

Often, the Lantern makes the case—as do many "cradle-to-grave" environmental analyses—that we should look at the average. (Consider, for example, last week's discussion of takeout, in which we were talking about averaging out the energy use of the restaurant across every meal.) Here's why: In many cases, looking at the marginal environmental burden of one consumer gives you a value close to zero. For example, as long as a plane has an empty seat, you aren't responsible for any of its emissions when you fly. So fly all you want! But in truth, each consumer contributes to the demand for a new restaurant or a new flight. With that in mind, it seems to make sense to focus on the average.

But in the case of public transportation, the Lantern makes an exception. We've already made the case that it's necessary to run off-peak buses and trains if you also want people to use public transportation at rush hour. If that's the case, then those off-peak buses will run whether there are five passengers or 25. It certainly makes sense to have these lonely buses run as infrequently as possible. But as long as some need to stay on the road to keep a public transit system functioning, you might as well hop aboard.

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Chongqing's Hot Pot Festival

"So what's that?" I asked, gesturing at a bowl of grayish fleshy ribbons with little spikes. It was one of the many tough-to-identify animal parts cramming the Lazy Susan. Zhang Haiqing, deputy director of the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, Chongqing Municipal People's Government, mulled the question for a minute. A gracious host to a group of journalists who had traveled to Chongqing, Zhang had lived in Seattle in the 1990s. He probably intuited the squeamishness of the visiting Americans.

"Quite frankly, it's beef stomach."

Chongqing, history buffs will recall, was the capital of China during World War II , or, as it's referred to here, "the Anti-Japanese War." Today, it's a massive urban megaplex at the junction of the Jiliang and Yangtze Rivers, the gateway to China's west and the focus of frantic economic development efforts. In contrast to the export-oriented coasts, Chongqing emphasizes domestic demand and heavy manufacturing rather than exports, services, and light manufacturing. At a Chang'an auto factory, workers were churning out cheap minivans intended to help rural farmers move stuff around.

Chongqing boosters like to say that it's the largest city in the world, with a population greater than that of Shanghai. But that's largely because it has been granted a special status: Imagine if you counted everyone in the New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, and Westchester suburbs as residents of New York City. It covers a vast geographical area, to which Chongqing is trying to bring its urban, modernizing sensibility. The scale of the place is impressive. The Yangtze River carves a deep course through this part of China (it's a few hundred miles upstream from the Three Gorges region), and high-rises are arrayed on the hillsides, plateaus and valleys.

The hot pot is a characteristic cuisine of the region and of its poverty. Peasants who lived by the river, unable to afford choice cuts of meat, would take whatever scraps they could gather and boil them in a shared pot of spicy oil. But my experience with the hot pot suggests that, even at a time when hundreds of millions of Chinese remain desperately poor, urban areas like Chongqing have made sufficient progress in the past 20 years that entrepreneurs can transform a symbol of poverty into an upscale consumer experience. The hot-pot restaurant is like a white-tablecloth soul food joint.

This hot-pot restaurant was in a theme mall perched on a hillside overlooking the Jialing River. The multilevel structure replicated the look and feel of a regional market, with open stalls selling nuts and dried fruit. One facade was topped, naturally, with ads for Subway and Starbucks. In Chongqing, examples of what Westerners like to think of as Chinese architecture are hard to find. There's the People's Congress Hall, and some of the banks feature stone lions outside them. But most of the structures, such as the Hilton Hotel we stayed in, or the many large apartment buildings, are standard-issue Western fare. The striking new buildings in town are designed by foreigners. From our table we had a view of the hulking Chongqing Grand Theater, which replicated a ship. It was designed by a German architectural firm.

The restaurant was a sort of theme treatment of the hot-pot experience. Rather than a communal pot, the table had built-in burners on which each person's small pot could be heated. Deferring to the sensibilities of foreigners, the personal hot pot was divided into two sections, one spiked with red chilies and the other with a bland broth. But the concessions went only so far. There were strips of beef and lamb. But there were also the aforementioned beef stomach, tiny whole fish, quivering pigs' brains, duck throats, and red chicken necks. (I stuck mostly to the vegetables.) Meals staged for foreigners tend to be epic affairs, with far more food on offer than even a famished table of 12 can consume. They seem designed to convey the fact that China can afford not just to feed you but to stuff you beyond belief.

As I surveyed the table, searching for something bland, it struck me that at this meal, as at every other meal we had eaten, there was no rice. This, too, may also be a sign of China's rising prosperity. Serving rice to guests is regarded as impolite and a sign of impecunity. It would be, one Chinese official told me, like serving a guest in America white bread with nothing to put on it.

Our hot pot wasn't the only example I noticed of Chongqing turning what until recently would have been a signifier of poverty into a marker of prosperity. Yesterday, we strolled through the central business district, a large pedestrian mall area with massive hotels, department stores, office towers and apartment buildings. In the middle there's a modest tower, the People's Liberation Memorial Tower. It's a few hundred feet high. Twenty years ago, it was the highest building in Chongqing. Today, it's dwarfed by fancy department stores, a huge Intercontinental Hotel, and high-end consumption. And the clock at the top of the tower is a Rolex.

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New Moon, the second installment of the Twilight series, hits theaters today. It features a family of teenage vampires who drink animal blood and who look down on those vampires "weak" enough to prey on humans. The film raises several questions about the logistics—and aesthetics—of blood-drinking.

Where's the best place to bite a person? Any of the major arteries. If you're going for efficiency—that is, the fastest blood flow—the best place to sink your fangs is into your victim's chest. Aim for the aorta, which carries blood out of the heart and is the largest blood vessel of all, up to 1 inch in diameter. (The aorta is located behind the breast plate, so you'd need long, sharp fangs to accomplish this feat.) Such a puncture would likely result in your victim's death. The next biggest artery is the femoral artery, which runs down the leg and is best accessed in the upper thigh. Again, it's hard to stem blood loss from the femoral artery, which is roughly the size of an index finger—victims of gunshot wounds to the groin area often die within minutes. The carotid arteries in the neck and the radial arteries in the wrists also offer ample blood flow. If a vampire goes for the neck, he'll get more blood the lower down he bites, since the common carotid artery splits off into two smaller arteries about halfway up.

If you want your victim to survive, go for his veins. Whereas arteries carry blood from the heart—and have higher blood pressure—veins carry blood to the heart and have lower pressure. It's therefore easier to patch up a puncture wound to a vein than to an artery. (When you see a wound spurting, that means an artery was hit, whereas bleeding from a vein is smooth and constant.) The most accessible veins are the jugular in the neck and the great saphenous vein that runs just under the skin inside your upper thigh. Although significantly less dangerous than hitting an artery, a puncture wound to a major vein would likely cause profuse bleeding and require significant medical attention. To be extra safe, you might be better off pricking a few capillaries in your prey's fingers.

How much blood can a vampire drink without killing his prey? About four pints. The average adult has about 10 pints of blood in his or her body. It's possible to lose up to 15 percent without feeling much of a difference—that's why donating a pint of blood is no big deal. After losing up to 30 percent, your victim might feel cool and dizzy and his heart rate would go up, but he probably wouldn't need a blood transfusion. If he loses between 30 percent and 40 percent, his blood pressure will drop, his heart rate will surge, and he'll go into shock, usually necessitating a transfusion. Upon losing more than 40 percent, he'll likely die without resuscitation and a generous transfusion. That said, the amount of blood a person can lose and still survive varies widely: For example, a young person can sustain more blood loss than an old man with a weak heart. Speed of bleeding matters, too. If your victim's losing blood slowly, he can survive a larger loss than if his blood's coming out all at once.

Does blood taste different, depending on what your victim ate for dinner? No. Human blood tastes the same, pretty much no matter what. Whether you're Type A, B, AB, or O, blood has a vaguely metallic flavor thanks to the iron contained in hemoglobin. Some people describe the taste as copperlike. That's not going to change noticeably no matter what your victim ingests. For example, his blood isn't going to taste sweeter after he's eaten a few packs of Skittles. (Mosquitoes seem to prefer certain blood types, but that has more to do with the chemicals we secrete than the taste of our blood.) Even alcohol barely alters flavor. Think about it: The legal blood alcohol content limit for driving is 0.08 percent. Even if your victim's BAC level reached 0.4 percent—enough booze to kill—that's still less than one-tenth the alcohol content of Smirnoff Ice. The taste of different animals' blood does vary slightly. Pig blood, for example, is more pungent than duck blood, while goat blood contains hints of the taste of goat meat. These variations affect the taste of blood-based dishes from sausage to soup to pancakes.

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

Explainer thanks John Howard of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Office, Barbara Rolek, and Stephen Stryjewski of Cochon Restaurant.

AP Video: New Moon Stars on Their Own Celebrity Obsessions

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Day 1

This summer, I drove out of San Diego and into the desert on a journey from Southern California, through long stretches of Arizona and New Mexico, and on to New Orleans. I'd decided to work my way along the path of Easy Rider, a road movie full of searching, shot-on-location images. Those images offer a vision of America at the end of the 1960s, when the country was still unsettled by the upheaval of the previous years and unsure where the years ahead would lead. The America of Easy Rider is one of unspoiled landscapes, utopian aspirations, deep-rooted prejudice, and senseless violence. I'd always felt removed from that America—Easy Rider was shot before I was born, mostly in parts of the country I'd never visited. I wondered what remained of that world 40 years later, and what I could learn about the movie—and about America, then and now—by retracing the steps of its heroes.

Released on July 14, 1969, between the Stonewall riots and the Apollo 11 moon landing, Easy Rider became an unexpected success and, like Woodstock, a touchstone for a generation. Not my generation, though. Before seeing it, I'd imagined Easy Rider as one of those you-had-to-be-there '60s clichés that so irritated those of us who came of age in the '80s—something to be slipped into that-was-then montages between footage of Vietnam and the '68 Democratic Convention.

Film enthusiasts my age had warned me to expect a film with long, often dull, experimental patches and stoner vagaries. When I finally got around to watching Easy Rider, I discovered those warnings weren't entirely unfounded. But I also discovered a more complex and sour movie than the one I'd imagined. More an elegy for a generation that never got where it wanted to go than a celebration of that generation's superiority, it pits hopefulness against resignation and sets the battle on a lovingly photographed stretch of the United States. Easy Rider hit theaters with a memorable tag line: "A man who went looking for America. And couldn't find it anywhere." Star, producer, and co-writer Peter Fonda hated that line, and rightly so. It's really the story of two men—Wyatt and Billy, played by Fonda and co-writer and director Dennis Hopper—who went looking for America and found it everywhere. They just didn't find a place for themselves.

What sent them looking in the first place? The film parcels out little back story: There's a drug deal conducted so nervously it's clear Wyatt and Billy aren't full-time dealers, a hope of getting to New Orleans in time for Mardis Gras, and some vague plans to "retire" in Florida. In his British Film Institute monograph on Easy Rider, critic Lee Hill refers to cut footage that would have established Wyatt and Billy as stunt riders from the carnival circuit, motivated by a desire to escape a world dominated by crooked promoters. In the final version, their stunt work is mentioned only in passing.

Fonda pared Wyatt's dialogue down to as few lines as he thought necessary. Hopper, on the other hand, turns Billy into a hyperverbal coil of hippie neuroses, always afraid he and Wyatt will miss the party or get ripped off. The film keeps circling back to the tension between Wyatt's fragile idealism and Billy's materialism. Wyatt tries on the philosophies of those he meets, rejecting each of them in pursuit of some better life down the road. Billy also wants to keep moving, inspired by dreams of Mardi Gras and living large off of drug money. The friction between the men drives the film more than the desire to reach a clear destination, and it grows more pronounced with each stop along the way.

Their first stop, and mine, is Ballarat, Calif. After selling two packages of high-grade cocaine obtained in Mexico to a character billed only as "Connection" (played by an already-creepy Phil Spector), Wyatt and Billy roll their stack of cash into a plastic tube and place it in Wyatt's gas tank for safe keeping. Wyatt pauses a moment to toss aside his watch, then the pair heads east as the credits start. "I'm hip about time," Wyatt will say later, as if talking about a habit he's trying to quit.

They couldn't have picked a more remote place to begin their journey. Located on the edge of Death Valley, Ballarat started out as a mining town in 1897. It died when the mines dried up 20 years later. By the time Easy Rider filmed there, its adobe-style buildings had largely crumbled into dust. The situation hasn't improved much since then.

Apart from a handful of trailers and some decrepit buildings, there's almost nothing to be found in Ballarat. Its sole resident, Rock Novack, runs the general store, which serves 4x4 enthusiasts. The store consists of little more than a cooler filled with Cokes and Bud. "This is downtown," Novack says by way of a greeting. He's accompanied by his dog, a friendly, perpetually panting mutt named Potlicker. Potlicker's "around 5," which is about how long Rock has been living in Ballarat.

Rock pointed out a dilapidated pickup that he said used to belong to Charlie Manson, who used a pair of abandoned Death Valley ranches not far from Ballarat as his headquarters for a while. I have no reason not to believe him, and it seems strangely appropriate that the paths of Easy Rider—the quintessential end-of-the-'60s movie—and the Manson murders—one of a string of symbolically end-of-the-'60s events—would cross. As the Manson family rolled into Laurel Canyon in August 1969, the film was still playing to packed houses shocked by its violent finale.



In Ballarat, Wyatt and Billy are just happy to be on their way. By their reckoning, whatever life they once led is now firmly in their rearview mirrors. What's ahead remains a mystery. I briefly consider making my own symbolic gesture, but what would fit the occasion? I could smash my GPS. Toss my BlackBerry. But who'd I be kidding? As I stood in the 120 degree heat, eager to get back into the comfort of my rented PT Cruiser—a far cry from Wyatt and Billy's choppers—I felt more acutely than ever that I'd been on a different path than these characters for years. I had a home to return to and a life to resume once I reached New Orleans. But standing in the ruins of Ballarat, I also began to understand how the thrill of the open road could be something other than an advertising cliché. For one week I'd do my best to stay true to Easy Rider's spirit of exploration. I knew the movie's itinerary, but I didn't know where it would take me.

Day 2

From Ballarat, Easy Rider cuts to its heroes riding across the Colorado River and into Needles, Calif. I don't have the luxury of editing. I drive through Death Valley; stop at Zabriskie Point, site of the dusty orgy in Antonioni's eponymous film; and spend the night at the Amargosa Hotel in Death Valley Junction, which doubled as the nightmarish Lost Highway Hotel in David Lynch's Lost Highway—two reminders that movies have left traces on even the most remote parts of America.

The next day, I don't make it much farther than the end of Easy Rider's opening credits. I don't really mind. There's a reason why this sequence has become so famous. When people talk about the freedom of the open road, the long, easy stretch of I-40 and what remains of Route 66 from Needles to Flagstaff, Ariz., is what they have in mind. The credit sequence finds Billy and Wyatt wearing expressions that suggest they've found exactly what they hoped for on the road, all cued to Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild," a classic rock staple that, these days, is hard to hear thanks to decades of overexposure on classic rock radio and bad covers and in its second life as an ironic signifier in films like One Crazy Summer and Dr. Doolittle 2.

And let's be honest: It's not that great of a song in the first place. It's the visuals that made this sequence iconic. The changing tones and colors of the landscapes Wyatt and Billy ride through often say more than Easy Rider's spare plot and cryptic dialogue. Hopper lets some scenes play out to the length of an entire song. Paired with the long shots of rolling vistas, the scenes become immersive and dreamlike, even to those not under the influence of the illicit substances favored by the film's characters.

Those scenes wouldn't have had such power were it not for the work of cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. A Hungarian émigré, Kovacs fled to America with lifelong friend and fellow cinematographer Vilmos Zsigimond after smuggling footage they shot of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution into Austria. They stayed in the states, bringing an outsider's perspective to an astonishing run of classic American films.

Kovacs, who died in 2007, would later add Five Easy Pieces, Paper Moon, and Shampoo to his résumé. But at the time of Easy Rider, he had worked on only one accomplished film—Peter Bogdanovich's remarkable debut, Targets—and a lot of quickie exploitation films. Some of those films now provide fascinating insight into their times. Richard Rush's dark-side-of-the-counterculture movie Psych-Out presents the high-'60s Haight-Ashbury scene with an immediacy not tinged by the paisley nostalgia of later years. And two movies Kovacs worked on for Rush—The Savage Seven and Hells Angels on Wheels, the latter starring Jack Nicholson—found him trying out the bikers-against-a-landscape-imagery form he'd perfect in Easy Rider.

Unable to afford a camera car, Kovacs used boards to mount Arriflex's liberatingly lightweight 35-millimeter camera to a '68 Impala. Some of the handmade roughness of this approach remains visible in the film, as do many instances of lens flare, "mistakes" that Kovacs and Hopper left in the film and that lend it a beautiful, sun-drenched quality. Partly by design, partly by low-budget necessity, Easy Rider helped create a new a way of looking at the American landscape. Hopper found uses for the ragged edges Hollywood films usually sanded off. The style was so imitated by films that followed that it's become hard to appreciate how radical it looked at the time. Today, even Pixar features occasionally throw in lens flare, never mind that there's no light to cause it, or even a lens to flare.

The road from Needles to Kingman to Flagstaff offers a straight line and a slow ascent, a gentle pull upward from desert depths to verdant hills and cooler temperatures. But for Wyatt and Billy, the feeling of escape doesn't last beyond "Born To Be Wild"'s last chords. Pulling into a motel called the Pine Breeze Inn, they're turned away by the biker-hating owner, who switches on the "No Vacancy" sign when he sees them approach. The movie has barely started and the good times have already begun to fade.

The Pine Breeze Inn still stands on the outskirts of Flagstaff, just down the road from a large Harley-Davidson dealership in Bellemont. The inn's closed now; its office sits abandoned in front of an RV park on a dead-end stretch of road. But it seems I'm not the first student of Easy Rider to visit this place. Someone's hung an Easy Rider poster on the front door, and a peek through the window reveals a second image of Hopper and Fonda, choppering down the highway in the poster that became a dorm-room staple in the years after the film's release. Wyatt and Billy couldn't get a room at this place. Now they've taken up permanent residence.

Day 3

Wyatt and Billy's next stop is Monument Valley, a stunning pocket of sandstone formations situated where Utah meets Arizona. Its history with the movies stretches back far beyond Easy Rider. The location of choice for director John Ford, its five square miles have defined what decades of moviegoers think of when they imagine the American West.

The film lingers in Monument Valley. It's hard not to. The imposing mesas, towering spires, and sandy paths inspire thoughts of the films that have been set there. Some of them, like My Darling Clementine and Fort Apache, starred Peter Fonda's father, Henry. It's tempting to view the arrival of the younger Fonda—sporting shaggier hair than any character his father ever played—as a rebuke directed at the elder Fonda's heroic legacy. But the truth is a little more complicated.

Ford's favorite leading man was John Wayne. Over the years, Wayne went from being the white-hatted hero of Stagecoach to the tortured obsessive of The Searchers, but his characters rarely changed much within a movie—Ford played to Wayne's ability to deliver extraordinary performances within a limited range. Fonda's characters, on the other hand, were frequently changed by events in Ford's films. The Grapes of Wrath's Tom Joad goes from loner to messiah; the gangly, inarticulate idealist of Young Mr. Lincoln becomes an able politician.



Fonda often played the hero in Monument Valley, but he wore the mantle uneasily. In Fort Apache, he's barely a hero at all, guided by bigotry and unable to adapt his rigid military code to the realities of the American frontier. As Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine—the hero whose name Peter Fonda's character would borrow in Easy Rider—he's a legendary marshall trying to start a new life as a cattleman who gets sidetracked by the crime and incivility of Tombstone. He wears a look of barely disguised disappointment as he realizes the world is not ready for him to hang up his badge. Fonda always conveyed depths of conflict below his taciturn exterior. (Released the same year as Easy Rider, Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, filmed in part in Monument Valley, pushed Fonda's gift for playing tormented souls in a new direction, casting him as a sadistic villain with an easy smile.)



On-screen, Peter Fonda is very much his father's son, and his work in Easy Rider plays like a continuation of the family's understated craft. He doesn't say much, but he doesn't have to. He has his father's gnomic manner, suggesting he's never quite finished thinking through the situation at hand. He proceeds with an outer confidence that does't quite square with what's going on inside his head. He claims doubt as a birthright.



As a Monument Valley sunset plays out in real time, Easy Rider pauses to let viewers consider the moment's layers. Wyatt and Billy—a pair of modern-day cowboys, if only in name—visit the heart of the West. Or, at least, the movie version of the West. Seeing it in person, I kept doing double takes. Here was a vista unlike anything I'd ever seen—except I had seen it, many times, in postcards, picture books, and films as varied as Forrest Gump, National Lampoon's Vacation, and Ford's Westerns. This was the frontier, untamed America, the place where the civilizing force of Wyatt Earp met the lawlessness of the Clanton boys—even if it had only played that part in movies.

Day 4

Easy Rider's next stop brings the story to a commune inspired by the New Buffalo settlement outside of Taos, N.M. Here movie geography and real-world locations split. Unable to get permission to film at New Buffalo, the film re-created it in the mountains of Malibu, Calif. I decide to visit Taos anyway. The town served as a Hopper hangout for years, and to commemorate Easy Rider's 40^th anniversary, the Harwood Mueum of Art is hosting an exhibit called Hopper at Harwood, featuring Hopper's art and photography.

The drive to Taos—where crags give way to plains, then mountains—doesn't disappoint. The town does. Its center remains, as it has since its time as a Spanish colonial town, Taos Plaza. Now catering almost entirely to tourists, it gives the impression of a face that's been lifted too many times. The long-lived La Fonda Hotel shares space with T-shirt shops and Mexican restaurants where no dish is deemed complete until the phrase "smothered in" has been added to its description. If it weren't for the many art galleries carrying on—or, at the very least, living off—Taos' tradition as an artists' colony, it could pass for virtually any other resort town.

The land north of here became dotted with communes in the late '60s, none more famous than New Buffalo. As Wyatt, Billy, and a hitchhiker they've picked up arrive at the film's New Buffalo, they find a place bursting with life, maybe too much of it. Billy, in one of his few unreservedly joyful moments, starts playing with some kids as Wyatt takes in the scene. The sequence that follows explores commune life, and it squares well with the firsthand accounts found in Iris Keltz's Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie, from one communard's obsession with the I Ching to an unspoken divide between those doing work and those just sitting around. Keltz first stayed at New Buffalo in 1968, around the time Easy Rider was shooting. She found a small group of people dedicated to living communally. But when she returned in 1969, she discovered a scene changed by too many casual drop-ins. It was the year communes first began to attract mainstream attention and, consequently, casual scenesters. No doubt helped by Easy Rider, 1969 became for communes what 1978 would be for discos.

The commune sequence is the film's weakest stretch, overlong and filled with experiments that don't really work, like a 360-degree shot of a communal dinner table that makes its point long before it completes its circle. (There's also way too much time dedicated to a hippie mime troupe.) But the commune section also features a scene that serves as Easy Rider's turning point. Taken to the fields not far from the main camp, Wyatt and Billy see college-age kids, in outfits not intended for rural living, dropping seeds into barren earth. "They're city kids," the hitchhiker tells them, "But they're going to stay here till it's harvested. That's the whole point."

"They ain't gonna make it," Billy concludes instantly. "They ain't gonna grow anything here." Wyatt has another idea. "They're gonna make it. Dig, man. They're gonna make it," he says with a smile and a nod. Faced with '60s idealism in its rawest form—kids who have done their best to drop out of society and remake it as something simpler and better—Billy responds with skepticism, while Wyatt recognizes fellow dreamers when he sees them. One sees barren earth and is happy to be headed toward Florida before the winter sets in. The other looks tempted to stay and enjoy the fruits of their commitment and belief. The shots that follow, of young men and women doing farm work and sharing a pipe, don't really support one view or the other.

In reality, though, they didn't make it. Not in the long run, anyway. Keltz's book alternates between rosy nostalgia and memories of infighting, struggles with other communes (some of which subscribed to more violent ideologies), troubles with Taos natives, hoarding, food stamp scams, druggy hangers-on, trendy gurus, and eventual disintegration. One late-period resident owner sums up the '80s as a time of "wine, heroin and shotguns." By the mid-'90s, New Buffalo had been converted into a bed and breakfast. Now it's gone.

Falling in love with the place after visiting it to prepare for Easy Rider, Hopper became an off-and-on resident for years. After the failure of The Last Movie, his 1971 directorial follow-up to Easy Rider, it would be more on than off. Over the last couple of decades, Hopper has become a go-to psycho in projects from the reputable (Speed, 24) to the ridiculous (Super Mario Bros., Waterworld)—interrupted once in a while with memorable turns in movies like True Romance and Elegy. This steady stream of work has made his tumultuous relationship with Hollywood easy to forget. Hopper became an acolyte of James Dean and a believer in his intense approach to performance after co-starring with Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. He took to method-acting immersion but found film work scarce after a confrontation with director Henry Hathaway on the set of the 1958 film From Hell to Texas. (The director put Hopper through take after take in a battle of wills that ultimately left Hopper unofficially blacklisted for much of the decade to come.)

Easy Rider revived his career, but he had a hard time finding a place in the auteur-friendly Hollywood the film helped create. By the time Easy Rider was released, he had become, by all accounts, a difficult character. Flashes of megalomania and self-destructive excess evident during Easy Rider's creation became a lifestyle. Peter Biskind's lurid yet essential New Hollywood history Easy Riders, Raging Bulls describes the alarming number of chemicals swimming through Hopper's bloodstream in the '70s. Cleaned up by 1986, he got a second chance after strong work in Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, and River's Edge (to say nothing of the honestly underrated Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), films that found him playing men damaged by the years and in danger of letting their obsessions destroy the world around them. He knew the part well.

The Harwood exhibit reveals a photographer with a keen eye and an artist with a studied, if not particularly exciting, command of collage and trompe l'oeil techniques. The wildness of his early career has evidently been exorcised. Despite remaining a fine actor, particularly when kept away from stock wild-eyed lunatic parts, Hopper has attracted more attention for his embrace of conservative politics than for his acting in the last few years. Wildness has disappeared from Taos, too, or at least the Taos I encounter. The pair of panhandling kids I see as I leave downtown look out of place. There's no room for them here and no home for them in the hills, either—the seeds never took root.

Day 5

After spending the night in Santa Fe, I get up early and head to Las Vegas, N.M. It's here that Wyatt and Billy run afoul of the law, arrested for "parading without a permit" after they ride their bikes through a small-town celebration straight out of a Jaycees brochure. Las Vegas is in the middle of a sleepy morning as I pull up, but I'm in for a shock. Parking my car just off the town square, I look up and read the marquee:

DOUBLE FEATURE: EASY RIDER & DUEL

I'm excited about seeing Easy Rider on the big screen, having only watched it on DVD. I slip into the nearby Popular Dry Goods, note an ad from a company boasting that its clothes were featured in No Country for Old Men, then excitedly ask whether the theater is still open and whether it's really playing Easy Rider.

"It's still open," a man named Dennis replies, "but if you buy a ticket for Easy Rider you're going to end up seeing G-Force." Turns out the marquee's been changed because there's a movie filming in town, the Greg Mottola-directed Paul, in which Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play comic-book geeks road-tripping across America. My quest to discover how 40 years have altered a movie version of America has stumbled on a pocket of America altered for a movie.

Hollywood gets out here a lot. Tom Mix shot some Westerns here. The Communists invaded it in Red Dawn. Billy Bob Thornton's been here a couple of times, once when he directed an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses and again when he starred in The Astronaut Farmer. It makes a fine stand-in for McCarthy's border country; the Coen Brothers were here for No Country for Old Men. But it's also a fine stand-in for small-town America, which I'm guessing is why Paul is using it. Later, I'll try to enter a cool-looking comic-book shop only to be told it's also part of a set.

In Easy Rider, it's here that Wyatt and Billy first encounter the small-town intolerance that will seal their fate. Their guide for this leg of the journey is a cellmate named George Hanson, a young local lawyer played by Jack Nicholson. Hanson wakes up next to them in jail, unsure where he is or how he got there. Soon the surroundings become familiar—thanks to his descent into alcoholism, Hanson has come to know the inside of the jail quite well. He speaks proudly of his work with the ACLU and matter-of-factly about the family connections that keep his jail stints short and relatively pleasant. "They've got this here, see, scissor-happy 'Beautify America' thing going on around here," he tells Billy and Wyatt later. "They're trying to make everyone look like Yul Brynner."

Nicholson had been acting in films for more than a decade when he appeared in Easy Rider, but it was this film that made him a star. He'd done some memorable work for Roger Corman and starred in two notable Westerns for Monte Hellman, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. He wrote the latter, too, but even in writing his own character, he'd yet to find a role that took advantage of his talent for conveying a charming yet insistent spirit of dissent.

As a man just barely able to restrain his disgust with mainstream society even as he works within it, Hanson is the template for memorable Nicholson roles that followed, from Five Easy Pieces to Carnal Knowledge to Chinatown. He's a bit more of an innocent than Nicholson heroes to come, but he shares their disdain for the world he's been handed, one with clearly marked, if rarely remarked on, limits. In Wyatt and Billy, Hanson sees an instant escape from the life he knows. He'll pay the price for that later.

Movies have long idealized small-town life. Easy Rider is not one of those movies. It presents the "silent majority" that swept Nixon into office the year before as a bigoted and ultimately murderous bunch. (What is still just a threat of prejudice and violence in Las Vegas becomes a terrifying reality when the film reaches the Deep South.) This no doubt played well with the movie's counterculture audience, and it's not as if a cultural divide didn't exist in America at the time. But the movie's depiction of Las Vegas and, later, the South tars a whole swath of the country with a broad brush.

Nicholson's Hanson, however, is an exception. Here's a man who's born of the same soil and speaking the same drawling language as the "Beautify America" set—a football star even—who's woken up to the shortcomings of the restrictive world around him. He's evidence that things can change—or would be if he weren't looking up from the bottom of a glass so often. Growing less effective by the drink, his '60s activism has gone limp in defeat.

"This used to be a hell of a country," Hanson tells his new friends after agreeing to join their trip to Mardis Gras. It's an oft-quoted line, one that makes Hanson sound more like the people he's leaving behind than the hippies he's joined. Would he really want to turn back the clock on the decade's political advances? Or has the end of that decade left him feeling hopeless? While cameras rolled on Easy Rider, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy died violently, the Vietnam War showed no signs of slowing, and domestic unrest mounted. It was enough to make anyone nostalgic for small-town comforts.

I spent much of my day in Las Vegas hanging out in a charming coffee shop where tattooed baristas served senior citizens playing board games. I left ready to pull up stakes and move there. It fit my movie-shaped ideal of what a small town was supposed to look like: the pleasant, tree-lined town square, smiling locals, a burger joint not associated with clowns or kings, a corner drug store complete with a soda fountain. The town surely has the same problems found across America, but they were nowhere to be seen during my visit. Of course, Las Vegas has an incentive to appear idyllic. If it appears otherwise, filmmakers will need to look elsewhere to find small-town imagery to idealize or subvert in their films. I ended up unsure whether I'd really seen Las Vegas at all, or just some Hollywood idea of small-town authenticity. After admiring a cowgirl painted on the side of a building announcing I'd arrived where "the Great Plains meet the mighty Rockies," I noticed it welcomed me to a town called "Calumet"—Las Vegas' name in Red Dawn. I could live here, but where would I really be?

Day 6

I begin the day by flying from Albuquerque, N.M., to New Orleans. It's cheating, but only a little. Warned not to film in Texas because the state had no patience for long hair, Easy Rider skipped the state, so I do, too. Renting a car at the airport, I head directly to Morganza, La., a rural community up the road from Baton Rouge where Hanson, Wyatt, and Billy try, and fail, to enjoy a meal. "You name it, I'll throw rocks at it," one local tells the town sheriff as they enter the diner. The teenage girls dining there have a different reaction. Visibly attracted to the men, they follow them outside and coo over their bikes. Easy Rider used locals as the diner patrons and Fonda recalls giving the men a single line of motivation: "We've just raped a 13-year-old white girl outside of town."

He didn't throw in that racial detail by accident. By this point in the film, race has become a persistent theme. When asked earlier by Billy and Wyatt whether he can get them out of jail, Hanson replies, "Well, I probably can if you haven't killed anybody. At least nobody white." Riding into Louisiana, the film lingers over images of rural black poverty. Looking like stereotypical rednecks, the diner patrons fill out the other side of that equation. It doesn't take much to connect the dots between the free-floating intolerance they direct at their shaggy visitors and its source, a resentment of the changing times. That they see the girls in the diner—the generation coming up—aroused by embodiments of that change sharpens their resentment to a deadly point.

There wasn't much to Morganza when Easy Rider filmed there, and there's less now. The cafe and the building that housed it are gone. Two buildings in the same style sit in disrepair down the street. Of course, it's not really Morganza we see in the film, just someplace the screenplay describes as "ext. Southern town—day." It would be easy to dismiss the sequence as a stereotype of a racist backwater if the moment didn't feel so real. And at least one member of the Easy Rider team knew how to conjure the troubled postwar American South: Terry Southern.

The issue of who deserves credit for Easy Rider has been disputed over the years. Hopper's friendship with Fonda hasn't survived, and both have played up the role of improvisation in ways that shift glory away from Southern, who shares a screenplay credit with them. It is difficult to pin down a dominant sensibility. The performances, direction, and look of the film all feed into a mood that slowly changes from celebration to elegy, but the individual episodes alternate between deadpan comedy (the opening scene of Wyatt and Billy out of their depths in drug-country Mexico) and finely drawn portraits of the era (the cultural anthropology of the New Buffalo commune). Even if no one can claim to be Easy Rider's author, the roots of all these moments can be traced to Southern's writing.

Southern is today best known for writing the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, which turned Peter George's joke-free Cold War novel Two Hours to Doom into a mad apocalyptic romp. By the time of Easy Rider, Southern had become an in-demand screenwriter and a counterculture icon, thanks in part to Strangelove and his well-received 1959 novel, The Magic Christian. Both mine a similar vein of black comedy, as does Southern's script for the 1965 film The Loved One, which takes Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood satire into darker territory.

Southern the broad satirist surfaces occasionally in Easy Rider. But the subtler Southern behind tightly focused short stories like "Red Dirt Marijuana" and "You're Too Hip, Baby," which emphasized the small dramas of particular times and places, can be found throughout the film. The Morganza sequence and the film's ending bring a third Southern to the fore, the unsparing observer responsible for the Esquire article "Twirling at Ole Miss," a pioneering piece of new journalism that found him embedded in a land rotten with fear, prejudice, and barely suppressed violence. Southern fills his stories of his native Texas with casual cruelty. Boys carry guns and use them without a second thought. Men with grudges die in knife fights that no one tries to stop. Violence happens without real reason but carries irreversible consequences.



As Easy Rider's three travelers camp outside the town that rejected them, the redneck locals attack them, killing Hanson. His death feels like an inevitability, a violent outburst in an ongoing clash between an entrenched set of rigid social codes and a generation in open rebellion.

In 1969, it wasn't clear who would win the battle for the future of America, and the final stretches of Easy Rider present a nightmare vision of the portion of the country that had swept Nixon into the office the year before—the unyielding, disapproving mass he'd later dub the silent majority. As they plunge into the backwoods of Louisiana, Wyatt and Billy and the counterculture they represent start to look less like the coming age than like an aberration, something to be tolerated only as long as it remains unthreatening.

Day 7

After Hanson's murder, Wyatt and Billy hit New Orleans for the celebratory dinner they'd promised each other and for the visit to Madame Tinkertoys' brothel they'd promised their fallen friend. They share Wyatt's acid with a pair of prostitutes (Karen Black and future new wave one-hit-wonder Toni Basil) before moving out into the Mardi Gras-clogged streets and then one of the city's distinctive cemeteries. For Wyatt, at least, this turns out to be the perfect setting for a bad trip. He's left sobbing as he embraces a monument in New Orleans' St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, cursing his mother for some past transgression. Egged on by Hopper, Fonda drew on memories of his own mother's suicide for the scene, and the moment has an uncomfortable rawness.

Constructed in 1789, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the city's oldest existing cemetery, and is known for its aboveground crypts and elaborate shrines. The rows of crypts make it easy to get lost here and hard to see what's around the next corner. Because it sits near the Iberville Projects, the city warns tourists not to visit the cemetery alone.

Easy Rider is a road movie, and characters in road movies either die or go home. The film repeatedly shows that its heroes have no home to call their own. The places Wyatt and Billy don't reject—the experimental community of the commune, the open frontier of Monument Valley—try either to lock them up or to destroy them. In New Orleans, they find only death, even in the midst of a celebration of excess and renewal.

The night before their murders, Wyatt and Billy have conflicting thoughts beside their campfire. Mardis Gras behind them and Florida ahead, Billy's happy at last. "We did it," he says. "We blew it," Wyatt replies, refusing to elaborate. He doesn't have to. Since Hanson's death, his mood has darkened, as if the possibility for change died with their friend. Wyatt's bad trip has also stirred memories of an older darkness. He may not expect to die the next day, but he knows they're not headed to a happy ending.

Wyatt and Billy are killed by a pair of stereotypical good ol' boys in a pickup truck. One announces that he plans to scare the hippies by pointing a shotgun at them, then decides to pull the trigger, apparently annoyed when Wyatt gives him the finger. Or maybe there's no motivation at all. They get Billy first. Wyatt rushes to help his friend but is quickly cut down as well, his gas tank and the bills inside blowing up around him. The camera pulls up from the fiery wreck, then draws back further and further still, the end credits rolling against the image of a dead end mistaken for an open road.

When I drove out to Morganza the day before, I looked for the stretch of highway where Wyatt and Billy met their fates, but I couldn't find it. Maybe I didn't drive far enough. Maybe the place has changed, become unrecognizable over the years.

The movie's final scene captures a growing feeling at the time that the decade had begun to wind down to a bitter end, that the New Frontier promised at its beginning had receded beyond the horizon. The finale feels almost apocalyptically pessimistic, and the years that followed, and the films Easy Rider inspired, would often reinforce its conclusions. The film's success led to other philosophical road movies in the early-'70s, films like Two-Lane Blacktop and Vanishing Point, as distinctive in their own ways as Easy Rider but nearly unimaginable without it. The movie's dour, inquisitive spirit found its way into other films as well, often embodied by Jack Nicholson, whose characters in films like Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail sometimes appear to be responding to lessons learned at a Louisiana campsite.

Following their on-screen path 40 years later, I didn't find what Wyatt and Billy were looking for, either. But as I drove the long highways they traveled, I gained a greater respect for the film's point of view than I'd had before. Listening to the news of the day on the radio as I drifted from exit to exit, it wasn't hard to imagine what it was like to feel lost and alone in a country of overwhelming beauty and irreconcilable divisions. Yet I took some comfort from the movie as well. The doom Easy Rider predicted never quite arrived. Though some of the stops along the way have changed, the roads Billy and Wyatt traveled are still out there—waiting for anyone who chooses to see where they will take them, even if that place doesn't end up looking like home.

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In the Nov. 19 "Moneybox," Daniel Gross misspelled the name of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. He also misspelled the name of the city of Chongqing.

In the Nov. 17 "Prescriptions," Timothy Noah misspelled the name of Len Nichols' co-author on the paper that first proposed a "level playing field" version of the public option. It's John M. Bertko, not Berko.

In a Nov. 17 update to a Nov. 16 "Prescriptions," Timothy Noah stated that Richard S. Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made an estimate on the Medicare drug benefit's 10-year cost that turned out to be too low. The estimate turned out to be (according to current projections) too high by 37 percent.

In a Nov. 16 "Technology" article, a quote about the sales numbers for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 incorrectly used the word environment rather than entertainment. This error was introduced at the editing stage.

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 Twilight Saga: New Moon

Sometimes a critic's aesthetic judgment is impossible to extricate from what you might call her cinematic libido. There are movies that bring us a pleasure that's neither definable nor defensible. These used to be called "guilty pleasures," but that phrase seems too judgmental, too pre-Vatican II, for our postmodern era of omnivorous cultural consumption. The distinction between high and low culture, between what we're allowed to enjoy publicly and what we must sneak off to savor in private, has effaced itself to the degree that "guilty pleasures" needs to be replaced by a more morally neutral term. For our purposes here, I'll go with a term that a friend and I coined in college and that I still deploy on occasion: movies we couldn't intellectually defend but still unapologetically loved we called "juicebombs."

All that to say that The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Summit Entertainment), like its 2008 predecessor Twilight, is a classic juicebomb. Mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important, the movie nonetheless twangs at some resonant affective chord. This viewer, at least, was catapulted back to that moment of adolescence when being mopey, draggy, and absurdly self-important felt like a passionate act of liberation. The Twilight movies are schlock, but they're elegantly appointed, luxuriously enjoyable schlock, and the world they take place in—the densely forested, perpetually overcast, vampire-and-werewolf-ridden town of Forks, Wash.—feels like a real, if fantastical, place. It's as specific and evocative a location as the fictional Washington town of Twin Peaks. It's this sense of place that elevates the Twilight films above the best-selling books by Stephenie Meyer, made up of impenetrable blocks of descriptive yet curiously featureless prose.

When we last left Forks, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), the sulky new girl in town, was attending the school dance with her true love, the forever-teenage vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). Edward, a member of an abstinent vampire clan that has forsworn human blood, is the dream boyfriend, given to slavish declarations of devotion ("Bella, you give me enough just by breathing") yet ever-unattainable because of his insatiable erotic appetite—if he so much as kisses Bella, he may not be able to stop himself from ripping her throat out and draining her blood. Like a '50s coed bargaining for her boyfriend's fraternity pin, Bella is constantly pressuring Ed to make her not his prey but his co-predator. If he bites her in some other, unspecified fashion, she will be turned into a vampire as well, and the two can live together in undead bliss for all eternity.

As the second installment begins, Edward and his whole pale, glittering, amber-contact-lensed family are about to leave Forks for good. Ed spouts some nonsense about not loving Bella anymore, but we know from his pained face that he's deserting her for her own safety. Bella spends three months numb with grief (a state that's effectively evoked by a long 360-degree shot of her staring out a window as the names of the months flash up on-screen). But on discovering that a rush of adrenaline allows her to sense Edward's presence briefly, Bella starts seeking out dangerous situations. Her friend Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), a foxy-fine Quileute Indian who's also, as it turns out, a newly initiated werewolf, helps her to salvage and restore some old motorcycles, which Bella takes out for high-speed spins. (The Twilight franchise may promote sexual abstinence, but its stance on helmet safety is downright promiscuous.) Meanwhile, an ancient enmity between vampires and werewolves is heating up in the forests outside of town.

The feminist in me wishes that Bella spent more time actually working on those motorcycles rather than hanging over Jacob's shoulder as he wields his manly, er, wrench. The feminist in me wishes a lot of things. But say what you will about the Twilight films; they take female desire as seriously as a grad student from the early '90s. The whole overcooked vampire vs. werewolf mythology (which also involves packs of shirtless wolf-boys and a sort of vampire Pope, played with camp glee by Michael Sheen) is, in essence, an excuse to place the viewer in Bella's Timberland boots: torn between two flesh-eating monsters, feelin' like a fool. Haters may construe Bella as a passive victim eager to be served up as vampire meat, but she's the subject of this love story, not its object; she's the lover while Edward and Jacob are her diametrically opposed beloveds, one hot-blooded (Jacob runs a constant body temperature of 108 degrees), the other pale and cold as stone.

Matty Robinson, a co-host of the excellent movie podcast Filmspotting, likes to say of an underrated performance, "I don't want to see his Hamlet, but [X] is not bad in this role." You don't want to see Kristen Stewart's Hamlet—and based on a few lines Ed reads aloud in an English-class scene, you really don't want to see Robert Pattinson's Romeo—but both actors are ideally suited to their roles as pining sweethearts separated only by the fact that one lacks an eternal soul. Based on her mumbly, visibly uncomfortable appearances on the talk-show circuit, Stewart really is a bit of a Bella, rough-edged and glum. And Pattinson—well, he's best when he's not talking, but, luckily, New Moon's Bella-centric plot structure doesn't often require him to. (Of course, the knowledge that they may or may not be dating in real life—not since the days of Walter Winchell has a Hollywood romance been more carefully stage-managed—adds to the penumbra of mystery that surrounds the couple.)

As a last-ditch defense for my fondness for New Moon, I'll observe that unlike its predecessor, the sequel (directed not by Catherine Hardwicke this time but by Chris Weitz, co-director of About A Boy and American Pie) is often intentionally funny: the scene in which Bella insists on taking not one but two prospective suitors to an action movie called Face Punch or the moment when a paper cut at a birthday party leads to a near-mauling by her vampire pals. But a true juicebomb, by definition, requires no defense. As the screen went black after Edward's supremely cheesy last line, my first thought was, "Give me a break." The second was, "How long till Eclipse comes out?"

Slate V: The critics on New Moon and other new releases

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The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended Monday that women without risk factors for breast cancer wait until their 50s before going in for regular mammograms. That's because early screening yields almost 50 times as many false positives as true cancers, triggering unnecessary biopsies and anxiety, and early detection doesn't do much good in 85 percent of cases anyway. The Task Force noted that the radiation exposure associated with mammography was a minor factor in their recommendation; on Wednesday, Slate's Darshak Sanghavi wrote, "It's possible the radiation from those mammograms may end up causing more cancers than they prevent." How much radiation is in a mammogram?

An average of 70 millirems—roughly the dose you'd receive from your normal, everyday environment over a period of two and a half months. Most of our lifetime exposure to radiation comes from radon produced by decaying uranium in soil and rocks. Enough of this gas gets trapped in your house to deliver about 200 millirems per year. Food, which incorporates uranium from the soil, adds to this total, as do air travel, smoking, and radioactive atoms inside your body. But that's no reason to worry: Studies have shown no increased risk of cancer among people experiencing as many as 1,000 millirems per year of background radiation. (As a general rule, though, you're better off with less exposure.)

The dosage figures for environmental radiation refer to effects on the whole body, but radiation delivered to specific body parts can be more or less destructive. Tissues that generate new cells more rapidly, like the thyroid or bone marrow, are particularly vulnerable. Breast tissue is somewhat unusual, since the rate of cell turnover varies with the amount of estrogen. As a result, the breasts are much less susceptible to radiation among post-menopausal women. (That's one reason why it might be a good idea for women to wait a few more years before starting with the routine exams.)

Still, the dosage number cited above—70 millirems per mammogram—refers to a total "effective dose" that's been adjusted to account for the relative vulnerability of breast tissue averaged over a woman's lifespan. (Men are not included in the calculation.) In terms of these adjusted rates, the mammogram is pretty mild compared with other medical tests. A spine X-ray delivers twice as much radiation, a common kidney procedure quadruple. If you needed a CT scan of your abdomen, you'd get 14 times more. (Of course, you may not be getting these procedures every year.)

So what are the chances that a few mammograms in your 40s will cause breast cancer? No one is really sure, because it's difficult to construct a study that separates the mammograms that caused cancer from the mammograms that merely detected it. But the consensus is that mammography alone is very unlikely to cause breast cancer. The only thing researchers can say with any confidence is that early and regular mammography increases the risk of disease for those women who have had prior exposure to high doses of radiation—either through cancer treatment, frequent chest X-rays to monitor tuberculosis, or employment in the atomic weapons industry.

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

Explainer thanks Penny Butler and Shawn Farley of the American College of Radiology.

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Twilight

Robert Pattison and Kristen Stewart return to the big screen in Twilight: New Moon this Friday. The first installment shied away from vampire myths and offered a modern take on the subject. Last year, Christopher Beam pointed out that Twilight and other recent movies were quick to discredit old vampire legends. The original article is reprinted below.

There's a scene midway through Twilight, the new 'tween vampire flick, in which the heroine, Bella, arrives at the vampire Edward's house—a bright, spare, Modernist home that seems stocked with Calphalon pans and furniture from Design Within Reach. She looks around wonderingly. "What did you expect?" he says. "Coffins and dungeons and moats?" It's a familiar scene to anyone who knows vampire movies: the part where the vampire (or vampire expert) turns myth-buster and explains what vampires are really like.

A perfect example is this exchange from HBO's True Blood. "I thought you were supposed to be invisible in a mirror," marvels Anna Paquin's Sookie, reclining in a bathtub. Sorry, says her vampiric love interest, Bill. "What about Holy water?" she asks. "It's just water." "Crucifixes?" "Geometry." "Garlic?" "It's irritating, but that's pretty much it." Irritating, indeed.

Vampire myth-busters are a cocky lot. Take this scene from Blade, when vampire hunter Wesley Snipes explains "vampire anatomy 101" to his new protégée. "Crosses and holy water don't do dick, so forget what you've seen in the movies," he says. "You use a stake, silver, or sunlight. You know how to use one of these?" He shows her a gun. "Silver hollow point filled with garlic. Aim for head or the heart. Anything else is your ass."

Or consider this exchange from the Twilight books: "How can you come out during the daytime?" asks Bella. "Myth," says Edward, her fanged paramour. "Burned by the sun?" "Myth." "Sleeping in coffins?" "Myth." Being smug jerks? True!

The list goes on. In Interview With the Vampire, the bloodsucker Louis corrects his interviewer on the rumor about vampires being afraid of crosses. "That is, how would you say today … bullshit?" (Same goes for stakes through the heart.) In I Am Legend, the vampire book on which the Will Smith movie was based, the narrator dismisses Dracula as "a hodgepodge of superstitions and soap-opera clichés." For example, vampires are vulnerable to garlic and sunlight, but the mirror stuff is bunk. In the Last Vampire book series by Christopher Pike, sunlight doesn't kill the undead protagonist—it just makes her age at a normal rate.

What's with all the rule-rewriting? And why are vampires always crowing about it?

Vampire mythology has never been set in stone—nor has any mythology, for that matter. The folklore that eventually became modern vampire fiction varied even more wildly in past centuries than in current-day stories. Ancient Greek mythology features women who seduce men and drink their blood; in southern Africa, there is the impundulu, a giant blood-sucking bird that controls the weather; Latin American folklore has the fanged chupacabra, a scaled reptile-kangaroo monster that drains the blood from goats. It wasn't until the 19^th century, with the publication of stories like Polidori's The Vampyre, Le Fanu's Carmilla, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, that vampire became synonymous with "fanged, Euro, coffin-dwelling Goth." But even in these books, the attributes vary—Polidori's Lord Ruthven can go out during the daytime, but sunlight weakens Count Dracula.

The modern reworkings of the genre are traceable to a few different factors. For one thing, rewriting the rules is just good storytelling. Upending conventions lets you surprise the audience. You thought garlic was going to ward off the boss vampire? Sorry. You planned to kill him with that little piece of sharpened wood? Good luck. These days, you'll see vampires slapping crosses out of the way more often than shrinking in fear. Variations on the vampire rules also make for some clever plot twists. For example (spoiler alert!), in 30 Days of Night, Josh Hartnett notices that once bitten, victims become vampires right away—but they don't become evil vampires for a few hours. He therefore injects vampire blood into his veins so he can fight them off and save his wife. True Blood also has a smart twist on the myth-busting trope: The vampires started the myths themselves. "If the humans thought they couldn't see us in a mirror," explains vampire Bill, "it was another way for us to prove we weren't vampires." Plus, tweaking the rules is part of the appeal of genre fiction—authors have a template to play with, so every minor variation they make becomes loaded with meaning.

These expository scenes are also common because vampires are so darn chatty. All monster myths vary, after all. Sometimes zombies are fast, sometimes they're slow, and it always seems to take a different tactic to kill them. But zombies can't talk, so they can't haughtily explain to you why they're not like all the other zombies. They just chomp your face. Vampires, on the other hand, are the biggest self-promoters around: They can't stop talking about themselves.

Another factor is changing censorship rules. Believe it or not, vampires were not always sexy (although sexuality was part of the mix as early as Carmilla). The original Dracula film came out in 1931, a year after the Hays Code was put in place. So they shot two versions—one chaste English version for American audiences and one Spanish-language version for distribution in Mexico. The women in the foreign version wear lower-cut dresses. Hot vampires really broke out in the 1950s in the British Hammer horror films and finally made it to the United States once the Hays Code was dropped in the late 1960s, clearing the way for Andy Warhol's take on vampire sex.

Technology also plays a role in vampire transformations. Vampire films got gorier once color film made it clear they were drinking blood, not oil. Shoddy makeup on high-quality film stock sometimes made fangs unconvincing. One director, Mario Bava, decided to scrap them entirely—the vampires in the 1960 flick Black Sunday are, like the Hays Code at that time, toothless. Technology within the films plays a role, too. In recent vampire stories, science is the new magic. In I Am Legend, it's the "vampiris germ" that causes vampirism. ("You see, the bacillus is a facultative saprophyte," we're told, which is supposed to explain why a stake causes a vampire to dissolve into dust.) In Underworld, it's a genetic mutation. And as technology evolves, so do vampire-slaying methods. Blade's garlic-filled bullets are nothing compared with the bullets from Underworld that are filled with—kid you not—daylight.

Other variations are introduced because, well, they're totally sweet. The vampires in 30 Days of Night are more feral than human, with their own creepy language and two rows of shark teeth. Needless to say, they don't leave two dainty dimples in the neck. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meanwhile, features an elaborate universe of humans, vampires, demons, werewolves, slayers, and "watchers." (Sometimes, they sing.) Underworld creates a deep mythology about a war between werewolves and vampires. In Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos, the vampire isn't human at all—it's a tiny mechanical beetle.

But the biggest reason for all the myth-busting has to do with creating a believable world. It may seem odd to explode the myth about crosses in one scene while positing that vampire blood is a sex drug in the next—neither myth is believable, taken alone. But stomping on old myths heightens the realism. It's a way of acknowledging the silliness of most vampire stories while distancing yours from the rest. We know vampire tales are childish, it says. This one is not. That's why you'll always have a character saying he doesn't believe in vampires—the filmmakers know that's what you're thinking, too. The myth-busting scene is therefore a necessary ritual. By rewriting the rules every time, you ask viewers to invest themselves in this story, not in the last vampire movie they saw.

All genres evolve, and in this respect vampire films are nothing special. But vampires seem to relish deviating from their conventions more than most. At the very least, it keeps the genre fresh for Lesbian Kung-Fu Robot Vampire Killers From Space.

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Yet another vampire film opens this Friday: Twilight: New Moon, the second installment of the popular series. Is New Moon simply part of a recent vampire boom, along with True Blood and countless others movies, TV shows, and books? Not quite, say Slate's Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson. In September, the pair discovered that vampires are almost never not in vogue. The original article is reprinted below.

You could be forgiven for thinking we're in the midst of an unprecedented madness for vampires. "True Blood Season Premiere Looking to Capitalize Off of Vampire Craze," headlined the Associated Press in June. "CW joins vampire trend with 'Diaries'," announced the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. The Hartford Courant asks, "Why Vampires Now?"

A better question might be, why vampires ever? Looking back, it's hard to think of a period when we weren't in the middle of a vampire craze. In the late 1970s, Anne Rice started raking in the money with Interview With the Vampire, and movies like Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre and the comedy Love at First Bite were critical hits. Then came The Lost Boys, Near Dark, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Innocent Blood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), four more Anne Rice books, and Interview With the Vampire (the movie)—which could all be lumped into a rage for vampires that lasted clear through from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Vampires were back again in the mid-1990s, with Buffy (the TV show), the Blade movies, Southern Vampire Mysteries (the book series), and From Dusk Till Dawn. And now we've arrived at the highly touted mid- to late-2000s vogue of Underworld, Twilight (books and movies), True Blood (based on Southern Vampire Mysteries), and The Vampire Diaries.

So perhaps instead of talking about vampire crazes, we should really be talking about vampire droughts. The brief, anomalous periods when few or perhaps even no vampire movies, books, or TV shows are produced at all. The Garlic Years.

To figure out whether there really have been any vampire-free periods, we dug through online compendiums, from Wikipedia to obsessive fan sites like the Vampire Library, and compiled a list of the most important vampire-related books, films, and TV shows of the last half-century. In total, we included 169 movies, 106 books, and 62 seasons' worth of TV.

It turns out there were indeed a few periods—four, to be precise—where the vampire genre seemed to hit a mini-recession. Here's a rundown of each dry spell and the vampire works that brought the genre back from the dead.

The Garlic Years, 1960-65: Vampires seemed to be enjoying a lot of momentum going into the '60s, after Christopher Lee's classic 1958 portrayal in Horror of Dracula. But that momentum quickly died. The Count wouldn't even make an appearance in the 1960 follow-up Brides of Dracula. There were no notable vampire movies for the next three years—other than the Italian film Black Sabbath, a trio of shorts that included one vampire storyline. Even the exhaustive compendiums of vampire literature list only a handful of obscure books and stories from this period.

… and the resurrection: Lee returned to the cape and fangs for the 1966 sequel Dracula: Prince of Darkness, in which the undead aristocrat is resurrected by his loyal servant Klove. That same year, ABC debuted the spooky soap opera Dark Shadows and quickly brought in a vampire character named Barnabas Collins to boost ratings. After Prince of Darkness, vampires started invading all sorts of genres, from blaxploitation—1972's Blacula—to the TV crime drama Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a short-lived X-Files prototype about a newspaper reporter who investigates supernatural cases. The highlight of this era was inarguably the debut of Count von Count on Sesame Street in 1972.

The Garlic Years, 1975-76: By the middle of the decade, the fad had run out of scream. There were no notable movies in either 1975 or 1976, and Kolchak was canceled after one season when even the lead actor requested a merciful death for the show.

… and the resurrection: Stephen King and Anne Rice to the rescue. The up-and-coming King published Salem's Lot in 1975, and Rice followed with Interview With the Vampire the next year. While these books were published during the Garlic Years, the craze they set off would not pick up until 1977, with the releases of Count Dracula, Rabid, and Martin. Meanwhile, the vampire mega-series became an established form: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro published the first of almost two dozen Saint-Germain novels in 1978. King soon moved on to other subjects, but Rice would stick with vampires for 30 years before switching to Jesus in 2005.

The Garlic Years, 1980-84: Any period that saw the conception, production, and release of a film called Gayracula ("He'll suck you dry!") holds promise. Unfortunately, that was one of only three major vampire films in the early 1980s—the other two being The Monster Club and The Hunger—amid a handful of forgettable novels. Apparently the '80s sucked less than reported.

… and the resurrection: Two works jolted the vampire world out of its Reagan-era funk: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat in 1985 and Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys in 1987. The former bridged the 18-year gap between the book and movie versions of Interview With the Vampire, while Schumacher's film helped establish the teen-vamp genre that would make Buffy possible. (Without Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, there is no Sarah Michelle Geller.)

The Garlic Year, 1997: In any other decade, this year would have been solid for vamps. But set against the fangtastic '90s, it looks like a slump. Only one vampire movie was released in 1997 (Vampire Journals, no relation to The Vampire Diaries) and only one book was published (Dracula the Undead). Both of these occupy special places on nobody's shelf. The exception to the rule, of course: TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted that March. So even this Garlic Year contained the seed of many bountiful harvests to come.

… and the resurrection: Buffy kicked off the longest vampire surge yet, opening the door to Blade, the Underworld films, John Carpenter's Vampires, Van Helsing, and the multimedia blockbuster Twilight series. By any measure, 2006 was the vampirest year of all time.

So where does this leave us? Let's just say that now may not be the time to bankroll that production of Gayracula 2: Return of the Manpire. If history is any guide, these plush times of vampire mania will soon end with a run of atrocious imitations, followed by a few years of peace and quiet. Don't despair if it happens again. They'll be back.

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Will Twilight characters Edward and Bella finally consummate their love in New Moon, out this Friday? Almost certainly not. In July, Grady Hendrix complained that New Age vampire films, like Twilight, lack blood sucking and sex. The original article is reprinted below.

Last week at Comic-Con, the big story wasn't comic books—it was vampires. Some 2,000 young women set up a tent city outside the San Diego Convention Center on Tuesday, sleeping rough so that they could attend the Thursday panel on New Moon, the upcoming sequel to vampire blockbuster Twilight.

It's just another sign of the massive popularity of vampires. Yet, like many people who acquire mega-celebrity, the vampire has developed an eating disorder. Read the books. Watch the movies. You'll see vampires who manage nightclubs, build computer databases, work as private investigators, go to prep school, lobby Congress, chat with humans, live near humans, have sex with humans, and pine over humans, but the one thing you won't see them do is suck the blood of humans.

No, bloodsucking is so yesterday. It's so 1994. It's so Anne Rice. Today's vampire is a good listener. He cares about our love lives and our problems, which is strange because we're supposed to be his food. Humans just assume that we are the center of the universe and so, faced with a literary creation that should, by all rights, just conk us over the head and suck us down like Slurpees, we've decided that we're too fascinating to be eaten. And so the modern vampire stalks, seduces, sleeps with, and cries over us. They don't eat us.

The original Dracula in Dracula loved to drink blood. He has "white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth." He forces Mina Harker to his bosom, where "[h]er white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down [his] bare chest," and he compels her to drink his blood, like a "child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk. ..." This bodily fluid fetishism was par for the course for the next 79 years, until Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire, when Ms. Rice started to tweak up the Gothness. In her books, vampires were better known for being immortal than for sucking blood, which makes their fascination with humans even more mysterious: After living among us for hundreds of years, haven't they heard all of our jokes by now?

At least Anne Rice's vampires were still primarily bloodsuckers. The first sign that something was awry came with the introduction of Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A prime example of the brooding, crying-on-the-inside, leather-jacketed emo boy of the '90s (see also: Dylan McKay, Beverly Hills, 90210; James Hurley, Twin Peaks), Angel was a vampire who had a soul. He fell in love with Buffy, teared up a lot, and believed in random acts of kindness. Angel, in short, sucked. Or, rather, he didn't suck, which was the problem. When he did suck, he took limited amounts of blood from consenting human women, or sucked blood against his will, or sucked rat blood.

Rat blood.

Think about it. Faced with the impact of his diet on humans, Angel accepts a yucky, cruelty-free substitute, then endlessly lectures other vampires about their moral failings because they don't do the same. He's not a vampire—he's a vegan.

But the ladies loved him, and he launched a sensitive-vampire industry. These days, you have Laurel K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels (from which we derive True Blood), Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy books, and Leslie Esdaile Banks' Vampire Huntress Legends series featuring Damali Richards, a spoken-word artist who fights vampires, a detail which guarantees that I'm rooting for the vampires. But most damaging of all are Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books.

At least Angel, Anita Blake's vampires, Sookie Stackhouse, and most of the rest of them have a lot of sex. But Edward Cullen, immortal star of the Twilight books, does not have sex. Edward tells Bella, his human paramour, that they need to wait until they're married before doing the deed. In the meantime, he's fascinated by her, beguiled by her, he can't stay away from her—but he can't touch her. Instead, he lies next to her in bed and moons over her as she sleeps. Leaving aside the fact that he's a 90-year-old man, this is what stalkers do, not boyfriends.

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

The bigger problem here is that we're breeding sexually incompatible human beings, and vampires are to blame. I can see a time coming when the birth rate is going to precipitously decline. And what that means is that vampires are going to run out of food. But if Charlaine Harris, Laurel K. Hamilton, Stephenie Meyer, and all the others are right about the souls of their emo, Goth, velvet-wearing, crybaby vampire spawn, then maybe some kind of mass, Kurt Cobain-inspired, "You'll miss me when I'm gone," specieswide suicide is what vampires have been after all along.

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It's difficult to overstate the success of Microsoft Office. Calling it one of the best-selling tech products of all time is a bit like calling Michael Jackson a very popular musician—it's certainly accurate, but it woefully misses the mark. According to Microsoft, more than 500 million people around the world use the Fantastic Four of productivity apps—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Yet no one simply uses Office; for many, these programs are an essential daily tool kit, the ever-present background hum of the white-collar grind.

There is no mystery to Office's success. Sure, Microsoft may have strong-armed its productivity suite to ubiquity, but unlike Windows, Office has long been unquestionably the best program in its class. Every Office app satisfies two important demands for Microsoft's large and diverse customer base: It's simple for novices to grasp but offers enough deep features for people to develop undying bonds of affection and expertise. The more you use Office, the better you get at it—and the less likely you are to use anything else.

Sometime next year, Microsoft will put out Office 2010. The suite has been available as an invite-only preview for several months, and this week the company launched it as a public beta—you can download the entire program for free here. A Microsoft rep recently gave me a walkthrough of the new version, and I was impressed.

Office 2010 offers lots of new features and several user-interface improvements over previous versions. One nice addition allows you to preview how text or images you're copying will look before you paste them. (Watch this video for a better idea of how this works.) Microsoft has also expanded the "ribbon" interface first seen in Office 2007—the tab bar across the top of the screen that replaces the cumbersome drop-down menu commands found in old versions of Office. The ribbon takes a bit of time to learn, but once you get the hang of it, it speeds up a lot of what you do in Office. Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft has built several collaborative features into the new Office. Co-workers can now simultaneously edit Word and Excel documents—something that many people now turn to Google Docs to do.

Still, as I tested out the new version, I couldn't help wonder about Office's future. In its last couple of earnings reports, Microsoft has reported rare declines in revenue from sales of Office. The company blames the sluggishness on weakness in the economy—a reasonable explanation, though one that perhaps masks a larger malaise. For one thing, Office's success has bred a kind of inertia. Once you've grown used to a certain version of Word—and can do pretty much everything you need to do with it—why would you ever need the next version? I toiled away in Office 2003 until the summer of 2009. I recently switched to Office 2007, which I like very much—but I'd be lying if I said it substantially changed how I worked or that I'd be greatly hassled if I were forced to go back to 2003.

Office also faces increasing competition from cheap online alternatives like Gmail and Google Docs. To be sure, Office users aren't leaving in droves for cloud apps, but these programs do pose a long-term threat to Office's hegemony. As Web rivals get better at mimicking Office's basic functions, they will likely eat into Microsoft's share of entry-level users. There might be 500 million Office users around the world, but there are a 1 billion Windows PCs. In other words, there's still an untapped market for productivity apps—and Office's future may lie in its ability to win over those folks before they flock to the Web.

One way that Microsoft hopes to attract the uninitiated is with a new free version, Office Starter Edition. This stripped-down Office freebie—no "track changes" mode in Word; no pivot tables in Excel—replaces Microsoft Works, the productivity suite that the company long marketed as a kind of gateway into Office. Starter Edition won't be sold in stores; it will only ship on new computers and will be supported entirely by a small ad that's displayed on the side of the screen. The ads don't look very annoying, though it is worth noting that Google Docs carries no advertising. Office Starter Edition, on the other hand, looks and feels pretty much like Office—meaning it's very easy to learn, and it's faster, more stable, and has a better user interface than Google Docs.

But that's not all: Microsoft is also building a collection of very good Web versions of each of the Office programs that will compete directly with Google Docs and the like. The Web apps will appeal to two audiences. First, just like Google Docs, they function as limited-featured productivity programs for folks who don't want to pay for full software. But if you do own Office, the Web apps extend your capabilities. You can create a Word doc on your full version of Office, then open, edit, and print that document anywhere else in the world—even on computers that don't have Office. Google Docs can be used this way too, but Docs sometimes has trouble displaying very complex Office documents; the Office Web apps hold out the promise of displaying Office documents exactly as you'd intended them to look.

So the next version of Office looks to be an improvement on the 2007 edition—and with the Starter Edition and great new Web apps, it could even succeed in staving off competition from free online rivals. That sounds great for Microsoft, except for one thing: In trying to win the war against free apps, Microsoft will have had to emulate them. You used to have to pay several hundred dollars for a copy of Office. Now, you don't really have to. Online and in new computers, Microsoft will give away a slate of productivity apps that, for most people, will be good enough. And thus, the question remains: Does anyone really need to buy a new version of Office anymore?

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Before she went rogue, Sarah Palin got lost. She was stalking "majestic dall sheep with their thick curled horns," she writes in her new book, in Mount McKinley National Park. "I was only about eight years old, and for a couple of anxious hours of climbing hillsides and calling my name, no one could find me on the crags and snowpack." Her father played it cool, "but inside, he was pretty frantic." She was found, at last, asleep on a rocky slope in a white T-shirt that made her look like one of the sheep.

Even though I presently have Palin frustration seeping out of my pores, this story struck a sympathetic chord. A few months ago, my 6-year-old, Simon, got lost. He was unfindable for 45 minutes, somewhere in woods on the shoreline, within reach of open water, and very much out of my reach and sight.

I did not think, Oh good, he is exploring the world, may he go forth and frolic, the way I would have no doubt counseled some other mother to do—at least hearing the story after the fact. I felt only panic. And when we found him, I was seized by the most powerful surge of mother-bear instinct I've ever experienced and vowed silently to never let him go more than 10 feet away from me in the outdoors again.

This story doesn't fit well with my theory of parenthood, the one in which children have the freedom to wander and encounter adversity, where parents understand that human beings need hardship to learn, and a central problem of middle-class mothering is that we're so terrified of appearing neglectful that we put our children on leashes, both literally and virtually. What I take from the afternoon of Simon's disappearance is a dose of humility. Theory never quite matches up with practice the way we want it to, does it? Especially when it comes to parenting. Also, dogma begs for a corrective. Some mothers don't give their children enough free rein and I don't want to be one of them. But what about giving too much?

Here's what happened: My husband and two kids and I were visiting the house of a friend and colleague on the shore in Connecticut. In a loose group of eight (three parents, two hosts, three kids), we went for a walk through a stand of pine and birch, surely no more than a square mile. Simon and another 6-year-old boy ran ahead down the path and picked a tree to hide behind. They jumped out and yelled "boo" and chortled at their own cleverness. Repeat twice. Then I watched them sprint off out of sight. I was at the front of the pack of adults, and I turned a corner and saw that the path forked ahead of me. I wasn't sure which way the boys had gone. But I figured the left-hand fork couldn't lead them far astray because it looked like a long dirt driveway.

I went to the right. Everyone else followed me. After maybe 10 minutes, I started looking for Simon and his friend instead of waiting for them to pop out from behind another tree. No sign. I started calling. No response. I admitted to the friend I was walking with that I didn't know where the kids were. This sounds like a natural step, but in the moment, I hesitated to take it. I didn't want to break the lovely peace of the afternoon. I didn't want to worry our hosts.

But eventually, it couldn't be helped: We called for the boys, and they didn't answer, so we had to start looking for them. At first we made small dry jokes about how they would be around the bend. They weren't. We split up and scattered, calling the boys' names. I walked down the path to the left, which was indeed a driveway, and found a family innocently sitting down at a picnic table. They looked sinister to me: Could they be hiding two boys?

I reminded myself how very rare child kidnapping is. In his new book, Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon mourns the loss of what he calls The Wilderness of Childhood and all the exploration that took place there "entirely free of adult supervision." He thinks we've closed off the wilderness because we fear the wolves, who to us take the form of child kidnappers. And yet

This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of stranger abductions in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known.

Right. Except that now my kid was lost in the woods. I started to run. Sweat trickled down my sides and my throat constricted as I called Simon's name. At one point I came out onto a small spit of beach. Simon wouldn't have gone into the water by himself, would he? One of our hosts was wading through a waterlogged spot, her sneakers soaked, for a better lookout. I felt bad that she was getting wet and immensely grateful that she was moving purposefully. She said something reassuring. I couldn't answer.

I turned around and ran back down the path, toward where I thought my husband Paul had gone. I was still calling Simon's name, but I hated the sound of my own voice, shrill and unhinged. Then Paul answered, from back in the woods off the path: He'd found them. He emerged with Simon in his arms, crying, and the other boy more calmly in tow. In her book, Palin says that her only "heartache" about getting lost was her disappointment that a Hershey's bar she had with her melted while she slept. Simon, though, kept saying tearfully, "I couldn't see you anywhere." I grabbed him and could barely restrain myself from saying I would never never be out of sight again.

I don't mean to suggest that this was a uniformly terrible experience. A few months later, Simon remembers getting lost with some grimness, but I wouldn't say he's scarred—more embarrassed, probably. He's still apt to take off in the supermarket, say, or across an open park. And yes, that's probably a good thing. Chabon writes that "Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity." But now, he warns, "the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations."

Chabon worries about the effect of this change on the development of children's imaginations. I see that. And if we want to bring back the wilderness of childhood, children will get lost there. So maybe the lesson is that once they are found again, you have to let go of the vestiges of panic and repeat the mantra that nice-looking picnickers almost never kidnap children and that 6-year-olds generally have the sense not to go into the ocean alone. But I can't forget the gap between my notions of parenting and losing Simon for just part of an afternoon. Chabon's wild childhood (he roamed in a two-acre strip of woods in Maryland) turned out fine. Maybe after Simon's does, too, I'll recover my certainty that a little peril has benefits.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

The health care reform bill that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will bring to the floor (text, CBO score) is mostly better than the Senate finance bill on which it is largely based. But it is mostly worse than the counterpart reform bill (text, CBO score) already passed by the House.

It's worse mainly because it's stingier. The Senate bill would save $130 billion over 10 years (a mysterious $1 billion more than the figure leaked last night by the Democratic leadership). That's $21 billion more than the House bill, which would save $109 billion. For about $2 billion a year, then, we could have a significantly better bill. That's less than what the Pentagon spends in two days. Still, we probably aren't going to get it. The numbers most people pay attention to are the bill's cost before taking into account offsetting savings (mainly through Medicare cuts) and taxes. The House bill would "cost" a little more than $1 trillion, whereas the Senate bill would "cost" a mere $848 billion. That puts Reid below a limit of $900 billion set by President Obama in a Sept. 9 speech to Congress. The limit, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has shown, was completely arbitrary—indeed, Obama's precise words were "around $900 billion"—but it became holy writ.

The Senate bill does not differ significantly from the House bill in the number of people to whom it would extend health insurance. The House bill would cover 36 million of the roughly 45 million uninsured. The Senate bill would cover 31 million. But the Senate would spend about $150 billion less in subsidies to help uninsured lower-income people purchase health insurance through the newly established health exchanges. To ease the added burden this would impose on the uninsured, who under both the House and Senate bills would be required to purchase health insurance, the Senate bill includes a substantially reduced penalty for failing to comply (up to $750, versus up to 2.5 percent of total income under the House bill). Unfortunately, as Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic explains, the subsidies have also been shifted somewhat relative to the House bill, falling in the Senate bill more heavily on poorer folks in order to ease the burden on the politically more powerful middle class.

Like the House bill, the Senate bill contains a public option. But the Senate bill allows individual states to enact laws opting out of it. Neither the House bill nor the Senate bill allows the public option to tie its doctor and hospital fees to Medicare rates. As with the House bill, CBO concluded that this prohibition would cause public-option premiums to be a little higher than premiums for private insurance plans available through the newly created exchanges. That's a serious problem. Len Nichols, the economist who dreamed up this "level playing field" variation on the public option, says CBO's wrong—the public option won't charge higher premiums because it will match its private competitors in various cost-control methods, including those meant to limit the proportion of sick people who buy in (a practice that will be greatly reduced, but not wholly eliminated, under the bill). I don't find that thought entirely cheering.

In some ways, the Senate bill is better than its House counterpart. It's at least theoretically tougher in forcing Congress to cut Medicare spending, and its 40 percent tax on so-called "Cadillac" family health insurance plans valued in excess of $23,000 would exert downward pressure on private insurance costs. Also, although it contains a counterpart to the House's ban on federal spending for abortions, the ban is far less restrictive and therefore (unlike the House bill) would permit—indeed, require—that at least one policy offered through the exchanges cover abortion.

Whether Reid can sell this to the U.S. Conference of Bishops, which exercised considerable muscle in the House (Speaker Nancy Pelosi even placed a call to Rome!), is another story.

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

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Sometime in the next few months, a small group of experienced criminal-defense lawyers will be assigned to what is likely to be the case of a lifetime: the defense of admitted 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or, to those enamored of sinister acronyms, KSM. Their work will not be easy, obviously. No jury on this continent is going to acquit their client, the government is certain to insist on the death penalty, and KSM will almost certainly try to put the government on trial. So what's a team of hardworking criminal defense attorneys to do?

Everything they can, which, in this case, will mean a lot of futile maneuvering that will generate a tragic flood of bad law, rendering the defense team's valiant service not merely unsuccessful but actually hostile to the interests of all their other clients.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Waleed bin Attash

The defense in KSM's case has two major weapons: persuasive evidence of torture that should result in the suppression of a great deal of evidence and use of the discovery process to uncover facts that embarrass or discomfit the government. These tactics work—if the government will come to the table to work out a deal. Take, for example, the prosecution of the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, currently serving the eighth year of his 20-year sentence. Lindh was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and charged in the eastern district of Virginia in 2002 with conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization. At the center of his case was a confession he made to interrogators from the FBI and U.S. Marines. Lindh's defense team turned up evidence to support the claim that Lindh was duct-taped to a stretcher, placed in a metal shipping container, and, with a bullet still inside him, interrogated without a lawyer, despite a warning from a Justice Department ethics adviser that such a move was unethical. The defense lawyers obtained graphic photos of an emaciated Lindh as well as confidential and internal Justice Department e-mails that seriously undermined Attorney General John Ashcroft's public statements about the legitimacy of the interrogation. All of which led the government to make an offer: Instead of the three life sentences he was facing, Mr. Lindh could have 20 years, as long as he abided by a gag order and dropped all claims of torture and mistreatment against the government.

This time, however, the government isn't going to make an offer to KSM, and even if prosecutors did, it is hard to imagine that a zealot like him would prefer to plead guilty than take advantage of the forum a trial affords. Thus the defense's tools won't work. Which brings us to the making of bad law.

Good criminal defense attorneys are seldom deterred by futility, so it's reasonable to expect that KSM's lawyers will make all the arguments there are to make: They'll allege a violation of KSM's right to a speedy trial, claiming that the years he spent in CIA detention and Gitmo violated this constitutional right. They'll seek suppression of KSM's statements, arguing (persuasively) that the torture he endured—sleep deprivation, noise, cold, physical abuse, and, of course, 183 water-boarding sessions—make his statements involuntary. They will insist that everything stemming from those statements must be suppressed, under the Fourth Amendment, as the fruit of the wildly poisonous tree. They will demand the names of operatives and interrogators, using KSM's right to confront the witnesses against him to box the government into revealing things it would prefer to keep secret—the identities of confidential informants, the locations of secret safe houses, the names of other inmates and detainees who provided information about him, and a thousand other clever things that should make the government squirm. The defense will attack the CIA, FBI, and NSA, demanding information about wiretapping and signal intelligence and sources and methods. They'll move to dismiss the case because there is simply no venue in the United States in which KSM can get a fair trial.

All of these motions and three dozen more will be either denied or denuded of any significant impact on the disposition of the case. The speedy-trial argument will fail. Important documents will be scrubbed and redacted to the point of unintelligibility or will be ruled irrelevant. The motions to dismiss will all be denied. And though some of KSM's statements will be suppressed in order to preserve the appearance of impartiality and integrity, plenty of the most damming ones will remain admissible. While condemning in stern language the terrible treatment of KSM and denouncing water-boarding as beneath the high standards of our justice system, the trial judge will nonetheless admit into evidence statements made by KSM in subsequent military tribunals, along with those made to a so-called "clean team" of interrogators, rendering all the suppressed evidence utterly insignificant.

In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that's where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.

At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

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Housing models at the Shanghai Real Estate Exhibition and Trade Fair

In Shanghai, which is China's New York, locals and expats are doing their best to foist American-style consumerism onto China's rising masses—with mixed results. Starbucks has opened several hundred stores, even though China has no coffee-drinking culture to speak of. As it spreads into China, Toys "R" Us is trying to convince higher-income Chinese parents that toys are a part of a childhood, not a distraction from preparation for the all-important national college entrance exams. Dickie Yip, executive vice president at Bank of Communications, lamented that 80 percent of the 11 million Chinese people who have opened up credit card accounts with the bank pay off their accounts in full every month. "We're encouraging our best customers not to repay," he said.

But there's one distinctly American habit the Shanghaiese seem to have picked up easily: talking about money, profits, and real estate prices without self-consciousness. I'm traveling in China this week and next with a group of American journalists. And we were instantly schooled by our interlocutors on the divide between the political capital (Beijing) and the financial capital (Shanghai). Beijing is all about politics, analysis, debate. In Shanghai, it's all pragmatism, getting things done, and making money. "To get rich is glorious," as Deng Xiaoping famously said.*

As in New York, real estate in Shanghai is a topic of near universal conversation. And as in New York, those fortunate enough to acquire property in the 1970s have done extraordinarily well. We visited the home of the Gao family on the 31^st floor of a tower in Hongye Gardens, a 2004-vintage 12-building complex of high-rise buildings cleaved by gardens, fountains, and a children's playground—the sort of thing you might find on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The parents, in their 50s, are both longtime employees of Shanghai's public bus company—the husband a middle manager, the wife a retired laborer. Their daughter, Yang Gao, a recent graduate of Fudan University, is going to start work at Ernst & Young next month. They were happy to share details of their personal finances. The Gaos were given the opportunity to buy workers' housing elsewhere in Shanghai very cheaply a few decades ago. That apartment, which they still own and rent out, has soared in value. The apartment in which they currently live, with finishes and features typical of a nice Manhattan apartment (save the two turtles in a box on the terrace) is around 1,300 square feet, and they paid about $200,000 for it a few years ago. The government workers, in other words, had morphed into landlords and residents of a fancy high-rise development. Their daughter, who majored in French, is about to join a global accounting firm.

Of course, there are ironies. Chairman Mao, unsmiling, peers out from every yuan bill—the pink 100, the green 50, the jade 20. (Shanghaiers of a certain ilk are frustrated that the highest denomination is the 100 yuan bill, only about $14.) The classless, harmonious society is in fact bifurcating—between urban and rural, between the prosperous coast and the modernizing interior, between those who were fortunate to get in on the ground floor of reform and those who are just now arriving on the scene. "Shanghai is not China," Dickie Yip of Bank of Communications told us. "What you see here is not representative." And as we left Shanghai I began to get a sense of that. On Tuesday, I sat in the Pudong airport, waiting to catch a flight to Chongqing*, the inland city that is the gateway to China's vast west. We were surrounded by well-dressed business travelers, black laptop carrying cases slung around their shoulders, worry-beading their phones and BlackBerrys. This could have been the holding area for the USAirways shuttle at Reagan National. Then around the corner came a group of 20 older travelers. Cheap plastic backpacks were strapped to their backs, and they wore hats, earmuffs, and scarves. They had the weathered faces and stooped posture of peasants.

Correction, Nov. 20, 2009: This article originally misspelled Deng Xiaoping's name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

Correction, Nov. 20, 2009: This article originally misspelled the name of the city of Chongqing. (Return to the corrected sentence.)

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It seems insane to fly across the ocean and spend thousands of dollars for the opportunity to make a few pieces of bad art when I could stay home and make reams of pictures no one wants to see. But there I was in Prague in the Czech Republic for a six-day "art vacation" with a company called Artbreak. Unlike the average tourist, who travels simply to consume culture, I would balance my intake by producing culture of my own.

When the urge strikes to go somewhere exotic to do something artistic, there are companies all over the globe, from Guatemala to Greenland, Indonesia to Ireland, that will set you up to draw, paint, pot, sculpt, or weave. Provence and Tuscany are popular destinations, but, perversely, I concluded that their beauty would make me want to wander, not try to capture the scene on canvas. Since I descend from gloomy people who came from gloomy places, I was drawn to Prague, a city where Franz Kafka wrote the story of a man who awoke one morning to find he'd become a bug.

The Artbreak vacation had an appealing structure: making art in the studio each morning, sightseeing in the afternoon, and attending great performances in the evening. This vacation would be possible only if I left my husband and daughter at home. They share a belief that the air in museums does not contain enough oxygen to sustain human life and that our habeas corpus laws prevent involuntary detention at the ballet or opera.

I was an artistic child who thought of the family home as a gallery for my ceramics, paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts. Then I became an adult and let it all go. Occasionally, I would take a class to try to revive my skills, but the classes grew further apart, and what I produced was increasingly disappointing. I hoped that an art vacation would relight that dormant spark.

I was also inspired by a slender volume by Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime. He writes that during a difficult period, he began dabbling with his children's paint box and that "the Muse of Painting came to my rescue." For the rest of his life (even through World War II), he found a restorative "psychic equilibrium" through sketching and painting. This was fortifying advice from the greatest figure of the 20^th century, and I was strangely comforted when the book's illustrations revealed that for all his enthusiasm, he remained a mediocre artist.

I wondered whether the atmosphere of Prague would influence my work. My reading about the city didn't so much prepare me as steel me. The very long history of Prague (it was first established in the ninth century) could be summed up as one of domination, defenestration, depression, despair, death, and dumplings. (If you've never tasted a Czech dumpling, believe me, it belongs on this list.) The Czech Republic is a small, landlocked country (about the size of Virginia) that its neighbors seem to think has been affixed with a sign that says, "Invade Me." For hundreds of years, waves of Austro-Hungarians, Germans, and Russians have occupied it. The Czech response is generally not to rise up but to keep their heads down and wait it out until the next invader arrives.

In Simon Mawer's new novel, The Glass Room, set in Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, one character asks, "Why are Czechs always so mournful?" Another answers, "They have a great deal to be mournful about." In the invaluable Prague: A Cultural and Literary History, scholar Richard Burton quotes Albert Camus, who, after a week in Prague, came away saying he was, "emptier and in deeper despair after this disappointing encounter with myself." (It should be noted that if Camus had found himself on a Carnival cruise, it's likely all the fun would have propelled him overboard.)

When I arrived in the fall, the city was, and remained, overcast and gray. But despite the history, despite the weather, maybe even because of this pall—chiaroscuro is a powerful artistic effect—like centuries' worth of visitors, I was stunned and uplifted by the fairy tale splendor of the city. Prague has a lovely setting on the Vltava River, but its real beauty is entirely man-made.

The city's glory is the human impulse to fashion out of raw material something both powerful and delightful. From the constantly varied patterns on the cobblestones beneath your feet, to the pediments that top the buildings, foot by foot, it was the most varied, most breathtaking assemblage of architecture and design I'd ever seen. Denis Dutton, a New Zealand professor of the philosophy of art, believes that the earliest humans got pleasure from making aesthetically beautiful tools and that this "art instinct" is an essential component of human evolution.

I met my two fellow Artbreakers. Rachel, a New Yorker in her 30s, is an advertising producer, and Francesco, an Australian in his 40s, is an engineer who specializes in consumer packaging—and I will never look at another box of feminine-care products without thinking of him. Like me, Rachel signed up out of curiosity about Prague and to jump-start her latent creativity. Francesco is a professional-level artist who was on the second leg of a multicontinent art vacation. He had just spent two weeks painting in Morocco, and after Prague, he would be off to Italy, then New York. Our hosts, American expatriate sociologist Douglas Pressman and Czech management consultant (a new profession in a post-Communist world) Richard Furych, took us out for Italian food at a Serbian-run restaurant, Mirellie, then off to our first cultural event. Later in the week, we were going to the opera, ballet, and symphony, but they like to mix in some funky, locals-only Czech performances. That night, two musicians, Lubos Bena, a Slovak guitarist, and Matej Ptaszek, a Czech harmonica player and singer whose usual venue is the street, performed "The Music of the Mississippi River."

Richard Burton observed that Czechs have a passion for automatons and proto-Frankenstein figures. (More on golem later in the week.) The Czech language is one of the most impenetrable for non-native speakers, but they gave the world the word robot from robota, or forced laborer, which was introduced in Rossum's Universal Robots, a play that premiered in Prague in 1921. I couldn't help thinking of this while listening to Bena and Ptaszek, because their performance was an uncanny channeling of Muddy Waters, Lead Belly, and other Delta greats. The rest of my group found them bizarre, but I loved the creative passion of two white men from Central Europe imagining themselves to be black musicians in the American South 60 years ago. After all, I was there to see whether I could gin up some creative passion of my own.

Each morning, Francesco, Rachel, and I took a tram to a basement studio to have art instruction from 9 to noon. Monday was clay, Tuesday film animation, Wednesday collage, Thursday and Friday drawing and painting. The Artbreak brochure explains that this structure "was inspired by university research findings—that creative expression, learning, and a supportive community are the master keys to happiness. Morning at Artbreak is not a 'master class' for professional artists but a chance for ordinary people to relish the catharsis and fun of artistic expression."

Back home, the most I hope for out of the morning is enough coffee to keep me conscious for the rest of the day, so "the master keys to happiness" and the "catharsis" of "artistic expression" promised to be a significant upgrade. Our studio was called Muddum, which means mud house, and it was run by Klara Dodds, a young Czech ceramicist. The first morning, she placed a slab of clay before each of us, and then she tied blindfolds across our eyes. We were to sculpt a mask of our own face by touch alone.

Francesco said he first felt the pull of art when, bored in a graduate-school lecture, he made a sketch of the teacher. Besides his art vacations, he now takes art classes two evenings a week. He recommended the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, because the exercises help to turn off your judgmental, rational left side and allow access to the creative right side. It was a best-seller in 1979, and I bought a copy at the time. I think I still have it somewhere in a box of books I never got around to unpacking. That seems like a metaphor for my artistic ability: buried at the bottom of a forgotten box.

Because we couldn't see what we were doing, Klara's exercise shut up the voice that says, "That looks terrible." An hour sped by, and we took off our blindfolds and laughed at our ridiculous, lumpy portraits. Next, to the sounds of mournful Czech accordion music, we were given another slab and allowed to sculpt ourselves while looking at our work.

As an adult, whenever I've undertaken an art project, the two halves of my brain have gone to war. One side celebrates the sense of losing yourself in the act of creation; time falls away, your hands and mind feel connected. The other internal voice complains that this is a waste of time. If I want a pot, or a painting, or an afghan (I once took two years and invested a fortune in yarn to knit my own), this left side says, I can easily purchase a more aesthetically pleasing version.

At Muddum, as I pressed and pounded the clay, I had to keep telling Lefty to shut up and let me work. At noon, I had a misshapen but faintly recognizable self-portrait. Prague beckoned through the window, but I was happy that I'd spent the morning making something.

The next day, our instructor was Sylvie Peeters, a 22-year-old Belgian language student who was contemplating art school. Our project was to make a stop-action animated film—our own Fantastic Mr. Fox. Oddly, a few days earlier, I had been to my daughter's middle school to observe classes during an open house. One was computer animation, and I became annoyed as she sat at a desk and repeatedly clicked on a mouse to make a little film. Painting class had been full, so here she was spending even more time on the computer. I worried than our film would be an equally silly exercise.

On the floor was a large piece of black paper, and over it a camera was mounted on a tripod. The three of us then got on the floor and covered the paper with flour. The idea was that we would push around the flour with our fingers and make dozens of little "drawings" that when seen together—as in a flip book—would produce action. Already this was more tactile and fun than my daughter's sterile class (although I could see the disadvantages to having 30 middle-schoolers covering a room with flour).

We divided the paper into three sections, so each of us could pursue our directorial ambitions. I planned to make an animation of a cat grooming itself and wagging its tail. But like so many auteurs constrained by time and budget, my final film consisted of the head of a cat that extended its tongue. Surrealism flourished in prewar Prague, and when Sylvie stuck our finished film in the computer for its premiere, I thought our triptych was an appropriate hommage.

At the end of the week, we worked with Siberian-born artist Tatiana Irbis. She explained that when she was a young art student in the Soviet Union, she couldn't get her hands on anything but black paint. As a result, she specializes in techniques using bold, black lines. We made pencil sketches of Richard, our Artbreak host, on a thick poster-board material. Next, Tatiana had us incise our pencil lines with a small knife; then we squeezed black and blue paint mixed with vegetable oil onto the drawings and rubbed the whole mess with a rag. The ink sank into the marks, and the poster board took on a metallic sheen—a poor man's engraving! I was surprised at how good my portrait looked. It was as if decades had fallen away, and I was back to where I had left off before I dropped art altogether.

The next day, I decided to do another incised portrait, so I started a pencil drawing of Franz Kafka. I got so absorbed that I spent the full three hours sketching, while Rachel made an abstract painting inspired by Prague's cobblestones, and Francesco did a tempera landscape of a bird's eye view of Prague that was better than anything we later saw at the National Gallery.

At the end of a week of art classes, I can't say that I achieved catharsis, or even that I found the keys to happiness. But I agreed with Churchill's admonition for the later-in-life painter, "We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint box."

The old man at the tram stop overheard us puzzling over our map and remarked in English, "Ah, you are practically natives!" He was the only Praguer to initiate a conversation with us. He asked where we were from, and when Rachel said New York, he told us that at one time he had lived in Hell's Kitchen. He said his name was Josef Hruska, then he added, unexpectedly, "Not only am I 81, I am also Jewish!" He said that when the Communists took over, he fled for Israel, then he went to Colombia and later the United States, and now he was back happily living in Prague. Our tram came, and Josef Hruska, a living miracle—a Czech Jew who escaped being murdered as a boy—said goodbye.

Since I was on a cultural trip to Prague, an unanswerable question loomed over my visit: What happens to your culture when your Jews are killed? The numbers are overwhelming. In Prague: A Cultural and Literary History, Richard Burton writes that in 1939 there were 118,310 Jews in Czechoslovakia (the Czech portion of which was renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by the Germans), many of them refugees fleeing Germany and Austria. Of those, 78,154 were murdered. When the Communists took over after the war, only about 5,000 Jews remained in Prague, and many of them fled, like Hruska, when the purges—targeting Jews—began.

Vanished Jews are big business these days. Prague's old Jewish Quarter, called Josefov, is perpetually crammed with tourists. Native son Franz Kafka, whose work was banned during much of the Communist period, is now iconic. His name and face are everywhere, and a new Kafka-themed museum recently opened near the Charles Bridge. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40 and is buried in Prague next to his parents. His three younger sisters—Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottilie—were exterminated. It is believed Ottilie passed through the Czech concentration camp Terezin (also known by its German name, Theresienstadt), a former fortress about 40 miles outside Prague, and finally perished at Auschwitz.

Jews first came to Prague at the end of the 10^th century. For much of their time there, they were confined to a small section of the city, were excluded from most professions, and had to wear a special badge to identify themselves (a practice later revived by the Nazis). Anti-Jewish riots and pogroms broke out from time to time, but for the most part, it was a relatively peaceful existence. So much so that Burton writes that in the Jewish diaspora, it was referred to as "City and Mother of Israel."

At the site of a new shopping, office, and residential development in Prague, archaeologists have been allowed to assess the buried artifacts before construction begins. Emerging from deep in the earth are pieces of medieval Jewish tombstones that had been taken centuries ago from the Jewish cemetery to use as building materials. The Jewish history of Prague, even in the few days I'm there, has a similar way of unexpectedly disinterring itself.

One day, Francesco, Rachel, and I stopped for lunch in a nontouristy part of town at a nondescript basement restaurant called the Piano Bar. Next to our table, attached to the wall, partially hidden by a heating pipe, was a piece of writing under Plexiglas, two paragraphs in Czech, German, English, and—this is what caught my eye—Hebrew. It was titled "Terezin Artists," and it concisely told the story of the imprisonment and death of some of the country's most celebrated musicians, composers, singers, and other artists at the camp. I asked a table of English-speaking Czech patrons if they knew why the memorial was there. They had never noticed it, but they asked the non-English-speaking staff. A waitress shrugged and said that it was left behind by the last owner; he sold the place years ago, and nobody knew more than that.

The buildings of Prague may have come through World War II essentially unscathed, but since it was one of the first countries occupied by Germany, it's remarkable that its synagogues are still standing. It turns out that they survived for a most malign reason. As Hitler's army marched across Europe, he ordered the continent's Judaica to be looted and sent to Prague. There, he was going to establish a "Museum to an Extinct Race."

But what is called the Old-New Synagogue, completed around 1270, is still used by the remaining Jewish community. On the Gothic ceiling, a fifth rib was added to each arch so that the congregants didn't look up to contemplate a pattern resembling a cross. Outside is the Old Jewish Cemetery. Because the Jews were confined to a small area, they could not expand their cemetery outward to accommodate the dead. Instead, they went up. There are 12 layers here, and 12,000 visible headstones, the oldest dating from the 15^th century. The stones lean hither and yon, like teeth in a long-neglected mouth. These are the lucky Jews, I think. These are the Jews who got graves.

The most famous marker belongs to the chief rabbi of Prague, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who died in 1609. A scholar and a mystic, Loew fought anti-Semitism and harsh government decrees. He is most famous today for his anachronistic association, starting in the 18^th century, with the legend of the golem.

According to the tale, Rabbi Loew fashioned a creature out of the earth and gave it the breath of life. It was a simple being, a servant of its maker, created to protect the Jews of Prague. In one telling, it becomes violent, and the emperor begs the rabbi to destroy it. The rabbi gets the emperor to promise he will protect the Jews and then places the slumbering golem in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, ready to return to life in case he's needed again. During the 20^th century, the golem must have slept the sleep of the dead.

Next door is the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535, which is now the city's Holocaust museum. I usually avoid Holocaust museums. Not because I want to pretend it didn't happen, but because confronting both the scale and the specificity is too much to bear. I forced myself into this one, though. It is simple and effective: The walls are covered with the names of 77,297 dead, handwritten in block script. I stagger at what almost 80,000 names looks like, floor to ceiling, room after room.

Upstairs is a small art exhibit: the works of the children of Terezin. Terezin was an unusual concentration camp, a Potemkin village in which the inmates were actively encouraged to produce artwork of all kinds. The children were given drawing instruction; famous Czech musicians composed and performed. This helped to convince officials from the Red Cross that the Jewish citizens who had been rounded up from their homes and imprisoned were being held in decent circumstances. By the end of the war, almost everyone at Terezin, including most of the 15,000 children, had been murdered.

In this gallery, the children's drawings are grouped by subject—things like memories of home, dreams of returning, life before deportation, transport. What is there to say? That Ruth Weissova was a promising young artist who was gassed to death just after her 14^th birthday? I came to Prague to make art and to look at art. It all seems useless when you're looking at the art of obliteration.

A Czech fable: A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she's dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: "Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do." The farmer gazes upward and says to God, "Please, Lord, kill my neighbor's cow."

Douglas and Richard treated us more like friends than customers, which meant they invited their friends along to our dinners so that we could get to meet some Praguers. It turns out that despite their guarded manner, Czechs do have a hidden passion: their dislike for other Czechs.

Occasionally, as you tour the city, you see a building with great bones that is in a state of grime-blackened neglect. Richard says that's what the whole city looked like when the Soviets left. Twenty years ago, a bloodless overthrow called the Velvet Revolution brought democracy to then-Czechoslovakia and made playwright Vaclav Havel president. (In 1993, the Velvet Divorce split the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.)

The Czechs sometimes joke that the most obvious difference between communism and capitalism is paint. It turns out that it's easier to spiff up inanimate relics than living ones. Francesco, Rachel, and I were struck by the contrast between the exuberantly painted and decorated buildings and the drabness—in both dress and demeanor—of the Praguers. On the tram and the metro no one was listening to music, or reading, or smiling. Almost everyone was staring, downcast, at a spot on the floor. Richard explained that this was a hangover from decades of Soviet rule. When tourists started flocking to the city in the '90s, they noticed that no one in Prague laughed. It was the result of decades of conditioning. "If you stood out, if you drew attention to yourself, you were suspect. And you never knew who was looking, so people just retreated."

In Prague: A Cultural and Literary History, Richard Burton quotes from a speech Vaclav Havel made early in his presidency in which he described the "decayed moral environment" of Czech life and said, "all of us are responsible, each to a different degree, for keeping the totalitarian machine running." But after the Communists left, Burton writes, there was a "conspiracy of oblivion" to not look too far into who had done what with or to whom, or what they had said about their co-workers, family, friends, and neighbors. Everybody was too implicated, and a recurring theme of post-1989 literature, he writes, is the "immense spider's web" of informing.

Still, ask Czechs to talk about Czechs, and it's like setting off a stink bomb. Our guide to the historic Old Town was the lovely Katerina Dederova, a 26-year-old graduate student. Over drinks, she waved her hand, dismissing the "post-Communist relics" who populate the country and said she looked forward to the time when that generation "slowly dies off."

Later, we met Natasa Sutta, a 48-year-old Czech artist, who took us on a tour of the National Gallery, and who saw her own family's story as a microcosm of the country's. After the crackdown of 1969, when the Soviets crushed the liberalization movement of the Prague Spring, Sutta fled with her mother and two older brothers to England. Her father stayed behind, and the family was permanently severed.

She said of her fellow citizens, "There's a horrible cowardly side to the Czech people. 'Let's keep our head down and be quiet.' No one talks about Communist crimes. It's been hushed up. I think my people are blind. It's like domestic abuse, you love the abuser, you're trapped in their power. I see it in my family and the whole nation."

After a few days in Prague, Francesco, Rachel, and I started to wonder whether the dissatisfied, downcast Czech character might also have something to do with their cuisine. The national dish is goulash and dumplings. This might sound spicy, homey, and satisfying. But the reality of Czech cooking is that the goulash is a few pieces of stringy meat covered with gluey brown gravy; on the side is a gigantic white dumpling, served in slices that have the taste and texture of soggy Wonder Bread. No wonder I didn't see a fat Czech the whole week—surely no one has ever asked for seconds. Besides goulash, there was pork knee, pork neck, potatoes half a dozen ways, pickled vegetables, and wan salads.

Every other block seems to have a cukrarna, or sweet shop, whose windows entice with puffs of cream and chocolate. During the Soviet era, many of these traditional shops were closed—the Communists didn't believe in private enterprise and apparently preferred everyone under their domination to have a bitter taste in their mouths. One day, we finally went into one to indulge ourselves, but the pastry was dry and tasteless. We decided there were untold opportunities in Prague for the contestants on Top Chef, for a Czech-speaking Oprah, and for a pharmaceutical company selling Zoloft-spiked dumplings.

The city of Prague is itself a work of art. This is a good thing, because after spending an afternoon in the National Gallery at the Prague Castle complex looking at their 19^th-century painting and sculpture—the artistic flowering behind a brief period of political independence—you would conclude that art this bad could only be done deliberately. Our guide, Natasa Sutta, regularly stopped in front of drab, dull landscapes to remark, "These are very Czech colors." I developed a theory that since invaders liked to sweep into Prague and sweep out with anything valuable, maybe the artists made paintings that defied anyone to steal them.

Then we emerged from the gallery to the glory of the castle grounds. (The palace scenes in the movie Amadeus were filmed here by Czech expatriate Milos Forman.) No nation that created such exquisite architecture could lack aesthetic judgment. But it's not just the show-stoppers like the castle, which hovers breathtakingly over the city, or the masterpieces, such as the 15^th-century Old Town Hall, with its astounding astronomical clock, or the Baroque church of St. Nicholas that amaze.

What kept the three of us craning our necks and snapping our cameras were the stunning residential and commercial buildings, a mélange of Beaux Art, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. There was even a Cubist building—who knew that this art movement was ever manifest in stone? The late 20^th century was well represented by Frank Gehry's Dancing House, known as Fred and Ginger, because it resembles dance partners in motion. We marveled at the attention to detail, how each building was a canvas for exuberant Crayola paint colors, or friezes, or murals, or reliefs, or shimmering gold balustrades.

As we took the panoramic tram ride down from the castle to the Old Town, without prompting, Sutta expressed what we had been thinking. "The beauty of Prague remains through the architecture. The buildings could not be stolen. The people are gray, their souls are gray, the waiters are grumpy. But the buildings speak of a noble majesty. I was ashamed of being Czech until I looked at the buildings.

"Prague has architecture from the ninth century to the 20^th century. In most other cities, there isn't that range—it's been pulled down. But the Germans didn't destroy it. The Communists didn't destroy it, even though they destroyed other cities to make them 'modern.' But not Prague."

The creators of Artbreak used the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, as a philosophical touchstone. But toward the end of the week, I sometimes felt it had been Jared Diamond's Collapse, so exhausted was I by becoming a culture vulture. Still, it was worth it to drag myself to the evening performances. One night we saw the avant-garde, five-man dance group Les Slovaks Dance Collective. In the lobby before the performance were traditional Slovak dancers, the women in dirndl skirts, the men in boots with spurs, their steps a European variation on square dancing. This turned out to be helpful, since Les Slovaks did a homoerotic deconstruction of Slovak folk dance, which was better than it sounds (unless that sounds good).

I preferred our nights at the jewel-box theaters of the national opera (Carmen), ballet (Romeo and Juliet), and symphony (Tchaikovsky and Dvorak). I vowed that when I got back to my family, I would try to drag those philistines to some culture.

After a week of arts immersion, I was both restored and exhausted—and forever grateful that I had never had to live under communism. I had also had the unexpected delight of befriending two strangers and spending 14 hours a day with them in complete harmony. On the flight back, I pulled out the sketch pad and pastels that were a gift from Artbreak and did a self-portrait while looking into the dark movie screen on the seat in front of me. It was the best piece I'd done in years. And when I arrived home, I found an art studio a few miles from my house and signed up for classes.

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Dear Prudence,

Every year my fiance's family takes a portrait together and mails it out as their holiday card. His parents included their new son-in-law when their daughter got married. This is the first holiday since my fiance and I got engaged, and they have already commented on needing a bigger lens to fit everyone in this year. However, I have no interest in being in their picture this year or any year. They sign the card "The Smiths," but I have no plans to change my name and don't feel this last name would be mine. I plan to decline to be in the photo since I have always looked forward to having my own family and sending our own pictures to family and friends. How can I gently say to my husband's family, "Time to cut the umbilical cord" and let your children start their own holiday family traditions? The thought of the upcoming family photo is making me sick and filling me with anger.

—Won't Say "Cheese"

Dear Won't,

It used to be said that when certain hunter-gatherer tribes were first exposed to photography, they believed that if a picture was taken of them, it would steal their soul. You're probably aware, however, that a photograph of you with your future in-laws will not forever capture your image and make it impossible for you to send a photograph of yourself for your own holiday card. Speaking of which, your fiance's family is going to conclude that you're quite the card when you tell them you're not going to be in their picture, you will never consider yourself to be part of the "Smith" family, and that you believe your future mother- and father-in-law are infantilizing their grown children. Everyone will be filled with seasonal joy that you'll be around for the holidays for the rest of their lives. There are two approaches you could take here. One would be to vent the rage you are feeling over your fiance's family wanting to include you in their tradition. That might solve everyone's long-term problem by making you a short-timer. (However, if your fiance hasn't figured out by now that you have some issues, he must have issues of his own.) Or you could spend some time figuring out why a gracious and inclusive gesture from your in-laws-to-be makes you act like a petulant baby and work on growing up yourself.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence Video: I Got My Co-Worker's Sister Pregnant!

Dear Prudence,

After raising my children alone, I found Mr. Right and got remarried. A few months after we were married, I found pictures of his stepdaughter from a previous marriage on his computer. He had always spoken of her as his daughter and said she thought of him as her father. These were nude pictures. When I questioned him, he said he did not take nude pictures but only modified them—just to see what she looked like naked. He explained that he did take pictures of her in lingerie on her wedding day and Photoshopped them to reflect her naked. This has been eating at me ever since. The bond between a parent and child is sacred, and I cannot understand the sexual pictures. I am afraid to have him around my daughters or granddaughter. Am I being paranoid?

—Bewildered Wife and Mom

Dear Bewildered,

When a letter starts with a wife sitting at her husband's computer, it's an inevitable cue for the staccato string music of Psycho. (I suppose the good news is that this image of the daughter-in-law won't be the family Christmas card.) Your husband's stated explanation for the photos may be true. If so, that means he was photographing his stepdaughter in her lingerie on her wedding day! If that's the case, the photos you saw don't just reflect his own private perversion, but show that his relationship with his stepdaughter has crossed so many lines that the two of them are tangled in a spool of yellow crime-scene tape. It's also possible he's lying about Photoshopping and that he has a cache of actual naked photos of her. Whatever really happened between them, you have just gotten an ugly look into the psyche of the man you married. I don't think you're being paranoid to worry about the safety of your daughters and granddaughter around him. But once you feel that way, it doesn't seem possible, or desirable, to continue in this marriage. Yes, it's a heavy blow to think you have finally found love, and find these photos instead. But at least you haven't invested years in this relationship—and I hope you've kept your financial investments separate. Someone who is afraid of her husband and is being eaten away by her knowledge about him is someone who needs to see a matrimonial attorney, ASAP.

—Prudie

Dear Prudence,

I am a medical secretary at an oncology practice. Over the years, I have developed strong feelings for a patient who has terminal cancer. (He is unaware of my feelings.) He is truly an amazing person and has expressed to the social worker that he'd like to begin a social life again (he's divorced with children). Coincidentally, we are on the same dating Web site as well. Am I overstepping my boundaries if I strike up an e-mail conversation via the Web site? What would I say? I don't want to regret not trying to make a connection with him, but I also do not want to put him in an awkward situation when he comes in for his doctor visits. A co-worker told me not to even try because, eventually, he will lose his battle with cancer. But I want to try to be happy with someone, and he has every right to want the same, too.

—Undying Love

Dear Undying Love,

I was with you until I got to your signoff. You may admire this man and be attracted to him, but you cannot love him because you don't really know him. I am worried that you may have gotten carried away with the idea of a doomed love, and the last thing this patient needs is someone else's emotional drama. However, you also seem to understand the potential awkwardness of this situation and have kept your feelings to yourself all this time, which is a good sign. Since you and he are on the same dating Web site, that is an easy and fortuitous way for you to connect. However, before you do anything, you should discuss this with the office manager to make sure you are not violating any rules. Explain that you would send him an e-mail, then totally leave it up to him whether to pursue this. If you get the go-ahead, just write to him that you work for Dr. X, you recognize him as a patient, and you'd like to get to know him in a more pleasant setting. If he doesn't make the next move, then continue your admiration from afar, and give him a warm professional smile when he comes in for treatment.

—Prudie

Dear Prudie,

My boyfriend and I have been together for more than two years. This year I thought it would be wonderful to host Thanksgiving dinner and have both our immediate families meet. I invited both his parents and siblings and mine. His father decided to invite his own brother (my boyfriend's uncle), who I had not planned on having. My boyfriend's uncle is fond of guns and likes to carry at least one everywhere he goes. This makes me extremely uncomfortable, and I don't even want to have this dinner party anymore. I asked my boyfriend to speak to his uncle and let him know that weapons of any kind will not be allowed into our home, but I don't think this man will listen. He displays antisocial behavior, and truthfully, he scares me. I hate the fact that he will be in my home, possibly interacting with my family. I only accepted that he was coming out of respect to my boyfriend and his father, otherwise this is not the type of individual I would ever want to have any contact with. What can I do?

—Extremely Concerned

Dear Extremely,

It always adds excitement to a Thanksgiving meal when, if the turkey is dry, the chef wonders whether the bird, or she, might end up pumped full of lead. I understand that under normal circumstances you don't want anything to do with Uncle, but these aren't normal circumstances; this is Thanksgiving. I'm assuming your boyfriend's father felt guilty about leaving his misfit brother alone for the holiday. A difference between a normal dinner party and Thanksgiving is that the latter is about an expansive welcome. Unless a family member has been demonstrated to be dangerous, even an odd, antisocial one should be included. However, what turns a simply antisocial relative into a potentially homicidal one is a deadly weapon, and you are completely within your rights to insist you don't allow firearms in your home. Your boyfriend has to make clear to his father that the two of them are responsible for making certain that Uncle is unarmed and also monitoring that his behavior is in check—and that if he starts acting up, they will take him home early. But as long as you know Uncle's not packing, you should graciously allow him to pass the stuffing.

—Prudie

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President Obama

As a professor of constitutional law, Barack Obama gave his students eight hours to complete his exam—even though the exam was designed, he wrote in the instructions, "to be completed in three hours." Now that he's president, Obama could use that kind of cushion. Upon taking office, the president promised that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would close in a year. He now says it will not. He demanded that Congress pass a health care bill by August. It still hasn't. The president's promise to sign a health care bill this year has now been pushed into 2010. Obama was also going to announce his new Afghanistan strategy in early November. It may now come as much as a month later. There are also delays—some, of course, beyond his control—in seating judicial nominations and passing climate-change legislation.

Whether you think this is a big deal depends on what you think of deadlines. (I'm on deadline right now, so you know where I stand.) The president has a professor's fondness for deadlines and a writer's lack of respect for them. "If you don't set a deadline in this town, nothing happens," he said last July before Congress sailed past his August deadline on the way to the beach for recess. His aides share the boss's view. When White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel heard Senate Majority Harry Reid suggest that a vote on the health care bill may not take place until next year, he immediately contacted Reid to voice his displeasure.

Yet Obama doesn't like it when people point out that he's missing deadlines. He warns against judging him out of context. Obama rails against the media's and his critics' artificial deadlines—why haven't you ended the wars yet, he asks, mockingly. Indeed he has been busy. The problem with all of this is that it is Obama himself who set the deadlines in the first place. Even now, he's setting suspiciously deadline-like expectations on Afghanistan policy as other deadlines on other issues pass.

Deadlines matter for several reasons. First, as a tactical matter, a deadline creates a momentum that can work in the deadline setter's favor: The person who makes the deadline limits the options of the person who has to meet the deadline while simultaneously putting pressure on him to make a choice. This motivates people to accept limited options they might not otherwise find attractive. Explaining this principle in Managing With Power, professor Jeffrey Pfeffer quotes the country music song "The Girls All Look Prettier at Closing Time." (See also: getting the bum's rush.)

In the Senate, recalcitrant Democrats who do not agree with the president's health care program know how this works. That's why they're threatening to block debate on reform before it even starts. They have more leverage now, before debate begins, than they would after the bill has been debated and the looming deadline of a final vote would pressure them not to be the one person standing in the way.

With homework as with health care, when deadlines are blown, it gives people who have had a deadline imposed on them a chance to make mischief. This is what happened in August with Republicans. If you delay long enough, you can get negotiations started afresh on more favorable terms. Missed deadlines also give a president's opponents quotes they can use to make him look out of touch, like this one from Raleigh, N.C., in late July: "First of all, this [health care] bill, even in the best-case scenario, will not be signed—we won't even vote on it probably until the end of September or the middle of October."

Deadlines also matter in measuring the hard-to-measure but crucial quality of presidential prestige and credibility. If a president's deadlines are meaningless, then he is less able to get other politicians to do what he wants. Voters may simply view him as ineffective.

Blowing a deadline isn't all downside, of course. Even if you buy the downsides to delaying a decision on Afghanistan—confusing allies, irritating the military and inspiring insurgents about America's lack of will—rash decision-making has also been pretty thoroughly debunked in the last eight years of war. Politically, letting a deadline slip can also give your supporters more time to build support for your program. (It's the flip side of allowing your opponents more time to make mischief.) There's some evidence that Obama's supporters wanted him to slow down in August.

Experience has not cured Obama of the deadline habit. If there's anything that has upset presidential deadline setting in recent years, it is war. And yet when describing his coming Afghanistan policy, the president is full of clarity and deadline talk. "I'm going to be able to present to the American people, in very clear terms, what exactly is at stake, what we intend to do, how we're going to succeed, how much it's going to cost, how long it's going to take," Obama told NBC's Chuck Todd. Those may be the things he says when he announces his new plan. But given the uncertainty of war, he's not going to be able to keep all of his promises.

Obama also made another declaration he can't really mean. Asked if the press leaks about his Afghanistan strategy sessions upset him as much as they do Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama said they bother him even more. He went on to tell CBS's Chip Reid that leaking was a firing offense. Does he really mean that? Not only did a similar policy trip up his predecessor, but when Gates complained about the leaking, he wasn't just talking about members of the military. He was also talking about White House aides. If Obama enforced his rule, he wouldn't have much staff left, joked one Pentagon aide.

Fortunately, the definition of leaking is pretty flexible. It's sort of like a deadline that way.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Sen. Harry Reid was set to unveil his "blended" health care reform bill on Nov. 19. The Congressional Budget Office was expected to release its analysis of the bill on Nov. 18, but it wasn't yet available on the CBO's Web site, and my attempts to get the CBO to tell me when it would make the analysis public were unavailing. (In its defense, I was having cell phone trouble and therefore couldn't leave a message.) Perhaps Reid didn't want to be upstaged, since the full CBO analysis of the bill couldn't really avoid telling you a lot about what the bill actually contained.

To keep everybody interested, Democratic leadership aides released to the press some top-line data from the CBO analysis. The bill would cost $849 billion over 10 years, but that would be more than offset by taxes and various savings, principally in the Medicare program, so overall the bill would reduce the deficit by $127 billion during that same period. That's $18 billion more than CBO's projected 10-year savings from the House bill and $46 billion more than CBO's projected 10-year savings from the Senate finance committee bill. The $849 billion figure is below President Obama's (somewhat arbitrary) demand that health reform not cost more than $900 billion over 10 years.

In other news, CNN reported that lobbyists have thus far spent $600 million trying to influence the health reform bill.

Also, Richard Foster, chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, replied to my column from earlier this week about CMS analysis of the House health reform bill. At my request, he also explained why his 2003 estimate of the 10-year cost of the Medicare drug benefit, shortly before it was enacted, was way too high. To read it, click here and scroll down to the bottom.

Stay tuned.

Update, 8:30 p.m.: The bump and grind continues. The Hill reports that Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said the Reid bill has some sort of prohibition on taxpayer-funded abortions through the exchanges, and that the prohibition is worded differently than in the House's Stupak amendment. But neither Nelson nor the Hill seems to know any details. In the Huffington Post, Ryan Grim reports that the Reid bill nonetheless requires that at least one plan within the exchange must cover abortion. And multiple sources report that the bill, as promised, includes a public option with an opt-out provision for states that don't want to participate.

Update, 9 p.m.: The Senate bill would extend coverage to 31 million of the roughly 45 million uninsured, saith the Washington Post, as compared with the House bill, which would extend coverage to 36 million. The Medicare payroll tax would be raised from its current flat rate of 1.45 percent to 1.95 percent for families earning more than $250,000, saith the New York Times. This would raise $54 billion. An excise tax on so-called "Cadillac" health plans would apply to family plans valued at more than $23,000, compared with a $21,000 threshold in the House bill.

Update, 9:25 p.m.: The feather boa drops, and the bill text is revealed.

Update, 9:30 p.m.: The wording on the abortion amendment is extremely complicated, but on first glance it seems to be similar to the Capps amendment that the House (and the U.S. Conference of Bishops) rejected, i.e., abortions may be funded in subsidized health insurance policies only if elaborate procedures are followed to segregate federal dollars from the dollars used to fund the coverage.

Update, 9:50 p.m.: The public option is described in Section 1323, where it is dubbed the "community health insurance option." States may opt out of this option by passing a law prohibiting it. Premiums must be sufficient to cover the health insurance option's costs. The Department of Health and Human Services negotiates rates paid to doctors and hospitals, but it can also hire a private nonprofit entity to perform this function. These "may not be higher, in aggregate, than the average reimbursement rates paid by health insurance issuers offering qualified health plans through the exchange."

Huh. But didn't the CBO and CMS say the House version of the public option, which is quite similar, would have to charge premiums that were slightly higher (4 percent higher, according to CMS) because its private competitors would use the public option as a dumping ground for less-healthy customers?

The community health insurance option would be supervised at the state level by a public or private nonprofit entity that would make recommendations to HHS on how to run the community health insurance option.

Well, that was quite a show. I'm spent. More tomorrow.

Update, Nov. 19: The CBO has released its analysis.

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

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This month brings the publication of Eating Animals—a vegetarian's memoir and manifesto, a Peter Singer sort of guide to a Michael Pollan world, the third book by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. In support of it, the author and his publisher have concocted a short Web video. When I watched it over dinner last night, it put me off my lamb shoulder chop (medium rare) only in its unpalatable tone, which is extremely cute and incredibly twee. It's but the latest reflection of the ways that such clips—"book trailers"—can reveal the hopes and fantasies of readers, writers, and publishers alike.

For an establishing shot, Foer offers his audience a Google Map pinpointing the corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifth Street in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., and—with too minor a garnish of sarcasm—defining his neighborhood by way of a photo of a fancy baby stroller. The three minutes that follow comport with the borough's hard-earned reputation as a roost for self-satisfied, quince-eating Bobos.

The author pretends—"Oh, hello"—that the camera has snuck up on him in his capacious study and proceeds to describe the book's inspirations and intentions. In bold graphics appropriate to the opening credits of a Guy Ritchie film, he acquaints us with his son, his dog, and his grandmother, who at one point asks whether he would like a nice piece of fruit. "At the end of the day, it's a family story," Foer says, using a cliché that no one of his intelligence should ever use outside a Hollywood pitch meeting. In conclusion, the clip presents a series of outtakes, the last of which—"the Hebrew one"—finds him saying shalom to the bubbies in the book-buying audience. Personality upstages purpose. What matters here is not the moral seriousness of Eating Animals but that its author has turned us a cheek to be pinched.

A company called Circle of Seven, which produces videos for an impressive array of trash, trademarked the term book trailer in 2002, but the phrase has caught on broadly, and there will be no turning back. A consideration of the form might begin, and even end, by dwelling on the word trailer itself, conventionally used to indicate a montage that, running in a movie theater before a feature, gives away too much of the plot of a film not yet released. No one would think to call an ad for a TV show a trailer; it is a promo or a spot or maybe a teaser. In embracing the term, the publishing industry helps itself to some Hollywood glamour. And in avoiding the most obviously appropriate word for these commercials—that is, commercials—sacrosanct literature keeps grubby commerce at an arm's length. The book trailers that feel most properly trailer-ish promote genre novels with all appropriate lurid color, whooshing noise, and bold strokes. See, for instance, the clip for Stephen King's new Under the Dome—apparently about a Maine town trapped under one of those thingies that goes atop a footed cake plate—or, a YouTube favorite, the tongue-in-cheek, tentacle-around-suitor ad for the Jane Austen-spoofing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Where the King trailer sells mass-market sensation with bold strokes, more "literary" endeavors tend to make a fetish of their independent sensibilities or to appeal to the viewer's admiration of his own intellectual gravity. In the first category, we must place the doggedly whimsical trailer for I Was Told There'd Be Cake, Sloane Crosley's rather charming essay collection, a clip that at least conveys something of the book's tone. Perhaps we can agree that it has a cousin in the promo for No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July's sporadically readable short-story collection, a clip that plays like propaganda against quirkiness.

At least the July promos has something like a sense of fun. You would not get the idea that Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project is, in fact, a good book after watching the trailer for it, largely because you would not be awake. Black borders; flat, ghostly score; disconnected excerpts presented in a somberly serifed typeface. Rarely does a sentence with a semicolon in it belong in a video clip. But the reader's self-image as a serious person is duly flattered.

I'd much rather that publishers play to my anxieties the old fashioned way, by selling sex. This series of Penguin Classics ads takes an ironic approach in suggesting that a close familiarity with Jane Austen will help you get laid—ironic but not really kidding. Please note how the tattooed shelf-browser featured at the 0:15 mark of the introduction fits into her skirt. And mark the narrator's claim that "social situations [are] excellent opportunities during which you can express the parallels that exist between great works of literature and everyday life." This is not perhaps what Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren had in mind when devising their Great Books list, but Roger Sterling and Bert Cooper would approve.

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A woman receives a mammogram

It's not often that a football game can teach us something useful about mammography. But look what happened on Sunday after New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick decided to go for a short fourth-down conversion from his own 28 yard line, with a late six-point lead. The Colts stopped the Pats cold to take possession, and star quarterback Peyton Manning quickly fired off a touchdown pass to win the game for Indianapolis.

Like a woman considering whether to have a mammogram, Belichick—widely considered one of the wiliest and most data-driven coaches in the game—had to process complex probabilities to make a decisive, if controversial, call. What's amazing is how mathematically sophisticated fans and sports commentators are in their analysis of Belichick's decision not to punt. Sports Illustrated labeled Belichick's call "I'm-smarter-than-they-are hubris," but only after it reviewed the preceding plays in numerical detail. On the other side, using a complex mathematic model, two fans gave Belichick a "thumbs up" for a "courageous and correct call": They calculated the Patriots' chances of winning at roughly 77 percent by going for it and 76 percent if they had punted instead. The New York Times football blog and the New Republic also dissected probability equations on the matter.

Journalists and physicians explaining the U.S. Public Health Service's widely publicized change in mammogram recommendations—it now suggests most women start receiving them every other year at 50, instead of 40—might take a page from the sports commentators' playbook. If the sports media have no problem filling newspapers and the airwaves with complex statistics—and often discussing them clearly—why do the health media treat the same consumers like innumerate dolts, especially when women's lives are at stake? Hopefully it's not because they think only testosterone-drenched sports fans can handle the math.

Even though they use the same data, the American Cancer Society, U.S. Public Health Service, and National Cancer Institute—not to mention Canadian and British health authorities—now fail to agree on when women should start getting mammograms. Some say at 40, others at 50. That's why it's critical to separate each organization's opinions from the facts. Encouragingly, there's really no disagreement about the latter.

Here's the bottom line about mammography: Getting screened or not screened for breast cancer is a gamble. There is no right answer, but there is helpful statistical guidance. There are two broad ways to handle mammography for women under 50 years old: to treat them as homogenous and statistically naive (the cookie-cutter approach, usually favored by policymakers) or to assume greater patient savvy (the personalized approach, increasingly favored by clinicians and patients).

Let's first review the "cookie cutter" approach the way a sports analyst might. For the average woman turning 40, there is a 1.4 percent—about one in 100—chance of getting invasive breast cancer before the age of 50. In baseball terms, she bats .986 against breast cancer. (For comparison, a woman turning 50 has a 2.4 percent chance of breast cancer over a decade; she bats .976.) Further, most cancers are treated successfully, no matter how they're found, so survival rates are even more favorable.

How does mammography improve these stats? Researchers generally agree that mammograms save lives, but—this is critical—catching breast cancer early changes the outcome in only 15 percent of cases. So consider the actual numbers: For the average 40-year-old woman, annual mammography for a decade increases one's overall chance of breast cancer survival from roughly 99.7 percent to 99.8 percent. That is, it increases the final batting average by only 0.001. According to the National Cancer Institute, there's also a downside. During this time, half of all screened women will have at least one suspicious mammogram, and one-quarter of them will end up getting a biopsy. Mammograms in women from 40 to 50 years old cause a huge number of false positives, resulting in about 100 biopsies for every life saved. Even more worrisome: It's possible the radiation from those mammograms may end up causing more cancers than they prevent.

But what if you're the one whose life is saved—doesn't that outweigh the dozens of fruitless biopsies and thousands of scans done on other women to save you? Now that's something to talk about. There: You now know pretty much everything the experts do in the debate over whether women under 50 should get mammograms.

Still, there's another way to discuss mammography, which is potentially more useful. When the people who know the most about the subject—like the folks at the National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control, and American Cancer Society—disagree so strongly about mammograms, the lesson is that people handle risks in idiosyncratic ways. As a result, there is a growing but small movement to indentify precisely a given woman's risk of breast cancer and help her make the decision that's right for her alone.

Developed by a statistician at the National Cancer Institute, the so-called "Gail model" allows women to estimate their risk of breast cancer based on family history, age, menstrual history, and other personal factors. (You can calculate your risk of getting breast cancer here. It's helpfully delivered as a percent over five years and over a lifetime.) This allows higher-risk women to make more personalized decision. For example, a woman under 50 who has a sister or mother who's had breast cancer has the same overall risk as someone over 50 and thus would likely benefit from routine mammograms. Based on her risk profile, a woman might make a choice that adheres to her comfort level, without being at the mercy of arguing authorities. To better guide women, national organizations could band together and propose mammogram screening predicated on personal risk percentages, instead of only the blunt instrument of age.

Earlier this year, the American Society for Clinical Oncology proposed another personalized strategy. For women with a Gail score predicting a five-year breast cancer risk of more than 1.66 percent, the organization recommends considering the drug tamoxifen, which reduces breast cancer risk by about one-third to one-half—yet the guideline is widely ignored.

A third personalized strategy involves targeted genetic testing for the "BRCA" genes, which are responsible for one-tenth of all invasive breast cancers. A woman carrying the gene has an almost 60 percent chance of developing breast cancer during her life—and yet, no organization has yet developed guidelines on who should get tested. Though data are still sketchy, it is reasonable to assume that carriers would benefit more than the average woman from early mammograms or tamoxifen therapy.

Over time, medicine is bound to become more individualized. Unfortunately, national health organizations have failed to take the lead in such cancer screening, though the tools exist. But if people given the right statistical tools can manage a fantasy sports teams over a season, it stands to reason they can probably take charge of their personal health the same way.

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Eric Holder

There are good arguments against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators in a federal New York Court. Testifying this morning before the Senate judiciary committee, Attorney General Eric Holder addressed most of them.

What Holder could not answer were the questions suggesting that he or members of his Justice Department actually opted to try KSM and his colleagues in New York because they want dangerous terrorists to go free. That one is beyond crediting. So Holder laughed.

Holder explained that while military commissions had produced only three convictions, 300 international and domestic terrorists are in custody following civilian trials in federal court, including the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and attacks on U.S. Embassies in Africa. Holder addressed the problem of keeping classified information secret and the contention that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would have an open mic at his trial to spew hate. He described security measures that will keep New Yorkers safe. But, try as he may, what Holder could not promise the committee was that the federal criminal trials will end in a conviction and execution. For some of the senators on the committee, that just wasn't good enough.

Let's think about this for a minute. Imagine a hearing in which the attorney general stood before the American people and swore under oath that he would personally guarantee the vote of every juror, control every piece of evidence, and supervise the decisions of every federal judge. Such legal systems have existed throughout history and still exist today throughout the world. Until recently, they may well have existed at Guantanamo, or so said the military prosecutors who refused to take part in President Bush's military commissions there because of the pressure to deliver slam-dunk convictions. So you see, the central problem of the American legal system—didn't we once believe this to be its central virtue?—is that a death sentence just cannot be fixed in advance of the trial.

Holder used his opening statement to answer Rudy Giuliani and the Sunday talk show guests who have suggested that the Obama administration is giving the terrorists everything they wished for. Responding to the argument that KSM shouldn't have a national platform to spew hate, he echoed Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign Relations, who argued in today's New York Times that "if the trial provides a propaganda platform for anybody, it will be for our side." Said Holder, "If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed makes the same statements he made in his military commission proceedings, I have every confidence the nation and the world will see him for the coward he is. I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will have to say at trial, and no one else needs to be either."

Holder debunked claims that the earlier civilian terror trials resulted in a wealth of secret intelligence, notably a list of unindicted conspirators and information about Osama Bin Laden's use of cell phones, which are alleged to have benefitted him. (Rush Limbaugh now contends the 1993 trial somehow caused 9/11.) Holder explained, to the contrary, that the list of Sheikh Abdel-Rahman unindicted conspirators turned over during the trial of Abdel-Rahman was never classified. Prosecutors could have sought a protective order for it and didn't. Holder also explained that despite widespread claims that the cell phone records were produced long before, they surfaced only in the embassy bombing trial in December of 1998 and were not disclosed in court until March 20, 2001. Bin Laden had stopped using his cell phones in October of 1998, before they came out at trial.

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., pointed out that America didn't go into meltdown when the Bush administration opted to try Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20^th hijacker in Virginia, just miles from the 9/11 crash site at the Pentagon. The trial happened. Moussaoui ranted. The conviction happened. Moussaoui is in jail. He looks likely to stay there. So what's different this time?

Holder wobbled under questioning from several committee Republicans on the line between prosecution in the federal courts and in military commissions. He was bruised by questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on the implications of shifting to the former. Graham asked: "Can you give me a case in United States history where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?" Holder could not. Graham even seemed to have stumped Holder on the question of whether Osama Bin Laden would need to be read a Miranda warning if he was captured: "Would you read him his Miranda rights? Would you get him a lawyer?" Holder waffled.

Holder did his level best to promise that he would deliver convictions. He testified that "failure is not an option" and that "these are cases that have to be won." He even promised that if any of the five are acquitted, under new congressional rules they would not be released in the United States. That still wasn't good enough for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who said, "I think a lot of Americans thought O.J. Simpson oughta [have] been convicted of murder rather than being in jail for what he's in jail for."

What Holder could not possibly answer for today was the claim that his Justice Department ostensibly wants to help the terrorists. This is hardly a new trope. But today offered a new twist: Holder was called out for harboring just such terror-lovers as, well, himself. Grassley demanded that Holder explain the presence in the solicitor general's office of Neal Katyal, who represented Osama Bin Laden's driver at the Supreme Court. Grassley used a smear from the New York Post (penned by the writer who ridiculously claimed Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh believed "Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts") to demand that Holder account for Jennifer Daskal as counsel in its National Security Division, who allegedly wants terrorists to have more time to write poetry. Grassley demanded that Holder produce a list of DoJ appointees who have ever acted as lawyers for terror detainees.

Then John Kyl, R-Ariz., read from an editorial suggesting that the reason these detainee trials have been so long delayed is all the "leftist lawyers" who stalled the military commissions by challenging them in the courts. Kyl noted many of those lawyers—including Holder—work for the Justice Department despite the fact that Holder's firm, Covington & Burling, "volunteered its services to at least 18 of America's enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people." Remember in 2006 when the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Cully Stimson, had to resign his position at the Pentagon for urging U.S. corporations to boycott any law firm that defended terror suspects? Apparently those law firms are still un-American, and anyone associated with them should be barred from DoJ. (The subtext for much of this criticism, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., observed, is that all these lawyers are somehow in it for the money.)

When Kyl asked his question about all of the terror-defenders at Justice, Holder just blurted, "Hah." Then he said, "I don't even know where to begin, other than to say that the vast majority of the time in which these matters were not brought to trial, to fruition, happened in the prior administration." He added that it was "the Supreme Court—not a group of leftist lawyers" that stalled the commissions. He said it was a Congress not "peopled only with leftist lawyers" that fixed the commissions.

Reasonable people can differ on whether the acts of Sept 11, 2001, were crimes to be handled in court or acts of war to be tried by military tribunals. Experts will never agree on whether criminal trials make us safer or less safe. The 9/11 families also remain split on whether trials or commissions are appropriate. But when you continue to hear that anyone who objects to Bush's detainee policies is unworthy to serve in government, or is part of some elaborate conspiracy to free terrorists, there is truly nothing left to do but laugh.

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The federal government made $98 billion in improper payments this fiscal year, according to an announcement Tuesday by the White House Office of Management and Budget. That's a 37.5 percent increase from the $72 billion improperly spent in 2008. How does the government know exactly how much it's misspending?

It audits itself. Every year, various federal agencies review programs that have a high risk of improper spending—that is, programs that historically misspend more than 2.5 percent of their budgets and more than $10 million total. Kind of like the IRS during tax season, agents don't pore over every last high-risk dollar. Instead, they take random samples and investigate those. For example, the federal food stamps program might examine just a few thousand of its 28 million or so payments. If 5.6 percent of the money spent in those payments includes errors—as it did in 2008—then that rate is extrapolated to the rest of the spending program.

There are three basic reasons a payment can be considered "improper." First: no documentation—no existing paperwork confirming that, say, John Smith paid $400 for an MRI. A payment might also be considered erroneous if the agency can't verify the recipient's eligibility. For example, if a public housing program doesn't have access to a tenant's income statement, they can't prove he falls below the cutoff. A third reason to classify a payment as "improper" is if it's impossible to verify eligibility. Say a tax credit requires that a recipient lives with a child for more than six months of the year. Federal agencies have no way of verifying that conclusively. In such cases, the payment's propriety is often a judgment call by the agency.

When an agency conducts a random audit and finds an individual—a Pell grant recipient, say, or a retiree who gets Social Security—who was paid improperly, it can take the money back. The government also does a thorough annual review of spending that goes to contractors—whether they build planes or set up telecommunications systems or conduct defense research—and tries to recoup any misspent funds.

If the government knows how much it's spending improperly, why doesn't it stop those payments in the first place? It tries to. Every year, the agencies use information from previous audits to better catch erroneous payments. For example, when handing out Pell grants, the Department of Education has long had trouble verifying a student's income because IRS documents are protected. Starting in 2010, the department will have better access to those numbers, saving an estimated $400 million annually.

This year, Medicare's fee-for-service program and Medicare Advantage—private insurance programs offered through Medicare—accounted for $36 billion, or more than a third of total improper spending. Last year, Medicaid and Medicare Advantage accounted for more than 85 percent of misspending in newly measured programs.

The 2009 spike in improper spending is likely due to new, more sensitive methodologies for sussing out errors. An illegible doctor's signature, for example, is now treated as a red flag. Plus, 2009 has seen more federal spending than ever before, thanks to the stimulus package and the ballooning budget. So even if the error rate stayed the same, there would be more dollars misspent.

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

Explainer thanks Kenneth Baer and Danny Werfel of the Office of Management and Budget.

Become a fan of the Explainer on Facebook.

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Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 61 with Juliet Lapidos, Stephen Metcalf, Troy Patterson, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner and by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Lady Gaga anyway, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and a study on how to warn future generations to stay away from our "nuclear waste."

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

Lady Gaga's official YouTube channel.

Lady Gaga's performance on Gossip Girl this week.

Jonah Weiner's Slate piece on the art-house poptart.

Troy Patterson's "Brow Beat" post on Gaga's "Bad Romance" video.

The official Web site for Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The Amazon page for Roald Dahl's children's book Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Dana's review of Wes Anderson's latest.

Slate's Juliet Lapidos on how to warn future generations about nuclear waste.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: the soundtrack to the Wes Anderson movie Rushmore.

Julia's pick: the Fox show Bones.

Juliet's pick: this n+1 article on the rise of the neuronovel.

Stephen's picks: the documentary New York Doll and the solo work of former New York Doll Johnny Thunders.

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

Posted on Nov. 18 by Jesse Baker at 12:54 p.m.

Correction, Nov. 20, 2009: Because of a miscommunication, an earlier version of this text and the announcement on the Nov. 18 episode of the Culturefest misstated a few of the details of this offer. The free book giveaway is limited to those who are not currently Audible members, and it is limited to one book per customer. We apologize for the error. (Return to the corrected paragraph.)

Nov. 11, 2009

Listen to Gabfest No. 60 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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

Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audio book, here. (Audiobook of the week: The Bonfire of the Vanities, written by Tom Wolfe and narrated by Joe Barrett.)

Find the Culturefest Facebook page here. Leave us a note and see what other Culturefest listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss Precious, Ian McEwan's novel Black Dogs (and the fall of communism), and a recent Vanity Fair article about the rise of cute.

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

The official trailer for director Lee Daniels' new film Precious.

Dana Stevens' Slate review of the film.

Armond White's negative review of the film in New York Press.

A plot summary of Ian McEwan's Black Dogs.

Black Dogs on Amazon.com.

Slate's Fred Kaplan explains why Berlin mattered.

Jim Windolf's Vanity Fair article on the rise of cuteness.

An over-the-top example of cuteness on the Internet: the Web site Cuteoverload.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: Fascinating branding Web site brandculturetalk.com.

Julia's pick: NBC's Parks and Recreation.

Stephen's pick: The best book you'll ever read, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

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

Posted on Nov. 11 by Jesse Baker at 10:34 a.m.

Nov. 4, 2009

Listen to Gabfest No. 59 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, June Thomas and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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

Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook, here. (Audiobook of the week: The Talented Mr. Ripley, written by Patricia Highsmith and narrated by David Menkin.)

Find the Culturefest Facebook page here. Leave us a note and see what other Culturefest listeners have to say about the latest podcast.

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss ABC's new comedy Modern Family; New Yorker writer Tad Friend's WASPy new memoir, Cheerful Money; and the New York Times list of things that restaurant staffers should never, ever do.

And don't forget: Next week, we'll be discussing Ian McEwan's Black Dogs, which is available on Audible.

Here are links t