In the Land of Guantánamo

In the Land of Guantánamo
By TED CONOVER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29GUANTANAMO.html

I. Dropped From the Sky

The juvenile enemy combatants live in a prison called Camp Iguana. It looks like a pair of tennis courts surrounded by fence lined with a few extra layers of the usual green-nylon wind screen. It is perched on a bluff overlooking the sea; the breeze is warm and pleasant. Not far away is a beachside park for barbecues and picnics and a wildlife-viewing area, but the young detainees don't visit these places. They must remain in one bedroom of a small cinder-block hut inside the fence or, for two or three hours a day, in the grassy yard that adjoins it.

There is a soccer ball in this small yard, and a Nerf football. A translator who is here all day long -- the same one who leads their study of the Koran, who is also trying to show them how to write their own names in English -- has taught them how to throw the football. They also play board games like chess and something called Popomatic Trouble. They pray. When they are done with their studies, they are given ice-cream sandwiches, which the guards say they love, and they watch videos: Disney cartoons and documentaries about the sea. ''They're very interested in the ocean,'' a guard tells me. They can see it through a wide window that has been cut in the green fence-netting on the ocean side.

There is only one feature film in the stack of videos: ''Cast Away,'' starring Tom Hanks as a FedEx employee who is stranded on a desert island when his plane crashes. Though I doubt that they can understand the words, the plot must be familiar: they, too, dropped from the sky onto a tropical island, where, far from home, they experience an indefinite detention. The soldiers here say that every homey detail of Camp Iguana -- down to the calming ''Carolina Blue'' shade of the wall paint -- was carefully thought out before the juveniles' arrival. If that is so, I wonder, who made the weird and brilliant choice of this film?

There are apparently three detainees, boys between the ages of 13 and 15. They are just a few feet away but out of sight on the other side of the hut. Single cots bolted to the floor fill the bedroom; the living room has two cushioned chairs and a table. Pieces of blue tape on the floor delineate the areas that are off limits: the kitchenette, the space near the front door.

Guards -- selected for their experience in working with young people -- are here around the clock, but otherwise there is not much visible in the way of security. This seems a bit strange, given that Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that they are very dangerous: ''Some have killed. Some have stated they're going to kill again. So they may be juveniles, but they're not on a Little League team anywhere. They're on a Major League team, and it's a terrorist team.''

But if they hate the United States, the juvenile enemy combatants do not seem to show it. For example, they respectfully rise to their feet whenever a soldier enters the room, says a Reserve sergeant from Michigan who has apparently never seen anything like it at the junior high where he teaches.

If anything, they seem more troubled than dangerous. One suffers frequent nightmares and what a military psychologist says is post-traumatic stress disorder. (He leads a regular group-therapy session that he says the youths ''love.'') They were captured on the battlefield; they are child soldiers. One -- a Canadian national reportedly held with the adult detainees -- is said to have killed an American soldier with a grenade, but Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who commands this detention operation at the naval station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won't comment on that.

Rather, his tone is sympathetic. ''We're doing our best to give these juvenile enemy combatants options to be able to be integrated back into their societies,'' he says after a prayer breakfast. ''These despicable terrorists have decided to use younger people as a part of their army. They're the ones who decided to impress, kidnap and force them into service. Their treatment program started the day that they came here. And so, like anyone freed from an intolerable situation, they're returning to what we'd consider normal.''

What is normal for teenagers who were made to fight in a war? Do we have any idea? Could being locked up ever be therapeutic? I mean these as real questions, not rhetorical jabs, and I recently visited Guantanamo to try to get a sense of how, a year and a half after its creation, the detention-and-interrogation center, this place where hundreds of people are being held indefinitely so that we might find out what they know, had evolved. What kind of community had grown here, and what might it say about America's attitude toward these prisoners of war?

II. Beachfront America at the Edge of Nowhere

Most of the roads around Guantanamo Bay are restricted to 25 miles per hour. Most of the buildings are low, made of wood or cinder block and painted a pale yellow with brown trim. Utility poles are stained a pleasing Forest Service green; the overwhelming impression is of suburban America circa 1950. At night, crabs scuttle across the road ahead of advancing cars; by day, iguana-crossing signs -- and the big, basking lizards themselves -- are commonplace. There is a golf course and Cuba's only McDonald's and Little League teams and a shopping mall staffed by guest workers from Jamaica and the Philippines.

The United States presence here dates from the Spanish-American War in 1898. The last lease, signed in 1934, granted the United States indefinite use of this 45-square-mile corner of the island in return for an annual payment of $4,085. Fidel Castro, who once called the base ''a dagger plunged into the heart of Cuban soil,'' has always refused to cash the checks.

It feels surreal to be on an American naval base inside the territory of a Communist country. And it feels doubly strange -- like a parody of a David Lynch movie -- to cruise slowly by little town-house subdivisions, past batting cages and even by a rocky outcrop where high-school students spray-paint their names, then come suddenly upon a prison camp in the ''war on terror'' wreathed in razor wire.

Prisoners from the Afghan war first arrived at ''Gitmo,'' as locals call the base, in January 2002. The first 110 men were brought to a makeshift set of cages called Camp X-Ray and were made to kneel, shackled and blindfolded with special blacked-out goggles, while soldiers trained rifles on them, an image captured in the first news photographs of them. Then, last spring, they were all moved to a newer, larger facility, Camp Delta. Unlike X-Ray, Delta has running water, indoor toilets and plenty of unused capacity. (There are 680 prisoners housed there now, with room for about 1,000.) Soldiers call Camp Delta ''the Wire,'' and it has plenty of that -- rows of chain link and concertina. Rising behind them are plywood guard towers, some draped with American flags, and an array of lights for night.

At the camp's main gate, a 4-foot-by-8-foot sign attached at eye level says ''Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.'' This is the slogan of J.T.F./Guantanamo, the joint military task force -- 2,000 strong -- that runs the detention-and-interrogation operation. It is printed on handouts and official documents and signs and is constantly recited, soldier to soldier, at the camp's checkpoints. As I arrived at the main gate for the first time, I turned to the first lieutenant who was escorting me. ''Isn't that a little strange,'' I offered, ''a slogan about freedom on the gate of a prison camp?''

He looked at me flatly. ''Doesn't seem strange to me,'' he said. ''Does it seem strange to you?''

III. A Very Long Way From Geneva

The detention-and-interrogation operation at Guantanamo Bay is clearly a problem area of America's war on terror. In mid-April, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell sent Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld a strongly worded letter that cited complaints from our allies that the indefinite detention of foreign citizens undermines efforts to win international support for the campaign against terrorism. And yet, two months later, the children are still there, the prisoner count is up by 20 and tribunals have yet to be scheduled.

Combatants from 42 countries are held at Guantanamo. Most, apparently, are from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Pakistan, but others are citizens of allies like Canada, Sweden, Australia, Britain and Kuwait. The indefinite detention of the young is a small but revealing part of the operation. There is practically global unanimity that children deserve special protection by governments; the Convention on the Rights of the Child (C.R.C.), adopted by the United Nations in 1989, is the most widely ratified human rights treaty ever. It specifies that detained juveniles shall have the right to legal assistance and to a court's prompt decision on their detention. We are not providing either.

But the main action at Guantanamo is Camp Delta. What the detention of teenagers is to the C.R.C., you might say, conditions at Camp Delta are to the Geneva Conventions.

Except for a new unit -- Camp Four, which now holds about 125 detainees -- it appears to be a prison based on the supermax model of solitary confinement that has become popular in the States during the past 25 years. Except, in many ways, Camp Delta is harsher. Each prisoner lives in a separate cell that is 6 feet 8 inches by 8 feet. The door and walls are made of a tight mesh through which it would be hard to pass anything larger than a pencil. Unless rewarded for good behavior, each prisoner is allowed out of the cell only three times a week for 20 minutes of solitary exercise in a large concrete-floored cage, followed by a 5-minute shower. Before coming out of the cell, he must submit to a shackles-connected-to-handcuffs arrangement known as a ''three-piece suit.'' Guards escort him on either side.

Twenty-four of these cells, constructed out of Connex shipping containers placed end to end, are situated opposite 24 others, and a roof with ventilators is constructed overhead; this assemblage of 48 cells constitutes a cellblock. So far, there are 19 of these cellblocks at Camp Delta, suggesting a capacity of approximately 1,000.

The United States, for what the administration says are reasons of national security, has chosen not to designate these combatants from the war in Afghanistan prisoners of war; this means that they are not protected by the Geneva Conventions. If they were, the prison camp would look a lot different. The Third Geneva Convention, which pertains to P.O.W.'s, says that ''close confinement'' settings are acceptable only ''where necessary to safeguard their health.'' It says that prisoners should be allowed to keep ''all effects and articles of personal use,'' that they should be permitted to smoke and prepare their own food when possible, that their religious leaders ''shall be at liberty, whatever their denomination, to minister freely to the members of their community'' and that the ''Detaining Power shall encourage the practice of intellectual, educational and recreational pursuits, sports and games amongst prisoners.'' Most relevant to the operation of Camp Delta, it says that prisoners must never be interrogated.

The conventions are famously important to the military, and those working inside the Wire take pains to emphasize the ways they are abiding by them. Exhibit A in this regard is how the military is bending over backward to respect Muslim religious practice at Camp Delta. Every prisoner is provided a prayer mat, prayer beads, oil, Koran, Islamic prayer book and access to a Muslim chaplain (who is American). On the floor of every cell are spray-painted an arrow and ''MAKKAH 12793 km.,'' so that prisoners know which way to face during prayer. The call to worship blares out over Camp Delta's public-address system five times a day (the chaplain downloaded from the Internet recordings of it from Mecca and Medina), the only American government facility in the world, it seems, that does that. The camp commander will tell you that meal times were changed to accommodate Ramadan, and Chief Warrant Officer James Kluck, the kitchen head, will talk about the baklava he added to the menu.

Exhibit B is the health care, which I was told several times is better than most of the detainees ever received in their lives. Capt. Albert J. Shimkus, the command surgeon for the joint task force, proudly shows the lab where a lot of tests can be done, the surgical theater, the X-ray machines, the examination rooms and the dental-care room, which is also used for physical therapy and prosthetics; several of the prisoners, Captain Shimkus explains, are amputees. Eighty-five operations have taken place so far, he says, mostly orthopedic. The average prisoner, I am told, has gained 13 pounds since arriving at Guantanamo.

But despite the hospital, all is not well with the detainees. In 2002, there were 10 suicide attempts. Then, in just the first three months of this year, there were 14 more, by 11 individuals. Almost all were by hanging. Most of the would-be suicides were not badly injured, but one suffered brain damage and at the time of my visit was in a ''persistent vegetative state,'' according to Shimkus, was being ''fed by a medical device in his stomach'' and required ''24/7 care.''

I ask where he is, and the captain points behind him to a room where the beds are; the patient is just a few yards from where we sit. I cannot see him. I was told at the outset that I would not be allowed to see any prisoners. (To deny the press access to prisoners, the military invokes, of all things, the Geneva Conventions article stating that P.O.W.'s ''must at all times be protected . . . against insults and public curiosity.'')

In late March, a special mental health unit was opened inside Camp Delta. I am told that there the emotionally ill are given special treatment and that since it opened there has been only one additional suicide attempt. (Three more have occurred subsequently, bringing the total to 28 attempts by 18 individuals.) About 90 detainees are under mental health supervision, the camp psychiatrist tells me, with about half of those receiving psychiatric drugs regularly. (Though Shimkus stated that no detainee had ever been forcibly medicated, one released prisoner, interviewed recently in Afghanistan by The New York Times, said that after a suicide attempt, he had been given an injection by force that left him ''unable to control his head or his mouth or eat properly for weeks.'')

But providing psychiatric care does not change other factors that surely underlie the despair. First there are the physical conditions of confinement: even in most American supermaxes, the cells are larger and prisoners are let out for at least 30 minutes of exercise daily.

But another factor in despair is the way prisoners think about their confinement. At the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where I spent nearly a year as a correctional officer, inmates understandably attach a great deal of importance to the lengths of their sentences, their first possible parole dates, prisoner offenses that could extend the time they serve, et cetera. Each passing day represents some tiny fraction of the whole, slow progress toward a goal. Having a sense of the length of the tunnel appears to make being in the tunnel more bearable. But all this is missing at Guantanamo: nothing is known of conditions for release, and there is no judicial procedure. Officially, the P.O.W.'s are being held for interrogation, but clearly, to judge by the conditions, they're being held for punishment as well. But for how long? Who decides? Under these conditions, it would seem, hopelessness is inevitable.

IV. What Can't Be Guarded Against

Next door to Camp Delta is Camp America, where many of the soldiers live. Like Delta, America is hot and treeless and fairly grim. I ate some meals in the Seaside Galley mess hall there, where every table has folded cards with slogans like ''How to Respond to a Potentially Suicidal Person'' and ''Symptoms of Depression.''

''This is to educate you about how to handle suicidal detainees, right?'' I asked a soldier one day at lunch.

''No,'' he corrected me. ''This is about us,'' he said, and pointed to a card, on which someone had written in pen. ''Symptoms of Depression'' had been amended to read ''Symptoms of Gitmo.''

The guards who work inside Camp Delta are mainly reservists from military-police companies; about half do some sort of police work back home, and many are in corrections. They have in common with the detainees a certain anxiety about how long they will spend here. Several, having nearly finished their usual six-month tours, had just been informed that their postings had been extended an additional six months.

The guards told me striking stories about the detainees and what it was like to work inside the camp. Sgt. Jason Holmes of the 438th military-police company from Kentucky said that it was hard not to show negative feelings toward the detainees, ''keeping it in mind that you're here just to serve a purpose, not pass judgment on anybody or condemn anybody. They're just as curious about us as we are about them'' -- and they'll often want to talk about their personal lives, even if the guards won't reciprocate. (To keep the prisoners from learning anything personal about them, the M.P.'s ''sanitize'' their uniforms before entering Camp Delta: they put a strip of green duct tape over the names monogrammed on their breast pockets. Off duty, many store these strips under the brims of their caps.)

''Did any prisoner ever refuse his weekly exercise?'' I asked Sergeant Holmes. ''Occasionally,'' he said, ''there are some that do not want to go, but depending on the M.P. at hand, generally, after a minute or two, they'll usually go. They use the question 'Why?' a lot. I reply: 'Why not? There's a soccer ball out there -- why don't you go out and kick it around?'''

Specialist Lily Allison Fritzborgen of the 344th M.P. company out of Connecticut said that if they want a guard's attention, they usually call ''M.P.!'' Sometimes in her case, however, they also call ''Woman!'' which she does not appreciate. ''We present it to them that we're all M.P.'s -- if they don't like it or won't speak to us, they're not going to get anywhere.'' Had she had any problems with respect from the detainees? ''I've had things thrown on me,'' she said. ''Bodily fluids, all that a man is capable of.'' Among the penalties for such behavior, I later learned, is being moved for up to 30 days to an isolation cell -- the same size as the others but with solid doors and walls and only a small window to let you know if it's day or night.

''Do they ever sing or make music?'' I asked. Specialist Fritzborgen said she had heard some of them humming or even outright singing songs from the Backstreet Boys. Holmes said, ''There are some new beds that are enclosed on three sides, and when you hit them, it sounds like an African drum, so some make pretty decent music.'' He had heard two detainees drumming together.

Sgt. First Class Bill Lickman, a correctional officer at a prison in Michigan, said his son had been working at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Being posted here was part of coming full circle, he said; the circle would be finished when he finally went back home. He said that these prisoners could be manipulative in the same way as prisoners back home: one might claim that a female guard had inappropriately watched him in the shower, for example, in the hope of getting her in trouble. He spoke of one prisoner known to guards as ''the General'' because of the way he could command everyone's silence when he had something to say or the way he could lead the block in a period of jumping jacks. And then there was ''the Riddler,'' who would always try to amuse them with lame jokes like: ''Why did the cat go into the barbershop? Because the door was open.''

I heard the Riddler story again the next day, over lunch with one guard who struck me as exceptional. She didn't work inside the Wire anymore, said Staff Sgt. Laura Frost of the 785th M.P. company from Michigan, and it was probably just as well.

Sergeant Frost is warm-faced, with a ready laugh and a smoker's rasp. Her job, she said, had been to distribute writing materials to the detainees so that they could send letters home. But then people like the Riddler would want to talk to her -- women make up 10 to 15 percent of the entire force, and there are not many around Camp Delta.

''He would want to tell a riddle or a joke or whatever -- I tried to stay professional and stay focused, but it was really, really hard . . . some of the letters were so sad. You know, they talk about asking their families for prayers, and their safe return, and that they were sorry because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I would get questions like, 'How do you spell amen?''' Frost got a bit choked up.

''What do you mean, they ask how to spell amen?'' I asked. ''Were they writing the letters in English, instead of their own language?''

Yes, she said, ''a letter in English goes out faster.'' Letters in other languages had to be translated so that the intelligence personnel could review them first. And likewise, all letters they received from abroad had to be first translated into English so that they, too, could be reviewed.

They had temporarily moved her out of work in the Wire when her security clearance lapsed; while she was waiting to have it renewed, she settled happily into an administration job. ''As I look back on it, I think it's probably a good thing,'' she said. ''I had felt very heavy in my heart for what was going on in there. You know, there's things that've happened that I'm glad I wasn't there to see.''

V. The Question of Questioning

"We do nothing here in Camp Delta that we wouldn't be proud of,'' said General Miller when I asked what the interrogation consisted of. I asked more pointedly, ''What did they do to get people to talk?'' He said drugs were never used in connection with interrogation, nor was ''violence or infliction of physical pain or anything psychological other than standard interrogation techniques.'' And what were the ''standard techniques''? Miller declined to say, asserting that to do so might aid the enemy and put at risk American troops and his mission.

I pursued this further with Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, head of public affairs for the joint task force, telling him that I flat out didn't believe that military interrogation could be all about decency and respect. ''This is not a coercive effort,'' he replied, ''because as you coerce people, they will tell you exactly what they want you to hear -- and that does us no good. We have to have accuracy and facts, and people need to be willing to give you that. It takes motivation, not coercion.'' The recent inauguration of medium-security Camp Four inside Camp Delta, according to Colonel Johnson, was about that kind of motivation: in Camp Four, detainees live in small dormitories and can eat, pray and exercise together. They wear white prison suits instead of orange. It is held up as a place you might get to if you cooperate. Most of the detainees released this year were all recent residents of Camp Four.

Unbidden, Johnson added: ''You asked about pain. I would say fear is very different than pain.

''I would say there are a lot of detainees who fear what faces them when they return to their own countries -- because of what people might think or believe they've been involved in.''

''You mean the suspicion that they'd snitched?'' I asked. Johnson would not respond, and I got nothing further.

One reason the interrogation process has dragged on for months and months, however, is that joint-task-force investigators are not the only ones doing the questioning. Presumably because each has a slightly different intelligence agenda, any interested government agency, including the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is given a shot at interrogating Camp Delta's detainees. It is easy to imagine that it could go on for a very long time.

One evening, as Johnson drove me in his Jeep Cherokee to a bluff overlooking what is now the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the detainees were originally confined, I pestered him again about the issues nagging me. Everyone knows the detainees are kept at Gitmo because they have no constitutional rights here, I said to him. (Responding to a complaint brought last year by families of Kuwaiti, British and Australian detainees, a United States court of appeals has agreed with the administration's claim that because Guantanamo is leased, it is not officially American soil.) Johnson smiled, but again did not respond.

Later, in an e-mail message, I pestered him some more about the extraordinarily tight security at Camp Delta. Are these soldiers considered more dangerous than enemy soldiers from any other war? Johnson replied: ''Unlike conventional soldiers who abide by certain laws of war, and who would also be bound by the III Geneva Convention to act in certain ways when confined, the enemy combatants in the high-security section committed themselves at some point to killing Americans, period. They are not obedient soldiers defending a nation, but individuals who are motivated for whatever reason to kill Americans.''

We can all argue about the nature of those who were defending Afghanistan against the American attack that followed 9/11; perhaps the jihadists are really just undisciplined murderers and not soldiers. But were the Nazi storm troopers or the suicidal Japanese soldiers of World War II any less hateful or fanatical? Certainly war has changed, but did the America that signed the Geneva Conventions ever think that detaining enemy soldiers would not involve having to manage antipathy?

It was just a little too dark to get a good look at the remains of Camp X-Ray by the time we got there, so we turned around and headed back. Johnson had James Taylor playing on the Jeep's stereo, and he was singing about the ''turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston.'' In the dusk, I thought about how Johnson was a smart and likable guy and about how the soldiers were good, decent people and about how whatever bad we were doing at this new American gulag we must be doing out of fear.

Later, as we passed by two housing subdivisions, Tierra K and West Iguana, I also thought of the ending of ''Cast Away,'' in which Tom Hanks, off the island at last, returns home to the suburbs. Moviegoers will remember what happened there: his fiancee, hearing no news of him for years, wrote him off as dead and married somebody else. He has survived, but his life is destroyed. Being incommunicado so long, as prisoners all over the world can tell you, is a sort of death.

Ted Conover is the author, most recently, of ''Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing.''

The Executioner's I.Q. Test

The Executioner's I.Q. Test
By MARGARET TALBOT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29RETARDED.html

Most people will never take an I.Q. test, and if they do, it probably won't have a big impact on them. Generally speaking, I.Q. tests do not carry much weight anymore. Not with vague charges of cultural bias still clinging to them. Not at a time when multiple intelligences -- that happy, inclusive vision in which nearly everybody is good at something -- are on the ascendancy.

If you do take a Stanford-Binet or a Wechsler, and you score in the average range, well, there you'll be, with hardly a reason to mention it. If you score high, the particular number won't matter much -- unless you're the sort to join Mensa, and then it will matter only to your fellow Mensa members.

But if you are in the bottom 3 percent of the population that scores 70 or lower, your actual I.Q. number will mean a great deal. Scores in that range will most likely lead to a diagnosis of mental retardation, and that diagnosis will entail many things, starting with mandated special education.

Since last June, across the United States, it has also entailed exemption from capital punishment. And so, for someone who has committed a capital crime, an I.Q. score can mean the difference, quite literally, between life and death. It can mean, if we want to be blunt about it, that there is such a thing as being too dumb to die, at least at the hands of the state.

On June 20, 2002, when the Supreme Court issued a decision declaring execution of the retarded unconstitutional, it surprised even some of the very people who had been working hardest to make that day come about. Asked to rule on the same question in 1989, the justices had reached the opposite conclusion, declaring that while evidence of a defendant's mental retardation ought to be presented as a mitigating factor at sentencing, it did not render him or her ineligible for the death penalty. Now here they were just 13 years later -- not so long in the history of what the court called our ''evolving standards of decency'' -- saying that the world had changed, that Americans were no longer willing to countenance the ultimate punishment for people who by definition could never be as morally culpable as other adults.

The evidence the court cited for this fundamental shift in opinion was suggestive but hardly an avalanche: in the years since the court's ruling in Penry v. Lynaugh and this one, Atkins v. Virginia, 16 more states had joined the 2 that barred the execution of the mentally retarded in the late 80's. And public opinion polls, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court majority, also suggested an emerging consensus that it was wrong to execute the mentally retarded. In 1992, though the court did not cite this, many people had been horrified by Gov. Bill Clinton's decision to permit the execution of Ricky Ray Rector. (Rector was not mentally retarded, but at the time of his execution he was clearly brain-damaged -- the result of a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head sustained at the time of his arrest.)

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, says that he thought a decision like this was bound to come at some point, but he was still surprised that the court hadn't waited a little longer to see if more state legislatures would ban the practice. Peter Arenella, a U.C.L.A. law professor who says he believes the court was absolutely right in Atkins, nonetheless finds the evidence of a public consensus ''underwhelming'' and wondered whether the court was anxiously looking for moral high ground ''after losing some with the decision on the presidential elections.'' David Bodiker, the state public defender in Ohio, had waited optimistically for the court's decision in Atkins, a Virginia case that centered on a convicted murderer named Daryl Renard Atkins. (Atkins's I.Q. had been tested at 59, but he was sentenced to death nonetheless for the abduction and killing of a young airman from Langley Air Force base.) Bodiker says he knew that the court ''would not have taken the case if the justices didn't want to say something new on the subject.'' But, he says, he is still ''somewhat astonished by what they did say, because we never anticipated anything that complete.''

In the year since the Atkins decision, these are a few of the things it has not done. It has not, as some of its critics predicted, unleashed a flood of farfetched claims. It has not produced flagrant cases of malingering, since in fact it is almost impossible to successfully fake mental retardation, the diagnosis of which involves not only I.Q. scores but documentation of the condition's onset before the age of 18 and assessments of how a person manages day to day, at work, at home and in the community. The person who imagined himself someday staving off execution with a claim of mental retardation would have to have been fiendishly proactive, starting at least in grade school with a purposeful campaign of deflating his test scores and bamboozling his way into special-ed classes. (And would-be fakers who try to flub I.Q. tests as adults don't tend to do it very well; they often make the mistake of answering all the questions wrong, which an actual retarded person rarely does.) It has not led, not yet anyway, to rulings that remove other whole classes of people -- like adolescents who commit their crimes at 16 or 17, older than the Supreme Court cutoff for the death penalty but younger than many states permit.

Here is what it has done. It has reopened cases and held out the possibility that a good number of people scheduled to die will spend their lives in prison instead. In Ohio, Bodiker estimates that perhaps 40 of the 207 people on death row may be retarded, and his office has already filed appeals based on the Atkins decision for 37 of them. In Virginia, according to Rob Lee, the lawyer who now represents Daryl Atkins, roughly 4 death-row inmates out of the 29 may have claims related to mental retardation. No one has done a national study, but some anti-death-penalty groups estimate that between 5 and 10 percent of the 3,500 people on death row may have mental retardation and therefore be eligible for Atkins claims that would save them from execution.

More fundamentally, the Atkins decision has heightened or exposed predicaments -- about the death penalty, about mental retardation, about the relationship between developmental disabilities and moral agency -- that will be with us for a long time to come. For the court majority, and for organizations like the American Association on Mental Retardation, it is clear that mentally retarded people should be exempt from the death penalty because, as a group, they are prone to gullibility and have poor impulse control and limited abstract-reasoning abilities, all of which render them less responsible for their actions -- or at least for their death-penalty crimes. Moreover, the same traits, along with a tendency to acquiesce to authority figures, make them more likely to confess to crimes they didn't commit, more likely to waive their rights and less able to participate in their own defense -- to remember or provide their lawyer with potentially exonerating details, for example, or to present the jury with a winningly remorseful demeanor. Denis Keyes, a professor of special education at the College of Charleston who serves as an expert witness on cases involving mental retardation, recalls ''seeing defendants slouched down in their chairs, scoffing at everything that's said, and that gets a jury mad. Well, there's a good chance the defendant is looking like that because he doesn't have a clue what's going on at the trial.''

And yet, to assert that mentally retarded people as a class are less blameworthy for the gravest of crimes is to raise some troubling contradictions. For one thing, a categorical exemption does not chime with the main chords of the disabled-rights movement. In recent years, advocacy for the mentally retarded has been aimed in a very different direction -- toward normalization, access, treating individuals as individuals. Some advocates have urged that we drop the label of mental retardation altogether, arguing that it is stigmatizing, arbitrary and bureaucratic.

''As important as it is to protect those who cannot protect themselves,'' wrote Donald Bersoff, an emeritus professor of law at Villanova and a psychologist, ''it is equally important to promote the rights of all persons to make their own choices and, as a corollary, to be accountable for those choices. It is simply untrue that no person with mental retardation is incapable of carrying out a horrible murder with the requisite intent or foresight.'' Bersoff, a liberal who found himself in reluctant agreement on this issue with Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the dissent, worried that ''if we accept the concept of blanket incapacity, we relegate people with retardation to second-class citizenship, potentially permitting the state to abrogate the exercise of such fundamental interests as the right to marry, to have and rear one's children, to vote or such everyday entitlements as entering into contracts or making a will.''

Moreover, if people with mental retardation are individuals, each with different capacities, as advocates for the mentally retarded often argue, then perhaps their individual differences are as important as the traits that could be said to unite them. ''In 26 years of working with retarded people,'' says Terrence Calnen, who until recently was director of clinical services at a community-support organization for the mentally retarded in Connecticut, ''I've known some people -- I'd say the majority -- whose sense of decency and empathy would prevent them from even contemplating a horrible crime against another person. And I've known others who had no capacity for empathy whatsoever and no ability to understand the finality of death. That experience makes me very wary of categorical judgments about the retarded.'' Calnen and Leonard Blackman, a professor emeritus at Columbia University Teachers College, have argued that it is not the global definition of mental retardation that reduces culpability in specific cases but particular deficiencies -- in foresight, understanding of cause and effect, capacity for empathy, for impulse control and so on -- that vary from person to person and crime to crime. These variations, they argue, exist even among a group, the mentally retarded, who are in general more likely to suffer from such deficiencies. ''So it is not enough to argue that a person with mental retardation automatically lacks the skills and abilities required for culpability for a capital offense without first knowing what skills and abilities the crime summons,'' Calnen and Blackman have written. Impulse control might be a relevant factor, for example, in a stabbing during a barroom fight. It would be less relevant if the stabbing occurred ''at an opportune time, hours or days after having stalked a victim.''

In other contexts, it seems obvious that intellectual ability and the capacity to act morally do not always go together. We've all known smart and amoral people, on the one hand, and dense but decent people, on the other. ''Whatever conceptualization of moral reasoning you use,'' says Douglas Mossman, the director of the division of forensic psychiatry at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, ''you see a range of moral capabilities in people and those capabilities do not necessarily coincide with measures of intelligence or social performance.'' And as Scalia put it in his dissent, even if there were a connection ''between diminished intelligence and the inability to refrain from murder'' -- a dubious connection to begin with -- ''what scientific analysis can possibly show that a mildly retarded individual who commits an exquisite torture-killing is 'no more culpable' than the 'average' murderer in a holdup-gone-wrong or a domestic dispute?'' Those are moral and legal judgments, after all, not scientific ones.

On the other hand, if the issue is not so much moral agency as it is gullibility and credulity, it is not clear that only people with a diagnosis of retardation are vulnerable. (Plenty of people with no such label are credulous -- or there would be no pyramid schemes, Powerball or phone psychics.) And if retarded people are more susceptible to the kind of badgering or leading questioning that produces false confessions, then that's a reason to make interrogations better and fairer (and perhaps a basis for due-process claims).

hen how a person happens to score on an I.Q. test -- a few points below or above 70 -- can determine life or death, we are surely adding a new element of arbitrariness to a death-penalty system that is already arbitrary in so many other ways. It's not that I.Q. tests are shoddy or unreliable (indeed, they've proved to be remarkably accurate at predicting academic success). But the same person can score differently on them at different times and under different circumstances. The mental retardation label ''is useful in that it allows mostly deserving individuals to get services and supports they often desperately need,'' writes Stephen Greenspan, professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut. ''It is fiction in that there is no justification for the idea that there is a magical line (let alone one determinable by a test score) dividing those who have or do not have this condition.''

Like other clinical definitions, the American Association on Mental Retardation's definition of the condition has frequently been revised. There have been 10 different versions issued over the last century. And the consequences of these refinements have not been trivial. A lowering of the I.Q. cutoff in 1973, for example, meant that the proportion of the American population classified as mentally retarded plummeted from 16 percent to 3 percent. Such core notions as whether people with mental retardation could ever improve have undergone a great deal of rethinking as well. For years, the standard definitions emphasized the condition's incurability; now they stress its mutability over time, and the power of a good support system to improve or even lift a diagnosis of retardation. Today, some people who might formerly have been classified as retarded are being classified as learning disabled, a different label with different implications.

Such changeability is one reason why some forensic psychiatrists are cautious about importing clinical diagnoses into the courtroom, or at least granting them a decisive role there. In the past, psychiatric experts called to testify in court have been able to tell themselves, truthfully, that they are offering a medical opinion, not a legally binding determination. This is distinct from what the court must then do, namely, render a moral and legal judgment about blameworthiness and punishment, into which many factors -- including a person's mental state but also, say, the heinousness and premeditation of the crime -- are swirled. With Atkins, though, ''the line between clinical standards and legal standards has seemingly been obliterated,'' writes Alan Stone, a professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard. ''A diagnosis of mental retardation is a constitutional bar to execution. This means that the battle of the forensic experts will be a struggle over the boundaries of a diagnosis that means life or death, a struggle in which scientific objectivity will be sorely tested and where it is difficult to claim that the court bears the burden of responsibility.''

Most retarded people on death row, like most retarded people in general, are in the mildly retarded range -- the upper range of the classification, which includes those who can and do, though usually with help, obtain jobs and driver's licenses, take care of themselves, marry, raise children and so on. Retarded people on death row tend not to have Down syndrome, which usually results in more severe retardation. In any case, people with more significant cognitive deficits either lack the capacity to plan or commit a serious crime or are declared incompetent to stand trial. ''Drooling guys who don't know how to feed themselves don't end up on the row,'' as Gregory Meyers, a lawyer in the Ohio public defender's office, puts it.

Many of the people I spoke to for this article pointed out that in making Atkins claims, they had to battle against a common misperception of the mentally retarded as more obviously impaired than most mentally retarded people are. They laughed and shook their heads over the stereotypes of slack-jawed guys humming tunelessly to themselves, hulking Lenny types, ''Deliverance'' extras. ''I was at a court proceeding in Florida where there were these two mixed-race defendants who were just gorgeous,'' Denis Keyes says. ''I mean, honey, these two guys took your breath away. And they were retarded, but you could imagine the jury was thinking nobody with mental retardation is that good looking.''

But if it's true that many people, even among those who support the death penalty, believe it is wrong to execute the mentally retarded, and at the same time true that many people hold in their minds an inaccurate stereotype of the retarded, then we may have a problem. It may be that the consensus the court identified -- holding that it is wrong to execute the mentally retarded but acceptable to execute schizophrenics or minors or people who sustained brain injuries after the age of 18 or people who were unimaginably mistreated -- may not be as stable as it seems.

Terrell Yarbrough, who is 22 and has been on Ohio's death row for three years, is one of the people whom the Atkins decision will probably save from lethal injection. His is one of the most persuasive of the 37 Atkins-related claims the Ohio public defender has filed. On the surface, it looks better, for instance, than did that of Ernest Martin, who claimed to have written an autobiography while in prison (''Casualty of Justice: A Black Man's Plight With the American Judicial System'') for which he planned a sequel (''The Case of the Exhumed Petitioner''). Indeed Martin's appeal failed, and he was executed on June 18.

The scores on the several I.Q. tests Terrell Yarbrough has been given over the years, starting at the age of 13, range between 59 and the low 70's. Yarbrough repeated the first grade and dropped out in the ninth. His grades throughout his school years were a welter of C's, D's and F's. Called to the stand during the trial of his co-defendant, Yarbrough's testimony consisted of the statement, ''On advice of my accountant, I invoke the Fifth Commitment Rights.'' He has told police detectives and various of his attorneys that he is 6 foot 1 (he is closer to 5-8), that he is from Harlem (he is from Pittsburgh), where he attended a Catholic school that he referred to as ''St. Jones,'' that he can write in Chinese and that he was tight with various prominent rap performers -- not suspecting, apparently, that anyone would notice the inaccuracies in his account. According to his current attorneys, who last summer filed a motion to overturn his death sentence in the wake of Atkins, he did not, at first, appear to understand that ''death row'' meant a death sentence. ''Terrell thought there was prison, there was execution and there was this other, discrete thing called death row,'' says his attorney Kathryn Sandford. ''I think he gets it now, though.''

When you tell a story like Terrell Yarbrough's, you face a choice. You can start with the crime, and if it is a capital crime, it's a horror story of some kind. Or you can start with the story of the criminal's life: he was born here, and his mother was a this, and his troubles started when, and so on, and almost as often it's a horror story, too, of a different sort. And either version is true, in its way, but the one you choose has implications. For the people whose main goal, now, is to help Yarbrough evade death, the story always has to start with his retardation and, in some sense, to end there, too. It's not about his crime, which they would rather not discuss with you and don't generally discuss with him. Public defenders who work on capital crimes, a lot of them, anyway, have an aspect of the pus-eating saint about them; they are willing to stand by people who are often despicable because they believe so deeply in the role they must play in ensuring the justice system's procedural fairness. And because who else will speak for the reviled? In Ohio, I heard a story about somebody's death-row client who urinated on one lawyer's shoes and threatened to kill another's young children and who scared away some of his appointed defenders that way, but not all of them. The lawyer for Michael Bies, who was convicted of beating to death a 10-year-old boy in the course of an attempted rape, said of his client that ''he loved the guy'' and sat with his arm around Bies while I interviewed him.

Still, however much you believe in your mission, it probably helps in this line of work if you don't dwell too much on what the client did, not if you can't at least entertain the thought that he might not have done it. For the rest of us, it's different. When I met with Terrell Yarbrough one afternoon at the Mansfield Correctional Institution, I kept thinking about the crime that put him there. I couldn't help it.

At 5 a.m. on Memorial Day 1999, Aaron Land and Brian Muha, two students at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, were pistol-whipped awake by intruders and abducted from the house they shared with a third roommate, Andrew Doran. Startled out of a sound sleep by noises he couldn't identify and a confused feeling that something was wrong, Doran managed to slip away and call the police. When they arrived, Land and Muha were gone. The two men later convicted of the crime, Yarbrough and a brighter, rougher companion named Nathan (Boo) Herring, stole Brian Muha's car -- a 1996 Chevy Blazer he had borrowed from his mother to move his stuff into the house that weekend -- and forced the two men into it. They drove Land and Muha to a hillside overlooking a highway in Pennsylvania and marched them up it. There, according to the charges against them, they forced one of the men to perform oral sex on the other. Then they shot both of them at close range in the head with a large-barreled handgun. They took Muha's wallet and headed for an ATM machine in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, where they tried unsuccessfully to use Muha's MAC card and where a security camera captured their images.

On the afternoon of that same day, a woman named Barbara Vey was leaving her apartment, which took up the entire top floor of a big old house in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Vey was a psychologist who ran a crisis program for traumatized children, but she wasn't working that day, since it was a holiday. She had an errand to do, which was to return a garden angel she had bought for her sister in Oklahoma City but had discovered was too large for the mailing box she had for it. Just outside her house, a young man she did not recognize said hi to her and she said hi back. Something about him -- the way he was just standing there, doing nothing in particular, plus the angry way a guy with him was talking to him -- made Vey nervous. And she remembered feeling relieved just to get in her car, a bottle-green BMW, and leave. When she returned, perhaps 15 minutes later, with a smaller version of her sister's gift, Vey went upstairs, answered a few phone messages, packed up the new garden angel and then decided she'd go enjoy the sunshine on her front porch. ''It was a holiday; there was nobody there,'' she testified. ''I changed my clothes and grabbed some things and put them in a bag -- soda, phone, a newspaper -- and was going to go outside on the front porch.''

When Vey reached the bottom step of the foyer, swinging the vinyl beach bag she had packed, two men jumped out at her. They were both black, and for a split-second the thought crossed her mind, absurdly, that the black engineer who lived in the downstairs apartment was playing some kind of joke on her. But these men, whom after a moment she recognized as the two she'd seen on the street, were yelling and screaming at her -- ''I'm going to shoot you, I'm going to kill you,'' and something, too, about her car. Vey sat down on the ground with her arms over her head and tried to make herself very small and very quiet and as calm as she could be, so that she wouldn't, as she put it, ''challenge'' the angrier of the two men, the one with the gun. And then the shorter, less agitated one, the one whom she would later identify as Terrell Yarbrough, did something odd. He put himself between her and the man with the gun. ''Don't shoot her,'' he said.

''When I sat down, it was almost as if he came forward to comfort me,'' Vey testified. ''It was very strange, and he kept saying 'Don't shoot her' to the other man.'' The short one told her to give her car keys to the angry one. But Vey didn't have her car keys with her. They were upstairs in her locked apartment. So the short one put his arms around her and led her up the stairs and steadied her shaking hand while she opened the lock on her front door. Once inside, she crawled toward her keys and then handed them over. The men took them along with the wallet they had already relieved her of. Then the shorter one kissed her twice. And unlike Brian Muha and Aaron Land, Barbara Vey survived, and her testimony served both to identify Yarbrough and to complicate the impression of him.

Yarbrough was arrested at about 6 p.m. that day, back in Steubenville, where he was tooling around with a friend in Brian Muha's Chevy Blazer. A few hours earlier, he'd taken it to a car wash, and a few hours before that he'd filled the tank with the help of a good Samaritan he flagged down after running out of gas on the highway.

It isn't exactly clear what Yarbrough's protectiveness toward Barbara Vey might mean. Is it significant, as his trial attorney argued, because what he did for her constituted the ''sole acts of humanity'' in a brutal chain of events and therefore a partial redemption of Terrell Yarbrough? Is it significant, as his appeal stresses, because it shows how dumb Yarbrough is, how he could apparently delude himself into thinking that if he kept Herring from shooting Vey, she'd want to be his girlfriend? (Yarbrough's interaction with Vey demonstrates, as the appeal puts it, ''a serious lack of social skills and social understanding.'') Or does it suggest something else entirely: that Yarbrough had the capacity to shield a victim from his accomplice -- a capacity he chose not to exercise when the two of them were terrorizing and later killing Aaron Land and Brian Muha?

When I met Terrell Yarbrough, in an office in the building that houses Ohio's death row -- a building helpfully stenciled with the words ''Death Row'' -- he would not talk about the events of May 31, 1999, and his lawyers were there to assure his discretion. We had gotten a ride across the Mansfield Correctional Institution in one of the golf carts employees use to move around the vast, windswept quadrangle there, and now we were sitting in a room that was bare except for a few pieces of furniture. One of them, oddly, was an elegant old roll-top desk that somebody said had probably been salvaged from the 19th-century prison nearby, which is used now by movie studios or by people who want to stay overnight as a lark. In 1897, Ohio became only the second state to adopt the electric chair, which was widely regarded by humanitarian sorts as an improvement on the gallows; the one used here was a rather grand, polished-wood affair known as Old Sparky. Now, though, most people executed in Ohio and elsewhere die by lethal injection. The room had that familiar, institutional smell: a faint but unmistakable fug of burnt coffee, disinfectant and overcooked vegetables.

Yarbrough seemed glad to see us and disappointed I hadn't brought a photographer that day. We talked about how he liked to play basketball -- ''I'm like the baby basketball star here,'' he said. ''I'm the youngest guy on death row. But I done things half the cats in here would never do.'' And he talked about how other inmates paid him to write rap songs for them. ''Other dudes were hearing me rapping and, you know, feeling my style. It started when one dude asked me to write a rap, you know, to send his mom or something, about what it's like being on death row. And so I wrote what I thought about it, being that we're basically in the same boat.''

What he thinks about it, mainly, is that it's boring, despite the basketball and the rap songs and the books ''about young black men coming up'' that he likes to read and the reality TV that he likes to watch. TV can be kind of a bummer, though, because ''I watch it, and I see all these young cats doing positive things, and I think that could have been me.'' Yarbrough looks younger than his 22 years. He has dentures now, to replace the upper teeth that rotted after years of never brushing when he was a child. He has a wispy moustache, a prominent nose and big, heavy-lidded eyes. He calls his lawyers, Kathryn Sandford and Wendi Dotson, who are young and pretty, his ''two angels.''

When Yarbrough was 3, his mother went to prison on drug and theft charges. His father was an alcoholic and a heroin addict who never worked after he was laid off from a steel mill. And since Yarbrough's mother kept going back to prison or rehab (her life was supporting her habit, she testified, and that meant that over and over again she would ''go in a department store, take something, go on the street and sell it''), Yarbrough spent most of his childhood shuttling among relatives in and around Pittsburgh. There was Aunt Itellia, a technician with the gas company, who worried about all the bottles of sugar water Terrell seemed to have been raised on and who spanked him with a belt and complained about his swearing at the age of 2. There were Aunt Brenda and Uncle Tony, who ran a youth ministry out of their used-furniture store and who inspired Terrell to do some street preaching, a task for which he showed a flair, they said. There were Aunt Iola and Aunt Rebecca and eventually Terrell's older sister, Stacy. Still, Yarbrough says, he felt like he was doing O.K. as long as his father was alive. ''My mom was in prison, and she was always selling me promises she couldn't keep. But my dad was my idol because when he was coming up, he was an athlete, good-looking and all. He was a heroin addict, so when I visited him, I knew what to expect. He'd be nodding off, all doped up.'' His dad had nicknames for little Terrell -- nicknames like Dollar and Money. Before his father died, of AIDS, Yarbrough was ''smoking marijuana every day and snorting cocaine and popping pills, but I wasn't selling. When my dad eventually died, it really hurt me. I'm not using it for no excuse, but it's real, though. After that I started selling drugs, going to different states, bringing stuff back.'' Starting at the age of 15, he was arrested several times and served time in juvenile facilities.

Now, when he talks about his prospects for living or dying or how he thinks he got here, Yarbrough falls back on strangely pat and anodyne phrases. ''I hope for the best and prepare for the worst.'' ''I try to keep my head up and take it one day at a time.'' ''When you come to prison you find out who your real friends are.'' The crime for which he was convicted was, he says, ''a tragedy.'' He doesn't talk about being retarded, partly because that's not a word that his lawyers generally use with him: they don't, Sandford says, ''want to make him feel like a loser.'' Instead he says: ''I'm not going to sit here and tell you I haven't made mistakes in my life. I've made mistakes. But I'm a human being.'' At his own trial, in a statement he gave at sentencing, Yarbrough had managed a similar smoothness. ''I want to ask God to, you know, touch the families' heart, take away all their pain and suffering that they're going through. And just let them know I'm sorry. And I can understand, like, if the mothers, you know, hate me, because no one got the right to take, you know, no one off this earth. And you know there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of Brian and Aaron, and I wish I could turn back time, but I can't. . . . Ain't no one gaining nothing in this whole situation. And you know, not only this situation, it's the world today, you know. Violence doesn't solve anything.''

If they choose to, inmates of Ohio's death row can put out a plea for pen pals on a Web site, ohiodeathrow.com, that is run by an anti-death-penalty lawyer and priest named Neil Kookoothe. More than 60 of the 207 men now on death row have done so, filling out questionnaires that Kookoothe then fashions into something resembling a personal ad. Like most self-advertisements on the Web, these pages allow their authors to appear in any light they might wish to appear, barring, in this case, the light of free men the state has no plans to kill. Terrell Yarbrough, for instance, presents himself as a man with a young son, whom he loves ''with all my heart'' (he has no son; the two photographs he includes of himself with a solemn, round-faced baby show his nephew), as a 6-foot-3 guy, as a ''caring,'' ''sensitive'' guy who's had to harden his heart to survive ''behind walls of glass,'' as a guy from Harlem, Yarbrough's eternal locus of cool and as a guy who has written a poem called ''If a Million People Love You.''

Michael Bies, who is also on Ohio's death row and who also has a claim of mental retardation that may save his life, says truthfully on his page that he has ''not had a single personal visit'' in the years he has been on death row, that he is lonely, that he likes to read and dislikes people who are dishonest and play games. And then, of course, there is a lot he does not say.

Bies, who is now 31, was convicted in 1992 of killing a 10-year-old boy whom he and an accomplice, Darryl (Junior) Gumm, lured from a park into an abandoned building with a promise of $10 for gathering scrap metal. The boy was small for his age and wearing a partial cast on his foot where he'd dropped some weights. Gumm tried to rape him, and when the boy screamed and resisted, he and Bies kicked and beat him, with pipe, concrete and fists, to death.

Bies has an I.Q. that has been tested as low as 50 and as high as 68. At the time of his trial, he could not remember the year, and he wrote the following statement to the jury:

''I am sorry for everything. I am 20 years old. My sister died two months. I can't reader thing have happening all of my life. I wants my mother here to tell the court I am not a bad person. I have three kids of my own, too. Always play with my two sons all the time. I would beat as a kid by my mom's boyfriend. I am sorry, yes, for not testifying. I was honest on news to police -- that's police. I never been in court before. I afraid of it. I once to get mercy on me her. I will stay in jail for life if you will let me.''

The statement took him two hours to write, according to one of his current lawyers, Randall Porter, and Bies had considerable difficulty reading it aloud. At his trial, a psychologist called by the defense testified that Bies was functioning at a third-to-sixth-grade level. The report of a doctor who assessed his mental functioning at age 10 reflected a persistent blankness. ''When asked what he would do if there were a fire in a movie theater, he said, 'I don't know what I would do.' When asked what he would do if he found a stamped, addressed and sealed envelope, he said, 'I don't know.' When asked about the difference between a river and a lake, he said, 'I don't know that, either.' When asked how oranges and apples are alike, he said, 'They are not.' He was unable to interpret proverbs.''

When I spoke with him in March, Bies labored to read the release form that the prison had provided and labored to sign it. ''You're really getting me to work my mind today,'' he said to his lawyer and me, with a smirk that erupted into one of the explosive giggles with which he often punctuates his remarks. Bies is pale, with a mauvish prison pallor, squinty green eyes and a pronounced widow's peak. He said he had trouble understanding the legal aspects of his case -- ''I ain't no lawyer'' -- but that ''when Randall broke it down'' for him he could. And he said he tried to read books but ''wasn't good at it'' and had tried to follow the war in Iraq but had some trouble with that, too. He said he knew that as a kid, he had been in a lot of different hospitals and schools. He couldn't remember them all, but he didn't think any of them had helped because ''I was too far gone, too set in my ways, you might say. When you've had as many hospitalizations as I have, you start debating on if anybody can ever help you, anyhow.'' A little later, he tried to remember a term doctors had once used to describe him. ''Was it acting on impulse? Was that the word?'' he asked, turning to his lawyer. He has an ex-wife and two children, the older of whom is 13, and Bies said that his ''only regret out of all this'' was not being able to see those kids grow up.

What, though, is the crucial fact about Bies? Is it that he is mentally retarded? Is it that he has a documented history of hearing voices and of multiple suicide attempts and is probably mentally ill? Is it that he had encephalitis as a child or that he was once hit by a city bus when he tried to pull his little sister out of the way? Is it that his upbringing was a grand guignol of abuse and deprivation, featuring a floridly disturbed mother who often left her young children alone for days or in the care of deinstitutionalized mental patients? When Bies was 9, he witnessed his 3-year-old sister's rape by a baby sitter. When she was a teenager, the same sister, whom he says he was always very close to, died of a drug overdose.

In an affidavit, Jackie Hookanson, the director of clinical and educational services for the Victor Neumann School, a Chicago institution for emotionally disturbed children that Michael Bies attended, stated that in her 26 years of experience she had ''never seen a more chaotic family'' than Bies's. Hookanson arrived at the apartment one time when Michael had been absent from school for several days to find him and his brother tied to chairs being screamed at and whipped by one of their mother's boyfriends. He regularly came to school filthy and, on at least one occasion that Hookanson remembered, covered in bruises. And yet, Hookanson recalled in her affidavit, ''after about a year at Victor Neumann, Michael made significant improvements. When he was not acting out, he was a sweet, adorable and needy child. He was a joy to be around and was very fond of the staff.''

Maybe the most salient thing about Bies is the interplay of all of these things -- his mental illness, his intellectual liabilities, his upbringing -- his story, which is actually something more, or at least different from, a clinical diagnosis. In some ways, the label of mental retardation seems like the least salient thing about him, the least relevant to whatever claim he might have on our mercy.

ven some of the public defenders eagerly making use of the Atkins decision sometimes wonder about the logic of it. ''Looking over some of the people on the row, there are people who, O.K., are probably not mentally retarded -- maybe they have I.Q.'s of 80,'' David Bodiker, the Ohio public defender, says. ''They have had horrible lives, they flunked out of school, but they don't quite make the grade, so to speak. And you wonder why should there be that distinction? I'm looking down my list of guys on the row, and I see, for instance, David Allen: I.Q. 82. Poor grades. Born premature. Psychiatric problems dating back to age 8. Reginald Brooks. He had an I.Q. of 77 at one time, then 89. Now he's probably got about 91. His problem is more in mental health -- schizophrenia.''

Bodiker finds it troubling that some inmates perform better on I.Q. tests the longer they've been in prison, which means that while they still suffer from cognitive deficits, they may no longer technically qualify as mentally retarded. Partly they do better because they may be taking an I.Q. test for the fourth or fifth time, reaping the benefits of a practice effect. But more likely, their improved scores reflect the fact that, as Caroline Everington, a forensic mental retardation expert, puts it, ''in prison, many of them are living in a stable environment for the first time in their lives.'' In the strictest sense, these prison-improved scores are unimportant: the focus of the Atkins decision is on a person's mental status at the time of the crime, not the time of execution. And I.Q. scores must be backed up with tests of a person's ''adaptive functioning.'' But in a broader way they do matter: they remind you that the elements that make up a diagnosis of mental retardation are fungible. The reasons for that are perfectly legitimate, but when the diagnosis matters in the way it does here, it becomes a little scary.

When it comes to lesser crimes, the mentally retarded are not, as a class, held less accountable. (Evidence of an individual's mental liabilities can be presented during the trial and at sentencing and may influence a jury to exculpate him or a judge to grant a more lenient sentence.) Why should it be only capital crimes -- by definition the most brutal or the most harmful to the commonweal -- that entitle a mentally retarded defendant to a lesser punishment? ''Surely culpability, and deservedness of the most severe retribution,'' Scalia points out in his dissent, ''depends not merely (if at all) upon the mental capacity of the criminal (above the level where he is able to distinguish right from wrong) but also upon the depravity of the crime -- which is precisely why this sort of question has traditionally been thought answerable not by a categorical rule of the sort the Court today imposes upon all trials, but rather by the sentencer's weighing of the circumstances (both degree of retardation and depravity of crime) in the particular case.'' But for many people who favor the Atkins decision, the good of saving some of the condemned from execution supersedes almost all other concerns.

If you are for the death penalty and against the Atkins decision, as Scalia is, then you can argue for individualized justice, not categorical exemptions. If you are against the death penalty, you can be enthusiastic about Atkins because it saves people, and people who it is possible to think of as uniquely vulnerable -- or you can be skeptical about Atkins. You can be skeptical, in the first place, about the classes of people it leaves out. Why the mentally retarded and not the schizophrenic, whose particular demons and deficiencies make them, if anything, less able to conform to the law than people with low I.Q.'s?

Douglas Mossman, the forensic psychiatrist, argues that there are other groups who should, in the wake of Atkins, be considered for exemption from the death penalty as well -- people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or with low levels of serotonin that inhibit their impulse control, or with brain damage that does not qualify as mental retardation because it occurred as a result of an accident, stroke or other mishap when the person was older than 18. ''By declaring the execution of persons with one particular psychiatric diagnosis 'cruel and unusual punishment,' Atkins has opened a psychiatric can of worms,'' Mossman writes. ''Courts will have no choice but to consider whether other equally disabling mental conditions also deserve placement in a special legal and moral category.'' Indeed, equal protection doctrine would seem to argue fairly strongly for including other categories of mental disability. And yet if we proceed that way -- lopping off whole classes of people from consideration for the death penalty -- eventually we'll be left with only a very few deemed execution-worthy. How much better to abolish the death penalty openly and altogether than in what amounts to a kind of piecemeal, back-door fashion? As even Scalia admitted in his dissent, ''There is something to be said for popular abolition of the death penalty; there is nothing to be said for its incremental abolition by this Court.''

Just as there used to be a notion of rehabilitation that no longer has much purchase in our culture, there used to be an idea of repentance -- the idea that gave us the word ''penitentiary.'' When the brother of the murdered college boy Brian Muha gave his statement at Terrell Yarbrough's trial, repentance was what he spoke about. He did not believe that Yarbrough should die; he was a Catholic and did not believe in the death penalty. What he said missed a lot of the nuances, and important ones, about Terrell Yarbrough's cognitive weaknesses. But it did reveal something about how it is that even some people who believe in the presence of evil and whose loved ones have been touched by it, even some people who believe firmly in retribution, can still oppose capital punishment. ''The Bible tells us that only God will judge us,'' Chris Muha said to Yarbrough that day. ''But it also tells us to confront our brothers and their wrongdoing. And why should we do this? Because unless you change, you will not go to heaven. And in that sense, Terrell, we are in this salvation thing together. And anyone who makes excuses for you is not helping you get to heaven. Anyone who makes excuses does not ultimately care about your soul.''

Blameworthiness -- not whether someone did a deed or not, but the extent to which they are culpable for it -- is a complicated matter, a matter of whole pictures. It would be a relief, in a way, if a diagnosis like mental retardation always settled the question of how much to blame a guilty person, but it would leave so much out of the picture. And some of those things -- moral agency, the nature of the crime itself -- might be the very things we care about most.

Margaret Talbot is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at the New America Foundation.

Ayn Rand, in Spades

Ayn Rand, in Spades
By JOHN HODGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29BRIDGE.html

I'm walking our sushi order back to the cafe table at the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia when I notice that Adam Wildavsky is talking to a fan. His name is Kumar, a retired pharmaceutical rep from India by way of Ohio. He's a bridge player like Wildavsky, here for the Spring Nationals, and he's sitting in my seat.

Wildavsky, tall and gaunt with a trim brown beard, is listening to Kumar's questions, nodding placidly in a birdlike dip. He has attached his portable back-support pillow to his chair, as he does to every chair, because he spends most of his life sitting down. He is a computer programmer -- specifically, an adherent to a hyperefficient system called ''Extreme Programming'' -- and he is also one of the best bridge players in the United States. Kumar has just been eliminated from the Spring Nationals' main event, the Vanderbilt Knockout. Wildavsky's team, on the other hand, is moving on to Round 3 this afternoon.

''Kumar wants to know the secret to being a better bridge player,'' Wildavsky explains. His eyes gleam briefly, mischievously. ''Of course, you know what I told him.''

Of course, I do. The secret to success in bridge is also the secret to success in life, and anyone who meets Adam Wildavsky soon learns it.

As it happens, Wildavsky has enjoyed a lot of success in bridge recently. At the American Contract Bridge League's Fall Nationals, his team took the coveted Reisinger Board-a-Match. And then Wildavsky partnered with Ivar Stakgold, a bridge legend, to win the New York Regional Board-a-Match title.

These tournaments, like most major bridge wins, earned Wildavsky merely honor. Occasionally, though, tournament wins earn him cash. Wildavsky made $4,000 when he won the Bridge Pro Tour's New York Open on Dec. 27, 2002. After the win, he was quoted in a Pro Tour press release as saying, ''Prize money will attract younger players and hopefully revitalize the game.'' Then he added, somewhat mysteriously, ''Money is the root of all good.''

Attentive readers will recognize the quote: it's the keystone of Francisco D'Anconia's defense of capitalism in Ayn Rand's very long novel ''Atlas Shrugged.''

Adam Wildavsky is an Objectivist, a follower of Rand's controversial philosophy of staunch individualism, selfishness and unrestrained capitalism. Rand developed Objectivism, in part, to codify the ideal of the heroic man that had emerged in her fiction: a man who is unapologetically self-interested, dismissing all needless emotion and mystic hereafters, certainly anti-Communist, usually very tall and very gaunt, for some reason -- one who creates his moral worth through productive endeavor, be it the building of skyscrapers or railroads, the writing of very long novels or, presumably, the winning of major bridge competitions.

It is this heroic ideal that Wildavsky is trying to explain to Kumar at the Reading Terminal Market over sushi.

''One of Rand's basic premises is that man has free will,'' Wildavsky is saying, ''which is expressed primarily through a single choice: to think or not to think.''

''I know, I know,'' Kumar says. ''That is my problem. I think too much.''

''No!'' Wildavsky corrects him. You should always think, he says. Weak players, he says, follow ''bridge nursery rhymes'' -- and here he waggles his head, reciting, ''Second hand low, third hand high, fourth takes if he can'' -- instead of looking objectively at what the situation requires.

When discussing the advantage that his Objectivism brings him, Wildavsky often returns to the same motif: reason must trump emotion. This is more than an abstract motto. It is, as he plays, a constant, rigorous, exhausting inner struggle: to resist guesswork and gut reaction and ''spacing out,'' to analyze each hand in itself, each bid, play after play after play.

At first glance, bridge isn't the most obvious game for an Objectivist. A deck of cards is divided equally between two partnerships -- North/South, East/West -- each of which works to win a set number of tricks above a book of six tricks. The number of tricks and the trump suit are established before play by an auction. A player bids four hearts, for example, if he thinks he and his partner can make 10 tricks with hearts as the trump suit.

But the bids and their sequence are also an intricate code through which each player tries to reveal the contents of his hand to his partner. This is not a lonely, tall, gaunt genius building a skyscraper or even conquering a crossword puzzle. It is an intimate relationship of trust and mutual reliance. Some partnerships last longer than many marriages. More end in anger; the game is notorious for its bad breakups among partners, its ability to inspire frustration, recrimination and rage. Kumar says that he began playing bridge 30 years ago with his wife. And then, with an apologetic glance weighted with bad memories, he gently explains, ''I am sorry to say I have difficulty playing with her now.''

But Wildavsky is always tranquil, always silent. He refuses to rehash hands at the table or to listen as other partners chew one another out, an uncommon deaf-muteness he has named ''the Keller Convention,'' after Helen Keller. It wasn't always this way. He used to be a ''terror'' at the table, he tells me. Then he stopped looking at the game emotionally and started looking at it Objectively. ''Selfishiness is what led me to the idea that it would be profitable to be nice to my partner,'' he says.

It most likely helps that his partner in the Vanderbilt, Doug Doub, is also an Objectivist. Counting himself, Wildavsky estimates there are three Objectivists among the 100 top players in the United States.

Meanwhile, at the Reading Terminal Market, Kumar thanks Wildavsky, shaking his hand vigorously. ''I learned a lot.''

''You're welcome,'' Wildavsky says. He has offered Kumar some additional recommendations from the Rand oeuvre. ''Let me know how you enjoy 'The Virtue of Selfishness,''' he says as Kumar departs.

dam Wildavsky, 43, has been playing bridge since he was in high school in Oakland, Calif. He continued playing at M.I.T., where he studied computer science. It was there that someone gave him a copy of ''Atlas Shrugged,'' and he has been an Objectivist ever since.

But it is only recently that he has been publicly weaving together his two passions, dropping references to Rand into an article for Bridge Today, where he is an occasional contributor, and crediting Objectivism for his success when speaking to the bridge media. In December, his Reisinger win was lauded by Alan Truscott, bridge columnist for The New York Times, as ''a triumph for the Objectivism of Ayn Rand.''

But the response has not always been positive. Last year, Wildavsky released a manifesto of sorts, a 300-word mission statement now posted on his Web site. ''I owe a large portion of my success in bridge, and in life, to novelist Ayn Rand,'' it begins. ''To be successful a bridge player . . . should always have a reason for his actions. Rand put it succinctly -- 'Emotions are not a means of cognition.'''

Hardly inflammatory stuff, yet the first time Wildavsky deployed his essay within the bridge community -- via the electronic newsletter of the bridge Web site, okbridge.com -- the letters swiftly followed.

''Have no doubt, whatever Adam Wildavsky may tell you, that the teachings of Ayn Rand are extremist,'' wrote a reader named Brian Meadows.

''The 47 lines about Ayn Rand should never have appeared,'' echoed Stefan (no last name given), with a bridge player's characteristic exactitude. ''I'm disgusted.''

But the heroic man does not require acceptance. Consider ''Atlas Shrugged.'' After Francisco D'Anconia delivers his ''Money is the root of all good'' speech to a party of government moochers, fey intellectuals and moneyed socialists, he leaves them all to rejoin his fellow titans of industry and science in a place called Galt's Gulch. The gulch is the Objectivist utopia, a refuge for the heroic thinkers whom the world has rejected. In many ways it resembles a bridge tournament: thick with C.E.O.'s (Warren Buffett is a renowned player of the game, and Bill Gates made an appearance at last year's World Championships in Montreal) and as far away from the real world as it gets.

On this day, utopia is the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott, site of the league's Spring Nationals -- more than 100 events over 10 days, drawing more than 5,000 players. They play in two four-hour sessions a day. The elite then head up to the suite of the league's president for cocktails and a deli platter. Many more gather at the hotel bar for drinks and the constant reliving of hands.

Adam Wildavsky strides into this world on long legs, with a box of clementines from the Reading Terminal Market that he drops off in his room before heading down to the fifth floor, the bridge floor. (Wildavsky is on the Zone diet. He wants to lose a few, he says, though he looks plenty skinny to me. I guess we can all stand to be a bit gaunter.)

Wildavsky is joining his six-man team for the afternoon's play of the Vanderbilt. It's the same team that won the Reisinger, including Doub. Today, they're playing against a five-handed team that includes one of the best players from Argentina and also one of the famous Hackett twins from England, Justin or Jason, Wildavsky isn't sure which.

One of Rand's favorite adjectives is ''indifferent'': it describes a kind of Objectivist Zen state of selfish focus, and it describes Wildavsky perfectly. He seems beatifically clueless of the anxiety that permeates the hotel. He introduces me to a man who is apparently one of the top players in the world, a short man with angry eyes and gray hair. The man seems frustrated that I have not heard of him and shakes my hand reluctantly. His hand feels angry somehow, clawlike and clammy, and his mind is clearly elsewhere: on the game to come or maybe some game from years ago. Bridge players are a haunted lot, possessing long memories, particularly for the hands that went wrong. They have their own language, a swingy patois full of metaphors and eponyms that sounds like a cross between a science textbook and scat.

(Consider this passage from Edgar Kaplan and Alfred Sheinwold's ''How to Play Winning Bridge'': ''Five-card majors, pre-emptive jumps, weak two-bids, controlled psychics -- all have been widely used by many others. We are advocates not of the separate ingredients but of the whole concoction.'')

Wildavsky introduces me to Ivar Stakgold, his friend and partner from the New York Regional. Ivar resembles a distinguished foreign character actor, the kind of guy who would be getting the Max von Sydow roles were he not busy being an applied mathematician and bridge legend. ''I knew Edgar Kaplan when I was a young man,'' he says. ''I contributed a little bit to the Kaplan-Sheinwold system. You know it? Yes. Anyway, in 1997, Edgar Kaplan passed away.'' He pauses, a little sadly. ''There was a memorial service, and I said a few words, as people will do. And this young man,'' he says, indicating Wildavsky, ''approached me and said he was interested in playing the Kaplan-Sheinwold system, which not many people were doing. I had not played serious bridge for years. It was a sad event, but something good came out of it. He brought me back into this terrible world.''

Later, I will ask Wildavsky about this story. Why did he invite Stakgold to be his partner? Was it gratifying to bring someone of Stakgold's caliber back to bridge? In an e-mail message, Wildavsky scolds me for my sentimentalism. Kaplan-Sheinwold experts are hard to come by, he writes, especially ones that play well. ''Look for the selfish motive!'' he instructs.

When Wildavsky gets his cards, he leans back against his portable back pillow and tries to get his legs under the stubby little table. There is a moment of study and rearranging of his hand. Then, with a decisive inner nod, he sits up, gently arching his head and neck forward. Bidding begins, but it is silent -- each player indicating his bid or his pass by pulling the appropriate laminated card from a little box mounted to his right. Each player shows his bid card -- one spade, say, or two no-trump or pass -- then places it face up on the table. There are perhaps two-dozen tables in this sectioned-off bit of ballroom, and for the course of the tournament, the room is full of the airy shuffling of bid cards, punctuated by the puff of an asthma inhaler, a call for the card caddy or one partner quietly chastising another in between games. Wildavsky and Doub are playing against Michael Polowan and the Hackett twin -- Jason, it turns out.

All is going smoothly until Hackett pulls out the stop card, indicating he is going to skip a level of bidding. Wildavsky waits 10 seconds and then shows his pass card. He does this because he knows the rules, and the rules say he has to wait 10 seconds. But Hackett thinks that Wildavsky waited too long, and he raises his hand to call the director.

Bridge is at once gentlemanly self-policing and deeply suspicious. You can't sigh funny or scratch your nose or wait a second too long, or else you risk being accused of sending ''unauthorized information'' to your partner. You must aspire to an even, expressionless tempo -- a kind of robotism that, at later levels, is enhanced by screens that prevent partners from seeing one another, requiring them to pass their bids through a small hole, like secret messages between prisoners in adjoining cells.

The director comes over. The players hunch and whisper their recollections of what happened, a quick Rashomon of silent seconds counted, who did what when. Finally the director determines the delay will not affect the outcome. Wildavsky and Doub end up winning the session, helping their team to a net gain of 37 International Match Points.

Some people get angry when the director is called on them. But Wildavsky doesn't seem to mind at all. That's exactly what should happen, he tells me later. It is when people are afraid to call the director that the system doesn't work.

And Wildavsky likes systems -- especially, it seems, if they are somewhat antique, like Kaplan-Sheinwold, or a little counterintuitive, like extreme programming, which boosts efficiency by having two programmers work the same problem at once. (''That's something of a tough sell to management,'' he says.) And he seems to like systems that are clear and final, even if they are occasionally opaque to the outsider, like bridge and like Objectivism.

Objectivists believe in absolute laws, whether of nature or of morality. This is Ayn Rand's promise that ''A is A'': up is not down, good (capitalism) is not evil (Communism), unemployment insurance promotes unemployment, three hearts cannot be bid after three spades and selfishness trumps all.

Although sometimes it doesn't. Later that evening, Wildavsky and Doub allow their opponents to make a three no-trump contract, and at the end of the night, they are out of the running. It's not easy to watch the team take in the surprise and sadness of this unexpected defeat. There is some sullenness, some verging-upon-tears. But Wildavsky bobs gently from toe to toe, a little shaken but generally calm.

''If I played perfectly every time,'' he says, ''what would be the point?''

Wildavsky seems to have forgotten all about the loss when I meet him later at the hotel bar. ''Objectivism is a reality-based philosophy,'' he will say later. ''We realize that time only moves in one direction. Whatever is in the past is not undoable.''

We run into Wildavsky's fellow bridge players Sheri Winestock and Uday Ivatury, who are having cocktails and talking about Objectivism. Winestock is married to Fred Gitelman, another Objectivist bridge player, and together they write and distribute bridge educational software through their business, Bridge Base.

Ivatury, meanwhile, is a computer programmer who helped found the Pipeline with James Gleick (also a bridge player) and is not any kind of Objectivist. In fact, Ivatury openly, smilingly, claims that he is trying to deconvert Winestock away from right-wing fanaticism. He has been needling Gitelman and Winestock about Bridge Base: if they're such hard-line capitalists, why are they giving this program away?

''Uday doesn't understand that selfishness is not always about money,'' Winestock says. ''The game I love is dying. If I help bring people into the game, that is good for me.''

Wildavsky nods. ''You can do things for other people so long as it's not a sacrifice.''

Some weeks later, I press Wildavsky on a similar point: if Objectivism truly gives him an edge in bridge, why share it with the competition? He gives me two answers, both of which I think are true. First: ''I just decided that my philosophy is the most important thing that makes me what I am, and it couldn't hurt to let people know.''

The second explanation: it has to do with Sept. 11 and the sense that day provoked in Wildavsky that our society is under attack, not just from collectivism within but also from a kind of destructive nihilism without. ''It's more clear now that the survival of Western civilization is at stake,'' he says. A more Objectivist world would be a better place for Adam Wildavsky to live, and that would trump whatever advantage he might lose in bridge.

At the end of the night, back at the bar, Wildavsky runs into Michael Polowan, Jason Hackett's partner during the controversy over the 10-second delay. ''I want to give you some advice,'' Wildavsky says. ''There is a rule that I don't think Jason understands.'' Wildavsky goes on to explain that under A.C.B.L. rules, he was correct to wait the full 10 seconds and posits that perhaps Jason was mistakenly following the European rules on waiting. Polowan rolls his eyes slightly, probably thinking, sour grapes. But I don't think that's it at all. As a bridge player, as a programmer, as a philosopher, Wildavsky is always fine-tuning the system. Why? Look for the selfish motive.

John Hodgman's last article for the magazine was about Alexander Payne, the movie director.

A Nation of Grinders

A Nation of Grinders
By DAVID BROOKS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29ESSAY.html

We're at an odd cultural moment. There's no dominant image of business success. Neither dot-com millionaires nor the Wall Street whizzes seem alluring. The risk-taking, push-the-envelope executives no longer inspire confidence. The charismatic C.E.O.'s just seem like overplayed blowhards. And yet nobody gets inspired at the thought of being the safe, secure, highly anal Organization Man.

So how about Abraham Lincoln as the defining capitalist figure for our age? As the Yuppie was to the 80's, as the dot-commer was to the 90's, maybe Abraham Lincoln could be for the coming decade. Not the great statesman Lincoln -- the president Lincoln -- but rather the middle-aged corporate-lawyer Lincoln, the guy who in the 1850's represented railroads and banks, the guy who traveled relentlessly around the legal circuit handling cases big and small, the guy who, when he made some money, added a second floor to his house so his family could have more space, the guy whose ambition, as his law partner famously said, knew no rest. That middle-aged Lincoln represents all the sometimes homely but invariably dreamy pushers who are what American striving is really all about.

Lincoln began life with high anticipations of glorious success. When he was young, he had a little boat, which he kept on the Ohio River. One day a pair of travelers asked him if he would row them to the middle of the river, where they could intercept a steamboat. Lincoln took them out, and as the men boarded the steamboat, they each threw a silver half-dollar into the bottom of his boat. ''You may think it was a very little thing,'' Lincoln later recalled, ''but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day. . . . The world seemed wider and fairer before me.''

He became a fervent believer in social mobility and came to see, as the historian Allen C. Guelzo has pointed out, that self-transformation is almost a moral responsibility for the aspiring American.

Many people start out like Lincoln, fervently convinced that easy and quick riches lie just over the horizon. Four-fifths of American college students, according to a Jobtrak.com study, believe it will take them 10 years or less to achieve their career goals. Three-quarters of U.S. college students expect to become millionaires, and 52 percent expect to have achieved this stratospheric status by the time they are 50.

But success didn't come quickly for Lincoln, just as it doesn't come quickly for most people. Recent research has indicated that the United States is, and always has been, a less mobile society than we think. Americans do move upward as we age. Only 5 percent of the individuals who were in the bottom income quintile in 1975 were still there in 1991. But an individual's mobility is likely to be measured in decades, not years. We rise as we age and as we get gradual promotions, not because we strike it rich. That's what happened through most of Lincoln's life. The Lincoln of the 1850's was prosperous and apparently a brilliant lawyer, but he felt that his greatest dreams were not realized. And that, too, is not atypical. For every Bill Gates and Jack Welch, there are millions of men and women doing well but not spectacularly, somehow not fulfilling the media image of corporate heroism.

They shouldn't worry. There is now a pile of books and articles correcting the distorted image of American capitalism that emerged during the Nasdaq bubble years, when instant fortunes did seem like some normal part of life, and when success seemed to be based on the ability to have a great visionary breakthrough in identifying the next big thing.

Now things have calmed down. A book called ''Execution'' recently hit the top of the Wall Street Journal best-seller list, about the need to actually execute and finish your strategies, rather than just develop grand visions and capitalize in earth-shaking revolutions. ''Leading Quietly'' hit the New York Times best-seller list, celebrating executives who avoid headlines and do not follow the leadership secrets of George S. Patton or Attila the Hun. When they find themselves with no good options, these businesspeople stall, play for time and muddle through. The most successful book along these lines is Jim Collins's ''Good to Great.'' Collins and his research team investigated companies that outperformed the overall stock market from the 1970's through 1990's by anywhere from 300 to 1,800 percent, crushing the performance of the Nasdaq superstars. It is hard to imagine a less fabulous list -- Walgreens, Kroger, Pitney Bowes.

The culture at these companies encourages the Lincolnian virtues of simplicity and humility. In these places it would be socially unacceptable for an executive to portray himself as an intellectual pioneer. ''Throughout our research,'' Collins says, ''we were struck by the continual use of words like 'disciplined,' 'rigorous,' 'dogged,' 'determined,' 'diligent,' 'precise,' 'fastidious,' 'systematic,' 'methodical,' 'workmanlike,' 'demanding,' 'consistent,' 'focused,' 'accountable' and 'responsible.' '' These are the classic, staid but unexciting bourgeois virtues. One executive at Wells Fargo described Carl Reichardt, then the C.E.O., this way: ''If Carl were an Olympic diver, he would not do a five-flip twisting thing. He would do the best swan dive in the world, and do it perfectly over and over again.'' Success, for most Americans, really is built upon the slow, steady, boring accumulation of accomplishments and money.

Most successful people, like Lincoln, also have a core faith in the moral power of hard work. ''I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition,'' Lincoln once told an audience of immigrants. ''Labor is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn,'' he declared during one of his debates with Stephen Douglas.

This work ethic is different from what you might call the creativity ethic or the lifestyle ethic. It emphasizes neatness, regularity and order. Sometimes you'll walk into a grocery store in rural America and you will notice that every can on the shelves is aligned to almost millimeter-width precision, and the floors are clean and stain free. Here is some stocker, in a supposedly dead-end job, committed to work done precisely and well. Here is some Horatio Alger hero for our day.

We think of the Horatio Alger stories as rags-to-riches tales. In fact they are not. The Alger heroes are almost never plucky young boys who become millionaires or moguls. Instead, most Alger stories are about plucky young boys who become middle-class clerks or midlevel executives. They achieve respectability, not riches. Alger would have insulted the democratic sensibilities of his readers if he had concluded his books with his heroes sitting around in grand palaces, employing servants. In most parts of the country, this suspicion of aristocracy still lingers. Lincolnesque plow horses are suspicious of quick wealth just as they are suspicious of great wealth. The goal is respectability and the self-esteem that comes with being seen as a winner in the game of life.

The sad thing for those of us who write about these people is that many of the hard-working people who make up the ranks of the gradually successful are flamboyance vacuums. Often they are far more interested in working and making money than in consuming and spending money. According to research that Thomas J. Stanley did for his book ''The Millionaire Next Door,'' written with William D. Danko, 70 percent of millionaires have their shoes resoled and repaired rather than replaced, and the average millionaire spends about $140 on a pair of shoes, which doesn't get you Guccis. After Visa and MasterCard, the most common credit cards in the millionaire's wallets are charge cards for Sears and J.C. Penney. In that 1996 study, Stanley and Danko reported that the typical millionaire paid $399 for his most expensive suit and $24,800 for his or her most recent car or truck, which is only $3,800 more than what the average American spent.

In other words, they shop the way most Americans shop, in that confused hierarchy-busting manner the market researchers now call rocketing. They spend lots of money on a few items they really care about -- their barbecue grills or their lawnmowers -- and then they go downmarket to Wal-Mart to buy most of the other stuff they don't care about. This isn't upper-class consumption or even relentlessly middle-class consumption. It's mixed-up no-class consumption.

In this, as in so many respects, people who live in Manhattan or Los Angeles or San Francisco or even Dallas have to keep reminding themselves that their experience is not typical. In most places in America, there are no massive concentrations of rich people and hence no Madison Avenue boutiques, no fine art galleries, no personal shoppers. There is just the country club, and certain social pressures to be just this affluent, to prove you are a success, and no more so.

In the land of the plow horses, wealth is acceptable because it is legitimized by the creed of social mobility, which in many ways originated with Lincoln and the Whig Party, of which he was a member for most of his career. According to this creed, affluence is admired because it is the product of hard work, and it does not corrupt because you continue to work even when you don't have to anymore. According to this creed, social mobility is the saving fire that redeems society. Social mobility opens up horizons because people can see wider opportunities and live transformed lives. Social mobility reduces class conflict because each person can build his own fortune, rather than taking from the fortunes of others. Social mobility unleashes creative energies and keeps everything new and dynamic. It compensates for inequality, because the family that is poor today may become richer tomorrow. It is the very essence of justice, because each person's destiny is somehow related to the amount of talent and effort he or she pours into life. The purpose of government is to ensure that there is, to use Lincoln's words, ''an open field and a fair chance'' so that everyone can compete in the race of life.

This is the sensible, steady and admirable ethic of American life. And people who hew to this ethic are still rewarded. If you get an education, get married and stay married, the odds are overwhelming that you will rise. If you migrate here from a developing country, and if you work hard, the odds are pretty good that you and your children will enjoy brighter and more open futures.

But, of course, in our own lives few of us are entirely sensible. And neither was Lincoln. While he was plodding upward, he still harbored dreams of greatness, and suddenly in the late 1850's fate plucked him up and sent him suddenly to the pinnacle. In the meantime, he was building the spiritual and moral resources that enabled him to face the greatest crisis any American has ever faced.

As many studies have by now documented, success is surprisingly loosely correlated with happiness. The most delicious moments in life are often not the ones experienced in the big houses or at the vacation resorts. They are experienced in the modern-day equivalent of Lincoln's boyhood boat on the Ohio River, with the two silver half-dollars floating toward you, opening up visions of a future life that is limitless and fair.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek.

Friendship Envy

Friendship Envy
By ANN PATCHETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29WWLN.html

There is a kind of friend that women make in college and through our 20's that for many of us becomes one of life's most important relationships. Unlike in grade school and high school, where you wind up friends with the girl who sits next to you on the bus or the one you're thrown together with in gym, these are the friends we truly choose. Separated from our families, we decide we can make a family of our own. These new sisters are the recipients of the enormous energy and time we have to pour into relationships. The idea is simply this: if you talk to someone long enough, sooner or later you'll know everything about her.

It was this very maelstrom of talk, this bright and complicated intimacy, that first caught me up in ''Sex and the City,'' whose final season commenced last Sunday night. I do not know people who dabble in this show. You love it, you hate it, or you don't have cable. Those of us who love it avoid travel and dinner parties on Sunday nights. For me, it also means going over to someone's house to watch it because I don't own a television. (I have only one show.) People who do not love it complain that it isn't realistic, and a woman who writes a weekly newspaper column could never afford all of those fabulous clothes, and besides, where exactly does she put them all?

An unrealistic clothing budget? Imaginary closet space? Well, that's just the start. It's the fact that they are constantly ordering a side of fries and still remain as thin as new spring leaves. It's the fact that they toss down cosmopolitans and never look puffy in the morning. They wear Manolo Blahniks as they click through the city streets and never complain about the torque on their knees. The ones who smoke never cough. And the sex? It can be shallow or meaningful or heart-stopping or boring, but it is always, always plentiful.

And while all of these unrealistic aspects prove to be enormously entertaining and nostalgic for those of us who have had to greatly curtail the cosmos and fries and have quit smoking and are monogamous and have achy knees after a scant 30 minutes in high heels, none of these unrealistic aspects even begin to approach the profoundly unrealistic aspect of this program that glues me to the screen on Sunday nights: here are four adult women who have continued the intensity of their friendships as if they were still college girls. No one moves away. No one is derailed by babies or relationships or work. They are at their table in the coffee shop every week, talking about the most intimate details of their lives, by which I do not simply mean sex. They talk about everything. They argue with one another and then make up again. Who has time to argue with their friends?

I used to think the core fantasy of ''Sex and the City'' was that you could have your ultimate soul bond in your friendships with women, while getting everything else you might need from a man. But as the program pulls into the home stretch, I don't think that's it at all. I think the deeper fantasy is having such close women friends and having the time to actually spend with them. It was indispensable in our 20's, but as I reach the final minutes of my 30's, I know it is almost impossible to make these kinds of friendships anymore. As women are bombarded with books about how to balance career and marriage and children, friendship is something that is squeezed in, not because it isn't a priority but because all those other priorities keep pushing it aside.

Of course, I still see my friends, but now we have an agenda. There's always a lot to catch up on, so we need to get down to business. The hallmark of the friendships of youth, like the ones that Carrie and her friends share, was that we had no business at all. Rare was the phone call that came with any reason attached to it. And that's my idea of real intimacy: it's not the person who calls to say, ''I'm having an affair''; it's the friend who calls to say, ''Why do I have four jars of pickles in my refrigerator?'' It is the minutia, the willingness to offer up every detail, that marks the bond between women, whereas men seem to prefer to bond over something rather than nothing, to have an activity when they get together. Do men ever have a three-hour lunch and then walk around looking in store windows as an excuse to just keep talking?

My best friend died six months ago. She was the person in my life I could say anything to, the person I would sit in a coffee shop with all day long whenever we would wind up in the same city. When we were young, we spent hours papering the bathroom walls of our graduate-school apartment with the torn-off covers of romance novels. We poured chamomile tea over each other's hair, trying to improve our highlights. We knew each other in a way that comes from having the kind of time that only the women on ''Sex and the City'' seem to have these days. So now I love the show even more, because it reminds me not of the way that Lucy and I lived our lives but of the fact that we were that close. I know that I will never have that much leisure for someone else again. I miss it, and I miss my friend.

Television entertains us with worlds we'll never have: better families, better love affairs, endlessly thrilling adventures that make the lives we live look dingy and small by comparison. But there are so many things to get done in a day, that rather than having real friendships, we are reduced to watching them. I'm glad this is the last season of ''Sex and the City.'' As great as the fantasy has been, I don't want to have a television show anymore. I need that extra half-hour for my friends.

Ann Patchett is the author of the novel ''Bel Canto,'' winner of Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction.

Latins Are Not Lousy Lovers

Latins Are Not Lousy Lovers
By JOYCE CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/magazine/29STYLE.html

I dreamed that I married Nacho Figueras.

I had met him only once, on a dusty afternoon, on a farm outside Buenos Aires. But the mark was deep: dark eyes, mop of lustrous hair, perfect bones, rider's build, cowboy walk. Every time he said ''polo'' (which was a lot), round and lovely in its Spanish pronunciation, I fell deeper into amor. I saw in him what Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke must have seen in Porfirio Rubirosa, what Gisele Bundchen once saw in Riccardino Mansur. I bet Camilla Parker Bowles's heart just flutters when she sees her aging yet still dashing prince alight from his pony, an honest and expensive sweat on his brow. In my dream, Nacho dropped on one knee in a paddock where horses grazed and told me, a consummate city girl who likes neither sports nor animals, that no one understood him but me.

Helen Lawrenson pronounced in Esquire in 1936 that Latins were lousy lovers. ''God knows,'' she wrote, ''the Cuban man spends enough time on the subject of sex. He devotes his life to it. He talks it, dreams it, reads it, sings it, dances it, eats it, sleeps it, does everything but do it.''

Well, what Lawrenson's Cubans think of sex, Nacho thinks of polo, except he actually does it -- a lot, and with passion. He says: ''Polo is a polo player's life. He eats it. He sleeps it. He dreams it.''

It has been six months since that afternoon on the farm, where these pictures were taken -- and my heart still skips a beat when I see Nacho in a Ralph Lauren ad. He is about to play in the Hamptons, where wives, girlfriends and players often bunk together.

Which made me wonder, With all these people around, is there any time for love?

As his longtime girlfriend, Delfina, looked on with the love-light in her eyes, Nacho said delicately, ''There are always private moments.''

And I knew, in the way a woman knows, that there was nothing lousy about Argentine polo players.

Israeli Forces Withdrawing From Part of Gaza

Israeli Forces Withdrawing From Part of Gaza
By JAMES BENNET with GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/international/middleeast/30MIDE.html

BEIT HANUN, Gaza Strip, June 29 — Under a moonless sky, Israeli troops broke down their checkpoints and drove their tanks out of this Palestinian hamlet late tonight, returning part of Gaza to Palestinian control after the three leading Palestinian factions declared that they were suspending violence.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the militant Palestinian groups, announced a three-month halt to attacks. After a day of internal bickering, Al Fatah, Yasir Arafat's mainstream faction, followed tonight with its own six-month cease-fire.

The factions set several conditions for Israel, including a halt to its killings of accused terrorists and a release of Palestinian prisoners.

Though as skeptical as the Palestinians, Israelis hoped today that they might be entering a period of calm, or even nearing the end of what some Israeli commentators called, perhaps prematurely, "the thousand-day war," a reference to the 33-month conflict. Officially, however, Israel dismissed the cease-fire as a dodge to safeguard terrorists.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, had pursued the truce as a way to re-establish Palestinian security control without having to combat Hamas immediately, fearing that he lacked political support for that confrontation. He hopes that his support will grow as the Israelis relinquish what by previous agreement are Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

"It's a beautiful feeling," said Fawzi Abu Jarad, 30, a local resident. He stood among a knot of men here tonight, solemnly watching as Israeli soldiers used chains and a hydraulic lift to hoist four waist-high concrete cubes that were blocking a road and load them onto a flatbed truck. "Our goal is not to see any occupation forces here, not to see any Israeli soldiers," he said.

There was none of the jubilation — none of the handshakes or hugging of soldiers — that accompanied Israel's withdrawal in 1994 from much of Gaza under the Oslo peace accord. This time, the Palestinians, like the Israelis, know from hard experience how quickly the fighting could start again and the soldiers and concrete blocks could return.

From the cockpit of an armored vehicle, a couple of soldiers waved before accompanying the truck toward a nearby military base at about 11:30 p.m.

A lone, giant Merkava tank that was still blocking Salahadin Road, the major east-west artery here, then spun around and followed, its treads clanking and the glare of its white spotlight splintering in the dust-filled air, as though in a fog.

An element of theater accompanied tonight's withdrawal. Their M-16's were at the ready, but the Israeli soldiers were nevertheless unusually indulgent of Palestinian cameraman, who swarmed around them and their armored machinery. In the glow of their own camera lights, the journalists pursued the Merkava down Salahadin Road, pursued in turn through the shadows by a few Palestinian boys, one of them waving a Palestinian flag.

The journalists noticed the boys. Their bubble of light stopped, then moved rapidly in the other direction until it enveloped the children and the cameras could come to bear on the green, red, black and white flag.

Though troops had sporadically raided this area of northern Gaza for months, they had been stationed here for only about 35 days, residents said. Israel said its soldiers were trying to prevent Hamas from continuing to fire crude rockets over Gaza's fenced boundary at Israeli towns.

Tonight, the army left behind a trampled landscape of uprooted orange orchards, smashed sewer lines and demolished houses.

The withdrawal from Beit Hanun was the first joint step under the terms of an international peace plan known as the road map, a step negotiated on Friday in anticipation of the truce. Muhammad Dahlan, the Palestinian security minister, and Amos Gilad, an Israeli general, agreed on how to begin putting the plan into action in Gaza. Field commanders met today to work out further details in the kind of pragmatic, face-to-face discussion that peace negotiators hope will rebuild trust.

A senior Israeli military official said Israel intended to move quickly to comply with its commitments, withdrawing more troops and easing travel restrictions on Palestinians by Monday or Tuesday.

Palestinian security forces began moving in tonight to assume responsibility for stopping rocket fire and other attacks on Israelis, should the cease-fire be violated. Palestinian and Israeli officers also plan to resume joint security patrols along Gaza's main north-south road.

Israeli forces will retain a large presence in Gaza, guarding the 7,000 Jewish settlers who live in several enclaves, among more than 1.2 million Palestinians.

While insisting on its own good will, each side said tonight that the new peace effort would succeed only if the other side abided by its commitments in the peace plan.

"These are important steps, and they pave the way for further progress on the road map," said Ziad Abu Amr, a Palestinian minister involved in negotiations with Hamas. "We hope Israel will not spoil it for us this time."

Gideon Meir, a senior official of Israel's Foreign Ministry, said: "Tomorrow there will be a new horizon. But success depends on the commitment of the Palestinian Authority to fighting terrorism."

In Washington, the White House said in a statement, "Anything that reduces violence is a step in the right direction." But it added: "Under the road map, parties have an obligation to dismantle terrorist infrastructures. There is more work to be done."

The cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal came as Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, wrapped up two days of talks with Palestinian and Israeli leaders to promote the peace plan. The plan seeks to establish a Palestinian state and a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace within three years.

In a meeting today with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his cabinet, Ms. Rice criticized a barrier fence that Israel is building against West Bank Palestinians. The barricade is being built generally along or to the east of the West Bank boundary, through Palestinian areas, and it jogs deep inside the West Bank at some points to encompass Jewish settlements.

Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 war, and since then it has settled more than 200,000 citizens there in a bid to hold on to the land. Palestinians regard the fence as a land grab.

Ms. Rice said the fence looked like a unilateral border, according to Israeli officials. But Mr. Sharon said it was strictly a security barrier, and officials indicated that construction would continue.

"In Israeli society, there's a broad consensus that the fence is a necessity to protect our citizens from suicide bombers," said Raanan Gissin, Mr. Sharon's spokesman. "As the prime minister said, we won't compromise on security issues."

The White House statement said that Ms. Rice had reiterated an invitation to Mr. Abbas from Mr. Bush to visit Washington, but that no date had been set.

Many previous peace efforts have been greeted by surges in violence. But this time, the pledges by the three Palestinian factions to suspend violence raised the possibility of a sustained period of calm.

"We declare that military operations against the Zionist enemy will stop for three months, starting from today," Hamas and Islamic Jihad said in a joint statement released in Gaza.

Al Fatah had sought the truce from the other groups, but in the end top officials of the faction balked in a dispute that stemmed at least partly from jealousy that Marwan Barghouti, a rising Fatah leader imprisoned by Israel, was receiving much credit for brokering the truce. Several Palestinian experts said Mr. Arafat was signaling that he remained in charge.

In the end, it was Mr. Arafat's office that gave the order tonight to Samir al-Mashharawi, a top Fatah official in Gaza, to release Al Fatah's statement.

While acknowledging that jealousy of Mr. Barghouti had played a role, Mr. Mashharawi said Fatah members were upset about the wording in the Hamas statement.

"Hamas said that resistance was the only strategy for them," he said in an interview in his Gaza City office tonight that was interrupted by the order from Mr. Arafat. "Fatah doesn't see it that way. For Fatah, all choices, including negotiation, are open."

Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which have always opposed peace negotiations with Israel, set no time frame for Israel to meet their demands, but said that if it failed to do so, "the enemy will bear the responsibility of what will result."

Mr. Gissin, Mr. Sharon's spokesman, put no stock in the militants' pledge. "We deal only with the Palestinian Authority," he said. "And for us, there is only one proper response concerning the terror organizations: They have to be completely disarmed and dismantled. We will not accept anything less."

Another faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said it would not join the declaration but would not violate the truce, according to Palestinian officials.

The senior Israeli military official who spoke of further planned troop withdrawals said that Israel still had dozens of active warnings about possible Palestinian attacks and that instructions to halt violence had not filtered down through the Palestinian ranks. But he said Palestinian security forces in the West Bank had stopped at least two planned attacks against Israelis in recent days.

Alongside the simmering anger of Gazans at Israel is a sense of exhaustion with a conflict that has brought them a great deal of pain. The rockets fired from here by Hamas have, in a sense, wound up doing far more damage in Beit Hanun than in Israel, by giving Israel what many Palestinian considered a pretext to invade.

Among those quietly watching the Israelis depart tonight was Tawfik Bansh, 25. "My brother was killed here," he said.

He said his brother, Rafik, 20, had been trying one night to sneak into Israel without a work permit. Watching the Israelis leave, Mr. Tawfik said, "I'm happy, because I don't want to lose another brother."

'Living History': The Real Hillary

'Living History': The Real Hillary
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/books/review/29DOWDOT.html

LIVING HISTORY
By Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Illustrated. 562 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $28.

Living History'' is neither living nor history. But like Hillary Rodham Clinton, the book is relentless, a phenomenon that's impossible to ignore and impossible to explain.

Her memoir does not fascinate with its dubious Monica revelations. Hillary was a college intern in Washington herself, under much less erotically charged circumstances, working for Representatives Gerald Ford and Melvin Laird. She dispatches the pesky Monica as quickly from her story as Bill should have from his study. It's far more interesting to know that Hillary Rodham was president of her high school's Fabian fan club. That explains a lot.

Poor Bill Clinton. He's trying to deal with Osama bin Laden and he's got a bunch of angry women on his case, and a sex-obsessed special prosecutor. He's like Ethan Frome, a guy who just wants to take a joy ride on a sled, and ends up getting stuck for life in a cramped cabin with the wife he betrayed and his now irritating and ubiquitous former dalliance.

Bill is bookended in history by Monica's plea to him in a note: ''I need you right now not as president, but as a man'' and Hillary's explanation of why she stuck with him: ''As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill's neck. But he was not only my husband, he was also my president.'' It makes you wonder whether Hillary would have forgiven Bill if he were merely her United States trade representative.

This book is important not because of the history Senator Clinton records, but because of the history she doesn't record, and what that airbrushing tells us about the history she aspires to shape. In her coda, she notes that she cannot give undisputed facts, only her own Rashomon tact: ''I am responsible for the opinions and interpretations expressed in this memoir. These pages reflect how I experienced the events I describe. I'm sure there are many other -- even competing -- views of the events and people I describe. That's someone else's story to tell.'' Like the dutiful student she is, Hillary, assisted by a team of helpers, has finished up her book first, so dawdling Bill will have to fit his ''competing views'' of events into his wife's ''interpretations,'' rather than vice versa.

Hers is not history in the Churchillian sense, but in the Carvillean sense -- campaign literature for the 2008 HILLARY! presidential campaign, with an ''acknowledgments'' section to hundreds of Ellen Jamesians from ''Hillaryland,'' as they called their cult-like universe, who are determined to see their warrior queen take back the White House from the hypermasculine and domestically Dickensian reign of the Bushies. She wows some people and others, as Ben Bradlee puts it, ''she bugs.''

When the graduating Hillary took a final swim in Lake Waban at Wellesley, the college's president, apparently still irritated over Hillary's fiery commencement speech, directed a security officer to confiscate the clothes and glasses she had left on the shore.

As a successful alpha female in an era when women are doing a lot of retro-cooing and clawing on ''The Bachelor,'' and when rampant ''blondenfreude,'' as The New York Times's Alessandra Stanley calls it, makes it treacherous for brainy, blond, controlling women to fly Icarus-high, Hillary followed a trajectory -- from being tormented by Al D'Amato to becoming Al D'Amato -- that is compelling.

But anyone who had hoped to gain greater insight into the weird codependent Clinton marriage or the sphinxlike senator may be disappointed. The language of the book is more dead than living, press-release soul-searching, not matching the poignant and painfully candid Katharine Graham memoir Senator Clinton said she was using as her model. Much of it is a travelogue, ranging from the puckish, when Boris Yeltsin serves Hillary soup with gelatinous moose lips floating on top, to the pedantic -- ''Bangladesh, the most densely populated country on earth, presented the starkest contrast of wealth and poverty I saw in South Asia.'' ''Living History'' aims to bury questions, not raise hackles. Unlike Dan Quayle, Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush in their memoirs, Hillary Clinton does not emphasize tartly settling scores with rivals or the press -- except for smacking Kenneth Starr, The Wall Street Journal over its ''spiteful'' editorials on Vince Foster that preceded his suicide and William Rehnquist for not curbing his ''ideological . . . partisan zeal'' with the Clintons and in the case of Bush v. Gore.

Her frictions with the Secret Service and the chief White House usher are glancingly mentioned. She notes that she knew she was not in totally friendly territory the night of the Inaugural when her pals, the Thomasons, found a black-humor note tucked under a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom: ''Dear Linda, I was here first, and I'll be back,'' the note said, and was signed, ''Rush Limbaugh.'' When the first lady came home after her father's funeral to find items in the bedroom askew, the chief usher informed her ''that a security team had searched all of our possessions to check for bugging devices and other breaches of security.'' (That's scary, but it's scarier when the Little Rock decorator Kaki Hockersmith or the television guru Tony Robbins show up as advisers.)

The revelations are so calculated and calibrated they might have been vetted by the pollster Dick Morris. She leaves out almost all mention of her husband's history of messing about (which, as David Maraniss writes in his biography of Bill Clinton, she worried about even before they were married, sending her father and brother to Arkansas to check up on him), so that her scene of being stunned over Monica plays more convincingly. By ignoring the trail of infidelities, she can ignore the marital dynamic caused by those infidelities, which ended up having seismic consequences for the Democrats in the 1994 election and the country.

Bill Clinton handed over huge chunks of responsibility to his wife on policy and appointments not only because he thought she was brilliant, but because he felt he owed her -- for giving up the career she could have had to become a ''lady lawyer'' in a place she didn't want to go (Arkansas), for taking

a name she didn't want to take (Clinton), for assuming a title she didn't like (first lady) and for putting up with humiliation she didn't deserve (Gennifer, Paula et al.).

When I asked one of Hillary's top health care deputies once why Bill hadn't insisted that his wife scale down the size of her health care plan, and warned her that the tactics of speed and secrecy might backfire, he replied the president felt too beholden to intervene: ''She has a 100-pound fishing wire around'' a delicate part of her husband's anatomy. In his book, the former presidential aide David Gergen said that he believed that President Clinton did not step in on health care because he did not dare to challenge Hillary after news reports that Arkansas state troopers fetched women for him.

What we cannot know from this book (since events are given other ''interpretations'' in other White House books) is whether Hillary was a gulping-for-air victim of her husband's affairs -- miserable, she is happy to include herself in the company of history's A-list victims, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela -- or an unflinching partner in combating the damage of such escapades, even the efforts by Clinton strategists to smear the women as ''cash-for-trash'' bimbos or delusional erotomaniacs.

When the Monica story broke, the president told Sidney Blumenthal That Woman was nicknamed ''the Stalker.'' Hillary told Sidney, as he later testified, that ''she was distressed that the president was being attacked, in her view, for political motives, for his ministry of a troubled person.'' Hillary's good friend, Charlie Rangel, told reporters that Monica had ''serious emotional problems'' and was ''fantasizing.''

If Hillary participated in the vivisection of young women she knew Bill had been involved with, it doesn't add luster to her portfolio, lavishly documented throughout this book, as someone who protects women and the vulnerable in society. It would mean she cares about women unless they get in the way of the Clintons' mission to help humanity, in which case they're expendable.

Hillary chafed at what she calls ''derivative'' power. During her husband's first presidential campaign, the uneasy realization hit her, when she got some stationery delivered with the ''Rodham'' dropped out of her name: ''Now I was solely 'the wife of,' an odd experience for me.'' She sent the stationery back, stat.

She acts willfully naive about her outsize influence over the president, as though she were just another West Wing official on the domestic side. She dismisses her role in the destruction of the veteran travel office staff members as an example of people trying too hard to please her after an offhand comment, like the time she said she liked Diet Dr Pepper and was deluged with it for years. ''I said to Chief of Staff Mack McLarty that if there were such problems'' with the travel office finances, ''I hoped he would 'look into it.' ''

I had dinner with her once during the 1992 campaign, in a revolving restaurant in Kentucky. She had a sly sense of humor, which she has never been able to incorporate into her public persona. In the book, she writes that she inherited her great laugh -- ''the same big rolling guffaw that can . . . send cats running from the room'' -- from her gruff, right-wing and loving dad, Hugh Rodham, who owned a drapery fabric business in Illinois. Her remarkable mother, deserted as a child, instilled in her the chutzpah that would allow her to triumph over feral assaults from the right, including a trifecta of attack books by blond conservative pundettes.

At our dinner, sipping white wine, Hillary talked about a job she had one summer sliming fish in a makeshift salmon factory in Valdez, Alaska. When she complained that some of the fish looked bad, the manager fired her. As she writes: ''Of all the jobs I've had, sliming fish was pretty good preparation for life in Washington.''

In her book, she drolly describes technicians setting up an interview at the White House with Barbara Walters; they ''bathed the room in a golden light so gentle and flattering that even the powdered-wig portrait of Benjamin Franklin above the fireplace seemed to glow with youth.''

At her best, she seems like Sarah Brown, the mission doll in ''Guys and Dolls,'' taken with a charming rake and trying to save the world, but fun if you'd get her out for a night in Cuba. (She tells a hilarious story about the State Department warning her to hide from Castro, who wanted to meet her, at Nelson Mandela's inauguration. ''I'd suddenly spot Castro moving toward me, and I'd hightail it to a far corner of the room,'' she writes.)

But Senator Clinton is also maddening. She will say she learned lessons from bad decisions but then often circle back to insist she was right all along. She resents the St. Hillary image (even as she talks often about the importance of prayer and Scripture in her life), but she can't confess to having a materialistic side that sometimes led her into inexplicably tacky choices, from her dealings with a dubious savings and loan operator in Arkansas to her $100,000 windfall in commodities to her attempts to avoid Senate ethics rules by negotiating an $8 million book advance and her agreeing at the end of her first ladydom to accept largesse from wealthy benefactors so she could buy china and silver for her post-White House life in an Embassy Row home.

''Hillary, though a Methodist,'' a top Clinton aide once explained to me, ''thinks of herself like an Episcopal bishop who deserves to live at the level of her wealthy parishioners, in return for devoting her life to God and good works.''

Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

Bush, Looking to His Right, Shores Up Support for 2004

Bush, Looking to His Right, Shores Up Support for 2004
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/national/30CONS.html

WASHINGTON, June 28 — A systematic effort by President Bush to enlist members of his party's conservative wing in the White House, and to champion touchstone conservative issues, has produced a unified base of support for him from this sometimes wayward faction of the Republican Party, conservative leaders say.

Mr. Bush's standing among conservatives going into next year's election appears more than strong enough to withstand the strains that have emerged in recent weeks over some of his policies, including his support for providing prescription drug coverage under Medicare and for expanding the child tax credit.

By any measure, Mr. Bush appears to have built up enough good will with his party's right wing to provide him significant latitude as he seeks to appeal to moderate voters by taking positions that might roil conservatives. Indeed, on one potentially pivotal matter — filling a Supreme Court vacancy, should one occur — conservative leaders say the president enjoys a level of trust that would allow him to nominate a candidate without unambiguously conservative credentials, avoiding an ideological battle that could harm his re-election efforts.

Mr. Bush's position among conservatives stands in marked contrast to the troubled relations his father endured with many of them when he lost his re-election bid in 1992.

Again and again in interviews, leading conservatives drew favorable contrasts with the first President George Bush, who endured a debilitating primary challenge from Patrick J. Buchanan, contributing to his defeat by Bill Clinton.

"It's night and day," said Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group. "Every group that this president has kept faith with, the previous president double-crossed."

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said: "In the first Bush administration, the conservatives were asked to be spectators — and it was hoped that they would applaud the action in the field. In this one, they have a president who wants them to be part of the team."

Mr. Bush's effort to tend to the conservative wing of his party has emerged as a crucial part of his early campaign preparations.

The Bush campaign has begun sending a representative to a meeting of conservative leaders that takes place in Washington every Wednesday, joining a delegation of as many as eight administration officials.

Party officials say Mr. Bush's advisers — starting with Karl Rove, his senior political adviser, and Ken Mehlman, his campaign manager — are now in regular contact with about 60 conservative leaders across the nation, discussing issues of concern to the White House and the re-election campaign.

Mr. Bush has named Ralph Reed, who first rose to prominence as executive director the Christian Coalition, as a senior member of his campaign team. Beyond that, Mr. Rove and Mr. Mehlman are viewed by conservatives as advocates for their point of view in the White House.

Asked about efforts to mobilize conservative support, Mr. Mehlman responded: "Ultimately good policy is good politics. This is a president who has strongly pushed numerous policies that appealed to a lot of different groups — including conservatives."

Many conservatives say Mr. Bush's alliance with their wing of the Republican Party is as solid as that enjoyed by Ronald Reagan. Some suggest it is even stronger.

To some extent, several argued, that is a benefit Mr. Bush is enjoying from following Mr. Clinton in the Oval Office.

"I think the strongest motivating factor out there that I see with gun owners and people who believe in the Second Amendment is that they can still taste eight years of Bill Clinton," said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association. "They don't ever want to go back to that."

Mr. Bush's White House has also embraced issues that many conservatives described as crucial to their support, starting with tax cuts (the issue that undid Mr. Bush's father with this group) and abortion, and also including national security and foreign policy.

"Just about every conservative is thrilled with a president who tells the U.N. to take a hike," said Nelson Warfield, a conservative strategist.

All this has given Mr. Bush some license to stray on other issues, particularly this long before Election Day. He has taken some positions that have stirred concern among his supporters, like his approval of the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, an increase in farm subsidies and the child tax credit measure.

"His fiscal record is appalling — spending is out of control," said Edward H. Crane, president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization. "The fiscal record of the Bush administration makes Clinton look downright responsible."

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative group, said Mr. Bush had been "one of the biggest-spending presidents we've had in 20 years." But, he added, "he has cut taxes, so politically that has protected him."

"A month ago, he passed this huge tax cut that I think is terrific — I mean, I'm thrilled by that — and now this month he's passing this preposterous prescription drug benefit, and I'm furious at him," Mr. Moore said. "But I can't get too angry with him because he passed this tax cut. That's the way this administration works."

Some conservatives said the real test of their relationship with Mr. Bush would come if there was a vacancy on the Supreme Court and Mr. Bush chose a candidate whose ideological credentials might be in doubt, like Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel.

Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, said, "There are two issues that are nonnegotiable for the base: the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage."

Mr. Connor praised Mr. Bush's record on abortion in particular, but said: "Everything he has done to date on the issue will pale in significance compared to the consequential nature of the Supreme Court nomination. If the president appoints another nominee like David Souter, all of that will be naught."

But other opponents of abortion said they had confidence in any judicial appointment Mr. Bush might make. "The president has made great selections on the Circuit Court, and I trust his judgment on the Supreme Court," said Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition.

Anti-abortion groups say they are already moving to make sure rank-and-file abortion opponents turn out solidly for Mr. Bush next year.

"What you'll probably see is pro-lifers trying to make sure that their fellow citizens, family friends, realize how bad at this point all of the Democratic president candidates are — they all support abortion on demand, with no limits," said Carol Tobias, the political director of National Right to Life.

In 1994, when conservatives led by Newt Gingrich took control of the House, there was concern that their time in power would be limited. Today, many conservatives say, American public opinion is shifting their way, so there is no reason to be impatient — or to pressure Mr. Bush into doing things before the election that might hurt him next year.

"The Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and the Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity," Mr. Norquist said. "So if this year the tax cut isn't the one we wanted — no biggie. There's a sense that we can afford to wait."

Fixing the Race Gap in 25 Years or Less

Fixing the Race Gap in 25 Years or Less
By STEVEN A. HOLMES and GREG WINTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/weekinreview/29WINT.html

The Supreme Court decision upholding affirmative action in university admissions seemed to carry an expiration date. "We expect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her 5-to-4 majority opinion last week.

While the justices have in the past said that affirmative action should not be used forever, never before has a justice placed a specific time limit on it. Having now done so, Justice O'Connor has raised tough questions, both broad and specific.

Are her views merely idle musings, or will they become an iron-clad legal principle? Should the goal be parity in graduation rates of white, black and Hispanic high school students? Or should it be equality in financing between poor school districts, which tend to have more minority students, and middle-class white ones? Can the gap between black and white students on the SAT be bridged in the next generation?

In The Chicago Tribune, Justice O'Connor said in a rare interview that the country can tackle many of these challenges. "I hope it looks as though we don't need artificial help to fill our classrooms with highly qualified students at the graduate level," she said. "And if we do our job on educating young people, we can reach that goal."

But closing the disparities in educational achievement and opportunities for college applicants across racial and ethnic lines will involve vociferous debate over the relative importance of school financing, social inequality and student study habits.

Statistics tell the story. On every major indicator of academic success — the SAT, the A.C.T. and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (given to elementary and secondary students) — the gap between white and minority students has persisted for decades. Though it narrowed somewhat on the national assessment exams from the 1980's through the early 90's, the divide has only widened since then.

"There is some serious heavy lifting to do before we get to the dream scenario Justice O'Connor is envisioning," said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and an assistant secretary of education in the Reagan administration.

Some liberals say the gap can be closed only by equalizing the amount of money spent on educating whites and minorities. The school districts that many blacks and Hispanics attend spend $902 less per student on average than mostly white districts, according to a national study conducted last year by the Education Trust, a group focused on closing the achievement gap.

To some degree, federal and state governments can, and do, try to fix this imbalance by sending more money to schools serving poor — and, by extension, disproportionately minority — students. Federal assistance for poor students is increasing, and state governments gave an average of $27 more per pupil to disproportionately minority schools in 2000 than to predominately white schools, though that hardly had a perceptible impact on the financing gap.

But even if federal and state lawmakers were bent on eliminating the financial discrepancies between white and minority districts, they couldn't have much affect. On average, states and the federal government have never accounted for more than 56 percent of schools' revenues over the last decade or so; the remainder has come from local sources, mostly property taxes. This financial structure makes parity unlikely at best.

And conservatives argue that the focus on financial parity misses the point, and point to some minority-dominated city school districts that have high spending per student but still lag well behind less flush districts, particularly in rural areas.

Moreover, educational parity may be linked to bigger, more complex economic factors. Most beneficiaries of affirmative action are middle-income. According to a study by Anthony Carnevale, vice president of the Educational Testing Service, 74 percent of students at the 146 most prestigious colleges and universities — where competition for admissions is most intense and where affirmative action is practiced — come from families in the top 25 percent of the nation's socioeconomic scale (as measured by income, educational attainment and occupations of the parents). Only 3 percent of the students at these highly selective schools come from the bottom 25 percent of the socioeconomic scale. As Lani Guinier, a law professor at Harvard University, puts it, "affirmative action is less an escalator up than it is a bridge across."

But even middle-class black and Hispanic children who are burdened with issues of crime, troubled homes and poor schools have not been able to close the test-score gap with their white counterparts.

"The gap persists across all income levels," said Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, who has written extensively on improving the academic achievement of black students. "We're talking about generations of habits in too many homes," said Mr. Hrabowski, who is black. "Unfortunately, reading is not the No. 1 priority as a habit. There is much more emphasis on television watching."

Both sides on the affirmative action issue agree on the need to close the education gap, but not much else. Some supporters of affirmative action hope that Justice O'Connor's 25-year time frame will protect affirmative action while the country makes headway in closing that rift.

But the decision last week does not invalidate laws in California and Washington State that ban the use of race in public university admissions, hiring and government contracting. Ward Connerly, the black California businessman who was the force behind passing those laws, has already vowed to make Michigan his next target.

Demographic pressures will also come into play. The Educational Testing Service estimates that from 1995 to 2015, the percentage of whites on college campuses will decline from 71 percent to 63 percent, while Hispanics will increase to 15 percent, from the current 11 percent, with blacks holding steady at 13 percent.

But with minorities making up a larger proportion of students going to college — and with the children of young immigrants approaching college age toward the end of Justice O'Connor's 25-year target — Hispanic and black parents may be clamoring even more forcefully that their children not be shut out of top schools.

In the end, the debate has not changed. Opponents of affirmative action will continue to say that such programs keep the country from focusing on what needs to be done — namely, helping minority students meet higher standards. The supporters of race preferences counter that the country cannot end affirmative action without first fixing the education system. All agree that unless a commitment is made — by society and minority families themselves — the old arguments will still be around in 25 years.

Lisa Navarette, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group, said, "If all we do over the 25 years is affirmative action, then we will still need affirmative action."

Crunching the Market's Numbers: Risk, Yes; Reward, Maybe

Crunching the Market's Numbers: Risk, Yes; Reward, Maybe
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/science/01MATH.html

While no one has discovered a soothsaying method to guarantee wealth in the stock market, the whims of millions of investors do produce robust patterns in the seemingly random price swings.

In this light, a market crash may seen as a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane, rather than collective human folly.

Dr. John Allen Paulos, a mathematics professor at Temple, lost so much in WorldCom stock that he declines to say exactly how much.

"Substantial," he said. "Leave it at substantial."

Dr. Paulos, author of "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," may recoup some of his money in his latest book, "A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market." In it, he recounts his investing travails and explains the mathematical underpinnings of markets that he should have known better.

As in his earlier books, Dr. Paulos writes about hard numbers and fuzzy emotions and how the hard numbers can deceive the emotions.

"The point of the book is to impart these little nuggets of insight," Dr. Paulos said, "so people can have a better feel for the logic, the conceptual way of the stock market. There's a value in understanding."

One simple example he offers is of two people, Henry and Tommy, betting on the flipping of a fair coin. Henry gets a point for each time the coin comes up heads; Tommy gets a point for tails.

Since the coin is fair, each is equally likely to win the contest. But that does not mean that each will lead in the cumulative score half of the time.

Rather, it is much more probable that one of them will hold the lead through 96 percent of this coin-flipping contest. Given a large number of flips — say 1,000 or so — one will likely, by chance, open up a significant lead and, because the coin is fair, maintain that lead. Even in this game of pure chance, Dr. Paulos writes, it is tempting to laud the winner for his prowess.

Stock pickers, too, sometimes succeed through luck, Dr. Paulos said.

Dr. Paulos also offers an example of how an investing strategy can produce phenomenal returns on average, but leave most of its practitioners almost broke. Going back to the late 1990's, he imagines buying the initial public offering of a new company every week, selling the stock at the end of the week, then using the proceeds to buy and sell another I.P.O. the next week. For simplicity, assume that half of the I.P.O's increase 80 percent in their week of trading and half of them drop 60 percent.

Start with $10,000. After two weeks, there are four equally likely outcomes for this strategy: both stocks gain (and the $10,000 investment jumps to $32,400); the first stock gains, the second drops (ending with $7,200); the first drops, the second gains (again producing $7,200); and both stocks drop (leaving just $1,600). Note that three of the four outcomes result in the investor's losing money, yet the average result ($32,400 + $7,200 + $7,200 + $1,600 / 4) is $12,100, a healthy gain.

Continue this strategy over the course of a year, and that disparity between average gains and likely losses widens. The average final value of the $10,000 investment is $1.4 million, but the most likely result for investors is that the $10,000 has dwindles to $1.95.

What seems to be a paradox arises from the fact that most anyone can lose the $10,000, while the few very big winners bring the average up.

In an article in the journal Nature in May, researchers at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that stock prices follow a distribution, known as a power law, that is almost identical to that of earthquakes.

"Financial earthquakes and earthquake earthquakes are perfect analogs for one another," said Dr. H. Eugene Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University.

For mathematical simplicity, most calculations of investment risk assume that the fluctuations follow a distribution known as gaussian, even though it is not a perfect fit. For small fluctuations, the difference is insignificant, but a power law indicates that large swings are more common than are indicated by a gaussian distribution. "It lets you quantify the risk," Dr. Stanley said, but "it does not tell you at all when the earthquake occurs."

Dr. Xavier Gabaix, a professor of economics at M.I.T. and another author of the Nature paper, said the power law distribution of fluctuations arises because the mix of stock traders follow a similar distribution, from the multitudes of individual small investors to a few very large investment companies.

While some have suspected for years that stock market fluctuations follow a power law, the new research shows that stock indices in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Europe all follow the same law, Dr. Stanley said. The researchers have found indications it may not hold for one market that operates under markedly different rules, Dr. Stanley said.

But he said he wouldn't use the new knowledge for personal profit.

The first — and last — company he invested in was Xerox. "I bought it at its all-time high," Dr. Stanley said. "I've watched it go down, down, down. I'm too stubborn to sell it. I might as well have fun and buy a lottery ticket."

Dr. Paulos is still in the stock market, but he says he is now content to ride along instead of trying to beat it. Most of his money is now invested in stock index funds.

"On the whole, I think the market, despite all its imperfections, is an engine for prosperity and is a good thing," Dr. Paulos said. "I'm skeptical of beating it by much for a long time, or even beating it at all."

From Stints on the Street, Many Tales to Tell

From Stints on the Street, Many Tales to Tell
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/business/yourmoney/29BOOK.html

SITTING in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan, Ken Morris, a former Wall Street trader, is trying to make a market for his latest product: his first work of fiction.

It's Day 1 of his road show, a 10-city publicity tour for the book, titled "Man in the Middle." The book is a pulpy financial potboiler about life in the trading trenches, and Mr. Morris, like the good trader he once was, is trying to create a little market buzz for it.

"I have 23 Amazon reviews, 22 are five-star and one is a four-star," he said. "I have not had a bad review yet. They have gone from mildly positive to wildly positive. Booklist gave a really terrific review."

Like most top Wall Street traders, and unlike most novelists, Mr. Morris does not appear to be particularly given to self-examination. He says he reads little fiction, and John Grisham is his literary model.

Mr. Morris is accustomed to quick, palpable successes: at the age of 32, he was running Morgan Stanley's international sales and trading desk. He went on to earn many millions as a top trader at Drexel Burnham, Prudential-Bache and Nomura Securities.

Mr. Morris, who is now 50, says his lush tale of evildoing in a San Diego hedge fund was close to being picked up by a major publisher, but he never got a big offer. Instead, he settled for a small advance from Bancroft Press, a publishing company run out of a house in Baltimore.

He is one of several novice writers who have recently produced books about the Street. But the market is apparently somewhat thin for Wall Street warriors eager to become the next Michael Lewis. Unable to snag big offers from mainstream publishers, they are using the riches from their Wall Street days to publish the books themselves, or hire publicists to drum up interest.

The works range from thinly veiled fiction to gossipy nonfiction that spills juicy tidbits about some of Wall Street's biggest names.

Most successful so far has been Andy Kessler's "Wall Street Meat," which he paid to have published this year. The chatty, nonfiction book is an account of Mr. Kessler's experiences as a research analyst and as a colleague of three of Wall Street's most notorious characters: Jack B. Grubman, the former Salomon Smith Barney telecommunications analyst; Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley's Internet analyst; and Frank P. Quattrone, the former highflying technology banker for Credit Suisse First Boston.

"Wall Street Meat" has been a best seller at the top investment banks, according to Amazon.com, and HarperCollins has just bought the paperback rights for a six-figure sum.

ICHAEL CULP has had a harder time getting the word out. Mr. Culp, a former director of research at Prudential Securities and PaineWebber, has just printed 15,000 copies of "Conflicted," a dense roman à clef that tries to bring high drama and intrigue to the mundane life of the research analyst. There have been a few reviews in the financial trade publications, but on Wall Street the book has not made much of a splash.

And David A. Mallach, a broker for Merrill Lynch in Philadelphia, has printed 2,000 copies of "Dancing With the Analysts, "a morality tale of how a young man can make a pot of money by listening to the right financial adviser.

While the the books tell different stories, they are similar in that their authors try to convey the thrill of the Wall Street experience to the public. The books are crammed with technicalities of the trade — shorting the Indonesian rupiah, the intricacies of Institutional Investor polls, the nuts and bolts of analysts' estimates — that may have limited appeal to those outside the cloistered world of Wall Street.

For Wall Street insiders, Mr. Kessler's book appears to have the most appeal: many of the scenes and much of the snappy dialogue feature the author with Mr. Grubman, Mr. Quattrone and Ms. Meeker in the early stages of their careers. But in a disclaimer, Mr. Kessler says he can't vouch for the accuracy of the quotations, most of which were remembered from as long as 15 years ago.

"It's a genre that goes with booms and it is all very solipsistic," said Michael M. Thomas, a former Lehman Brothers partner who has written five novels about life on Wall Street.

"It is as if Sherman McCoy had written `Bonfire of the Vanities,' " he said, referring to the novel's central character, a "Master of the Universe" on Wall Street. "They are so deeply inside that they think what they do is fascinating. These days, I would say that the capacity for fiction on the Street is better displayed in financial statements as opposed to anywhere else."

There is a history of Wall Street practitioners who take the drama of boardroom putsches and trading-desk heroics and turn them into fiction. Louis Auchincloss is considered by many to be the best of the bunch. A corporate lawyer, he would come home from work and write. Since 1951, he has written more than 20 novels, most of which have focused on the social foibles and executive-suite battles of the lawyers and deal makers he encountered at work.

What made the books of Mr. Auchincloss and Mr. Thomas so compelling was that while they were written by active participants in the trade, they benefited from a combination of wry detachment and a novelist's ability to tell a gripping tale.

In 1990, Michael Lewis continued in this tradition, albeit in a nonfiction vein, with "Liar's Poker," which famously spoofed his well-known colleagues at Salomon Brothers, like John H. Gutfreund and John W. Meriwether.

Now, in the wake of the stock market collapse, with bankers being investigated by regulators, the raw material for the next generation of Wall Street yarns is certainly ripe for literary use.

Mr. Lewis says he has been inundated with pitches and proposals from Wall Street bankers and former Enron employees, all of them convinced that their stories of bond deals gone bad and crazy trader antics will be the successor to "Liar's Poker."

"People who don't read and write much think that writing is something that anyone can do," Mr. Lewis said. "There is no awe at a Wall Street firm except for people that make more money than you do. They think that all you need is the zany story. It's the manufacturing approach to bookmaking."

Mr. Culp's literary ambition is simple. He wants to write just one book that he hopes will do for 1990's Wall Street analysts what "Barbarians at the Gate" did for 1980's investment bankers.

Mr. Culp, who has a serious demeanor, worked on the Street for 27 years. He resigned in 2000 and began writing his book, a task that took him close to two years.

"I want to take people inside a research department and show them the lives of analysts," he said. "What motivates them, what makes them tick, what their incentives are. I really want to flesh out the lives of those people you see on TV for 15 seconds every day."

Like Mr. Morris, he took his ideas to agents and publishers, none of whom showed enough interest. So he had the book printed himself. "Conflicted" has a professional feel to it: it is sturdily bound and the paper is smooth.

Mr. Culp's prose could be described as serviceable,much like the research reports he used to write during his days as an analyst in the 1980's.

And while it is true that Henry Blodget, the former Internet analyst at Merrill Lynch who has been banned from the securities industry, may be a household name, most Wall Street analysts are not, and for good reason.

Like Mr. Culp, they are mostly decent, hard-working men and women who spend their days deconstructing balance sheets, fending off investment bankers and obsessing over their rankings in investor polls. Not exactly the stuff of a bodice-ripping thriller.

R. CULP addresses some timely issues in an expert manner, namely the over-the-top obsession that investment banks have had with recruiting analysts who receive high rankings in investor polls. But in the wake of the recent government settlement with Wall Street investment firms, the premise of Mr. Culp's plot loses some of its immediacy. Research departments are now dismissing their ranked analysts as the funds from investment banking that once paid their exorbitant salaries have been cut.

Mr. Kessler also was not able to find a publisher for his mini-bildungsroman, "Wall Street Meat." So last January, he pounded out 208 pages, found a freelance editor on the Internet and printed 20,000 books. Unlike "Conflicted," "Wall Street Meat" has some rougher edges. The print quality has a cheaper, samizdat feel to it.

"Wall Street Meat" tells the story of a squeaky-clean Mr. Kessler interacting with Mr. Grubman, Mr. Quattrone and Ms. Meeker and emerging an even purer man for having survived the process. The book says some not-so-nice things about its principals, especially Ms. Meeker, whom Mr. Kessler professes to have taken under his wing in the early 1990's while he was an analyst at Morgan Stanley, before she became famous.

After Mr. Quattrone left as a top technology banker at Morgan Stanley in the mid-90's, he sought to take Ms. Meeker with him. Failing to do so, he said that he would just about have to invent Ms. Meeker because of her stalwart support for investment banking efforts, according to Mr. Kessler's book.

Mr. Kessler names names. In one passage, for instance, he pokes fun at Byron Wien, Morgan Stanley's well-regarded strategist, saying that he had outlived his usefulness.

A spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the contents of Mr. Kessler's book and said that Ms. Meeker had not read it.

HEN there is Mr. Morris.

In 1991, at the age of 39, he gave up Wall Street and returned to his home in San Diego. Missing out on the 1990's boom was tough for him.

A man in his 40's who felt he still had a story to tell, Mr. Morris took to his computer. A million deleted words later he had produced his novel, 10,000 copies of which have just been printed by Bancroft Press.

Mr. Morris is so enamored of his new profession that before his first book even hit the market, he wrote a second one. And he promises that there are many more on the way.

"I'm fortunate in that I have quite a long pipeline. I sold two books at once and I have two more behind them," he said. "Right now the switch is on. I just like doing stories."

For him, writing books could be compared to a company's issuing of stock. He has his pipeline of books. He has hired a publicist to muster up demand, and now it is time to go public. He has amassed an assortment of plugs, which are on his Web site.

"Enjoyably engrossing," says Clive Cussler, the author of more than 50 popular fiction novels.

"I really enjoyed `Man in the Middle' and thought the story was quite gripping," says Bill O'Leary, a managing director at Morgan Stanley, on the site.

Like many traders, Mr. Morris hesitates when asked to name a literary influence. "I never read fiction while I was at Morgan Stanley," he said. "I'm still not an avid reader. I read when I have the time — mostly early Grisham."

"Man in the Middle" has the plot line of early Grisham. Its main character, Peter Neil, a callow young man, goes to work for a hedge fund, runs up against a fleet of bad guys, saves the day and ultimately gets the girl. Mr. Morris says he loves the rich imagery of writing, and it shows in his prose, which reveals a giddy love for metaphor. In fact, he has become so fond of his craft that he now teaches creative writing classes at elementary schools in his San Diego neighborhood.

His book begins: "Blood-red stripes ribbed the horizon while an ocean breeze, wed to the scent of salt and seaweed rustled past." Throughout the book, faces strobe red, rooms are jungle hot, voices surprise as much as snow in June and eyes are chutes that lead straight to hell.

There is plenty of violence and sex, too. In one scene, Peter Neil severs the limb of his nefarious boss with a Civil War sword; the action is described with the fervor of a Hardy Boys novel. Brains rack, brows furrow and tight knots release like springs in Peter's belly.

Mr. Morris is proud of his florid style, and of the fact that his prose is not edited. "I use imagery and language to a greater extent than some of the thrillers out there," he said. As for editing, he said that his publisher does line edits to makes sure that his punctuation works.

According to Amazon's rankings as of Friday, Mr. Kessler's book came in at 1,835, Mr. Culp's was at 6,391 and Mr. Morris's was a distant 512,876, his sterling reviews notwithstanding.

For Mr. Morris and Mr. Culp, the quest for a better number continues. Mr. Morris's 10-city book tour, the cost of which he is splitting with his publisher, began last week in New York. On Tuesday, the two authors shared a panel with R. Foster Winans, the former Wall Street Journal columnist who spent time in jail in the mid-1980s for insider trading.

THE alumni association of the University of California at Los Angeles was host for the event, which was thinly attended and held in a back room of the Intercontinental. A few trade journalists showed up, as well as a larger number of publicists and friends of the authors, who mingled around the cash bar.

Bruce Bortz, Mr. Morris' publisher, looked on proudly. "We think he has the potential to be another Grisham," Mr. Bortz said. "The financial thriller is a genre no one has occupied. His is not just a story for our times, but it could have a long shelf life, too. We have already pitched the book to 30-40 movie studios. There has been a lot of interest."

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com

Online Dating Sheds Its Stigma as Losers.com
By AMY HARMON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/national/29DATE.html

Of the 120 men she traded messages with online in her first four months of Internet dating, Kristen Costello, 33, talked to 20 on the telephone at least once and met 11 in person. Of those, Ms. Costello dated four several times before realizing she had not found "the one."

It is one of the first lessons learned by many in the swelling ranks of subscribers to Internet dating sites: soul mates are harder to come by than dinner and a movie. But like a growing number of single adults, Ms. Costello, a fourth-grade teacher in Florham Park, N.J., remains convinced that the chances of finding her life partner are better online than off.

"The difference is there's a huge number of people to draw from," said Ms. Costello, who is getting divorced and tried Kiss.com on the advice of a friend who met her current boyfriend through the site. "I just haven't found the right one."

Online dating, once viewed as a refuge for the socially inept and as a faintly disrespectable way to meet other people, is rapidly becoming a fixture of single life for adults of all ages, backgrounds and interests. More than 45 million Americans visited online dating sites last month, up from about 35 million at the end of 2002, according to comScore Media Metrix, a Web tracking service. Spending by subscribers on Web dating sites has soared, rising to a projected $100 million or more a quarter this year from under $10 million a quarter at the beginning of 2001, according to the Online Publishers Association.

And despite the Web's reputation as a meeting ground for casual sex, a majority of the leading sites' paying subscribers now say that what they are looking for is a relationship.

Stories of deception persist. Many online daters turn out to be married, and it is taken for granted that everybody lies a little. But they are more often trumped by a pervasive dissatisfaction with singles bars, dates set up by friends and other accepted ways of meeting prospective mates.

"My brother told me to join a canoeing club or something stupid like that," said Dan Eddy, 28, who met his fiancée, Sherry Sivik, 27, of North Ridgeville, Ohio, on Match.com.

Ms. Sivik sent an e-mail message to Mr. Eddy when she saw a picture of him with a shaved head. She refused to meet him for weeks, afraid he would be "some kind of lunatic." But after hearing that Mr. Eddy drove a Jeep, Ms. Sivik's friends, who had a long-running joke about trying to find her a bald guy with a Jeep, knew it was all over.

As word spreads of successful matches, the stigma of advertising for a romantic partner online rather than waiting for friends and fate to conjure one is fading. "I really don't think there's anyone under 35 who would think twice about it," said Sascha Segan, 29, who has persuaded several friends to try online dating since meeting his fiancée, Leontine Greenberg, on Nerve.com.

Not prepared to cede the potential of a better love life to youth, older singles are also logging on to dating sites in growing numbers.

"We're at a time of life where nothing's structured where you can mingle," said Judith Carrington, a public relations executive who lists herself on Match.com as in her late-50's. "And as you get older it's hard to find a deep bond with people because you've had rich lives and you haven't lived them together."

After a few unremarkable dates, Ms. Carrington, whose husband died several years ago, said she recently had dinner with an investment adviser she met through the service and felt drawn to him because of a shared experience with a family member's mental illness.

"Just to have someone in the running is nice," she said.

As it did for book buying and auctioning used toys, the Internet reduces the transaction costs of meeting romantic prospects. With pictures, long essays, sometimes even videos — and a cut-to-the-chase etiquette that encourages pointed questions in e-mail messages — singles say they can learn far more about potential partners online than they can by sizing them up across a crowded room or wringing information from a friend.

"The traditional institutionalized means for getting people together are not working as well as they did previously," said Norval Glenn, a sociology professor at the University of Texas. "There's a need for something new and the Internet is filling that need."

Two or three decades ago, most American couples met in high school or college, Professor Glenn said. But as more people choose to marry later in life, few social institutions have arisen to replace the role that local communities, families and schools once played.

Internet dating may finally be stepping into that breach.

"The Internet gives the impression, and it may or may not be truthful, that you can find someone who is more specifically tailored to your desires," said David M. Buss, author of "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating" (Revised edition, Basic Books, 2003). "So perhaps the sense that you don't have to settle as much will bear out in more solid bonds."

Along with large dating sites like Match.com, which boasts nearly 800,000 subscribers who pay $24.95 a month each, and 8 million separate profiles, numerous dating sites now exist for every imaginable group of people. Generally, there is no charge for posting a profile on a Web dating site, but to contact a prospective date, most sites require users to pay a subscription fee.

Lativish Gardner, 24, a Web designer in Valdosta, Ga., switched from Yahoo Personals to BlackPlanetLove.com last month, for instance, to better focus his search.

"I'm a black man and I'm using Black Planet to find a black queen," said Mr. Gardner, who flew to Houston recently to meet a woman he found on the new site.

Web sites like TONY.com (Time Out New York), Nerve.com and Boston.com offer online dating services by pooling a collection of profiles submitted by their younger, more urban subscribers, through a template provided by their New York-based company, Spring Street Networks. In addition to the fundamentals, subscribers are asked to complete sentences like, "In my bedroom you'll find," and to cite their most humbling moment.

Greg Bush, 34, an emergency room doctor in Huntington Beach, Calif., swears by Eharmony, one of several sites that profess to take a more scientific approach to the matchmaking process. Prospective subscribers to Eharmony, founded by a psychologist, fill out a long questionnaire, and the service says they are rejected if it appears a match for them cannot be found.

"She's gorgeous," said Mr. Bush of the woman the service set him up with, a pharmaceutical representative he said he planned to propose to soon. "She's the kind of girl I'd look at all night but never go up and talk to because I'd be too intimidated."

The first trick to online dating is to narrow the search without inadvertently ruling out a perfect match. Helen Gaitanis, 35, of Los Angeles searches only for white men aged 33 to 43 who are at least 5-foot-9. She refrains from filtering out brown eyes, despite her strong preference for blue. Typically 600 profiles of men within 25 miles of her zip code show up in her Match results, Ms. Gaitanis said.

"You can kind of get a feel: Are they dorky, are they going to be a slick cheeseball party guy?" Ms. Gaitanis said. "I look at my profile and I think sometimes it's more intense than others. It's not as flirty or playful. But it says who I am."

Indeed, for women, who have long been taught to search for a mate while scrupulously pretending not to, social historians say online dating may be making it more acceptable to openly signal what they are looking for.

But gender rules still apply. Men say women rarely send the first e-mail note. And like many women, Ms. Gaitanis found that when she did send an e-mail message to a man, he almost never responded. Instead, she is concentrating on refining her profile and updating it often enough that it does not get lost in search results, as profiles are generally ranked in order of the latest updated. She has also seized on Match's new "wink" feature, which allows subscribers to indicate interest in someone's profile simply by clicking a button, which sends them a prewritten message.

"It's like saying, `Hey, look at me, what do you think?' " said Ms. Gaitanis, who received 6 winks back out of the first 10 she sent. "They can respond or not and at least you didn't spend any time writing an e-mail."

There are still plenty of holdouts. Ms. Gaitanis's brother, John, 28, told her that online dating was "strictly for losers."

And even those who embrace online dating acknowledge a major flaw: the frequent disconnect between who people say they are online and what they are really like. In one recent example, the Army said it was investigating accusations that a colonel, who is already married, duped dozens of women on tallpersonals.com into believing that he would be marrying them.

Most online dating deception is of the run-of-the-mill variety.

"It's amazing how all women say they're slender when a lot of them are overweight," said one 79-year-old Manhattan man who lists himself as 69 on his Match.com profile.

A Culver City, Calif., woman who lists the adjacent, more upscale Santa Monica as her residence, said, "I swear every time they put 5-10 you have to deduct 3 inches."

But what is most persistently frustrating, veteran online daters say, is not so much the obvious lies as the difficulty in judging physical chemistry through virtual communication.

"Certain things look really good on paper," said Rebecca Hammond, a computer consultant in Manhattan who has met several boyfriends through Nerve.com. "Then in real life it's a completely different story."

After enough of such encounters, many online daters burn out.

Those who do find partners say they are often plagued by the insidious sense that they might find someone better — if only they paged through a few hundred more profiles.

"If you get unsolicited e-mails coming in it's hard not to look," said David Kleinbard, a researcher for a credit ratings agency in New York who has dated several women from JDate, a Jewish online dating service. "And if the person's cute it's hard not to give it some thought."

But for Jonathan Gerstel, 40, a university fund-raiser who was looking for a Jewish woman in Durham, N.C., with a kind disposition and at least shoulder-length hair, JDate proved the perfect tool.

Amid the 20 matches he found Marta King, 38, an actress and teacher looking for a Jewish man who knew what he wanted in life, made at least as much money as she did, and liked to dance, or was at least willing to try. If the process lacked a certain romantic sweep that Ms. King once imagined, she said she had come to prefer reality.

"I just don't think it matters how you meet," Ms. King said.

Just this month, the two reached an online dating milestone: They removed their profiles from the JDate site.

Is Google God?

Is Google God?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/29FRIE.html

Since 9/11 the world has felt increasingly fragmented. Reading the papers, one senses that many Americans are emotionally withdrawing from the world and that the world is drifting away from America. The powerful sense of integration that the go-go-globalizing 1990's created, the sense that the world was shrinking from a size medium to a size small, feels over now.

The reality, though, is quite different. While you were sleeping after 9/11, not only has the process of technological integration continued, it has actually intensified — and this will have profound implications. I recently went out to Silicon Valley to visit the offices of Google, the world's most popular search engine. It is a mind-bending experience. You can actually sit in front of a monitor and watch a sample of everything that everyone in the world is searching for. (Hint: sex, God, jobs and, oh my word, professional wrestling usually top the lists.)

In the past three years, Google has gone from processing 100 million searches per day to over 200 million searches per day. And get this: only one-third come from inside the U.S. The rest are in 88 other languages. "The rate of the adoption of the Internet in all its forms is increasing, not decreasing," says Eric Schmidt, Google's C.E.O. "The fact that many [Internet companies] are in a terrible state does not correlate with users not using their products."

VeriSign, which operates much of the Internet's infrastructure, was processing 600 million domain requests per day in early 2000. It's now processing nine billion per day. A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net. And you ain't seen nothin' yet. Within the next few years you will be able to be both mobile and totally connected, thanks to the pending explosion of Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity. Using radio technology, Wi-Fi will provide high-speed connection from your laptop computer or P.D.A. to the Internet from anywhere — McDonald's, the beach or your library.

Says Alan Cohen, a V.P. of Airespace, a new Wi-Fi provider: "If I can operate Google, I can find anything. And with wireless, it means I will be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime. Which is why I say that Google, combined with Wi-Fi, is a little bit like God. God is wireless, God is everywhere and God sees and knows everything. Throughout history, people connected to God without wires. Now, for many questions in the world, you ask Google, and increasingly, you can do it without wires, too."

In other words, once Wi-Fi is in place, with one little Internet connection I can download anything from anywhere and I can spread anything from anywhere. That is good news for both scientists and terrorists, pro-Americans and anti-Americans.

And that brings me to the point of this column: While we may be emotionally distancing ourselves from the world, the world is getting more integrated. That means that what people think of us, as Americans, will matter more, not less. Because people outside America will be able to build alliances more efficiently in the world we are entering and they will be able to reach out and touch us — whether with computer viruses or anthrax recipes downloaded from the Internet — more than ever.

"The key point is not just whether people hate us," says Robert Wright, the author of "Nonzero," a highly original book on the integrated world. "The key point is that it matters more now whether people hate us, and will keep mattering more, for technological reasons. I don't mean just homemade W.M.D.'s. I am talking about the way information technology — everyone using e-mail, Wi-Fi and Google — will make it much easier for small groups to rally like-minded people, crystallize diffuse hatreds and mobilize lethal force. And wait until the whole world goes broadband. Broadband — a much richer Internet service that brings video on demand to your PC — will revolutionize recruiting, because video is such an emotionally powerful medium. Ever seen one of Osama bin Laden's recruiting videos? They're very effective, and they'll reach their targeted audience much more efficiently via broadband."

None of this means we, America, just have to do what the world wants, but we do have to take it seriously, and we do have to be good listeners. We, America, "have to work even harder to build bridges," argues Mr. Wright, because info-tech, left to its own devices, will make it so much easier for small groups to build their own little island kingdoms. And their island kingdoms, which may not seem important or potent now, will be able to touch us more, not less.

Iran Is Trying to Curb Porn and Politics on Web

Iran Is Trying to Curb Porn and Politics on Web
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/international/middleeast/29IRAN.html

TEHRAN — It is sometimes called Iranian porn.

It appears on certain Web sites that specialize in mocking the Islamic Republic's puritanism, featuring women with hair tumbling out of their head scarves or exhibiting deep décolletage at family gatherings.

Such sites have been officially labeled depraved recently, joining a host of other political, social and truly pornographic online destinations in Iran's first attempt to restrict Internet access.

"After the limitations put on newspapers and other mass media, they understand that people are looking for news on the Internet," said Reza Parisa, the director of an association of Internet service providers. "So of course, the government wants to limit access to the Internet, too."

But like much of the regulation in Iran, the line between what is acceptable and degenerate, legal and illegal, remains fluid, so the crackdown has prompted a cat-and-mouse game between the conservative hierarchy and Iran's younger generation, which is growing ever more technically proficient.

Even those who support filtering Internet content suspect that the effort is doomed, like earlier bans on videotapes and satellite television. The government is bound to lose, they say, as the almost 50 million Iranians under age 30 seek to have more fun.

"The intention is to filter or stop sites with immoral content or that contradict our social values," said Hussein Shariatmadari, the publisher of the newspaper Kayhan, which often reflects the views of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "In fact, these sites are readily available. It's like removing a ladder leaning against a building so a bird won't fly off the roof."

The crackdown started this spring with the arrest of a popular Internet journalist, since released on bail, and the distribution to Iran's 300 or so Internet service providers of three lists of sites to be blocked.

No service providers objected publicly to the first two lists, which contained over 100,000 pornographic sites originating outside Iran, Internet specialists said. But the third list, of about 94 sites, caused a stir because it contained a number of sites from both inside and outside the country that criticize the government on political and social grounds.

"To start with, they are focusing on pornography and Web sites that speak out against Islam and the mullahs," Mr. Parisa said. "The government is very sensitive about that."

It is particularly sensitive at the moment because some officials in the Bush administration and in Congress have vowed to underwrite efforts to destabilize the government. The ruling clerics have a history of limiting any liberalization at times when they feel threatened.

A sudden jump in Internet access over the last couple of years is believed to have made officials here more concerned about the Internet as a tool that could be used against them. Iran now has an estimated three million Internet users out of a population of around 65 million, Mr. Parisa said, the vast majority using it solely for e-mail and chatting.

Sites that mock the clergy — they might refer to a leading ayatollah as "His Mullah Highness" — are among the most popular here. One new site, set up outside the country by an exile political party, posts photographs contrasting the somewhat glamorous court of the late shah with the drab public face of the ruling theocracy.

"Beggers & Servants," reads the caption of one picture of clerics before the revolution. "Rulers and Masters," says the caption underneath the current ruling pantheon.

There has also been an explosion of Web logs. Service providers estimate that roughly 50,000 such personal diaries are published in Farsi, discussing topics ranging from art and movies, to music, computers and everything else. Web specialists say that among the 10 most visited sites, at least 6 either feature nudity or offer links to other sites that do.

One popular Web log, called Faheshe, or "whore" in Farsi, features the memoirs of a former prostitute detailing her downfall. The site also promotes links to interviews with other prostitutes, one saying that clerics tend to frequent the same women and that some give their patronage the patina of legality by reading the vows that Shiite Islam provides for short-term marriages.

None of the Web logs have been blocked thus far.

The political sites are perhaps more worrisome for the government than the online pornography. Many of the journalists who founded liberal, reformist newspapers that have been banned by the conservative-run judiciary have started Web sites that use much bolder language than the print media and have proven harder to shut down.

This spring, 135 members of Parliament wrote an open letter to Ayatollah Khamenei, suggesting that it was time for Iran to reform and to do more to reintegrate with the world.

They cited an old line from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini about drinking a cup of poison at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, a suggestion that trying times require distasteful, drastic measures. Not a single newspaper published the letter — it is unclear who ordered them to refrain — but it was widely available on the Web.

When protests erupted in Tehran and around the country in mid-June, the newspapers offered limited coverage. Eventually the Culture Ministry even barred journalists from attending the demonstrations. But student Web sites kept the country informed with nearly blow-by-blow accounts of events each night.

Newspapers have reported on the rough guidelines on Internet use that the Justice Ministry plans to promulgate. A report in the newspaper Iran listed 20 kinds of online activity that would be considered possible violations, including publishing articles that insult Islamic values, Iran's leadership, top clerics or the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary patriarch.

Sites that promote gambling, smoking or drug addiction will also be outlawed, the account said, and the judiciary will create a special department to investigate and prosecute Internet offenses.

Service providers complain that they do not have the means to buy the expensive filtering equipment needed. Internet specialists believe that the government might have obtained some highly effective American equipment — getting around the ban the United States has placed on such exports by purchasing it through European subsidiaries.

For reformist legislators in Parliament, the sudden interest by the ruling clergy in the Internet prompts concern that broader restrictions may lie ahead.

"What is important is not to interfere with the free exchange of ideas in the society," said Elaheh Koulai, one of the outspoken women in Iran's Parliament. "There is a fear that this kind of filtering will expand to the circulation of information, not just limit things that go against our legal and cultural norms."

China and Hong Kong Finalize Trade Agreement

China and Hong Kong Finalize Trade Agreement
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/international/asia/29CND-TRAD.html

HONG KONG, June 29 — The governments of Hong Kong and mainland China concluded today a broad free-trade agreement providing greater access to the Chinese market for Hong Kong businesses, as politicians here and in Beijing braced for a huge anti-government protest here on Tuesday.

Today's trade pact goes beyond the market opening that China pledged when it joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001.

China will throw open its markets to Hong Kong's highly competitive shipping, logistics and moviemaking industries; eliminate most tariffs on imports from Hong Kong's dwindling manufacturing sector; and allow Hong Kong's banks, management consultants and lawyers somewhat greater privileges in China than their rivals from elsewhere.

Britain handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997. But Hong Kong retains separate economic, legal and political systems, including its own trade regulations and a separate membership in the W.T.O. from Beijing's.

The new agreement, the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, comes at a time of widespread anger here about chronic economic problems and an insular political system that is often slow-moving, disastrously so in the recent outbreak of SARS.

Over the last two weeks, officials here cited the trade agreement repeatedly to contend that Beijing is helping Hong Kong, now a special administrative region of China.

"This goes to show our motherland continues to open up" its economy, and that Beijing's policy toward Hong Kong of "one country, two systems" is working, said Antony Leung, Hong Kong's financial secretary, at a news conference this afternoon.

Pro-democracy political parties, trade unions, the main Christian denominations, doctors, teachers, students and other groups are preparing to hold on Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of Hong Kong's handover, what could easily become the biggest march ever here to protest local government policies. The march is unlikely, however, to match the hundreds of thousands of people who protested here following the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

Unemployment stands at a record 8.3 percent here and still rising. The local government is widely accused of having responded slowly at first to SARS. And the provincial government of Guangdong, across the border on the mainland, is widely blamed for having covered up the disease for four months as it spread there and then to Hong Kong.

The local government has sparked particular anger here by drafting stringent internal security laws against sedition, treason and subversion, and pushing them through the territory's compliant Legislative Council, where a vote of approval is expected as soon as July 9.

Tuesday's march is expected to be peaceful. Hong Kong has a history of non-violent protests except when violence on the mainland spills over into the streets here, as occurred in the late 1960's with riots that faintly echoed the Cultural Revolution in China.

But Sing Ming, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong specializing in recent Hong Kong history, said that the city had become so tense that there was the possibility of spontaneous outbreaks of violence later this summer.

Today's trade agreement may not bring quick relief to this territory's problems. Henry Tang, the secretary for commerce, industry and technology, said that the main economic effects would be felt in the long term.

Mr. Leung, however, predicted that residents "will see the effect almost immediately" as businesses around the world take a careful look at whether it makes sense to base more of their operations here to as to make use of the pact's provisions.

Hong Kong made few trade concessions to China because it already does not collect any tariffs and allows companies of any nationality to set up subsidiaries to offer services. In today's agreement, Hong Kong pledged not to begin collecting tariffs on exports from the mainland or to restrict its service industries.

A big issue from the start of the negotiations lay in how the pact would define what qualifies as a Hong Kong company. Some local business leaders had suggested a fairly restrictive definition that might narrowly limit the agreement to businesses owned by local residents while excluding the subsidiaries of multinationals, an arrangement that might have prompted China to offer much greater concessions to a narrow group of companies.

But Mr. Tang said that Hong Kong had decided to comply with its obligations to the World Trade Organization by not discriminating against companies based on their nationality. Today's agreement nonetheless contains provisions designed to prevent multinationals not already active here from quickly opening shell companies as a way to perform an end run around Chinese trade rules.

Most of the concessions for service industries require companies to have been doing business here for at least three to five years, depending on the industry. And companies will not be allowed to offer any services in China that they do not offer here, a clause that could trip up multinationals that have regional headquarters here but have never really tried to compete in the local market.

In addition, negotiators must still work out whether goods assembled in Hong Kong from imported parts — as is common for most of Hong Kong's modest manufacturing sector — would qualify for duty-free treatment. The agreement referred to an annex for the rules that would determine what qualifies as goods manufactured in Hong Kong, but the annex itself, in the packet of papers released by the government, was a single sheet of paper pledging to reach an understanding by the end of the year.

The so-called rules of origin are relevant because Hong Kong's modest manufacturing sector relies heavily on producing products that include many imported components.

Mr. Tang said that the agreement would reduce tariffs to zero on Jan. 1 for 67 percent of Hong Kong's exports to China, and that China's previous commitments to the W.T.O. would reduce tariffs to zero for an additional 23 percent of Hong Kong's exports. But Mr. Tang acknowledged that these calculations assumed that Hong Kong could work out rules of origin that would allow most of Hong Kong's current exports to count as locally produced.

Much more important in commercial terms for Hong Kong were the agreement's provisions regarding services. The most surprising Chinese concession was to allow unlimited shipments to the mainland of movies that are produced by Hong Kong companies, including by the local subsidiaries of Hollywood studios, although the movies do not have to be shot here.

China only promised the W.T.O. in 2001 that it would let in fewer than two dozen movies a year from the rest of the world.

Victims Say Japan Ignores Sex Crimes Committed by Teachers

Victims Say Japan Ignores Sex Crimes Committed by Teachers
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/international/asia/29JAPA.html

HAYATO, Japan — Two years ago, a 16-year-old high school girl who lived near here was hospitalized with a high fever. After doctors found that she had an acute case of genital herpes, she told her parents that her teacher had had sex with her.

When approached by the parents, the teacher denied the claim, warning them that their daughter would be expelled if they reported him.

Experts say molestation and statutory rape are commonplace in schools across Japan, and that victims rarely come forward. To do so would violate a host of powerful social conventions, said Akiko Kamei, a retired teacher who is the country's only nationally known expert in classroom sexual abuse.

"In Japan there is a rape myth, which says that the victim of a rape is always to blame," Ms. Kamei said. "Moreover, women are told that if you suffer molestation or groping, you have to be ashamed. If you talk about it to anyone else, you are going to be tainted for the rest of your life."

Beyond that, even when they are identified and caught, molesters rarely receive more than a slap on the wrist.

Speaking at a public symposium, a member of Parliament, Seiichi Ota, recently made light of reports of gang rapes at a Tokyo university. "Boys who commit group rape are in good shape," Mr. Ota said. "I think they are rather normal. Whoops, I shouldn't have said that." (The legislator's comments were carried in many Japanese newspapers.)

Recently, however, the public tolerance for rape has begun to change as a handful of victims or their families have pressed charges against classroom molesters. The mother of the girl infected with herpes, for example, went to the police, which led not only to the dismissal of the 49-year-old teacher, but to a one-year prison sentence for him as well.

In an interview about the incident, the mother requested anonymity, as do most people involved in such cases. She said that if her identity were revealed, she would be ostracized and could even lose her job.

As if to underline the family's concern, the daughter has left Japan, fleeing the taunts of fellow students and the cold shoulder of teachers at her former school.

"Whose interests would it serve for us to go public?" said the mother, who asked not only that her name not be used, but that the name of her town, which is near Hayato, in western Japan, not be revealed. "We would have liked to receive solidarity from other people, but that is not how it works in Japan. I grew up in this community, and although a foreigner might not understand, it is a fact that the victim is always cast in a negative light."

This reality was vividly demonstrated in another recent molestation case in Osaka, where a 13-year-old girl insisted, against her parents' advice, on bringing charges against a 51-year-old teacher. In February, the man was fired and given a two-year prison sentence for fondling the girl in a school office, though more than 40 teachers, friends and colleagues signed a petition requesting leniency.

The victim's best friend told her she had ruined the teacher's life, according to one newspaper, The Mainichi Shimbun. When the girl answered that it was the other way around, the classmate replied: "Well, you are young. You have a second chance."

The victim told the court that after the teacher's arrest she became an object of ridicule.

"When I was at a supermarket, I was surrounded by some senior students I had never spoken to before," she said, according to the newspaper account. "They shouted, `That's the sexually harassed one!' and laughed at me."

The girl's family and lawyer would not agree to requests for further interviews. Ms. Kamei, who published books on sexual abuse under a pseudonym while she was a teacher, came to her field more than a decade ago, when an alarmed mother approached her to say that her 8-year-old girl was masturbating. It emerged that a teacher had been fondling the girl.

Ms. Kamei said that at the time, she and the mother merely insisted that the teacher be sent to another school. "Even today, if a prosecutor fails to bring an indictment, the teacher is completely off the hook," she said. "Even after administrative dismissal, some of these teachers find work in other schools in other districts, or even as volunteers with children, although some people estimate there is an almost 100 percent chance of recidivism."

There are no generally accepted statistics on classroom sexual abuse in Japan. According to figures compiled by the Education Ministry, which parents and advocates for victims say reflect vast underreporting, there were 27 cases of molestation by teachers in 1992, a number that included cases in which teachers themselves were victims.

By 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the number of reported cases had risen to 122.

In Tokyo, an Education Ministry official minimized the extent of the problem.

"Compared to other issues such as bullying, truancy and school violence, the rate of incidence is not so high," said Yoshiyasu Tanaka. "Of course I don't think the official reporting shows everything, but still, this is not something that occurs in every school, whereas problems like bullying occur almost everywhere."

That is small comfort to the mother from the school near here. When asked whether she felt satisfied with the punishment meted out in her daughter's case, she paused and shook her head.

"It is a fact that he was punished, when lots of other cases are swept under the rug, but I can't say that we got 100 percent justice, either," she said. "One year in prison is too light. The disease given to my daughter wasn't taken into account. I just wonder what the judges were thinking about."

Dating a jailer

Dating a jailer
by Annie Wang, SCMP PRD
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZVAWSP8HD.html

ON THE SECOND week of her vacation in Missouri, Niuniu starts to date a 20-something guy named Tom, who she met at a party.

Tom works as a jailer in a federal prison, but he is very smart and talented. He writes crime stories in his spare time and believes in Buddhism. The best part about Tom is that he respects women. Every so often, he will cook for Niuniu, preparing his own recipes for corn bread and smoked tuna.

Niuniu loves spending time with him. They ride horses, play golf, go shooting and fishing together. Their dating life is idyllic.

Niuniu and Tom often joke that if they had depended on a computer dating service, they would never have been matched because they are a completely different species.

Tom is a country boy, a WASP, more than two metres tall, 102kg and a conservative Republican. He voted for George W. Bush, was in favour of the war in Iraq, hates the United Nations and the French, loves the quiet country life, professional wrestling, boxing and car racing. He disapproves of homosexuality and abortion.

Niuniu, meanwhile, is a city girl, Asian, 1.6 metres, a 50kg liberal Democrat, and a cosmopolitan journalist. She plans to vote for Hillary Clinton if she runs for president, was against the American invasion in Iraq, believes the UN Security Council can throw off the hawks, and enjoys the busy city life of Beijing, Shanghai, New York and Hong Kong.

Niuniu watches Ally McBeal and Oprah, has gay friends, and girlfriends who have had abortions.

From their political views to their favourite shows, Niuniu and Tom have nothing in common.

Niuniu never dreamed she would one day date a jailer who watched stupid professional wrestling. This type - a redneck, a group that on her chart barely beats the Neanderthals - is the last type she likes to associate with.

But Tom is the best date Niuniu has had. He's like a teddy bear: sensitive, loyal and protective. He teaches her things - from how to putt to how to bait a hook. And he's great in bed.

Niuniu contemplates writing to big dating firms such as Match.com to tell them that opposites attract. Her girlfriends in China are astonished by the fact she is dating a jailer.

Both Beibei and Lulu call her.

''It's a big loss of face if you come back with a man who works in prison,'' Beibei says.

Lulu adds: ''Fishing? Making bread? It sounds boring. American suburban life is not for us.''

''But Tom is nice,'' Niuniu says.

''But he is not one of us,'' Beibei comments. ''He's not yuppie or international enough for you.''

''But Tom is a man of integrity. I've met too many international yuppie jerks - from San Francisco to Beijing,'' Niuniu sighs.

''Now you know why we are still single,'' Lulu says, ''We love our lifestyle better than we love love.''

A Star Is Born (and Swimming in Singapore)

A Star Is Born (and Swimming in Singapore)
By WAYNE ARNOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/business/yourmoney/29WORL.html

SINGAPORE -- NOTHING says "lucky" to a Singaporean the way a luohan does.

With its preposterously bulbous forehead and garish markings, the luohan, a 6- to 8-inch-long fish, has become so wildly popular among this city's ethnic Chinese majority that in some households there are more luohan than people.

"We Chinese believe it will bring us luck," said David Lim, who keeps no fewer than 10 luohan at his apartment.

Since its introduction to Singapore from Malaysia in 2001, the luohan, also known as the flowerhorn fish, has become so popular that its image is used to adorn packages during Lunar New Year celebrations. Shops dedicated to selling the fish, their food and their tanks have proliferated. And a brisk resale market for luohan has emerged, complete with fish burglars and black-market luohan, with top fish fetching nearly $40,000.

In some ways, the luohan bubble may have burst. Prices are receding, apparently because the luohan seems to be falling victim to its own popularity. Too many sellers have taken advantage of the fish's prolific breeding habits, creating a luohan glut.

Keeping fish has always been part of Chinese culture, and fish occupy an important role in feng shui design. Those influences, along with this city's equatorial weather and efficient port connections, have made Singapore the world's capital for tropical fish. In 2001, Singapore exported 76 million Singaporean dollars worth of ornamental fish — about $44 million — to 70 countries.

No official statistics are kept, but dealer associations here estimate that at least one of every five Singaporeans has an aquarium. Some fish are perennial favorites, like the Japanese koi or the prehistoric-looking arowana. But in Singapore, fish come in fads, according to Kenny Yap, executive chairman and managing director of Qian Hu, a local company specializing in tropical fish.

A decade ago, he said, Singaporeans were wild about the discus, a nearly flat, circular fish. The next rage was for an import from Taiwan, the red parrotfish, he said.

The luohan is an unexpected sensation, the aquarium world's equivalent of the singer Norah Jones. The fish was first produced in 1997 by breeders in the old tin-mining town of Ipoh, Malaysia. No one here seems to recall precisely how the fish was bred, whether from crossing a "feng shui" fish and a "chili soma," or a "sparkling mammon" with a "redface monk."

When Qian Hu began importing luohan, Mr. Yap said, many retailers thought the fish was too ugly to sell. "Shops didn't want to carry it," he said. Luckily for the luohan, it was named after the eight immortals of Chinese taoism, a word with connotations of good tidings, particularly because the number eight is considered lucky in Chinese numerology.

Fish enthusiasts fell in love with the luohan because no two of the fish have the same markings or color patterns. Better yet, luohan are low-maintenance. "They eat anything," said Edwin Low, who raises fish as a hobby when he isn't running his building supplies business.

Serious collectors like Mr. Low look for fish with bright red faces, and bodies that are roughly one and a half times as long as they are high. The fins and tail should be in good condition and symmetrical. The forehead should be large but not grotesque. A veteran koi collector, Mr. Low paid roughly $750 for his first luohan two years ago. He paid more than $1,700 for his second, which last November was named grand champion at Singapore's first luohan competition.

Behavior is another important factor in judging luohan. As members of the carnivorous cichlid family, luohan are fiercely territorial as adults. Each must be kept in its own tank, where it will content itself moving pebbles from side to side until someone approaches. Then the fish will approach the glass to confront the intruder and will even follow a finger.

LUOHAN lovers say that this "playfulness" is a display of the luohans' intelligence; Mr. Yap, for example, says that they can even be taught tricks. Of one $5,200 specimen at his company's farm, Mr. Yap said, "He's a good kisser," and blew kisses at it through the glass.

For the average Singaporean, the luohan's appeal is in the distinctive black markings — called "flowers" or "pearls" — on the fish's side. Mr. Low's prize-winning fish has two rows of these markings, which resemble characters in Chinese script; this feature has brought him offers as high as $8,700 for the fish. But he is not selling.

Some luohan owners scrutinize their fish for omens — suggestions of words or likenesses, or, better yet, numbers that they can use to play the local lottery. At Flower Horn Paradise, a luohan store, Alvin Sim, the owner, has a fish whose flowers clearly read "1, 1, 4, 7." Mr. Sim said he played those numbers and won several thousand dollars. Taking advantage of the luohan's habit of rearranging objects in its tank, Mr. Lim put plastic lottery balls into his tanks for their luohan to pick.

For a while, some aquarium shops were suffering a wave of luohan heists. At Nanyang Trading, another local fish dealership, thieves broke in four times, said the shop's proprietor, Winson Yong. He has installed a $3,000 security system.

With so many luohan in homes around Singapore, however, some people have naturally lost interest in the fish. "My dad thought it would bring us fortune," Pam Wong, a university student, said of the luohan her father bought. "But after a while it didn't seem to work. So we got bored with it."

Nowadays, she said, her father jokes about steaming the fish for dinner.

This Land Is Made, Finally, for Chinese Settlers

This Land Is Made, Finally, for Chinese Settlers
By DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/national/29LOCK.html

LOCKE, Calif. — Look long and hard enough in the dying light of day and it is almost as if ghosts are sitting on the splintered benches and withering balconies along Main Street.

Connie King says she sees them sometimes. They give her a smile or a knowing nod, the kind that says: We are counting on you, Connie. Do the right thing.

"The old Chinese people left a lot of spirits here," said Mrs. King, 80, resting on a bench where she recalled encountering a long-departed neighbor late one evening. "That is maybe one of the reasons that I am living longer, to finish the job."

Mrs. King feels good about the ghosts of Locke these days. That is because the job she mentioned is almost finished.

What is about to happen here is an extraordinary effort by the county government not only to restore life and health to a crumbling town, but also to right the racist policies of an earlier age, when immigrant Asian laborers were allowed to work the land but forbidden to own it.

For the first time since Chinese immigrants established Locke nearly 90 years ago, on a rented peach orchard tucked behind an earthen levee along the Sacramento River, the land beneath its rickety clapboard and rippled metal buildings is being prepared for sale. Over the coming months, county officials will put together a plan to carve Locke into 50 private lots.

The subdivision will finally undo an anachronistic property-leasing arrangement created under the state's 1913 Alien Land Law, which effectively blocked Chinese immigrants and their children from owning land. The law was part of a wave of legalized discrimination against Asian immigrants that swept across the nation nearly 150 years ago.

"I remember a lot of Chinese people leaving the town over the years, and they would say to me, `Connie, we never got our land, but you keep trying,' " said Mrs. King, who complains of the usual aches and pains but shows no sign of letting up in her pursuit of that goal.

County officials say that one of the new lots will be sold, for about $5,000, to Mrs. King, who moved here in 1949, when she married her husband, Tommy, who has since died.

In a story typical of the times, the newlyweds had looked up and down the delta for a place to settle, even finding a couple of perfect homes on the river's edge. But they wound up converting a rented garage in Locke, the town where Mr. King had grown up, because the doors to those lovely homes kept closing.

"We saw one little ranch on the side of the road, and we took our checkbook with us," Mrs. King recalled. "I said to my husband, this is the house. We should qualify. But the man inside said, `I can't sell to you. You are Chinese.' "

The Alien Land Law, which was copied by more than a dozen other states, was struck down in California in 1952. Two states, Florida and New Mexico, still have versions of the statute on their books, although they are not enforced.

"What happened in Locke was subordinate to a larger policy of keeping Asians out of the country, starting with the coolie laws in the 1860's and the laws that assumed all Asian women were prostitutes," said Gabriel J. Chin, a professor of law at the University of Cincinnati.

As part of the subdivision plan, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, which governs the 10 acres on which Locke was built, has asked to have a list made of the people who lived here when the land restrictions were in place. Officials will interview longtime residents like Mrs. King and cull names from census data and other public records.

The board has also created a nonprofit group to run the town, with the instruction to alert Locke's early residents and their relatives on the list when a building or home comes up for sale. Current owners of buildings will have the first opportunity to buy the land, but should any decide to sell, the descendants would be given a chance to match the best offer.

Although the nonprofit group will have the final say, and could settle on a buyer without a Locke connection, the county's intention is to encourage ownership by Asian-Americans with family ties to the town.

"The overriding issue was righting a historic wrong," said Stephen L. Young, director of community development for the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency.

Even so, some of Locke's 90 or so residents, mostly low-income and not of Chinese descent, have expressed a stronger interest in preserving the present.

Some worry about having to pay property taxes for the first time. Others fear the town might lose its idiosyncratic charm if wealthy outsiders spruce up the old buildings.

The town's biggest property owner, Locke Property Development Inc., a group of investors from Hong Kong, has gone along with the subdivision idea, but not without some different worries. Faced with the overwhelming task of repairing the town's dilapidated sewer system, the investors, who bought the land beneath Locke and several hundred acres of orchards around it in 1977, sold the town's 10 acres to the county last year for $250,000.

Clarence Chu, the company's general manager, said he feared that new investors might avoid Locke because of the uncertainty that would come with the nonprofit group's oversight.

"We need people with some money to help preserve the history of Locke," Mr. Chu said. "The history is more important than pursuing some dream of bringing Chinese people back here."

Even some who support the subdivision plan confess that the redress comes late. Many of those who cared the most about owning land in Locke are dead, or have moved and have no interest in returning.

At one level, some current and former residents said, Asian-Americans have done so well for themselves that they no longer need Locke and all that it represents.

"I would like to see the town preserved, but it is more like a living memorial than a place to live," said Ping Lee, 85, a businessman who moved to nearby Walnut Grove 12 years ago and whose father was a founder of Locke.

Yet as what historians say is the only surviving town in America that was built as a Chinese settlement, Locke carries a burden of history far greater than its four blocks of mostly unkempt buildings would suggest.

Christina Fa, a pediatrician and member of the Chinese American Council of Sacramento, which was an advocate for subdividing Locke, said the town was a symbol for Asian-Americans nationwide.

Even if no former residents returned, Dr. Fa said, the changes being proposed amounted to an important form of restitution by drawing attention to Locke's racist past, and the largely unsung contributions of Chinese laborers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.

"Without them, the delta would still be a swampland and California agriculture wouldn't be nearly as advanced and as much a world player as it is now," Dr. Fa said.

Locke came into being at a time when many Californians felt economically threatened by Chinese immigrants, who had begun arriving in significant numbers in the mid-1800's looking for gold.

By the turn of the 20th century, most of the Chinese had given up on mining and had settled into agriculture, the mainstay of the delta, a flat and mostly fertile expanse of islands between San Francisco and Sacramento protected by a labyrinth of levees built by Chinese laborers.

In 1915, after a fire raced through the Chinatown in Walnut Grove, one of the many delta towns that had a section for Chinese farm workers, some residents from the Zhongshan district of China's Guangdong Province decided to set out on their own.

They looked about a quarter mile up the winding levee road, where the heirs of George Locke, a Sacramento businessman, had inherited several hundred acres of orchards. There was already a wharf and a Chinese store and saloon there.

With the Locke family's permission, the outpost grew into a full-fledged Chinatown, all built on land leased to Chinese tenants to skirt the land law.

Over the years, Locke became well known in the delta for its rowdy gambling halls, clandestine opium dens and abundant bordellos. At its peak, the town's population swelled to more than 1,000.

"What was different about Locke was that it wasn't just a small section of some town that others had founded," said Sucheng Chan, a historian who wrote the foreword to "Bitter Melon" (Heyday Books), an oral history of Locke.

"When people write about the Chinese in the United States, and they focus only on the urban Chinatowns, it gives an incomplete and distorted view of the early history of the Chinese-Americans," Ms. Chan said.

That same early history is what motivates longtime residents like Mrs. King, who is known around town as "Locke Mom."

When the final subdivision plan is approved, perhaps as early as next year, Mrs. King says she expects to see some of the old-timers again.

"Yes, I believe in ghosts," she said, "and I think they are watching and waiting."

How to Kill Orchestras

How to Kill Orchestras
By BERNARD HOLLAND
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/arts/television/29HOLL.html

As American orchestras lick their wounds, or die of them, the blame falls on fleeing contributors, bad management and disappearing audiences. Maybe these are symptoms, not causes.

Real causes? Take the model on which American orchestras are built. It no longer works. It survives in a few big cities, but even musical fortresses like the Pittsburgh Symphony and the Chicago Symphony are, by all reports, leaking blood by the quart.

American orchestras began with a place, not a culture. Simplified, the story goes like this: With westward expansion, cities were new and their roots shallow. Certain things were needed to keep them from blowing away with the wind. For stability, the American city needed street lighting, sewers, schools, parks, libraries and — oh, yes — a symphony orchestra.

The free-enterprise system, which worked so admirably to bring the American city its new wealth, transferred poorly to the performing arts. Local tycoons found that the pay-as-you-go ethic that had made their own fortunes fitted not at all. But they had been to New York and Boston, and to Europe. "These places have Beethoven symphonies," they said, "and so should we." When the American orchestra presented its unpaid bills at the end of a season, the wealthy few wrote personal checks.

But then the wealthy few became too many. They had children, and the children had children. Family wealth spread sideways; descendants multiplied and left for other American cities. They took their diminishing share of the family riches with them. Family foundations were established, and though arts-friendly at first, they became more interested in AIDS research and social reform.

With the great mansion on the hill no longer a reliable source of fiscal salvation, local corporations helped with the burden. If U.S. Steel was to keep its Pittsburgh executives happy, and if it was to attract new ones from elsewhere, it needed a city with first-rate universities, the Steelers and the Pirates and — oh, yes — a symphony orchestra.

This remained good business until the coming of the worldwide conglomerate: a handful of international operatives buying up the many companies that had made their own American cities thrive. Boardrooms in London and Geneva could hardly be expected to burn with civic pride for the Midwestern city halfway across America. Local, state and federal governments offered a little, but not much. American officialdom has always been uneasy with any enterprise that cannot take care of itself. Now everyone is so strapped financially that giving more, or even as much as usual, becomes moot.

With good management, it is supposed, money and listeners will come rolling in — again, a symptom masquerading as a cause. Orchestras are not sick because they have bad management. They have bad management because they are sick. Failing industries do not attract top employees.

One wan and revealing little culprit here is the invention of the arts-administration degree, fostering a younger generation that can administer but doesn't know what it is administering. The incidence of musical illiteracy in symphony offices, staffed with music lovers and record collectors, is high. Symphony boards tend toward successful businesspeople admirably devoted to keeping orchestras fiscally afloat but who, with little knowledge of music or real interest in it, have no capacity to fix a purpose or a path.

As for disappearing audiences, no amount of managing will solve that one. Classical music has only itself to blame. It has indulged the creation of a narcissistic avant-garde speaking in languages that repel the average committed listener in even our most sophisticated American cities. Intelligent, music-loving and eager to learn, such listeners largely understand that true talent and originality must find their own voice. What they do not understand is why the commitment to reach and touch listeners in the seats does not stand at the beginning of the creative process, as it did with Haydn and Mozart. This kind of art-for-art's-sake has much to answer for.

Once upon a time, a regenerative process was in motion: the mysterious new piece of music that was gradually transformed into the next old masterpiece. It still happens, but as an exception, not the rule. A recent performance of Schoenberg's Five Pieces on the West Coast was preceded by an explanatory lecture from the podium that was longer than the music itself. The Five Pieces are almost 100 years old.

The failure of cross-pollinating programs (old favorites standing next to new music) is painfully obvious in the way programs are arranged. Schedule Brahms before intermission and Birtwistle after, and you will watch one-third to one-half of your audience vanish prematurely into the night. Program forgotten masterpieces 200 years old, and still, avoidance mechanisms kick in. "New" has come to equal "suspect" among wary patrons.

It is nice to celebrate the hip, fresh faces who come to hear Stefan Wolpe at the Miller Theater or Bang on a Can composers at Symphony Space. These are not, on the other hand, faces you are likely to find listening to Rimsky-Korsakov in the symphony halls of American cities. Audiences have fragmented. Lovers of the new have their own worlds now. Rejecting the new, symphony managements and the patrons who keep them in business have fallen back on the tried and true, repeated endlessly.

SO have American opera houses. One is happy watching as they attract new listeners for old favorites. But our blind faith in immortal masterpieces is just that: blind. "La Bohème" is not a renewable resource. Use it too often, and it wears out. The "Bohème" audience, furthermore, likes neither "Lulu" nor any "Son of Lulu." So what are opera companies to do other than idle in neutral? The wave of new pieces sweeping American houses, staggering in their mediocrity, live and die like fireflies.

I wish I could interest the Environmental Protection Agency in looking into the symphony managers and conductors — almost all of them — who have so mercilessly exploited the mighty Beethoven Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, reducing them to pop-culture clichés and deadening their amazing qualities to the public ear. The record business is failing in the same way. After 50 recordings of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, Nos. 51 and 52 become irrelevant.

Fleeing audiences are one more symptom, the cause being a public art that has been abandoned by its avant-garde and uses up its given natural resources with profligacy. Audiences are not to blame. They are smarter than Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt want to think they are.

American orchestras will keep failing. I feel less for them than for the excellent musicians who will be displaced. But face a few facts. American orchestras will no more grow than Mother Nature will take the liver spots off my hands. We have grown old together. Darwinism is at work, and American orchestras must adjust: to smaller dreams, fewer orchestras serving wider areas, fragmented listenerships, hopes for some kind of government help and, above all, a way of preserving the past, electronically if not by word of mouth.

The Hungriest Critic of Them All

The Hungriest Critic of Them All
By A. O. SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/arts/29SCOT.html

COLCHESTER, England -- COLCHESTER is an unassuming red-brick town about an hour northeast of London, with a few Roman ruins in the center and a modern university on the outskirts. On a sunny afternoon at the end of May, I sat in a noisy cappuccino bar on the edge of the town's bustling business district, chatting with Clive James, who was performing that evening, with his songwriting partner, Pete Atkin, at the municipal theater. A stout, chipper woman from another table came over and asked Mr. James to autograph her ticket, which he happily did. A few minutes later, as we walked up a quiet lane toward the theater's backstage entrance, the proprietor of a rival coffeehouse popped onto the sidewalk with his camera, requesting a snapshot of Mr. James for his establishment's collection of celebrity portraits. Then, a few paces on, a nervous, eager man appeared with a large red autograph book, a rubber band marking the page reserved for Mr. James, who took all the unsolicited attention with the gracious, faintly self-mocking air of one long accustomed to the intrusions and obligations of fame, making genial small talk and duly signing whatever was put in front of him.

I, on the other hand, was somewhat astonished. Like most of his American admirers, I know Mr. James primarily as a literary critic, and in my experience members of that profession are not routinely stopped on the street by autograph-seekers, or asked for head shots to grace the walls of provincial eateries. But Mr. James's prolific, wide-ranging criticism, a fat, career-spanning collection of which has just been published in the United States by Norton, represents only one face of a remarkably protean public personality. In other parts of the English-speaking world — like Colchester, for instance — Mr. James's actual face is much better known. In the last 35 years he has been, in addition to a tireless literary journalist, a pioneering television critic, a popular television personality, a novelist, a poet and a best-selling memoirist, and from time to time, in tandem with Mr. Atkin, who writes the music, he plays the instruments and sings the songs, an "assistant rock star." (The two men, who met at Cambridge in the late 1960's, went on to record six albums of their pop-folky post-graduate rock 'n' roll, which occupies a place on the musical and lyrical spectrum somewhere between the Kinks and Steely Dan. They reunited last year after a quarter-century hiatus.) When, midway through the evening's performance, I asked the woman sitting next to me what had brought her to the concert, the answer was both simple and, as I was discovering, fairly complicated: "I quite like his poetry," she said, "and we've always watched him on telly, of course."

"Renaissance man," Mr. James writes in an essay on Pier Paolo Pasolini, "is a description tossed around too lightly in modern times — actors get it if they can play the guitar." Even if he had not circumnavigated the globe producing travel documentaries, or interviewed every imaginable celebrity, Mr. James would surely qualify. Knowing him almost entirely through his writing — and principally, unlike my seatmate, through his prose — I was struck, that evening in Colchester, by the continuities between his presence on the page and on the stage. For much of the performance, of course, his words were channeled through Mr. Atkin's reedy, passionate voice and jazz-inflected melodies, while Mr. James sat in a chair, listening. In between numbers, though, he stepped up to the microphone to manage the transitions with anecdotes, observations on the state of the world, poems, and excerpts from his "Unreliable Memoirs," which have been reprinted 62 times, and which some in the audience seemed to know by heart.

In the deceptively loose, ad-lib style of a showbiz veteran, Mr. James covered an awful lot of ground — from uproarious childhood misadventures with a homemade go-cart to reflections on romantic love, Australian history, World War II and Saddam Hussein — and the disparate themes were united less by a definable style or point of view than by a curious brand of charisma. Mr. James seemed happily immune to embarrassment. Readers of the memoirs, which follow him from reckless toddler to feckless graduate student, will know that he is generous in providing laughs at his own expense. He is also, as a critic, perpetually qualifying and reappraising his published opinion. The title of his new book, "As of This Writing," suggests a man who doesn't much care about having the last word, and most of the essays are accompanied by postscripts in which Mr. James embellishes and qualifies his earlier judgments, and occasionally allows himself a chortle of satisfaction at their rightness.

"There's nothing you can't say in songwriting if you get the tone of voice right," Mr. James remarked in Colchester, an observation that might well serve as his critical credo. It sounds easy enough, but reading through his essays you notice the careful, apparently effortless modulations of tone. He is, in the best English tradition, a master of eloquent distemper — "there are people reviewing books, even reviewing poetry, who can read only with difficulty, and begrudge the effort" — and also of the kind of epigrammatic summary that gains in complexity the more you think about it: "[Robert] Lowell thinks he is chipping away the marble to get at the statue. It's more likely that he is trying to build a statue out of marble chips."

He is also remarkably agile in using humor to set up a serious insight. In a postscript to a long essay on photography, he recounts a safari during which he snapped a picture of an angry lion. "When the photographs came back from the chemist's," he writes, "I was as open-mouthed as the lion. Cartier-Bresson would have swallowed his hyphen with envy." Far from boasting of his prowess as a photographer, he is instead marveling at the technological might of his camera. "Art is safe from such developments," he writes. "We aren't, but it is." There follows a passage, in effect the book's envoi, which might risk pomposity were it not anticipated by such self-teasing wit (and also if it were not, with respect both to its author and to his calling, entirely true): "As long as human life lasts, art will go on being the one activity for which no amount of calculation can provide a substitute, and the job of the critic will be to explain why this is so. The ability to realize that he can never attain to an exhaustive analysis of the thing he loves best is the indispensable qualification for signing on. What he has to offer is his life, of which his learning can only be a part: the more he knows the better, but if he thinks that nothing else counts then he will count for nothing."

Mr. James's own life began in 1939, in Australia, where he grew up in a lower-middle-class Sydney suburb called Kogorah, the only child of parents who had left school in their early teens. "The war came," Mr. James recalled, "and my father enlisted and became a prisoner in Singapore." He survived slave labor in Japan only to be killed when the American plane that was bringing him home crashed in a storm over Taiwan. Clive was 6 at the time. "That's the formative event in my life," Mr. James said. "Because of that, I don't like luck. I've had more than my share, but I still don't like it."

He retains an ardent, patriotic affection for Australia, though, even if he has been away for more than 40 years, and left, like many ambitious men and women of his generation — the likes of Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries (a k a Dame Edna Everage) — as soon as he could. "Australia was a backwater," Mr. James said. "If you wanted to do something in the media or the arts you went to England. Always to England." But Australia was also a "functioning democracy" with wide-open educational opportunities. (Mr. James's youthful squandering of such opportunities is one of the themes of "Unreliable Memoirs.") Unlike some of his fellow expatriates, though — in particular Mr. Hughes, whose book "The Fatal Shore" is the subject of one of the best pieces in "As of This Writing" — Mr. James avoided the further expatriation (and the potential for brighter glory or deeper obscurity) of migration to America.

The memoirs, which bring him to the brink of a late-blooming adulthood, present a young man who is not so much suspicious of luck as indifferent to it, and, therefore, supremely lucky — a kind of holy fool flourishing in spite of his utter (and, given the title of the first installment, no doubt wildly exaggerated) unsuitedness for love, literary glory, go-cart racing or distinctions in the field of dental hygiene.

DEPARTING Australia at the dawn of the 60's, having begun a promising journalistic career (and completed a lackluster academic one), Mr. James arrived in London planning (as he put it in "Falling Toward England") "to take a low-paying menial job during the day and compose poetic masterpieces at night. After due reflection I decided that it would be preferable, at least initially, to take a high-paying job in journalism and sacrifice a small proportion of the masterpieces to expediency."

He's joking, of course. But the punch line is that he is also describing, more or less, precisely what happened, though not right away, and not exactly according to plan. After Cambridge, he gravitated toward the sharp-elbowed world of London literary journalism, to which he retains a strong allegiance. Then, in 1972 — "by accident, which I now like to palm off as a master plan" — he was hired by The Observer as its weekly television critic. This was a serendipitous assignment — not just for Mr. James himself, who built the week-in, week-out constituency of readers who would make him a bestselling author and a media star in his own right, but for anyone who reads English and watches television. Like Kenneth Tynan on theater or Pauline Kael on movies, Mr. James had discovered a critical idiom that matched his chosen medium and reflected how people actually experienced it, rather than their sense of how they ought to. At the time, British broadcasting was a kind of inverted mirror image of its American counterpart: high-minded rather than vulgar, state-sponsored rather than commercial, serious about itself rather than cynically self-mocking. All of which was reflected in journalistic norms. "It was all very worthy," Mr. James said. "The big programs were coming out" — serious realist dramas like "Cathy Come Home" and earnest educational programming — "and you talked about that. You didn't talk about the stuff that joined it up. And you didn't take seriously how the Eurovision song contest was going. So it wasn't that people weren't taking TV as important. They were taking it as important and nothing else." Mr. James managed to bring out the latent importance of what appeared most trivial about British television, and also the unacknowledged silliness of what was most elevated.

He stayed at The Observer for a decade, and then moved from writing about television to appearing on it. How did he manage the transition? "Because I was glib," he says, with a mixture of self-deprecation and pride. "I was a talk show guest who graduated to a host." And he was, for nearly 20 years, a charming, indomitable interviewer of celebrities, as well as the host and producer of a series of innovative travel documentaries and excellent miniseries like "Fame in the Twentieth Century," for which he also wrote a companion volume.

"I'm in a constant state of telling myself this strange career I've had has been functional," Mr. James told me. "I hope so. If I was confident about it I would have learned nothing. It's just that kind of confidence in your mission that is exactly the kind of thing I'm out to avoid. I want to retain my capacity not to become a hardened figure in any field."

In one of the many critical boomerangs in "As of This Writing" — sentences written about others that seem to apply, at least glancingly, to the author himself — Mr. James describes the prose of Mr. Hughes, his old expat compatriot, as "the product of an innocent abroad who has consciously enjoyed every stage of his growing sophistication without allowing his original barbaric gusto to be diminished." Mr. James's London pied-à-terre, a loft duplex in a converted wharf on the South Bank, is accordingly lined with books in languages ancient and modern, including Russian and Japanese — the signs of both his voracious civilization and his insatiable curiosity. ("The message of his work," he writes of Mr. Hughes, "far from being `look how much I've read,' is `look how much there is to read.' ")

THERE are no prizes for spotting that I had myself in mind when I said Agee was versatile in an age that doesn't understand versatility," Mr. James writes, flinging a boomerang at the reader to deflect the one heading back toward him. "What I neglected to add was that no age ever has. Leonardo had people telling him that he was spreading himself thin." It may be best, then, to take his occasional expressions of half-regretful wondering about how his time and creative energy might otherwise have been spent with a grain of salt. "I often thought, I'll never write `War and Peace' at this rate," he told me. "The answer is, well, somebody already has written it. And maybe the superficial knowledge you gain this way is your subject. I think there's something to that." Which is true enough: Mr. James's subject, over the course of his career, has been contemporary culture in its far-flung and multifarious manifestations, from Holocaust literature to Lady Diana, from Federico Fellini to Les Murray, from Solzenhitsyn to Clive James. But the zest with which he has chased them down and the open, skeptical intelligence with which he writes about them makes him something more than a dilettante — or makes him, rather, the ideal dilettante and therefore, granting the impossibility that there could be such a thing, the perfect critic.

Although Mr. James occasionally refers to himself as "retired," this seems only to mean that he has, for the moment, given up appearing regularly on television, limiting himself to 4000 words a month in the Times Literary Supplement, his tour with Mr. Atkin and an ever-expanding number of projects in various stages of execution and conceptualization: he hopes to live long enough to write a novel about the Pacific War, which marked his own life so decisively; in the meantime, he has all but finished "Alone in the Café," an ambitious work he describes as a "cultural analysis of the 20th century, based on individual people and works of art." "I'm not just cleaning the desk," he says, noting that, in addition to the essay collection, he is preparing to publish an impressively thick collection of his poetry this year. Meanwhile, in his apartment in London, a long, windowed upstairs room has been converted into a tango salon, where he indulges one of his recent enthusiasms. "I'm trying to open up new opportunities, which is probably crazy at my age. But there are other things I can do yet. I'm thinking of writing a musical with Pete, a tango musical. That could be my ultimate calling. That could be the one where God reaches down from heaven with a lightning bolt and says, enough."

Intriguing Works Rise in London Sales

Intriguing Works Rise in London Sales
By CAROL VOGEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/arts/design/30AUCT.html

LONDON, June 29 — In the auction world, all it takes is two stubborn collectors with deep pockets to create a buzz. So it was in a packed salesroom at Sotheby's here on June 23, during the semiannual series of major auctions, that a pair of telephone bidders fought over a painting by Egon Schiele. The work, "Krumau Landscape: Town and River" (1916), set a record price for that artist's work, selling for $21 million, almost twice its high estimate of $10.8 million.

Not only was the painting considered rare by experts, but it also came with a compelling history. It originally belonged to Wilhelm and Daisy Hellmann, who were among the first families of Viennese art patronage in the early 20th century. The Hellmanns acquired the Expressionist painting directly from Schiele, who was a friend. In 1938 it was seized by the Nazis and auctioned in 1942 to Wolfgang Gurlitt, a German dealer who later sold it to the Neue Galerie in Linz, Austria. It hung there from 1953 until earlier this year, when it was returned to heirs of the Hellmanns, living in Britain, who gave it to Sotheby's to sell.

A canvas of bright orange, red and brown rooftops painted from a high vantage, with a river winding through one side of it, the painting is considered especially important by experts who think it is one of Schiele's most powerful late works. It is also particularly desirable given the fashion for German and Austrian Expressionist art.

The $21 million paid for this Schiele was the highest price ever paid for a restituted artwork sold at auction, and the most expensive painting of the week's sales. The buyer has not been disclosed. All the usual names have been bandied about, from Ronald S. Lauder, chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and founder of the Neue Galerie in New York, a museum of German and Austrian art, to Rudolph Leopold, a passionate Viennese collector, and Lily Safra, widow of the billionaire banker Edmond J. Safra. Another possibility, experts said, is David Thomson, the son of Lord Thomson of Fleet, former owner of The Times of London and one of the richest men in Canada. The family's collection has been promised to the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The rarity of "Krumau Landscape" coupled with the allure of its provenance made it one of the bright spots in a week of rather predictable ups and downs. While the top international dealers gathered here, the well-trodden path from Sotheby's salesrooms on New Bond Street to Christie's headquarters on nearby King Street was noticeably lacking in Americans. For the last two seasons they have been conspicuously absent, choosing to stay home and bid either through their dealers or on the telephone, or perhaps not at all.

In trying to analyze the week's results, Thomas Gibson, a leading London dealer, said: "Everyone likes to create a mystery about the art market, but there are no mysteries. If something was an exceptional work by a popular artist, it did well."

Besides exceptional works, those works with unusual or compelling provenances outperformed the run-of-the-mill, irrespective of whether they were important.

Van Goghs, no matter what their quality or subject matter, attract collectors. At Christie's two van Gogh paintings and a drawing became top sellers, and all were bought by unidentified telephone bidders. The most expensive, "Still Life, Vase With Carnations" (1890), sold for $7.1 million, above its $4.9 million low estimate. Three bidders went for "The Reader of Novels," an 1888 painting of a dark-haired girl with her head in a book, which brought $5.6 million, also above its $4.9 million low estimate.

(Prices include the auction houses' commissions. At Sotheby's it is 20 percent on the first $100,000 and 12 percent of the rest; Christie's charges 19.5 percent of the first $100,000 and 12 percent above that. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

More interesting than either painting, however, was a van Gogh drawing. That sketch of his famous yellow house was made on the back of a letter he wrote to his brother, Theo, on Sept. 28, 1888, in which he described a painting he was about to work on. That painting was "The Yellow House," which now hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and Christie's was selling the sketch for it, known as "Vincent's House at Arles." The sketch sold for $1.4 million, midway between its $1.2 million and $1.6 million estimates. Christie's identified the buyer only as an American collector.

Throughout the week works on paper brought high prices. Christie's sold two collections of drawings, gouaches and watercolors. Both had low estimates, a smart tactic by Christie's because it contributed to a feeding frenzy. One collection included 30 works that belonged to Efstratios Eleftheriades, better known as Tériade, the publisher of 20th-century art books who died in 1983. They were being sold by his widow, Alice Tériade, to benefit a French hospital foundation.

Among the top work in that sale was Miró's "Rooster," a bright work on paper that was bought by the Nahmad family, dealers with galleries in New York and London. The Miró work sold for nearly $3 million, more than five times its high $560,000 estimate.

Also for sale at Christie's was a group of Cézanne drawings that had belonged to Adrien Chappuis, author of the catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne's drawings. The collection remained in the Chappuis family until 1999, when it was bequeathed to the family of Georges and Jean Barut, friends of Chappuis. Top among the group was a self-portrait of Cézanne with a disheveled collar and a straight-on stare; it sold to an unidentified collector for $737,339, nearly six times its $130,000 high estimate.

In the Impressionist and Modern art sales and in the contemporary art auctions, when a mediocre painting came up, bidding frequently evaporated, and the room went dead. Banal examples of Klee or Renoir, Warhol or Fontana went unsold.

There was little doubt as to which artists were in fashion. European buyers had a healthy appetite for Surrealist works by artists like Magritte and Delvaux.

At Sotheby's contemporary art sale, a striking Fontana, "Spatial Concept, the End of God" (1964), a large bright-yellow egg-shaped canvas punctuated by Fontana's familiar holes, was bought by Anthony Meier, the San Francisco dealer, for $2.2 million, well above its $1.3 million high estimate. Five bidders tried to buy that work, and after the sale experts speculated that Mr. Meier was bidding for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which he has bid for many times.

Also popular at Christie's were three paintings by the Russian-born painter Nicolas de Staël, who died in 1955. "It is interesting to note that if any artist has been in the shadows for years and has a major retrospective, people reassess that artist's place in history," Mr. Gibson said, referring to the current retrospective of de Staël's work at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris.

Prices for work by Gerhard Richter, strong since his major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, have grown even stronger. Four of his paintings from various periods were among the Top 20 best sellers of the week. At Christie's, three bidders went after "Forest (3)" (1990), one of Mr. Richter's bright-blue, blurry abstract images. Rachel Mauro, who runs the Dickinson Roundell gallery in New York, bought it for $1.3 million, in the middle of its $1.2 million to $1.6 million estimates.

At Sotheby's two telephone bidders tried for "Small Canary Landscape" (1971), one of Mr. Richter's dreamy, photo-based images. It sold to an unidentified collector for $512,650, above its $471,000 high estimate.

Many in the art world noticed the growing difference between the market for Impressionist and Modern art and that of contemporary art. After Christie's sale of contemporary art on Thursday night, Armand Bartos, a Manhattan dealer, said he could feel the market for contemporary art getting stronger and stronger.

"Over the next three to five years the offerings and audience for contemporary art will increase," he said, "whereas unless someone dies less will come up for sale in the area of Impressionist and Modern art, so there will be less buyers. Just look at the inflation of younger artists."

Tobias Meyer, director of Sotheby's contemporary art department worldwide, said he noticed that this season in particular the audience at the Impressionist and Modern art sales and the auctions for contemporary art were markedly different.

"New buyers, people who have made money in global financial markets, are no longer going into the Impressionist and Modern field as they did in the past," he said. "These people are interested in postwar art. As a result there's a different energy in the salesrooms. There is more supply and more fashions."

'Collected Poems': The Whole Lowell

'Collected Poems': The Whole Lowell
By WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/books/review/29PRITCHT.html

COLLECTED POEMS
By Robert Lowell.
Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
1,186 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $45.

I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.'' The final line of Robert Lowell's ''Eye and Tooth,'' one of the many poems about depression in ''For the Union Dead'' (1964), feels ominously prescient of a decline in the poet's reputation after his death in 1977. Something like it happened to both Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot after their deaths in the mid-1960's.

In Lowell's case, biographical accounts of his clinical dementia and concomitant unhappiness inflicted on others (''not avoiding injury to others, / not avoiding injury to myself,'' as words from ''The Dolphin'' put it) alienated some readers. In particular he was criticized for using, as material for poems, letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, from whom he had separated. Although books and articles continued to appear about Lowell's life and poetry (biographies by Ian Hamilton and Paul Mariani; a collection of essays and memoirs about him edited by Jeffrey Meyers; an incisive short book, ''Damaged Grandeur,'' by Richard Tillinghast), claims for Lowell's centrality were less often made. It was as if, being early on crowned as America's premier poet and a ''political'' one to boot, Lowell had no place to go but down.

Frank Bidart, who writes the introduction to the ''Collected Poems'' he and David Gewanter have edited, was a student of Lowell's at Harvard in the 1960's and went on to become not only his friend but both ''amanuensis and sounding board'' for the poet's work. Bidart's efforts as a sounding board on Lowell's behalf were called into play particularly in the late 60's and early 70's, when Lowell wrote and rewrote the hundreds of unrhymed sonnets that appeared first in ''Notebook 1967-68,'' then in a revised ''Notebook'' (1970), then three years later -- rearranged, and with many new sonnets -- in ''History,'' ''For Lizzie and Harriet'' and ''The Dolphin.'' In one of the three sonnets from ''History'' titled ''Randall Jarrell,'' Lowell has his friend and fellow poet say to him, ''You didn't write, you rewrote.'' Bidart quotes this at the beginning of his introduction by way of admitting his own active participation in the process of Lowell's rewritings. That introduction (quite properly) doesn't make a case for Lowell's pre-eminence as a 20th-century American poet, but stresses instead the editors' attempt to look at every published instance of a Lowell poem and to include, in their notes, versions and lines that appeared elsewhere than in the published volumes. It is good to have included, among many other things in the notes and appendixes, magazine versions of such central poems to the Lowell canon as ''Beyond the Alps'' and ''Waking Early Sunday Morning.'' But I would hazard that, just as is the case with Yeats or Auden -- other great revisers of their own verse -- Lowell's interest for us does not depend upon his revisionary zealousness or obsession.

''Collected Poems'' includes 10 books of Lowell's, from ''Lord Weary's Castle'' (1946) to ''Day by Day'' (1977). ''Imitations'' is here, Lowell's renderings of other poets, but not his first book, ''Land of Unlikeness,'' which occupies the first of several appendixes. These also contain Lowell's versions of poems by Akhmatova and Mandelstam; various uncollected poems, some in manuscript; a short, delightful essay, ''After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me,'' which he wrote near the end of his life; and a useful essay, ''On 'Confessional' Poetry,'' in which Bidart describes the sequence of the last four poems in the final section of ''Life Studies.'' There then follow 165 pages of notes, ranging from the very useful to the scarcely necessary. These notes avoid interpretations of individual poems and don't attempt to account for all textual changes.

Amodel example is the note to Lowell's early ''Colloquy in Black Rock'' (''Here the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean''), which locates the Connecticut neighborhood near Bridgeport where Lowell lived after his imprisonment for draft resistance. Black Rock was populated in part by workers at the Sikorsky helicopter factory, many of Hungarian descent, who attended St. Stephen's Roman Catholic Church -- thus the allusion to Hungary's first king and patron saint as well as to another Stephen, the first Christian martyr (''In Black Mud / Hungarian workmen give their blood / For the martyre Stephen, who was stoned to death''). Lowell's account of the poem's genesis is given, as well as a letter published in The Black Rock News about the geographical proximity of his house to the church. A query by T. S. Eliot, Lowell's editor at Faber, about the word ''detritus'' is mentioned, along with other bits of annotation that serious readers of Lowell will be informed by. At the other extreme, one wonders what conceivable reader of this volume will need to have Lent and Pax Romana glossed, to be informed that Tacitus and Juvenal are Roman writers, that ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles'' is by Thomas Hardy, and that Trollope is a ''novelist,'' Emerson an ''essayist'' and Thoreau the author of ''Walden.'' Still, assembling these notes is an achievement not to be minimized.

Bidart singles out Helen Vendler for her insistence that this edition of Lowell have notes, and over the past 35 years, she has provided, in a number of valuable essays that are the equivalent of a short book, the strongest case for Lowell's pre-eminence as the American poet of his time. The pre-eminence is clearly not a matter of superior technique -- in this realm he is excelled, or at least equaled, by his contemporaries Richard Wilbur, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill and Anthony Hecht. But as Eliot put it, complicatedly, in ''The Sacred Wood,'' ''we cannot say at what point 'technique' begins or where it ends.'' Consideration of Lowell's technique as a poet must include the sense of how wide he cast his net, of how many men, women and events he engaged with, and of how much history or ''life'' he aspired to take in and send out in the poems. He once called Hart Crane the great poet of his (Crane's) generation in that ''he got out more than anybody else . . . he somehow got New York City; he was at the center of things in the way that no other poet was.'' In his poems and prose tributes, many of them to other writers, Lowell got more out of the midcentury American scene -- literary, cultural, political -- than anyone else. Vendler's name for his peculiar quality was ''difficult grandeur.'' No one will deny the grandeur, from ''Lord Weary'' through the hundreds of sonnets; but assessments of the difficulty that went along with it vary, as seen in the divergent verdicts by serious poets and critics of his contribution to poetry over all.

That important poets show a power of development over their careers has been the assumption on which we measure the majorness of a Yeats, an Eliot. But the notion has also been countered by as major a poet as Philip Larkin, who once alluded to Oscar Wilde's quip about how only mediocrities develop. There is no question that Lowell ''developed'' in the sense of a gradual stylistic unfolding over a career of books: from the rhymed, brutally enjambed pentameters of ''Lord Weary,'' to the modified free verse of ''Life Studies,'' to the public address of octosyllabic couplets in ''Near the Ocean,'' to the jammed unrhymed abruptness of the sonnets, to the final free verse explorations of ''Day by Day.'' But Lowell's development in the sense of an achieved maturity, a higher instance of the display of human powers in poetry, is a more contested subject, especially with reference to the poems written after ''For the Union Dead.'' I have in mind not only what Larkin most likely thought about Lowell's sonnets, but also what such good poets and critics of poetry as Donald Hall and Donald Davie, Denis Donoghue and Clive James said in print about them and about ''Day by Day.'' But then, as Jarrell once put it, ''if you never look just wrong to your contemporaries, you will never look just right to posterity.''

For this reader, a trip through ''Collected Poems,'' read in the order they appeared, enforces Lowell's sense of tonic -- and Eliotic -- restlessness with any perfected style. (As Eliot said in ''Little Gidding'': ''For last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice.'') So the unyielding rhetorical overkill of ''Lord Weary'' and its successor narratives in ''The Mills of the Kavanaughs'' (''The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket,'' ''Between the Porch and the Altar,'' ''After the Surprising Conversions,'' ''Her Dead Brother'') provokes, with ''Beyond the Alps'' as a hinge or pivot, the rueful, humorous, ironic voice of the ''Life Studies'' section of ''Life Studies,'' from which lines like the following are as fresh and irresistible as when I first encountered them 45 years ago: ''Anchors aweigh, Daddy boomed in his bathtub''; ''Dearest, I cannot loiter here / in lather like a polar bear''; ''Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed''; ''There are no Mayflower / screwballs in the Catholic Church.'' Humor is a feeble word for the deeply satisfying twists made by such lines, and they are all over ''Life Studies.'' Five years later, we hear the depressed, regretful tenor, again ''frizzled, stale and small,'' of most of the poems in ''For the Union Dead''; then at book's end the title poem, which moves beyond private turmoil into civic, momentous statement. About a number of poems in these two volumes it can be said what Jarrell said about ''one or two'' of them in ''Lord Weary'' -- that they ''will be read as long as men remember English.''

No such consensus exists about the late Lowell. After I. A. Richards read and reread ''Notebook 1967-68,'' he wrote a letter to the poet that was probably not sent, and one can see why Richards might have held it back as he explains to Lowell why he can't ''understand justly'' these poems: ''The tone, the address, the reiteration, the lacunae in convexity, the privacy of the allusions, the use of references which only the Ph.D. duties of the 1990's will explain, the recourse to contemporary crudities, the personal note, the 'it's enough if I say it' air, the assumption that 'you must sympathize with my moans, my boredom, my belches' . . . puzzle me.'' This from the great construer himself! Recurrent readings of those sonnets and further ones in ''The Dolphin'' never quite put Richards's complaints to rest. Even Lowell's loyal friend from Kenyon College days, John Thompson, noted that the sonnet's brevity ''relieves the poet of the burden of exposition and encourages him to get lyric about anything that catches his fancy.'' My own favorite sonnets are the ones about older writers -- Frost, Eliot, Pound, Williams, Ford and others -- where the ''convexity'' Richards had trouble with feels stronger and where Lowell's mischievous humor is most evident. (''Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs.'') Still, one could name 30 or 40 of the sonnets with passages gripping enough to lodge them in our minds and ears.

Bishop once told Lowell she envied him the authority granted him as a poet just by being a Lowell rather than, say, her Uncle Artie. A mixed blessing of course, but if the equivalent of Uncle Artie had written ''Day by Day,'' published shortly before Lowell died, it would have seemed slack and listless -- as, in fact, the book was judged to be by some reviewers. Only when we read ''Day by Day'' as a ''Life Studies'' written 20 years later, by a poet who knows his career as a writer and his life as a man are about to end, does its beauty and pathos emerge.

Some would call this special pleading; but read in this splendid edition and after the noise and flash of the sonnets, Lowell's final book has the ring of inevitability about it, as a last reinvention, painful and sometimes breathtakingly delicate, of the man who said to Bidart, months before he died, ''I don't know the value of what I've written, but I know that I changed the game.''

William H. Pritchard teaches English at Amherst College. A collection of his essays and reviews, ''Shelf Life,'' has just been published.

The Mystery of Itch, the Joy of Scratch

The Mystery of Itch, the Joy of Scratch
By ABIGAIL ZUGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/health/01ITCH.html

An itch demands a scratch, but science has barely begun to scratch the surface of why an itch itches, and how to make it stop.

The itch-scratch cycle sits right at the fascinating intersection of pleasure and pain, reflex and compulsion, but it has received relatively little scientific attention. Ten years ago, one of the small band of international itch researchers called itch "sadly neglected," an "orphan symptom."

But new developments are slowly beginning to refine scientific understanding of itch. They include the identification of nerve fibers devoted to transmitting itchy sensations, of brain sectors that process itch, and of molecules that seem to provoke itch. Itch experts hope that better treatments for itchy patients will soon follow.

People who sail through the occasional mosquito bite without a conscious thought may be unmoved by this news. But for the many others whose itch-scratch cycle has been deranged by yet-unknown neurochemicals into a tortured process that scars their skin, destroys their sleep and sometimes sends them to the brink of suicide, the dearth of scientific understanding and treatment options for itch is deeply frustrating.

"So many people suffer from itch," said Dr. Gil Yosipovitch, an associate professor of dermatology at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., who has coordinated several international itch conferences. But financing for itch research is hard to come by, and effective treatment options for itchy patients are quite limited. "I do believe that our patients deserve better," Dr. Yosipovitch said.

Anyone doubting his word might pay a visit to Dr. Yosipovitch's Web site, www.itchforum.com, and watch five short video clips of patients with the itchy skin condition called atopic eczema. Filmed at night during sleep, the patients writhe in bed, unconsciously clawing at their faces, torsos, ankles and feet, clearly in the grips of a powerful primal instinct their doctors have been unable to interrupt.

Itch is a sensation that links the skin, the spinal cord and the brain in a kind of circular neural superhighway with exits all along the way. An itch may start anywhere along the loop — or even in organs like the liver far removed from the loop — and the process may then escalate into a vicious high-speed circular chase of itch and scratch, one worsening the other.

Sometimes, finding and treating a problem far afield from the skin itself is the only thing that can stop the cycle.

The simple mosquito bite is one of the few causes of itch that scientists feel they understand fairly well, and even it is full of unknowns.

When a mosquito injects its saliva into the skin, antibodies against molecules in the saliva cause cells in the skin to release the well-known itch mediator histamine. (When food or medication allergies cause the itchy raised wheals on the skin called urticaria, or hives, that itch comes from histamine, too.) Histamine causes nerves in the skin to send an alarm up the spinal cord to the brain.

But the precise path of that signal, and what happens when the alarm reaches the brain, is still full of conjecture.

Until recently, researchers thought that feelings of itch traveled to the brain along the same nerves as feelings of pain, and that, in fact, itch was really just an attenuated form of pain.

But many researchers felt that this assumption had to be wrong. How could itch and pain share nerves, they reasoned, when, among other differences, the two sensations are completely different, and elicit very different responses? Pain provokes instant withdrawal from the source of the pain, while an itch provokes a scratch. Sure enough, in 1997 a group of German physiologists identified a family of tiny slow-conducting nerves with broad tentacles in the skin that seem to be devoted to itch alone.

"The discovery of a specific itch pathway caused a cataclysmic shift in thinking about itch," said Dr. Earl Carstens, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California at Davis. This new finding emphasizes that itch is a unique sensation that requires specific research of its own.

Meanwhile, events in the brain segment of the itch pathway are also newly unfolding.

Several years ago, researchers injected tiny quantities of histamine under the skin of volunteers — effectively giving them artificial mosquito bites — then scanned their brains with positron emission tomography, or PET technology, which displays activated areas.

As the volunteers' skin began to itch, their brains showed intense activity in sectors responsible for sensation, sectors responsible for planning and initiating movement and also in deeper areas of the brain where the more primitive emotions of pain and pleasure are processed.

In other words, the brain has no specific "itch center," the researchers concluded. Rather, itch seems to be a multidimensional neurologic web incorporating sensation and action along with deeper emotional overtones.

And if itch is a mystery, scratch is even more so.

In its basic, most primitive form, scratching is a reflex that is controlled by the spinal cord and requires no input from the brain. Experimental animals whose spinal cords have been severed from their brains still have a scratch reflex.

But the action of scratching a specific, annoying itch requires the brain to supply the strategy, strength and coordination to supplement the primitive spinal reflex.

"The big mystery in the field is the link between the itch pathway and the scratch reflex pathway," Dr. Carstens said.

Even the basic question of why a scratch relieves an itch is still not definitively answered.

The general theory is that scratch provides a counterirritation: a slight pain that functions as a kind of transient neurologic distraction for the brain. Focusing on the discomfort of the scratch, the brain eventually forgets the itch.

Sometimes, though, scratching itself may provoke more itching, Dr. Yosipovitch said, possibly through damage to the upper layers of the skin, which release yet unidentified molecules that then bring on the sensation of itch again.

Meanwhile, the relationship between pain and itch has still further complications.

Powerful painkillers like morphine are notorious for provoking itching, especially if they are injected directly into the fluid that bathes the brain and the spinal cord.

The explanation for this observation: Because the sensation of pain seems to be essential to the process of quelling itch, when the ability to feel pain is dampened by morphine and similar drugs, intractable itch may result. There is evidence that natural morphinelike molecules in the brain, called opioids, may also play an important role in producing the sensation of itch.

Even though doctors do not yet entirely understand this phenomenon, they have begun to harness it for the treatment of some kinds of chronic itch that have no other known treatments.

Only a few kinds of itch can be relieved with antihistamine drugs like Benadryl (diphenhydramine) because only a few, like mosquito bites and allergic skin reactions, are caused by histamine release in the skin. Most other itchy skin conditions — among them dry skin, eczema, fungal infections and psoriasis — do not appear to involve histamine, and thus are seldom relieved by antihistamines.

Instead, these itches sometimes respond to antibiotic creams, skin moisturizers or drugs that suppress the immune system like steroids.

But itching complicates other medical conditions too: it is very common in people with certain kinds of liver disease and also in people with kidney failure even after they go on dialysis.

For these itchy people, antihistamine drugs do not work well — and creams and ointments do not work either. Frequently, no treatment is successful.

In 2001, two British liver specialists described in a European medical journal the case of a woman with liver disease who was so miserable from intractable itching that she almost received a liver transplant.

Studies have shown, however, that intractably itchy patients like her can sometimes be helped with drugs that counteract the effects of morphine.

These drugs work by blocking opioid receptors in the body's cells, and are often used to treat people with drug overdoses. The fact that opioid antagonist drugs relieve itch that nothing else helps has suggested to scientists that in some patients itch may be caused at least in part by too many natural opioid molecules circulating in the brain.

Instead of a liver transplant, the British woman was treated with the opioid blocking drugs naloxone and naltrexone. Her itch subsided completely and she avoided life-threatening surgery.

But itching and scratching are not always dire medical problems. They can also provide pure pleasure, as anyone who has ever wielded a back scratcher in just the right spot knows well.

And if science is still floundering to explain the misery of itch, it has not even begun to tackle the joy of scratch.

"No one has figured out why it is so pleasurable to scratch an itch," Dr. Yosipovitch said.

Crime and Provenance: A Chosen Son Is Exiled

Crime and Provenance: A Chosen Son Is Exiled
By PHOEBE HOBAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/fashion/29SANS.html

JAMES SANSUM entered the elegant parlor room of his Upper East Side antiques gallery, with its rare artworks and precious knickknacks, followed by a frisky miniature poodle. Dressed in khakis and a blue-and-white checked shirt, Mr. Sansum, a 36-year-old Harvard graduate, looked more like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad than a man charged with grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, to the tune of half a million dollars.

On June 3, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, announced the indictment of Mr. Sansum on charges of stealing $160,000 worth of art, antiques and books from his former employer of 12 years, Helen Fioratti of L'Antiquaire and the Connoisseur, a renowned antiques shop off Madison Avenue. He was also charged with defrauding her gallery of some $400,000 for personal expenses, including a $23,000 Gucci bill, $15,000 for a personal trainer and tanning salon, and veterinary expenses for Choppy, the poodle.

A week later, seated on a beige suede Jansen couch at James Sansum Fine and Decorative Art, his second-floor shop on Lexington Avenue, Mr. Sansum protested his innocence. He described the circumstances as a personal and business relationship gone terribly toxic. "I had always known Helen could be a tough businesswoman," he said, "but the realization that she had turned on me was shocking. I feel really betrayed and sad. I'm fighting for my life here. I'm very confident I will be vindicated and the truth will come out."

The indictment of Mr. Sansum, who faces up to 15 years in prison, has shocked people in the genteel circles in which he moves, the concentric worlds of young New York society and Upper East Side designers. His friends include Alexa Hampton-Papageorgiou, the daughter of the decorator Mark Hampton; Princess Alexandra of Greece; and Alex and Eliza Reed Bolen, whose stepfather is Oscar de la Renta. "James is a close friend and someone we trust very much," Mr. Bolen said. "He has assured us he hasn't stolen anything and that he's anxious to defend himself against these charges."

Mr. Sansum and his lawyers contend the criminal investigation against him, instigated by Ms. Fioratti, was the direct result of a civil suit he filed in 2001 to get her to buy out his minority share in her business. "The criminal case is absolutely retaliatory," said Neil Grossman, who is representing Mr. Sansum in the civil suit.

But that is not how Ms. Fioratti and her family see it.

"Did you see that movie `The Remarkable Mr. Ripley?' That was it," Ms. Fioratti said, referring to the film whose correct title is "The Talented Mr. Ripley." It stars Matt Damon as a cultured but penniless young man who ingratiates himself with an Ivy League heir, then insidiously usurps his identity.

Asked what had led her to suspect Mr. Sansum of theft, Ms. Fioratti, who had let him live in an apartment on the top floor of her town house and who underwrote part of his graduate education in decorative arts history, replied: "We just wondered why we had no money. I was told, `You can't buy this. You can't buy that. You don't have money.' And I said, `Why? We sold so much.' `Taxes, the rules, the this, the that.' But it wasn't."

Ms. Fioratti, 70, who was en route to her home in Florence, Italy, referred all further questions to her lawyer, Michael Miller, who read a statement: "We are very grateful to the Manhattan district attorney's office for its thorough investigation of Mr. Sansum's unfortunate and substantial thefts from L'Antiquaire and the Connoisseur. Helen Fioratti is devastated by the betrayal in her trust in Mr. Sansum."

Betrayal, devastation, echoes of the fictional Tom Ripley, the ruin of a reputation. The story of the disintegration of an intimate personal relationship described by both parties in legal documents as like "parent and child," and the unraveling of a professional bond between a celebrated antiques doyenne and her talented protégé, is a convoluted one.

"They both had the same passion," said Paul Wiseman, an interior decorator in San Francisco who knows Mr. Sansum and Ms. Fioratti. "He seemed to be very knowledgeable, and she seemed to be training him in a wonderful way. It seemed like a perfect relationship."

Mr. Sansum entered the Fioratti family, which goes back a generation in the antiques trade, on the arm of Ms. Fioratti's daughter, Arianna, a classmate at Harvard. (Ms. Fioratti's mother, Countess Ruth Costantino, founded the shop in 1918.) The two were such extremely close friends that if they were not exactly dating, they were considered nearly siblings. In Harvard Magazine, Mr. Sansum was referred to (erroneously) as Arianna Fioratti's cousin when he served as a witness to her marriage, in 1997, to Count Mario Loreto Frusci di Bertinoro, at the Fiorattis' 10th-century castle near Siena.

After Mr. Sansum graduated from Harvard in 1989, he moved into the top floor of the five-story town house at 36 East 73rd Street that is home to Ms. Fioratti's shop. (For a time in the mid-1990's, while this space was being renovated, he lived in her apartment at 555 Park Avenue.) Over the decades, the shop, which specializes in European art, including old master drawings, and furniture from the 15th to the 18th centuries, has had clients that included Stavros Niarchos and various Vanderbilts and Fords. According to Mr. Sansum, L. Dennis Kozlowski, the former Tyco executive who has been charged with looting the company, was also a client — he bought an 18th-century Venetian toiletry case there for $18,000.

Mr. Sansum, who started as an intern, was eventually entrusted with dealing with clients and even given signatory power on L'Antiquaire's bank account. Both Ms. Fioratti and Mr. Sansum considered it to be a lifelong arrangement, according to legal papers both filed. In 1997, Mr. Sansum was made a shareholder in the gallery and now owns 12 shares, or 6 percent of the firm.

A tall, formidable woman who has been described as resembling a thin Eleanor Roosevelt, Ms. Fioratti is considered an expert in an exclusive field. She has written about French and Italian antiques, and is on the board of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America. "She's definitely considered to be one of our top members," said James Frankel, the association's secretary. "She brings a level of not only scholarship, but style and class to our field that one doesn't find very often."

Mr. Wiseman, the San Francisco decorator, said: "Her shop is legendary. People from all over the world go there. If you are going to New York for antiques, it is one of the top five places."

Mr. Sansum was by all accounts an apt and ambitious pupil. Ms. Fioratti paid part of his tuition at Cooper-Hewitt, where he received a master's degree in 1993. He displayed his knowledge by curating exhibitions at the shop, including one on Ms. Fioratti's pet fancy, unique decorative boxes (called "Tempting Pandora"), and writing catalogs for L'Antiquaire. "James brought a stylish, fresh, attractive personality to the gallery, and it needed someone like that," said David Netto, an interior designer and a friend of Mr. Sansum's.

It was a cozy arrangement. So cozy that their financial agreement, in terms of how Mr. Sansum was compensated for his work beyond a small salary, depended entirely on mutual trust. "It was like a mom-and-pop store that happened to be a gallery," said Michael Lumer, Mr. Sansum's criminal defense lawyer. "It was a kind of casual way of doing things that makes attorneys and accountants cringe."

Still, it is apparently not that atypical of such businesses. "This is an extreme example of many relationships among small antiques dealers in New York, where there is an imbalance in age and wealth between the main partner and the `talent,' " said a leading Upper East Side decorator who has shopped at L'Antiquaire. The younger person's living expenses, he said, are often subsidized by the business.

Mr. Sansum was popular and led a busy social life with frequent dinner parties, trips abroad and the right furnishings and clothes, from tweed jackets with full Windsor-knot ties to trendier Gucci garb. He and Arianna Fioratti were fixtures and fund-raisers of organizations including the Young Friends of Save Venice. "He had a very nice life," said a friend of Helen Fioratti's. "He would go over to Venice, he would go out to dinner a great deal, he was always impeccably dressed. Helen had a deep affection for him."

For Mr. Sansum, in particular, his home and workplace in Manhattan must have felt like a rarefied safe haven. Those close to him were aware of the family tragedy that caused him to change his last name from Niebauer to Sansum during his senior year at Harvard. His mother, Abigail Niebauer, a poet, was the victim of a notorious California murder. In February 1985, James, then a high school senior, came home from a night out with friends to be met by the police. His mother had been shot in the chest in what was at the time ruled an accident: his father, James, a retired physical therapist, claimed he had been showing her an antique shotgun. But in response to a relentless campaign by Ms. Niebauer's brother, the case was reopened. Almost 14 years after the death of his wife, James Niebauer was found guilty of murder. He is serving a life sentence.

After that, said Mr. Sansum, who has no contact with his father, the Fiorattis were "like a second family."

Although Mr. Sansum seemed to live in the lap of luxury, appearances were deceiving. For the dozen years he worked at L'Antiquaire, from 1989 to 2001, he earned only $18,200 a year, according to the civil suit he filed in October 2001, never once receiving a raise or earning a commission. He was able to get by because his apartment was rent-free. His income was also supplemented by having personal expenses, up to $1,000 a month, paid for by the gallery. This sum was raised in 1998 to $2,000 a month and in 1999, to $5,000. With this money, he was also able to buy and sell artwork for himself through the gallery, he said. In legal papers, Ms. Fioratti denies the gallery ever agreed to cover Mr. Sansum's personal expenses. (He didn't claim any of the compensatory payment on his income tax returns for 1999 and 2000, and his June 3 indictment includes charges of tax fraud for failure to report and pay taxes on the money he is accused of embezzling.)

Mr. Sansum's good relations with the Fioratti family began falling apart in 1999 when he became romantically involved with a man named Markham Roberts, a decorator. According to Mr. Sansum, speaking with his pronounced stutter, the Fiorattis did not approve of this relationship. "When I began to go out with Markham, they had a negative reaction," he said. "That was hurtful."

Meanwhile, Mr. Sansum's salary continued to be an issue. He had been pressing for a higher regular salary, a request reinforced by the gallery's accountant, Paul Kamke, who, in a letter in March 2001, advised the gallery to stop the practice of compensating Mr. Sansum by paying his personal charges and institute a "reasonable" salary, according to Mr. Sansum's suit. Mr. Kamke declined to comment.

On June 14, 2001, Mr. Sansum resigned from the gallery, expressing in a letter to Ms. Fioratti appreciation for "the incredible opportunity" she had given him and informing her that he had moved out of his apartment and would be contacting her lawyer about selling back his shares. "This is very difficult for me," he wrote. "But I know that it will be best for all of us. With much love, Jim."

Mr. Sansum moved from East 73rd Street to an apartment in Murray Hill, which he shares with Mr. Roberts. When Mr. Sansum returned to the top floor of L'Antiquaire to remove the last of his things, however, the locks had been changed. But the Pandora's box of accusations over what went on at L'Antiquaire had only just been opened.

In August 2001, Ms. Fioratti made a complaint to the district attorney's office — her daughter had discovered that things were missing from the gallery, although it wasn't clear exactly what. Daniel J. Castleman, the chief of the district attorney's investigation division, said that financial records for the gallery were also missing. "It was a complicated situation in the sense that they had to reconstruct a lot of business books and records to make the determination as to what was missing," Mr. Castleman said.

But the Fiorattis were not the only ones pointing fingers. In his civil suit, Mr. Sansum accused Helen Fioratti of diverting more than $4 million owed to the gallery to offshore bank accounts, and using the money to pay personal creditors involved with her residences in Italy, as well as selling items directly to clients and demanding payment to herself rather than the gallery.

In her January 2002 answer to Mr. Sansum's civil complaint, Ms. Fioratti denies his charges and makes claims against him, including that he stole artwork, business records and other valuable property, and that he charged his personal expenses to the gallery "without authorization and in violation of the trust" in which he was held.

In June 2002, Mr. Sansum opened his own gallery at 1020 Lexington Avenue, practically around the corner from L'Antiquaire. He said he financed it by selling shares in several family houses to his sisters. Unlike his former workplace, with its four musty floors, Mr. Sansum's space is bright and airy, filled with quirky items including a pair of cabinets built by Napoleon's cabinet maker and two life-size English Regency vestal virgins. The back room serves as the office for Mr. Roberts's interior decorating business, and the men often used the gallery-office space to entertain, including a dinner buffet of quail eggs and pigs in blankets chronicled in a Sunday Styles article on April 6. Mr. Sansum, it seemed, had successfully completed the transition from intern at L'Antiquaire to master of his own universe.

IN October 2002, however, Mr. Sansum and Mr. Roberts were brusquely awakened at 8 a.m. at their Murray Hill apartment by investigators with search warrants. The investigators removed eight items from the apartment, including books and furniture; another 16 items from Mr. Sansum's gallery, including a Chinese bronze dish and a horn cup; and five items from Mr. Sansum's storage space, including paintings by Arianna Fioratti that Mr. Sansum said had been gifts to him.

Mr. Sansum, released on his own recognizance after his indictment, and Mr. Lumer, his lawyer, maintain that the art objects described as stolen and the personal expenses described as embezzled funds were all part of Mr. Sansum's legitimate compensation. "The issue is not if he had them — it's what the underlying agreement about them was," Mr. Lumer said.

But Mr. Castleman of the district attorney's office said, "It was a very substantial, lengthy investigation, and the grand jury took its action based on the evidence they heard."

Mr. Castleman said that L'Antiquaire was not under investigation. But he added that if a person files a criminal complaint, as Ms. Foratti did, and he has "unclean hands, we have a long history of finding that out and taking appropriate action."

Reached in Florence, Arianna Fioratti, who said she had not seen Mr. Sansum in several years, said she had been asked not to comment on the case, but added, "I absolutely believe he was guilty of this stuff."

Mr. Sansum's friends have rallied around him, attesting to his honesty and good character. "He is absolutely incapable of plotting any kind of evil or harming anyone in any way," said Nathalie Farman-Farma, a longtime friend. "He is a little passive, and I can see how Helen might have taken advantage of him and he never thought to question the status quo until he fell in love and wanted to have a life of his own."

Collier Gwin, an antiques dealer based in San Francisco who knows both Ms. Fioratti and Mr. Sansum, said he understood that in small businesses, compensation is sometimes unconventional, and that things can get confused. "I got the feeling that it's like when people get divorced," he said, "and you are going to get two sides of it, and down the road it will straighten itself out." At least legally.

Now that it's been opened, this particular Pandora's box — criminal charges, potential prison time and the implosion of a surrogate family — might never be completely closed. In the meantime, the next court date for L'Affaire L'Antiquaire is July 16.

Enthusiasts Gather to Salute G.I. Joe

Enthusiasts Gather to Salute G.I. Joe
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/national/30GIJO.html

BURLINGAME, Calif., June 29 — The American G.I.'s, average Joes but he-men all, were embedded 11 stories high in treacherous terrain, part concrete fortress, part jungle. At precisely 10:41 a.m., the hazardous mission began, as 500 of them — compactly built, tightly muscled, buoyed by willpower and testosterone — hurtled from the top of the Hyatt Regency atrium. There were casualties: dozens were tragically lost when their silver parachutes snagged in the potted palms.

But most of the troops prevailed, as is their genetic birthright, smartly executing the Friday morning battle plan for the seventh annual Hasbro International G.I. Joe Collectors Club convention that began outside San Francisco this weekend.

They wafted into the hands of waiting children as "war photographers" like Connie McCartney, 59, recorded the event. ("Seany," she cried to her grandson. "Look at Gamma!")

At a moment when American troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan and support for the military is high, the cultural mythology of G.I. Joe — the iconic "fully posable man of action," as he was billed when he was introduced in 1964 — is in the air. Sales of the pectorally robust action figure (never call him a doll) were up 46 percent last year, according to Hasbro, pumped up by post-9/11 patriotism, the military buildup and the growing phenomenon of middle-age fathers collecting vintage Joes and passing their boyhood obsession to their children.

The cult of Joe was vividly symbolized today by the arrival of the original 1963 prototype G.I. Joe, which came via armored truck and will be protected all weekend by an armed guard. Although G.I. Joe began life as a World War II soldier, a covert Barbie for boys, with equally cool accessories, Heritage Comics, a Dallas auction house, expects the prototype to fetch $600,000 when it is auctioned next month.

With everyday vintage Joes selling for $60 and up and a rare 1967 nurse figure in mint condition in her original box now worth about $6,000, young recruits are learning about more than war.

"You can play with your G.I. Joes, save them and someday they'll be worth a lot of money," said Jimmy Loveless, 9, who rode here with his parents from Bountiful, Utah.

To the hundreds of men here who still shop the "green aisle" as opposed to "the pink aisle" where Barbie and her wussy friend Ken reside, G.I. Joe represents a reclaiming of childhood and perhaps a lost ideal. Michael Ciccone, 34, a stay-at-home father from Babylon, N.Y., and Barry Kay, 35, a director of operations for Cablevision who lives in Lindenhurst, N.Y., spent Thursday at a diorama class with X-Acto knives and Styrofoam, re-creating the tableau of suburban summer days with Joes.

Of his childhood Mr. Ciccone says, "It was basically mud and Joe."

He added, "I am trying to get my son away from video games, to play like I played."

Mr. Ciccone, Mr. Kay and some friends unveiled an elaborate fantasy diorama on Friday, built with the help of 28 friends from around the country who exchanged images and instructions via e-mail. It features a pirate ship filled with G.I. Joes converted to pirates. "It brings you back to a happy place," Mr. Kay said.

Although G.I. Joe's popularity has waxed and waned, and he was even retired briefly after the Vietnam War in part because soaring petroleum prices sent the cost of the raw material soaring, too, he has endured despite antiwar sentiment as a symbol of "the greatest generation." Richard Slotkin, a professor of American studies at Wesleyan University, said G.I. Joe merges two streams of popular culture, the "superhero" tradition combined with the "platoon movie" genre.

"Kids today don't understand terrorism, but they understand that there is good and bad in the world," said Brian Savage, the collectors' club director who organized the convention, which is part toy promotion, part love-in. "They want to keep the bad away. He is the defender, the protector of the homeland. Ultimately, G.I. Joe always wins."

The premier American folk symbol may no longer be Paul Bunyan, said Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. President Bush on the aircraft carrier was "the president playing G.I. Joe," he said.

"We have a lot invested in our country in the image of a man of action, and we honor them," he said. "We do less well with veterans. They are no longer action figures."

Nostalgia for childhood, expressed in the collection of G.I. Joes and things like vintage PEZ dispensers, is a fairly recent phenomenon, said Gary Cross, a historian at Penn State University and the author of "Kids' Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood" (Harvard University Press, 1997). It has flourished with modern life, especially with high divorce rates and familiar neighborhoods subsumed by sprawl.

"Each child growing up in America is bound to a particular set of consumer goods that flow through their lives," Professor Cross said. "When the whole physical world has changed, toys become an emotional sentimental anchor, ones that can be recovered to make memories concrete."

In G.I. Joe's heyday and during the youth of many of those who still cherish him, the action figure was not always so elevated.

"G.I. Joes are what you melted and threw away," said Ace Allgood, an editor of television commercials in Minneapolis who sells surplus Joes as a hobby. He showed photographs of his newborn daughter with a G.I. Joe dressed as an obstetrician. "This toy was about destruction. Now we're doing the opposite, collecting the cherry mint."

Named after the movie "The Story of G.I. Joe," starring Robert Mitchum and Burgess Meredith, G.I. Joe was the first mass-produced doll for boys, a revolutionary notion, and the first action figure to be "fully articulated," advertising jargon meaning he had 21 moving parts.

As Karen J. Hall, a cultural critic at Syracuse University points out, "His masculinity resides in his ability to hurl a grenade and pose mid-throw."

Compared with today's models, with their washboard abs, the original G.I. Joe, who will celebrate the big Four-O next year, looks as if he could use more trips to the gym. His olive fatigues have a Shakerlike simplicity. He has a stoic, detached expression. His right cheek bears his famous battle scar, now fainter, a totem of rugged masculinity and a legal ploy to protect the trademark by making the image distinctive.

His identity has morphed over time: in 1969, during the Vietnam War he was repackaged as a swashbuckling civilian adventurer, with big fuzzy hair and a folk-singer beard. Later, he adopted a kung fu grip, bionic limbs and even an eerily lighted bionic eye. (The 1976 Bullet Man, with chrome arms and a helmet shaped like a silver bullet, was a bomb at the time but has recently spawned the Defenders of Bullet Man.)

Embattled by Vietnam and "Star Wars," not to mention antiwar mothers protesting at the Toy Fair in New York, he became a tomb raider, abominable-snowman hunter and pygmy gorilla capturer, less "Apocalypse Now" and more National Geographic.

After his retirement in 1978, he rebounded full of grit in 1982 as the Real American Heroes, a team of strong fully developed 3.75-inch elite soldiers who come together in a package. Among them is Jinx, who, the package explains, "competed in three forms of martial arts from the time she was 7 until she graduated from Bryn Mawr."

The prototype being auctioned next month, outfitted with a hand-stitched sergeant's uniform and a backpack, belongs to Don Levine, 75, who joined Hasbro in 1959 and was the commander in chief of the product's development team. He assembled the ancient hand-painted hatchling — now the Hope diamond of American machismo — on his Ping-Pong table.

Today's Joes include two African-American figures; two Latinos; a Navajo code talker, a talking Joe who speaks Navajo; a new Asian-American Joe; and Colin L. Powell, who was the top G.I. Joe in 1998 before he became secretary of state. In 1996, Hasbro reintroduced the Classic Collection Joe, standing at 12 inches. The collection drew on historic battles and divisions and was heavily influenced by aging fans with children.

Predictably, not everyone in San Francisco, a hub of the antiwar movement, is overjoyed by the presence of Joe. David Harris, a war protester who went to jail for resisting the draft in the Vietnam War and has spoken at recent antiwar rallies, said, "I don't think we are well served by anything that belittles the consequence of war and killing people. To the degree to which war toys contribute to a larger cultural desensitization, I think they are very destructive."

But in the idealized world of Joe fantasists, there are no real casualties and no M.I.A.'s, just M.I.B.'s (mint in box).

Craig Polnoff, 43, of Goodyear, Ariz., is an engineer turned professional G.I. Joe doctor. Collectors turn to his Old Joe Infirmary for arm and leg restringing, talker repair and limb replacement. He also does plastic surgery and cosmetic enhancements, like adding a goatee or mustache or touching up an eyebrow. He is so busy he is not accepting new patients.

Tellingly, perhaps, a client in Florida recently asked Mr. Polnoff to make his G.I. Joe middle-age.

"He wanted me to do salt-and-pepper hair," Mr. Polnoff said. "He said, `Doc, why does Joe always have to be a young guy?' "

In the Event of Emergency

In the Event of Emergency
By SUSAN STELLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/travel/29prac.html

BEFORE I went to Brazil in March, I called my health insurance provider to find out about my coverage when traveling abroad.

A representative told me I would be covered in case of an emergency, but was quick to point out that if I was planning a South American tummy tuck or any other nonemergency procedure - apparently not an uncommon reason for a trip to a country known for its runway models - then I was on my own.

I tried to reassure him that the only thing I suffered from was superstition: the last time I was in Brazil, I got so sick with a gastrointestinal ailment I was convinced I wouldn't make it home.

Fortunately, my recent trip was medically uneventful. But it turns out my caution wasn't entirely misplaced: many, if not most, health insurance policies do not cover policyholders once they leave the United States.

"As a general rule, health plans do not cover injuries or illnesses in the course of traveling abroad, even for emergency care," said Larry Akey, a spokesman for the Health Insurance Association of America, an industry trade group. "What we recommend is that before someone departs on an overseas trip they check their insurance policy, either with their H.R. department or by calling the customer service number that's on their insurance card."

You can also check the printed summary of benefits for your plan, but one reason to pick up the phone is to get a number to call in case you need approval for emergency care abroad. My insurance card, from Oxford Health Plans, only includes a toll-free phone number, so when I called to inquire about international coverage, I asked for a number that would work abroad. I was also informed I would need to call within 48 hours of seeking emergency care in a foreign country in order to qualify for reimbursement. Plans that do cover policyholders abroad typically require patients to pay out of pocket and submit receipts for reimbursement, and some medical providers only accept cash from foreigners.

Medicare

Among the health plans that do not cover individuals abroad is Medicare. There are a few exceptions, such as when someone in the United States has a medical emergency near the border, and a Canadian or Mexican hospital is closer or easier to get to than the nearest hospital in the United States, or if an emergency arises while a traveler is crossing through Canada between Alaska and the lower 48. In general, anyone covered by Medicare is advised to buy a Medicare supplement, also known as a Medigap policy, that includes foreign travel emergency coverage. For questions about Medicare coverage, call (800) 633-4227.

For those who are not covered by their own health insurance, or who want more benefits than their policies provide, buying travel insurance is an option. There are several types of policies that include medical benefits: package policies for a single trip that also cover things like trip cancellation and lost baggage; medical-only policies, which can be bought for a single trip or multiple trips within a year; and medical transport policies for emergency evacuation to a medical facility.

Prices vary depending on the type of insurance, the traveler's age and the cost and length of the trip. According to Jim Grace, president of InsureMyTrip.com, a Web site that lets consumers compare and buy travel insurance from multiple providers, prices for travel medical policies can be less than $100 for minimal coverage for a young traveler to more than $1,000 for an older person wanting more compreshensive coverage.

For package travel insurance policies, which typically include $10,000 to $50,000 of medical coverage, premiums are 4 to 7 percent of the trip's cost. For instance, a comprehensive policy for a 45-year-old taking a 10-day $5,000 trip is $169 to $404, according to InsureMyTrip.com. However, when buying insurance, it is important to find out exactly what is, or is not, covered.

"Some of them will exclude skiing and things like that, so you want to make sure if you're doing any sports that you'll have coverage for that," Mr. Grace said. Other variables include the policy's limit ($10,000 may not go far in a serious medical situation), the deductible, how narrowly a medical emergency is defined, whether dental care is included, whether the policy covers evacuation and repatriation (transporting you back to the United States) and whether pre-existing conditions are excluded.

"It's really important to read the fine print, because even with some of the excellent companies, people are surprised," said Phyllis Kozarsky, medical director of the TravelWell Clinic at Emory University and a professor of medicine at Emory. "They will have assumed they purchased, say, a repatriation policy, only to find out that yes, the company will fly them out, but they will fly them somewhere they deem the medical care to be equivalent to the United States."

Pre-existing Conditions

Dr. Kozarsky said she recommends that patients at least think about buying supplemental travel insurance, especially those who have medical conditions or are going into high-risk situations. But for those who do have pre-existing conditions, she said, "it's really important to look at the exclusionary categories." Some insurance companies will waive exclusions on pre-existing conditions if the policy is bought within 7 to 14 days of when a trip is paid for, but the interpretation of such clauses can be a gray area.

One reader, who asked that his name not be used because he is still disputing the denial of his claim, canceled a cruise that he and his wife planned to take last winter after her doctor advised against the trip for health reasons. Although the couple, who are 82 and 94, had bought travel insurance, the insurance company denied the claim after obtaining copies of the woman's medical records, citing a clause that excludes pre-existing conditions.

Whatever the merits of that denial, it is a cautionary tale for anyone considering travel insurance at an age when pre-existing conditions are a fact of life. It's also why some tour companies work out their own deals with insurance providers.

"We'd rather be assured, especially if we have people in remote areas, that they're all covered," said Jim Sano, president of Geographic Expeditions, a tour operator that includes the cost of insurance in the price of all its trips.

Mr. Sano described the complications of arranging for a private air ambulance to evacuate a client who had had a stroke in Lhasa, Tibet. The plane took off from Singapore but had to stop in Guangzhou, China, to pick up a military liaison officer before flying into Tibet. After being treated at a hospital in Singapore, the patient was flown back to the West Coast on a stretcher that took up six business-class seats.

"I think the total tab for that was a little over $85,000," Mr. Sano said. "These costs can add up really, really quickly."

SUSAN STELLIN contributes regularly to the Travel Section.

You Might Want to Put Your Credit to the Test

You Might Want to Put Your Credit to the Test
By JENNIFER BAYOT
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/business/yourmoney/29CRED.html

RECENTLY engaged and hoping to buy a house, Amy Mitchell paid $12.95 last February to view her credit score, that important single number that summarizes her overall creditworthiness. She then played with her score: What would it be if she paid off all her credit card balances each month, if she applied for an auto loan, or if she declared personal bankruptcy?

Ms. Mitchell, 34, a management consultant in San Francisco, was trying a new online simulator that allows consumers to see how making certain financial choices, like applying for a mortgage or even closing a credit card account, could alter their credit scores. There are two available right now — one from the Fair Isaac Corporation of San Rafael, Calif., whose FICO credit scores are used most often by lenders, and another from CreditXpert of Towson, Md., a company that designs credit management tools.

The simulators are an important addition to the credit industry. Only a few years ago the credit-rating agencies kept credit scores secret from consumers. Credit experts say these tools will help people make better decisions and give them more control over their finances. That could be especially helpful as the home-buying season moves into full swing and as more people take advantage of low interest rates to refinance mortgages.

"People don't have to feel that they're at the mercy of financial services providers; they can change their financial lives," said Ms. Mitchell, who recently bought a home in Orinda, Calif., a San Francisco suburb, with her fiancé, William Weber, 35, a political consultant.

By working with the simulator, Ms. Mitchell said she learned that paring down her credit card debt would raise her credit score significantly. That may help her if she ever needs to borrow money to fix up or furnish her home, or even refinance the mortgage. "I had a plan for paying off my debt, and this sort of reaffirmed my decision to do that," she said.

The credit simulators are also being used by credit-reporting bureaus and credit counseling agencies as an education tool. And some lenders and brokers are using the programs to distinguish themselves from their competitors in counseling prospective borrowers.

Credit scores have always stumped consumers. Even people who know their FICO scores often don't understand the logic behind them. (They range from 300 to 850, and the higher the number the better.) A person's credit score is based — in decreasing order of importance — on the person's payment record, how much is owed, how long the person has used credit, the characteristics of the newest credit and the types of credit being used. Owning too many credit cards often hurts a score, but so does owning too few.

Credit simulators help demystify the scores. Ms. Mitchell used the one from myFICO, Fair Isaac's consumer division.

Introduced a year ago, the FICO Score Simulator offers six kinds of financial conjectures. For example, customers may hypothetically transfer credit card balances, push the spending limits on their credit cards or pay bills on time for the next month, three months or six months. They may even pretend to miss a few payments. (By the way, if your score is now 707, and you missed payments this month on all accounts on which a payment is due, your score would drop to the range of 582 to 632. But if, instead of missing the payments, you paid all your bills on time for the next month, your score could increase to 727.)

Consumers can use the score simulator for 30 days through two packages that can be bought on www.myfico.com (click on "products"). For $39.95, consumers get credit information from the three major credit-reporting bureaus — TransUnion, Experian or Equifax — plus their FICO score, an analysis of the score and use of the FICO score simulator. For $12.95, they get the FICO score plus a credit profile from one bureau and the use of the simulator.

The six options in the FICO simulator correspond to customers' most common concerns, according to myFICO, but some people may want more choices. For instance, the simulator cannot allow more than one hypothetical move at a time.

For a larger selection of financial situations, there is the What-If Simulator from CreditXpert. Introduced in February, this simulator can also advise consumers on how to achieve goals like refinancing or simply improving their scores. Unlike the FICO Score Simulator, it allows customers to see how multiple actions would affect their scores.

The What-If Simulator is not available directly from CreditXpert but can be bought at varying prices from some lenders, credit reporting agencies and other sellers of credit reports. A list of some sellers is at www.creditxpert.com (on the "consumers" page). Among the brokers that offer it are 1st Republic Mortgage Bankers in Floral Park, N.Y., and Capitol Mortgage Finance in Columbia, Md. It is available for $9.95 from Intersections in Chantilly, Va., which sells credit reports and privacy protection services; Intersections calls it the Credit Analyzer.

Christos Balis, 37, a chiropractor in Herndon, Va., recently used the What-If Simulator to look at the cumulative effect on his credit score of refinancing his mortgage, paying $3,000 on one of his credit cards and taking out a loan for some home renovations.

He was simulating a plan that he and his wife, Tamara, 32, a director at a Montessori nursery school, were considering to help them finance a $10,000 remodeling of their kitchen.

Dr. Balis said he learned that his credit score would gain twice as many points if he made a sizable payment on one particular credit card than it would if he made a comparable payment on another card. (He was closer to the credit limit on the first card.) He also found that a loan to remodel the kitchen would have little effect on his score. "That actually was news to me," he said. "It gave me a sense of security."

He said that before using the simulator, he was more inclined to spend his and his wife's savings on the kitchen. Now they are more likely to apply for a loan, he said, and to put some savings toward the credit card as suggested by the simulator.

ENDERS generally do not use CreditXpert's scores to make their lending decisions. But CreditXpert said the scores use the same principles as the FICO scores; they were developed when Fair Isaac still withheld its scores from consumers.

"The fundamental principles behind credit scoring are the same; it's just a matter of how you put the pieces together," said David G. Chung, CreditXpert's interim president and vice president for business development. "The things that will move you up our scale will move you up somebody else's scale."

Because a person's credit profile can change constantly, both myFICO and CreditXpert say that the actual score may not increase or decrease by the exact number of points calculated by the simulators. But it should certainly move in the expected direction, they said, and often by roughly the same number of points.

The companies say that just as high school students routinely take practice tests to raise their College Board test scores, so, too, can consumers use simulators to help raise credit scores. That would give people more control over their credit — and what they pay for it — the companies said.

"Consumers by and large are very aware of credit reports; they are now getting to have awareness of how to improve their credit scores," said Sue A. Simon, the vice president of myFICO. "It's a whole different ballgame when you realize it can save you $300 a month on your mortgage payment."