Margaret Talbot: All Publications, Events and Press

Brain Gain

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:46:00 -0400

Better, Faster, Stronger, Smarter | WNYC - The Brian Lehrer Show

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:05:00 -0400

New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot explores the world of neuro-enhancing drugs. Link to audio

A Prescription For 'Brain Gain'? | NPR

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:04:00 -0400

In the modern world of busy schedules and busier lives, some people are turning to "neuro-enhancing" drugs to gain a competitive edge.

As journalist Margaret Talbot writes in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, a variety of students, professors and business people are taking drugs intended for attention deficit disorder, narcolepsy and epilepsy in an effort to enhance brain function and get ahead. Link to audio

Margaret Talbot in the Washington D.C. Examiner | ' Why Do So Many Evangelical Teens Get Pregnant?'

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:40:00 -0500

Margaret Talbot, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation has recently written in The New Yorker about “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” She states the “The ‘sexual debut’ of an evangelical girl typically occurs just after she turns sixteen.” She reports that a number of social scientists and family scholars have taken up this serious and troublesome social pattern that has obvious ramifications for a lot of good young women, their boyfriends or sexual partners, and the families involved. LINK

Red Sex, Blue Sex

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:08:00 -0500

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, "Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it's great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion." A Mississippi delegate claimed that "even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they've also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child." Palin's family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, "There hasn't been one evangelical family that hasn't gone through some sort of situation." In fact, it was Popma's own "crisis pregnancy" that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin's pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America's dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex." His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents--seventy-four per cent--say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their "sexual début"--to use the festive term of social-science researchers--shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement's warnings that condoms won't actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges--which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian--end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it's hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it's Sodom and Gomorrah.

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity--such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren't deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how "embedded" a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America's sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn't the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

A terrific 2005 documentary, "The Education of Shelby Knox," tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, "maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant." In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who--despite their own conservative leanings--admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby's efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don't acknowledge "reality."

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, "In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt." Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating--hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage--but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that "red families" and "blue families" are "living different lives, with different moral imperatives." (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of "moral-values voters" in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). "The ‘blue states' of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage," Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states--in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules--messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, "the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing."

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct "middle-class morality" taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus's survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, "They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks." These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of "strategic orientation"--how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage--just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining "technical virgins" but because they assess it as a safer option. "Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities' lifestyles," Regnerus writes. "They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality." They might have loved Ellen Page in "Juno," but in real life they'd see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become "a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It's not just unwise anymore; it's wrong."

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks--in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms--producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In "Forbidden Fruit," Regnerus offers an "unscientific postscript," in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they'll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, "Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down." Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.

"Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable," Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should "work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation."

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as "what two dogs do out on the street corner--they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom." Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, "Every Young Woman's Battle," by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: "physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description." Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book "Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity," writes, "Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married." Teenagers and single adults are "told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages" them "to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way"--getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, "This doesn't mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well--so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they're not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely."

Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. "Every Young Woman's Battle," for example, tells teen-agers that "the momentary relief" of "self-gratification" can lead to "shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you." And it won't slake sexual desire: "Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It's better not to feed such a monster in the first place."

Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it's possible to "believe in abstinence in a religious sense," but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous "for students who simply are not abstaining." As Knox's approach makes clear, you don't need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed--you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new "abstinence-plus" curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. "Abstinence works," Knox said at the hearing. "Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not."

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a "secondary" or "born-again" virgin. That's not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

The "pro-family" efforts of social conservatives--the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion--do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality--indeed, they may feel that it's unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren't originally about values--maybe they were about maximizing education and careers--yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents' economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it's pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they're not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn't true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In "The Education of Shelby Knox," for example, Shelby's father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter's campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, "You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It's because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance." But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn't worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can't support. As Shelby's father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy "is a problem--a major, major problem that everybody's just shoving under the rug."

The Lost Children

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like “If you aren’t divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you.” That October, Masomeh also escaped from Iran and joined Majid in Toronto, where they lived for ten years. Majid worked in a pizza place, Masomeh in a coffee shop. She dressed and acted the way she liked -- she is blond and pretty and partial to bright clothes and makeup, which she could never wear in public in Iran -- and for a long time the Yourdkhanis felt they were safe from politics and the past. Their son, Kevin, was born in Toronto, in 1997, a Canadian citizen. He grew into a happy, affectionate kid, tall and sturdy with a shock of dark hair. He liked math and social studies, developed asthma but dealt with it, and shared with his mom a taste for goofy comedies, such as the “Mr. Bean” movies. In December, 2005, however, the Yourdkhanis learned that the Canadian government had denied their application for political asylum, and Majid, Masomeh, and Kevin were deported to Iran.

Upon their return, the Yourdkhanis say, Masomeh was imprisoned for a month, and Majid for six, and during that time he was beaten and tortured. After Majid was released, the family paid a smuggler twenty thousand dollars to procure false documents and arrange a series of flights that would return them to Canada.

Then, on the last leg of the journey, the family ran into someone else’s bad luck. On February 4, 2007, during a flight from Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, a passenger had a heart attack and died, and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico. American immigration officials there ascertained that the Yourdkhanis’ travel documents were fake. The Yourdkhanis begged to be allowed to continue on to Canada, but they were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply for it in the United States. They did so, and, five days later, became part of one of the more peculiar, and contested, recent experiments in American immigration policy. They were locked inside a former medium-security prison in a desolate patch of rural Texas: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

****

Hutto is one of two immigrant-detention facilities in America that house families -- the other is in Berks County, Pennsylvania -- and is the only one owned and run by a private prison company. The detention of immigrants is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in this country, and, with the support of the Bush Administration, it is becoming a lucrative business. At the end of 2006, some fourteen thousand people were in government custody for immigration-law violations, in a patchwork of detention arrangements, including space rented out by hundreds of local and state jails, and seven freestanding facilities run by private contractors. This number was up by seventy-nine per cent from the previous year, an increase that can be attributed, in large part, to the actions of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In 2005, Chertoff announced the end of “catch-and-release” -- the long-standing practice of allowing immigrants caught without legal documents to remain free inside the country while they waited for an appearance in court. Since these illegal immigrants weren’t monitored in any way, the rate of no-shows was predictably high, and the practice inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment.

Private companies began making inroads into the detention business in the nineteen-eighties, when the idea was in vogue that almost any private operation was inherently more efficient than a government one. The largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, or C.C.A., was founded in 1983. But poor management and a series of well-publicized troubles -- including riots at and escapes from prisons run by C.C.A. -- dampened the initial excitement. In the nineties, C.C.A.’s bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee, where the company is based, failed; state legislators had grown skeptical. By the end of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock had hit an all-time low. When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.

One complication was that hundreds of children were among the immigrant detainees. Typically, kids had been sent to shelters, which allowed them to attend school, while parents were held at closed facilities. Nobody thought that it was good policy to separate parents from children -- not immigration officials, not immigrant advocates, not Congress. In 2005, a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressed concern about “reports that children apprehended by D.H.S.” -- the Department of Homeland Security -- “even as young as nursing infants, are being separated from their parents and placed in shelters.” The committee also declared that children should not be placed in government custody unless their welfare was in question, and added that the Department of Homeland Security should “release families or use alternatives to detention” whenever possible. The report recommended a new alternative to detention known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program -- which allows people awaiting disposition of their immigration cases to be released into the community, provided that they are closely tracked by means such as electronic monitoring bracelets, curfews, and regular contact with a caseworker. The government has since established pilot programs in twelve cities, and reports that more than ninety per cent of the people enrolled in them show up for their court dates. The immigration agency could have made a priority of putting families, especially asylum seekers, into such programs. Instead, it chose to house families in Hutto, which is owned and run by C.C.A. Families would be kept together, but it would mean they were incarcerated together.

****

When the Yourdkhanis were sent to Hutto last winter, the facility had been open for nine months, but few Americans knew of its existence. Hutto is in Taylor, Texas, a town of seventeen thousand, forty miles northeast of Austin, with a lot of boarded-up businesses on its main streets. A National Guard recruiting station is on the eastern side of town; a place that offers concealed-weapons training is at the opposite end. Hutto has more than five hundred beds, though the population fluctuates, and the facility appears never to have been at full capacity; about half the detainees are children. At the time the Yourdkhanis got there, many of the four hundred or so detainees were from Latin-American countries (these did not include Mexico, because Mexicans caught without documents are automatically sent home), and some of those were people who had come to the United States for economic reasons; that is, they were the kind of undocumented immigrants that most people probably think of when they hear of immigrants being rounded up somewhere in Texas. But a substantial number of the families were asylum seekers -- people from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Romania. Like the Yourdkhanis, they were people who said that they had been persecuted in their home countries, and many of them had passed the first test for achieving asylum in the United States -- a so-called “credible fear” interview. None had criminal records.

The Yourdkhanis, upon arriving at Hutto, saw a white concrete complex with slit-shaped windows, surrounded by double fencing topped by rolls of razor wire. A shadeless exercise yard was ringed by floodlights. Across the street was a railroad track where freight trains frequently idled, cutting off the facility from the rest of Taylor. Families were placed in former inmate cells. Each cell had a twin bed or a bunk bed with a thin mattress, a small metal or porcelain sink, and an exposed toilet. Generally, mothers and very young children stayed together in one cell, fathers in a separate cell, and older children in another. Husbands and wives were not allowed to visit each other’s cells. Masomeh told me, “For three days, Majid had a fever, and I wasn’t allowed to go in and ask, ‘How are you?’ ” The cell doors were metal, and each had a window two inches wide; the floor and walls were bare, except for a shatterproof acrylic mirror. Doors were to remain open during the day, but they were wired with laser-detection alarms that were triggered when anyone came or went at night. A 2007 report by two advocacy groups -- the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children -- noted that if a child sleeping in a separate cell woke up at night and went looking for his parents the alarm would sound, and only C.C.A. staff members were allowed to respond.

The guards at Hutto conducted as many as seven head counts a day, during which all detainees, even toddlers, were supposed to remain in place, usually by their beds, for as long as it took to complete the count. In practice, this meant that detainees might be in their cells twelve hours a day. (When head counts were not taking place, detainees could assemble in the common area within their “pod” of cells, where there were couches and two televisions.) Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made “six or seven requests,” and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl “smelled of urine.”

No contact visits were allowed at Hutto -- relatives had to sit behind Plexiglas partitions and talk through phones in the old prison visiting room. In any case, few relatives visited, since Hutto was so far from where most of them lived. Deka Warsame, a Somali woman, was detained at Hutto for four months, along with her three children. Her mother and a sister lived in Columbus, Ohio, but she told her lawyer that, even if her family could have come to Texas, she would have been ashamed to have them see her looking like a criminal, “trapped behind Plexiglas.” If detainees had an attorney, as Warsame did, the attorney could talk to them without a partition. During such conferences, children were required to stay by their parents’ side. The governing idea of Hutto was that detainees would constantly supervise their children -- as a result, it wasn’t deemed a child-care facility, and required no relevant licensing. But this also meant that children had to be in the same room even when, say, their parents recounted stories of torture, rape, or domestic abuse. Barbara Hines, a law professor who runs an immigration clinic at the University of Texas, in Austin, and who was one of the first legal representatives to see detainees at Hutto, began bringing crayons and markers with her, hoping to distract the kids.

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.

Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt if I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

Michelle Brané, an advocate with the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, managed to get a tour of Hutto in December, 2006. Describing the facility as “an incredibly punitive-feeling place,” she said, “People there told us that children were being punished for normal kid stuff -- running around, making noise, tantrums. I have a two- and four-year-old at home, and I kept thinking, 'How would I manage in here keeping them under control?' The shocking thing is that the people running it didn’t realize any of that. I think they thought it was a great place.”

Majid Yourdkhani told me that he and his wife felt as though they had “disappeared into a black hole. We’d ask the officers, ‘What’s our future here? What’s going to happen to us? What do we need to do?’ We’d ask, and nobody could tell us.” That feeling of having disappeared wasn’t entirely irrational. Getting information about Hutto -- especially from the people who run it -- is hard. Private prison companies are not subject to the same legal requirements as public prisons to provide incident reports on assaults, escapes, deaths, or rapes. It’s true that a company’s contract stipulates that it must report such incidents to the government agency for which it is a vender, and people seeking information about what goes on inside a private prison can submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the government agency. But this can be an exercise in frustration, as Judith Greene, a researcher who is a critic of private prisons, found out. Several years ago, she and a colleague, Joshua Miller, were doing research on a new prison in California City, California, that was to be operated by C.C.A. for the federal Bureau of Prisons. According to Greene, before awarding the contract the bureau had signalled that the government would not delegate to a private company the legal authority to use force against inmates. Greene and Miller wondered how this would work in practice. In a Freedom of Information Act request, Greene asked for documents that might shed light on this question. Eventually, she recalls, she heard from the Bureau of Prisons that it was prepared to give her the information but had to get permission from C.C.A.; a second letter informed her that C.C.A. had said no, claiming that the information she sought about the use of force was a business secret. Greene told me, “Prisons in general are to a great extent secretive, isolated places, but if you’re dealing with private prisons you’ve got an additional layer to penetrate in order to find out essential facts and figures. And government agencies seem to give a lot of the decision-making to the private companies when it comes to what to reveal.” A bill now pending in Congress would, for the first time, make private prisons as accountable about their daily operations as public ones.

It’s easier to gain access to the death-row section of most publicly run prisons than it is to get into Hutto, unless you are a detainee or an employee of C.C.A. Even Jorge Bustamante, a sociologist and a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants, was denied access to Hutto. From Geneva, he had applied to visit, as part of a tour that he was making of immigration-detention facilities in the U.S, and permission was granted. But when he arrived in America, last May, Bustamante was told that permission had been revoked. Bustamante remains angry about the incident, and says he will mention it in a report that he plans to submit to the General Assembly this month. For my part, I got no response to repeated requests to tour the facility, which were sent by phone and fax to Evelyn Hernandez, the administrator of Hutto. (She also refused multiple requests to speak on the phone, as did top officials at C.C.A.) Two weeks after I submitted questions in writing to C.C.A. officials, I did receive some answers. Steven Owen, a spokesman for the corporation, wrote that “C.C.A. always strives to provide humane, safe and secure housing to the populations entrusted to our care in accordance with applicable laws and the expectations of our customers. We are proud of the company’s 25-year track record.” No reporters have been admitted on any occasion since a single-day group media tour, in February, 2007. Currently, the only way to see the inside of Hutto is to watch an intermittently blurry video available on YouTube, evidently filmed by immigration officials and later posted by a blogger. It shows kids and adults in blue and green scrubs walking down fluorescent-lit halls and eating food from plastic trays. There are brief shots of a prison cell outfitted with a crib and of a man lying on a couch, his wrist encircled by a bright-blue I.D. bracelet. Another sequence shows kids outside their cells, learning the alphabet song. The footage has no sound.

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Last March, the A.C.L.U., along with the immigration-law clinic at the University of Texas and the law firm LeBouef, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, brought suit against Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the immigration officials who oversee Hutto. The suit said that conditions at Hutto violated a 1997 legal settlement that grew out of a Supreme Court case known as Flores v. Reno, which centered on the detention of minors who had arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied by an adult. The settlement called for minors in immigration custody to be released to family members or appointed custodians whenever possible, and ordered that children in detention be placed in the “least restrictive” setting available. Kevin Yourdkhani was among the twenty-six children named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. case. In a statement for the U.S. District Court in Austin, his mother said of conditions at Hutto, “Majid and I cannot be good parents. We cannot provide Kevin with the basic things that he needs... We cannot give him a pen to write with or any books to read. We cannot teach him about the outside world or let him run around, the way young boys should. We are totally helpless as parents and depend on the guards for everything.” Her family, she said, “is falling apart in here.”

The A.C.L.U. commissioned a psychiatrist to investigate conditions at Hutto, and, not surprisingly, the resulting report documented depression and fearfulness among children housed there, and predicted that, until the facility overhauled its “policies and procedures beyond recognition” and replaced its “current (correctional) staff,” it would not be appropriate for children. More surprising, a psychiatric report commissioned by the government defendants also questioned the “authoritarian milieu fostered by this excessive number of security personnel,” and criticized an atmosphere “capable of contributing to the development of unnecessary anxiety and stress for these children.” The report’s author, Richard Pesikoff, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, concluded that it was “essential” to make changes at Hutto, in order to protect the mental health of the children.

Kevin, it must be said, was lucky. The plaintiffs’ lawyers soon figured out that the crayons and markers they had brought in to occupy the kids while they talked to their parents could also be politically useful. They were particularly so in the hands of articulate, indignant Kevin. One day, Kevin drew an American flag and wrote “Pleace help us” inside one of the stripes. He drew a picture of his common area, with sofas, tables, “police,” and “camra.” And he wrote a letter to Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, in a rainbow of colors: “Dear Mr. Priminster Harper, I don’t like to stay in this jail. I’m only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I’m sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminster haper give visa for my family. This Place is not good for me. I want to get out of the cell.” One of the University of Texas law students, Matthew Pizzo, placed Kevin’s handiwork in his satchel, and Barbara Hines later mailed it to journalists in Canada. Newspapers and bloggers there started covering Kevin’s story. Sometime around then, Hines recalls, she and her students were told by Hutto officials that they could no longer bring in crayons and markers.

After six weeks at Hutto, the Yourdkhanis were released, and the Canadian government offered them temporary resident permits. Students at Hines’s immigration clinic found the family a new lawyer in Toronto. The Yourdkhanis are now awaiting the outcome of a “humanitarian and compassionate” application for permanent residence, and their lawyer expects the process to be resolved by the end of the year. Majid is working at a restaurant; Masomeh is at home for the time being. In November, when I visited the Yourdkhanis in their high-rise apartment in Toronto, Kevin was excited about a new aquarium that his parents had bought for him. He had taken the bus home after school, grabbed an ice-cream bar out of the freezer, and was sprawled on the couch in shorts and a Darth Vader T-shirt, answering his parents’ questions about a field trip that his class had taken that day. He told me that he tried not to think about Hutto, but said, “It was horrible in there. People should be free, especially kids.” He said that he had given some thought to what he would do if anybody tried to take him away from Canada now. “I’d glue my foot to the ground,” he said. “And they’d have to cut me out of the ground. They’d have to take the cement with me!”

****

Immigration officials have said that, before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, the average length of detention at Hutto was about fifty days. For some families, however, the stays were much longer. Liliam Restrepo, a thirty-six-year-old Colombian woman, was detained at Hutto, along with her ten- and twelve-year-old daughters, Paola and Andrea, for nearly a year. In Colombia, she was an activist with the Partido Liberal Colombiano, and says that she had to leave because of threats from paramilitaries. She now lives in a cramped one-bedroom walkup in South Boston, where she cleans houses for a living, and is awaiting an appeal on her asylum claim. She told me that children come out of Hutto with “a mind-set, a feeling they can’t forget. It’s bad for adults, but it’s worse for children. My kids play these games -- they still do -- where they are arresting people. My one daughter, she is afraid now of the police. She doesn’t want to walk by the police station at the end of our street. They have been trying to adapt to the life of freedom here, but it is difficult, because they unconsciously still feel they are detained. They can’t stop thinking and talking about prison.” Restrepo, a slim woman with long dark hair, was wearing a neatly pressed Corona Extra T-shirt and tiny gold hoop earrings. At her small, rickety kitchen table, she sat with her hands folded in her lap. The linoleum was cracked and worn, but somebody had tacked on the wall a calendar from a Chinese restaurant and an incongruous print of a couple of plummy-looking golfers on a lush green set of links. Life was clearly tough for Restrepo, but she was still glad to be out of Hutto. So were her daughters. Andrea recalled having to take a group shower with other kids, and being embarrassed; guards, she said, shouted at kids for running or making noise. What she missed most, she said, was “just being able to breathe real air.” The facility has an indoor gym, but when the Restrepos were at Hutto there were days at a stretch when kids were not allowed outside.

Salwan Komo, an Iraqi refugee who belongs to the Chaldean Christian minority, was confined in Hutto for more than five months, along with his wife, Neven, and their baby daughter, Miryam. Komo had a sister living legally in Detroit, and his wife had an aunt and a brother who were living in San Diego. In Iraq, Chaldean Christians have been subject to persecution and killings by Muslim extremists. The Komos had stopped going to church there and feared for their lives; most of the family had fled to Syria, where it had become increasingly expensive for Iraqi refugees to live and employment was nearly impossible to find. The Komos had tried, they said, to come to America the right way. They had presented themselves to the guards at the Mexican border in Southern California, and said that they were seeking asylum. Neven put it this way: “We came to the door, we -- how do you say? -- asked to come into your house.” If they had paid a smuggler and snuck into America, she noted, they probably would have avoided detention in Hutto.

In December, I met with the Komos in the immaculate little apartment where they now live, in El Cajon, near San Diego. It was a neighborhood of modest ranch houses and Spanish-style courtyard apartments, bejewelled with Christmas lights. Outside, the wind played punching bag with the giant inflatable polar bears and the manger scenes on the neatly tended front lawns. Inside, eighteen-month-old Miryam, in pink sweatpants and pigtails, was dancing to the Arabic-language music videos on a flat-screen TV, brandishing a cookie in one hand and a toy cell phone in the other. Komo explained that the family had recently been granted asylum, and that he now had a good job installing air-conditioning and heating units. Unlike the Yourdkhanis, he didn’t think Hutto should be shut down -- the government might need to put people there for short stays. “But if you have family and they can sign for you, they should let you leave,” he said. “You know, the baby was only a few months old. She was too small for a place like this. At five-thirty in the morning, they push open the door -- boom, boom, boom. We told them, ‘Don’t knock like this, please.’ During the day, she need to nap. It was noisy. My wife close the door, but then they come -- they call the captain and they make problems for us. We say, ‘Can we get some different food for her? She won’t eat this.’ They say, ‘If you don’t like the food here, go back to your country.’ But we didn’t come here for the food -- we had food. We come here for the safety. I say, ‘I’ll bring you the money. But when I’m in the jail I can’t do anything for my family.’ For two weeks, maybe one month, it’s O.K., but not for five months, nine days.”

Matthew Pizzo, the University of Texas law student, made a ritual of taking families to Wal-Mart when they were released. He says that Neven cried when she saw all the goods you could buy there. Pizzo remembers minding a three-year-old Iraqi girl as she played in the toy aisle while her parents bought clothes and baby food. A father with his own little girl asked Pizzo, “How old is your daughter?” Before thinking how the answer would sound to a stranger, Pizzo explained, “Oh, I’m not her father -- I’m her attorney.”

****

Last August, the A.C.L.U. settled its suit against the government. The agreement entails a number of changes at Hutto, including eliminating the head-count system, providing pajamas for children, letting kids keep a limited number of toys in their room during the day, making a priority of hiring people with experience in child welfare, and installing curtains around the toilets. In the months before the lawsuit was settled, Hutto had already started making changes: it got rid of the razor wire; expanded the length of educational instruction, first to four, then to seven hours a day; and began allowing detainees to wear their own clothes. Yet it seems unlikely that these changes would have been made without pressure from the A.C.L.U. lawsuit and from advocates like Barbara Hines and her students. The settlement also aimed to get people out of detention faster and stipulated that families at Hutto have their cases reviewed every thirty days, to determine if they could be released on parole or on bond.

Vanita Gupta, a staff attorney for the A.C.L.U. and the lead counsel on the Hutto case, says that she didn’t think the government would agree to close Hutto down, so the settlement was the next best option. “We are very proud of it,” she says of the settlement. “We fought for every word, tooth and nail. But at the end of the day do I feel detention is appropriate for children? No. The settlement forced the government to make tremendous changes, but these are still prison walls.”

The A.C.L.U. and the plaintiffs in the case -- all of whom Hutto released after the suit was filed -- could, perhaps, also count as a victory a written statement made by Julie Myers, the new assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the D.H.S., during her confirmation process last fall. Detaining families would continue to be an important part of the agency’s operations, she wrote -- indeed, the effort would likely be expanded -- but “the physical structure of Hutto -- a former prison -- will not be used as the model for future facilities.”

It’s clear that Hutto is now a very different, and more humane, place than it was before the lawsuit. But, Gupta says, “it shouldn’t have taken the A.C.L.U. to make the government realize that holding innocent children in a converted medium-security adult prison is a bad idea.”

****

Why did the government turn to a former prison in the first place? It wasn’t the most cost-effective option. C.C.A. charges the government nearly thirty-four million dollars a year to run the facility. And whereas close supervision of a released immigrant costs only about twelve dollars a day, incarcerating one costs about sixty-one, according to a 2000 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization based in New York. It is clear that the government knew almost from Hutto’s inception that there were problems there. Last March, federal immigration officials found many “deficiencies” at Hutto, including inadequate sanitation and the lack of an immunization program for children -- chicken pox had broken out. (Parents, the report noted, were afraid to tell Hutto officials when they found rashes on their children, because they thought it would prevent them from being released.) The inspectors said that C.C.A.’s “overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency,” and concluded that the “overall review of the facility can accurately be rated as deficient.” This evaluation was issued months after demonstrators from local immigrant-advocate groups had started holding vigils outside Hutto, in December, 2006, attracting coverage by local news outlets.

A separate internal memo, which was obtained by the A.C.L.U., expressed particular concern about the high turnover among employees at Hutto. The memo’s author, whose name is redacted, complains about how hard it was to get straight answers from C.C.A. about staffing. (“Approximately five requests were made.”) The memo goes on to report that, of the three hundred and thirty-eight employees who had been hired since Hutto opened, in May, 2006, two hundred and three had quit or been fired by March, 2007. That meant that “the average length of employment for the 170 critical positions of detention officer, program facilitator, correctional officer, and case manager is 3.01 months. C.C.A. is losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” The memo blames low pay -- C.C.A. pays new employees $10.22 an hour, versus the county standard of $14.36. (In general, private prison companies pay considerably less than public prisons.) The memo continues, “Unfortunately, the caliber of some employees at the T. Don Hutto facility is not as high as it should be considering the nature of business that is required in managing a family residential detention facility.”

There is evidence that some immigration officials were skeptical about Hutto even before inspectors observed it in action. In August, several of the attorneys for the plaintiffs received a copy of a memo from someone who wanted to remain anonymous but who claimed to work in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in San Antonio. The memo, which the letter writer said had been composed by senior staff in the office before Hutto was reopened, concluded that it would be a poor choice for a family-detention center. For one thing, Hutto was a “hard” detention facility, with cells and bars and barbed wire. For another, the town of Taylor had “a minimal Hispanic population. This would make it difficult to obtain Spanish-speaking community members to provide religious, social, medical, educational services.” The memo also observed, with striking cynicism, that Taylor was too close to Austin, which had nonprofit and community organizations that “have typically been very strong advocates for immigrants.” (This observation proved prophetic -- it was Austin immigrant advocates, such as the students in Barbara Hines’s clinic, who exposed the problems at Hutto.)

U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks, a sixty-eight-year-old lifelong Texan, presided over the A.C.L.U. case. He is not a typical Austin liberal. He is the grandson and great-grandson of county sheriffs, and was appointed to the federal bench by George H. W. Bush. At the first hearing about Hutto, on March 20, 2007, he sounded irascible. More than once, he made the point that the immigrants housed at Hutto had intentionally broken U.S. laws by coming here without a visa. He admonished Gupta, the lead A.C.L.U. attorney, “Take the cotton out of your ears.” Yet, as Judge Sparks listened to testimony, he grew increasingly critical of the government. When he learned that children were required to be in the room even when their parents were sharing brutal stories with lawyers, he snapped at the government’s attorney, Victor Lawrence, saying that the rule “best not apply tomorrow.” Lawrence assured him that improvements had been made at Hutto, and would continue to be made. Sparks responded, “Why did there have to be changes in the first place? I mean, this is detention. This isn’t the penitentiary. Even in the penitentiary, the lawyers can see their clients one-on-one, and do not have to speak in front of children!” Lawrence said, “Your Honor, you know, part of this is the novelty of the facility itself. It’s a family detention center.” Sparks replied, “That’s right. And the government didn’t see fit to issue any regulations. The government hadn’t seen fit to go back into the Flores settlement for modification.”

The government argued that the 1997 Flores settlement applied only to unaccompanied minors coming illegally to the United States, and not to minors who entered the country with their parents. Even so, Judge Sparks implied, the government would have to establish clear rules for how to detain families safely and humanely. And although officials at Hutto might be making changes now, he noted, didn’t Lawrence have a feeling it was merely because the defendants knew, on account of the lawsuit, that “the hammer was coming down?” He said that he was beginning to wonder who was in charge “out there, either C.C.A. or the government. It’s very troubling to me.”

Lawrence returned to the government’s fundamental argument that the most important goal was to keep immigrant families together, and that Hutto had succeeded in that goal. As he put it, “It makes common sense to everybody in this courtroom that that’s a good thing -- as opposed to separating them.”

Judge Sparks replied, “But it would not be a good idea for them to hog-tie them and hang them up in lockers while they did it.” Admitting that he was talking more like a lawyer than a judge, he added, “The truth of the matter is there are ways to do it that are right and there are ways to do it that are wrong.”

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If you visit Taylor, Texas, it’s not hard to see why people there might not want to give up on Hutto, and its two hundred or so jobs. On a drive into town, you pass a trailer park set amid spindly trees, and a fast-food chicken place that advertises “Livers and Gizzards Tuesday and Wednesday.” Farther on, you see the Lone Star Pawn Shop, where a sign promises cautiously, “We can cash most payroll checks.” Taylor has a couple of consignment shops, a few hair cutteries, several cotton gins, and two barbecue restaurants, Rudy Mikeska’s and Louie Mueller’s, that look as though they’ve been around a good long time. The sidewalks were mostly empty when I passed through on a sunny Monday morning, and on the side streets a number of the houses were ramshackle or derelict. A street leading to Hutto was cratered with potholes; the Landmark Inn and the liquor store were both abandoned.

The Hutto Correctional Facility opened in 1997, housing prisoners of the U.S. Marshals Service and overflow inmates from the county jail, as well as detainees displaced by hurricanes. Since the numbers were always fluctuating, C.C.A. was always struggling to find new customers, and in July, 2005, the company announced that it would have to close Hutto down. A last-minute reprieve came in December, in the form of an agreement with the federal government to detain non-criminal immigrants. The initial press release said nothing about children. At the time, Rick Zinsmeyer, a local resident, told the Taylor Daily Press, “The good part about it, and what Taylor gets out of it, is a lot more employees and more people coming into the town.”

José Orta, who is retired from the Air Force and works maintaining the town’s computer network, is one of a handful of people from Taylor who started protesting outside Hutto “once the word got around that they were holding children in there.” It’s been a lonely business. Orta told me, “I know people at my church who work at Hutto. When I try to talk to them about it, they just say, ‘It’s my job.’ My sister had a friend who worked there. She was a single mom and her job before that had been cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage, $5.85 an hour. C.C.A. is paying, like, twice that. I said to her, ‘What if it were you and your son in there?’ That was literally something she’d never thought about. When she realized I was one of the vigil organizers, she stopped speaking to me or my sister.”

A few Taylor residents spoke out against Orta’s efforts. In a letter to the Daily Press, Michelle Hernandez wrote of Hutto detainees, “These individuals are eating three meals a day, even if it isn’t food that suits their palate. They have a dry, comfortable place to sleep, television and PlayStations, Xbox or whatever type of video games they have. The kids are getting an education, books to read, toys to play with. So many of our U.S. war veterans are homeless and don’t even get that. Who the hell is marching and complaining on their behalf?”

On the day I drove past Hutto, there was no one outside on the brown patchy grass, and no children on the play structure in the bare exercise yard. A stiff wind whipped the four flags at the entrance: one for Texas, one for the Department of Homeland Security, one for the United States, and one for the Corrections Corporation of America.

C.C.A. was founded in 1983 by a small group of politically well-connected entrepreneurs. One of them, Thomas Beasley, was the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. Another, Terrell Don Hutto -- the prison’s namesake -- was once the director of the state prison system in Arkansas. He was also the defendant in a famous case that went before the Supreme Court, in 1978. In Hutto v. Finney, one of the first successful lawsuits by prisoners against a correctional system, the Court held that conditions in the Arkansas state prisons, which placed prisoners in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time, constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Early investors in C.C.A. included Honey Alexander, the wife of Lamar Alexander, then the governor of Tennessee. Over the years, C.C.A. has continued to strengthen its political ties. The company’s PAC gave more than three hundred thousand dollars during the 2006 election cycle, overwhelmingly to Republican congressional candidates, and has given more than a hundred thousand so far for the 2008 elections. The company’s chairman, William Andrews, and its C.E.O., John Ferguson, have been generous donors to Republican senatorial and Presidential candidates. Philip Perry, who is the son-in-law of Dick Cheney, and who served as general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security between 2005 and 2007, lobbied for C.C.A. while he was at the law firm Latham & Watkins, to which he has returned. And C.C.A. spends a lot on lobbying. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2005, the year that Homeland Security awarded C.C.A. the Hutto contract, the company paid close to $3.4 million dollars to five different firms to lobby the federal government.

The company’s first contract, in 1984, was with the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, for the building and oversight of an immigration holding center in Houston. C.C.A. soon began taking on contracts with counties, states, and the federal Bureau of Prisons. To win these entities over, private prison companies like C.C.A. argued that they could operate more cheaply and efficiently than the government could. It is certainly true that they can build prisons faster and cheaper, largely because they don’t need to seek voter or legislator approval. The relatively low salaries make running prisons cheaper, too. In 1999, two criminologists, James Austin and Garry Coventry, of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, concluded that “privately operated facilities have a significantly lower staffing level and offer significantly lower salaries than public state correctional agencies.” But Austin and Coventry also reported that private prisons had “a significantly higher rate of assaults on staff and inmates.” Austin, who is now a criminal-justice consultant, told me that “he just didn’t know” if that was still the case today -- nobody had done a comparable follow-up study. (That could be because it’s so hard to extract information from private prisons.) Austin noted, “In general, where there’s higher staff turnover you’re going to have rates of violence that are higher.”

Occasionally, stories about the operations of private prisons reach the public, and many are discouraging. In Youngstown, Ohio, C.C.A. built and oversaw a facility that housed prisoners from the District of Columbia. In the late nineties, it gained notoriety for endemic violence. In its first year of operation, there were six inmate escapes, twenty stabbings (two of them were fatal), and numerous other assaults -- figures that came to light only after a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the inmates. Among other problems at Youngstown, prisoners prone to violent behavior were housed with the general population -- a situation that U.S. District Court Judge Sam Bell, who presided over the case, referred to as the “mixing of predators and their prey.” Bell ordered all maximum-security inmates to be removed from Youngstown. C.C.A. admitted no wrongdoing, but in order to settle the suit it agreed to pay $1.6 million to prisoners and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal fees.

In 2004, inmates rioted and set fires at a private prison in Colorado run by C.C.A. A state investigation blamed mismanagement, and noted that C.C.A. had only thirty-three uniformed officers overseeing eleven hundred inmates when the riot erupted, and that the company paid its employees a third less than state prisons did.

Meanwhile, C.C.A. got into financial trouble by building prisons on spec -- putting up facilities for which it did not yet have contracts -- and by angering its stockholders with an ill-advised corporate restructuring. Over the course of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock price plummeted by ninety-three per cent. The company has since got back on much sounder financial footing. The hiring of John Ferguson, a former finance commissioner for the state of Tennessee, as C.E.O. helped. But the most important factor was the rise in immigrant detention. Since early 2002, the company’s stock price has more than quadrupled, even though several of C.C.A.’s immigrant-detention centers have been plagued by their own problems -- in 2005, a correctional officer at a San Diego facility was accused of raping a detainee.

During a conference call with investment analysts, in February, 2007, Ferguson was especially optimistic about the immigrant-detention trade. Noting that the elimination of the government’s catch-and-release initiative was “helping” the bottom line, he said that the number of beds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was asking for had risen from twenty-one thousand to twenty-seven thousand in the previous two years. He also noted that President Bush’s proposed 2008 budget called for doubling the size of the border patrol, to more than eighteen thousand agents, before he left office. “So we feel very strong about the demand that is developing,” Ferguson said. (At one point, he noted that, in all its facilities, C.C.A. had “worked hard in a number of areas to reduce medical costs, including modifying a number of our contracts to reduce or eliminate our responsibility for medical expenses.”)

In the same conference call, Tracy Rabold, an analyst for Bank of America Securities, offered “congratulations on yet another good quarter.” But Rabold wanted to know if lawsuits were causing any “throttling back,” noting that lawsuits were “kind of part of the business, but there seems to be at least a little more publicity around some of the housing conditions that are being reported on the immigration side. Without getting into the philosophical discussion with that, I’m just curious if that is having any impact on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest policies or the volume that you guys have seen from them.” Ferguson said that more time was needed to assess the impact on the prison business. But William Andrews, C.C.A.’s chairman, told the analysts, “I just don’t want to leave anybody the impression that these facilities... are in any way substandard. In fact, they’re above standard.” The negative reports, he said, had come “from special-interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. We welcome anybody to visit our facilities, and the family facility, particularly at T. Don Hutto, is almost like a home.”

****

Last May, a guard at Hutto was caught engaging in sexual activity with a female detainee in the cell that she shared with her young child. The guard was videotaped crawling out of the detainee’s cell -- trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid the camera -- on two occasions, once at 11:36 P.M., seven minutes after entering, and once at 11:47 P.M., following a ten-minute visit. Employees watching the security camera alerted their supervisors. The man on the videotape was seen “adjusting his pants around the belt area” as he left, according to a report on the incident by federal investigators. (The report -- or eighty of its four hundred pages, at least -- was obtained by the Taylor Daily Press.) It is unclear if the activity was consensual, but any sexual contact between correctional officers and inmates in a federal prison is a crime. At the time of the incident, however, the law applied only to prisons under the authority of the Department of Justice, and not to immigrant-detention centers, which are under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. The guard was not prosecuted. (This past July, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, introduced legislation that closed the loophole.)

The guard case caused a stir, and the commissioners of Williamson County, where Hutto is situated, became briefly concerned about Hutto. Williamson County acts as the middleman in the agreement between the federal government and C.C.A., and it receives a dollar a day for each detainee at Hutto -- as much as a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. At a meeting in October, 2007, commissioners expressed worry that they might be named in any future lawsuits directed at Hutto or, as one commissioner put it, drawn into “the liability loop.” The county was considering withdrawing from the contract.

At the meeting, a large contingent of Hutto employees showed up, dressed in their new, friendlier uniforms -- maroon polos and khakis. They sat together in the audience, clapping and murmuring “Amen” as Evelyn Hernandez, the facility’s administrator, gave an emotional speech about Hutto. She declared that she and her employees “provide a safe, secure, loving environment” for the families detained there. Hernandez spoke feelingly of the importance of keeping families together. She herself had a four-year-old, and “could not imagine ever having that child taken away from me, under any circumstances.” She had moved to Texas from Idaho to take her job, she said, and she could have left her daughter with family in Idaho until she got settled. “But that child has to be with me,” she said.

A lawyer for C.C.A., when it was his turn at the microphone, assured the commissioners that “it is extremely difficult for someone to successfully sue a county in Texas in this arena.” The county really had no liability -- after all, it didn’t own the property or employ the people working there. Just in case, C.C.A. would indemnify the county, up to a quarter of a million dollars, for any future legal fees. The commissioners kept the contract.

Although the meeting had centered on matters of liability, it also exposed a deeper confusion. When we place families in a facility like Hutto, are we punishing them for coming to America? Or are we just keeping them somewhere safe, so that they don’t get separated or disappear while we figure out what to do with them? Or, rather, is our policy to try somehow to combine the practical and the punitive? After all, if the goal was simply to keep track of immigrants, in most cases an electronic monitoring bracelet would suffice. And if the goal was simply to keep families together, we could surely house them in something other than a former prison, in a place where employees are trained in child welfare and kids can get fresh air. The decision to house families in a former prison was, perhaps, not so arbitrary after all. At the meeting that day, Cynthia Long, one of the county commissioners, a woman in a businesslike red blazer and glasses, spoke about keeping families together. But she also said something that probably represented the gut feeling of a lot of people who are angry about illegal immigration. Long said, “The thing we forget is the adults who are being detained have broken the law.” Unfortunately, she went on, children sometimes “have to suffer with the sins of our parents” -- “to suffer, if you can call it that, because of their parents’ choices.”

Stealing Life

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 07:27:00 -0400

On a muggy August afternoon in Baltimore, trash scuttled down Guilford Avenue, the breeze smelling like rain and asphalt. It was the last week of shooting for the fifth and final season of the HBO drama The Wire, and the crew was filming a scene in front of a boarded-up elementary school. Cast members had been joined by forty or so day players -- mostly kids from the neighborhood. Earlier, the episode’s director, Clark Johnson, had been giving some of the kids the chance to say "Cut!," and they’d bellowed it like drunks at a surprise party. Now, when Johnson yelled "Cut," the kids swarmed around a video monitor to look at themselves in the last shot, pointing and laughing. "He just said it was good," one kid complained. "Why we gotta do it again?" Johnson, who was wearing what he called his "lucky cowboy hat," stepped away to talk to one of the professional actors. Another man -- a bald white guy, unprepossessing in jeans and a T-shirt -- remained by the monitor, and he answered the kids: "Hey. He’s the director. You don’t believe him? He kinda, sorta knows what he’s doin’." The bald guy was David Simon, the show’s creator: a former Baltimore Sun reporter who figured that he’d spend his life at a newspaper, a print journalist who has forged an improbable career in television without ever leaving Baltimore.

The kids listened politely to Simon and ran back to their places.

Each season of The Wire has focussed, with sociological precision, on a different facet of Baltimore. The previous season featured a story line about the city’s anarchic schools, told partly through the character of Roland (Prez) Pryzbylewski, a young cop turned schoolteacher. Simon recalled, "On the first day, the kids were all cutting up and yelling. It was like the first day of school. You know how they kicked the shit out of Pryzbylewski emotionally on the show? The kids were doing the same to the assistant directors. One poor A.D. was, like, ‘Please! This is too fuckin’ meta.’ By the end of the year, we had a good crew of young actors, but in the beginning it was, as we say in Baltimore, like herding pigeons." While Simon was telling this story, Jermaine Crawford, a fourteen-year-old who joined the cast last season, came over to hug him. The scene being filmed would mark the final appearance of Crawford, whose character, Dukie, comes from a family in which all the adults are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Much of the new season, which will begin airing in January, will take place at a downsizing newspaper called The Baltimore Sun. Johnson, back at the monitor, began teasing Simon for giving so many of his old Sun colleagues small parts on the show. Among the dozens of people who have recurrent parts or cameos are Simon’s former editor, Rebecca Corbett, now an editor at the Times; the former Sun political reporter Bill Zorzi, now a writer for The Wire; Steve Luxenberg, the editor who first hired Simon as a reporter at the Sun; and Simon’s wife, Laura Lippman, a crime novelist who used to be a Sun reporter.

"It was like a frat house the other day, with all your newspaper pals around here," Johnson told Simon. "What, you think somebody in Iowa’s gonna be watching and go, ‘Look, honey, it’s Bill Zorzi!’?" Warming to his riff, he added, "You ever try playing off these people who’ve never acted before? Somebody yells ‘Action,’ and they stand here like this" -- he made a blank fish face.

Johnson is an actor as well as a director. He played a detective on Homicide, the NBC cop series based on Simon’s 1991 book by the same name, about murder in Baltimore, and in the new season of The Wire he plays Gus Haynes, a city editor who tries to hold the line against dwindling coverage, buyouts, and pseudo-news. In the season opener, Haynes provides a bitingly funny introduction to newsroom culture. He complains about a photographer who invariably gooses the poignancy of fire scenes by positioning a charred doll somewhere amid the debris. ("I can see that cheatin’ motherfucker now, with his fucking harem of dolls, pouring lighter fluid on each one," Haynes fumes.) And he patiently explains to a junior reporter one of those house rules which arbiters of newspaper style cling to with fierce persnicketiness: a building can be "evacuated," he instructs, but you cannot evacuate people. "To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema," one of the old-timers chimes in. "At the Baltimore Sun, God still resides in the details."

The Sun allowed its name to be used on The Wire, but stipulated that no current employees could appear in it; the newspaper’s offices have been re-created on the show’s hulking soundstage outside the city. This arrangement suited Simon fine -- he bitterly accepted a buyout offer from the paper in 1995, feeling that it was squandering talent under new management. The Wire, Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society -- and, particularly, "raw, unencumbered capitalism" -- devalues human beings. He told me, "Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm -- the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less."

Some of the dialogue from the fifth season is taken word for word from the Sun’s newsroom. Simon recalled, "There was this writer, Carl, who every day would eat the same thing for lunch: cottage cheese. One day, somebody walked by and saw him staring down into his cottage cheese, poking it with a spoon and saying to himself, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.’ That’s in there."

Finely tuned as Simon’s ear is for the newsroom, it is perhaps even better calibrated for the street corner and the precinct, having been sharpened by thirteen years of daily crime reporting. Viewers of The Wire must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined, just as they wouldn’t be by real people tossing them around. To have "suction" is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a "redball" is a high-profile case with political consequences; to "re-up" is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. "The game" is the drug trade, although it emerges during the course of the show as a metaphor for the web of constraints that political and economic institutions impose on the people trapped within them. And, in one memorable neologism, a penis is referred to as a "Charles Dickens."

Because Simon and his primary writing partner, Ed Burns -- a former Baltimore homicide detective who was once one of Simon’s sources -- are both middle-aged white men, people tend to assume that the dialogue spoken by the drug dealers and ghetto kids is ad-libbed by the black actors on the show. In fact, one of the show’s writers was always present on the set, keeping the actors on script. A single dropped word was noted and corrected. Gbenga Akinnagbe, the actor who plays a drug dealer’s henchman named Chris Partlow, said, "This is David’s domain. He gets the streets of Baltimore better than we do." The novelist Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), whom Simon hired to write several scripts, agrees: "When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue -- that’s them. They are so much further ahead of the curve on that."

The show’s departure from Hollywood formulas may be nowhere more palpable than in its routine use of nonactors to fill the minor roles. No other television drama, it seems safe to say, features an actor whom one of the show’s lead writers helped put in prison with a thirty-four-year sentence. That is Melvin Williams, a Baltimore drug kingpin whom Ed Burns nabbed in a wiretap investigation in 1984; Simon reported on the case for the Sun. Williams plays the part of the Deacon, a community leader both savvy and wise. The former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, an advocate of drug decriminalization, has a small role as the city’s health commissioner; the character works with a police commander who creates an experimental zone, which the street kids call Hamsterdam, where drug users won’t be arrested. The former Republican governor of Maryland Robert Ehrlich shows up as a state trooper on the governor’s detail in a scene where the Democratic mayor of Baltimore comes to Annapolis to ask for a bailout. People whom Simon reported on appear in cameos as city clerks, drug counsellors, corner boys, hired muscle. "These jokes don’t impair anyone else’s viewing," Simon explained. "But when Kurt Schmoke advocates for drug decriminalization as the city health commissioner, there’s an extra kick for the locals. But here’s the other thing: these are faces you don’t see on television, the faces and voices of the real city."

Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, "I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ "

Near twilight, Simon headed over to the location for the next scene: a parking lot under the highway that is directly across from the Baltimore Sun building. There the crew had set up a small, pretend encampment for homeless people. Cars rattled along the highway above, like marbles in a chute. The parking lot reeked, authentically, of urine.

Filming on city streets in marginal neighborhoods carries its peculiar risks and rewards. On one occasion, a car involved in a high-speed chase smashed into one of the actors’ cars, and everybody had to dive out of the way. Another time, a man got shot yards away, staggered onto the set trailing blood, and was treated by the show’s medic. Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, "Man, you need a fix more than I do." Royo refers to that moment as his "street Oscar."

That night, the streets were a little quieter, but there was still the circus-comes-to-town bustle of a location shoot. The blue lights of an ambulance and a police car, which were featured in the homeless-people scene, pulsed in the darkness. Simon stood in the middle of it all, and crew members ran up to him with the smallest of questions: Do you like the way they’ve laid out the sleeping bags? What about the way the ambo and the squad car are positioned?

Gone are the days when Simon, who was a writer on Homicide but didn’t run the show, couldn’t get Johnson to say something he didn’t think his character would say. Back then, Simon lacked suction. As Johnson waited for the lighting crew to finish setting up, he and Simon reminisced about how Johnson had repeated one Homicide speech over and over, purposely dropping a line that Simon had written. Simon recalled the episode: "That was ‘Scene of the Crime.’ Episode 421. Possibly 422." Now Simon is the court of last resort. The actor Tom McCarthy, who plays a reporter, came over to ask a question about the upcoming scene. McCarthy pointed out that his character was supposed to be coming back from a City Council meeting that had run late into the night. Would he really put a quarter in the parking meter at that hour, as the script indicated? "Hell, yeah," Simon said cheerfully, inviting McCarthy to take a closer look at one of the nearby meters -- they were in effect twenty-four hours a day.

"You’re right," McCarthy said. "You’re right." With a mixture of admiration and irritation, he added, "Gee, it’s great to have you on the set!"

The Wire débuted in June, 2002, looking more or less like a cop show. But the differences were important. It spent as much time with the lawbreakers as it did with the law enforcers. And you didn’t see the suspects through the cops’ eyes only -- you saw them through their own as well. The drug trade emerged as its own intricate bureaucracy, a hierarchy that subtly mirrored that of the police department. Moreover, The Wire did not rely on the jumpy handheld-camera shots and the blurry "swish pans" that a lot of network cop shows had adopted. The camera remained locked, for minutes at a time, on people talking. And the story unfolded at a slower pace, too, which meant that many of the scenes elaborated on the characters and the power structures they moved within, rather than lay the pipe of plot.

Simon delivered the pilot to HBO in November, 2001. Soon after, he met the novelist George Pelecanos at the funeral of a mutual friend. Pelecanos, like Simon, grew up in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland; attended the University of Maryland, in College Park; and was deeply interested in the fate of the American city and, in particular, of the black urban poor. After the funeral, he gave Simon a ride. As Pelecanos recalls it, Simon told him that The Wire would be "a novel for television. Not in a ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ sense. Each episode would be like a chapter in a book. You could digress, in the way a novel does. And it would be about the social aspects of crime." Pelecanos, who wrote seven episodes for the show, said, "That struck home, because if it’s not about something more than the mystery, the thriller part, I’m not going to do it. Life’s too short."

The show’s title referred to the wiretap that a unit of the Baltimore police force was using to keep a local drug organization under surveillance. Ultimately, the term suggested more -- the way that the show allowed viewers to eavesdrop on various recondite power plays, and the way that poverty, politics, and policing were interconnected in a struggling post-industrial city. In Simon’s view, The Wire was never "a cop show. We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city."

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. " ‘The Wire’ is dissent," he says. "It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right." He also likes to say that The Wire is a story about the "decline of the American empire." Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled -- at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating The Wire, Simon said, he and his colleagues had "ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy -- not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state." He went on, "What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason -- instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions ... those are the indifferent gods."

When Simon pitched The Wire to Carolyn Strauss, now the president of HBO Entertainment, he did not mention Greek tragedy or the decline of the American empire. With only one executive-producing credit -- for the HBO miniseries "The Corner," based on a 1997 book he co-wrote with Ed Burns, about the Baltimore drug world -- he knew better. Instead, he argued that HBO might understandably be reluctant to do a cop show -- cop shows, like hospital shows, were TV, not HBO -- but that was, in fact, precisely why the network should do it. Now that HBO had created dramas about subjects the networks avoided (the Mafia, prisons), it was time to expose what the networks did as fraudulent. In what Simon calls a "begging-ass memo" to Strauss, he wrote:

It is a significant victory for HBO to counter program alternative, inaccessible worlds against standard network fare. But it would, I will argue, be a more profound victory for HBO to take the essence of network fare and smartly turn it on its head, so that no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like C.S.I. or N.Y.P.D. Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows. For HBO to step toe-to-toe with NBC or ABC and create a cop show that seizes the highest qualitative ground through realism, good writing, and a more brutal assessment of police, police work, and the drug culture -- this may not be the beginning of the end for network dramas as the industry standard, but it is certainly the end of the beginning for HBO.

For a begging-ass memo, it was supremely confident in tone. Strauss got used to such displays, and to the impassioned e-mails that Simon dashed off. "He’s quick with the incendiary memo," Strauss said. "I think he puts as much into those written pleas as he does into writing his characters."

It took HBO more than a year to green-light the show. The pilot script, written by Simon and Burns, did not sufficiently impress Strauss and Chris Albrecht, then the chairman of HBO; Simon had to write two more episodes. Once the show finally entered production, there were skirmishes that helped pin down Simon’s vision: HBO wanted to cut an early sequence in which Omar -- a stickup artist -- steals money from drug dealers who hadn’t been introduced to viewers and who wouldn’t appear again. But Simon argued, successfully, that the scene had to stay in, because over time Omar’s importance would become clear, and because the show would lose its insider feel if it explained too much.

Rafael Alvarez, a former Sun reporter whom Simon hired to write for the show, said, "You know how, in a Russian novel, the reader does the work for the first hundred pages, and then it turns and you’re lost in it? With The Wire, it might be Episode 6 before it turns and you’re in." The creators of The Wire would never say that their work is as good as that of Tolstoy or Dickens, but they can’t quite resist the comparison, either.

The Wire has never won an Emmy -- in fact, it has been nominated only once, for Pelecanos’s script about the murder of Stringer Bell, the drug boss who imagined himself as a legitimate businessman. Its audience is modest. Last season, about 4.4 million people a week watched The Wire. The Sopranos, by contrast, had thirteen million viewers a week last season, and Big Love, considered a marginal hit, had six. On any other network, The Wire would not have been renewed after the first season, and even on HBO its continuation was far from certain. As Simon sees it, there was a "kind of fever" at HBO for a while after " The Sopranos and Sex and the City generated so much heat and so much money, and magnified expectations of what a high-end cable outlet can do. Everybody was hungrily looking for the next one. But those shows were beautiful mutants." In the meantime, "if you weren’t getting those numbers, it was, like, This is good and we like it, and critics like it, so we could order up another season, but, you know, we could also take this thirty or forty million and go develop three or four more pilots, one of which might become The Sopranos or Sex and the City.’ " Simon felt that The Wire was particularly vulnerable after its third season. But Albrecht -- who has since left HBO (following an arrest in Las Vegas for assaulting his girlfriend) -- liked the media focus of the projected fifth season. And Strauss, Simon said, was "crazy about the kids" in the fourth season: "She said, ‘We can’t cancel this -- this is what we do well.’ "

Despite having what Simon jokes is an "audience of seventeen on Sunday night," The Wire has been a hit with two groups in particular: people who identify with the inner-city characters, and critics. The Wire is the first HBO drama to be syndicated to BET. Bootleg copies of the DVDs circulate widely in the mostly black and poor neighborhoods of West Baltimore. One day during the recent season, Simon got a call from Felicia (Snoop) Pearson, who plays a butch little killer with a Baltimore street accent so thick that some viewers might be tempted to turn on closed captioning for her dialogue. (Pearson’s role on The Wire is her first acting job; she spent most of her adolescence in a Maryland state prison, serving time for second-degree murder, and has since been trying to turn her life around.) Pearson told Simon that she had just collared a guy who was trying to sell her a bootleg DVD of The Wire, and wanted to know what to do with him. A bemused Simon told her to set him loose: "What are you gonna do, Snoop, hold him for the HBO authorities?" The HBO message boards are full of testimonials that suggest an affinity between Wire fans and Wire characters. "My favorite character is Michael because his character and me are the same I was raised in the streetz and had to take care of me and my people thats why alot of people call me streetz and it’s tatted on my hand"; "I like ma nigga Bodie sad 2 see him go he waz a true ridah!"

Critics, meanwhile, have compared the show to a great Victorian novel. The Chicago Tribune, Salon, and the San Francisco Chronicle have called it the best show on television. Jacob Weisberg, writing in Slate, went even further, declaring that The Wire was the best American television series that had ever been broadcast: "No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature." Sometimes the fan base of The Wire seems like the demographics of many American cities -- mainly the urban poor and the affluent élite, with the middle class hollowed out.

A favorite phrase of David Simon’s is "You can’t make this shit up." In the opening sequence of the very first episode of The Wire, Jimmy McNulty -- the half mensch, half jerk of a Baltimore cop, played by the British actor Dominic West -- is sitting on a stoop across from a crime scene. McNulty is talking to the compatriot of a dead guy called Snot Boogie, and can’t resist a little philosophizing on the subject of his name: "This kid, whose mama went to the trouble to christen him Omar Isaiah Betts -- you know, he forgets his jacket, so his nose starts runnin’ and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him Snot. So he’s Snot forever. It doesn’t seem fair." Snot Boogie liked to shoot craps with his pals in the neighborhood, it seems, but, every time he did, he’d steal the pot before the end of the game. So why, McNulty wants to know, did they still let him play? "Got to," his interlocutor answers. "This is America, man." It was a perfectly crafted setup for Simon’s themes: how inner-city life could be replete with both casual cruelty and unexpected comedy; how the police and the policed could, at moments, share the same jaundiced view of the world; how some dollar-store, off-brand version of American capitalism could trickle down, with melancholy effect, into the most forsaken corners of American society. But, as it happened, the Snot Boogie story was real -- Simon had heard it, down to the line about America, from a police detective, and it appears in Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Simon’s gift is in recognizing an anecdote like that for the found parable that it is -- "stealing life," as he once described it to me -- and knowing which parts to steal.

Of course, in producing The Wire, Simon and his colleagues did make a lot of shit up. And yet nearly every scene is grounded in documentary truth. This became clear at the writers’ meetings, which were equal parts urban-studies seminar, reporters’ bull session, and Hollywood story conference. The writers’ office is in a former bank in an old out-of-the-way waterfront district of Baltimore called Canton. Simon, Ed Burns, Bill Zorzi, and a young writer named Chris Collins sat around a table. Simon had a laptop open in front of him. In the middle of the table was a basket full of dried cranberries, Fig Newtons, and jelly beans. On the wall was a long sheet of butcher paper, divided into a grid: the name of each member of the show’s ensemble was written in marker on the side; the episodes, identified by number, were notated along the top. Above the butcher paper were head shots of all the major actors on The Wire. As the writers decided what would happen to each character in a given episode, Collins would write a brief description of that plot point, or "beat," on a colored index card and pushpin it to the appropriate box on the grid. But a lot of the discussion on the days I was at the writers’ office had to do with the larger political themes of the show.

One morning in February, Simon -- his hands laced behind his head, elbows jutting out-talked about the character of Tommy Carcetti, a venal pol with an idealistic streak, who by Season Five has been elected mayor of Baltimore. Carcetti faces any number of challenges, from bad crime statistics and floundering schools to the fundamental fact that -- as he put it during his run for mayor -- "tomorrow morning, I still wake up white in a city that ain’t." (Carcetti is deftly played by the Irish actor Aidan Gillen.) That morning, Simon and his colleagues were analyzing how Carcetti’s ambitions to become the governor of Maryland are molding his agenda in the mayor’s office. Simon noted that Carcetti had promoted education reform in Season Four. "He’s gotta show that test scores have gone up," he said.

"For the first and second grade," Burns said sarcastically.

"Right," Simon said. "It’s always just the first and second grade." Simon was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, his standard outfit. (His lone sartorial affectation is a black porkpie hat of the type favored by jazz musicians in the nineteen-fifties.) He looked as if he could easily play one of the cops or a longshoreman. Every once in a while, he got up, thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and paced in front of the window, with its distant view of downtown Baltimore. Burns is silver-haired and pink-cheeked, and, in his homey cardigan, might suggest Mr. Rogers, if Mr. Rogers were a brainy, cynical, and profane former homicide detective.

Burns said, "Carcetti is, like, ‘I don’t want to be the education mayor -- the numbers aren’t good.’ His advisers go down the list: environmental mayor, this, that, and the other thing. He tries on a few roles, and they just don’t have the juice. But then he decides on the homelessness issue -- this is great stuff. And he runs with it." Eventually, Burns suggested, Carcetti would learn a little about the complicated reality of homelessness, "but he’s not interested in the reality. He wants a silver bullet." Maybe, Burns went on, Carcetti could acquire some FEMA trailers to shelter the homeless of Baltimore, and talk grandiloquently about how the homeless situation is a disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. Zorzi, the former political reporter, rejected this as implausible: how would the Democratic mayor of Baltimore get trailers from the Bush Administration?

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about "perception versus reality" -- in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals -- stories that have a clean moral. "It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing," Simon said at one point. "That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems-newspapers are not designed to understand it."

If Simon’s characters were to deliver the kind of doomy social criticism that Simon does, The Wire would, as he likes to say, "lay there like a bagel." Fortunately, his characters bristle with humor, quirks, private sorrows; his drug dealers express intricate opinions about Baltimore radio stations, chicken nuggets, and chess. One reason for this is that the writers knew people like them. Burns knew plenty of drug dealers as a homicide detective and plenty of inner-city teen-agers when, like Detective Pryzbylewski, he left the force and became a teacher in the Baltimore city schools. Zorzi knew plenty of city and state politicians when he was a tough, cranky Sun reporter who would never eat so much as a carrot stick from a buffet paid for by a candidate. As a crime reporter for the Sun, Simon knew plenty of junkies, snitches, cops, and people just trying to keep their heads down and get by in violent neighborhoods. Simon can be scathing, even righteous, about other television shows that presume to depict urban America without the benefit of direct knowledge. As he told the audience at Loyola, "So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don’t even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty. The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong... . Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they’re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz... . How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they’ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it’s like."

The writers began to see Season Five as a tragicomic collision between homeless people, newspaper reporters, politicians, and the cops we’ve come to know. Carcetti, they decided, would suffer some significant collateral damage. "I actually feel bad for him," Simon said, laughing. "He’s doing his job here, which is basically: be on the right side of some issue and exalt your achievement."

Over the next several days, the writers poked holes in each other’s ideas and, like Greek gods, mapped out the fates of the characters. Most of the trajectories were grim, but one troubled character, they decided, would pull himself together and enjoy what George Pelecanos calls one of the show’s "inglorious redemptions -- not Rocky knocking the Russian out in the ninth round but somebody getting through to the other side." Simon often says that The Wire refuses to indulge in the "life-affirming" messages that are woven into the fabric of network TV. Still, he seemed glad to incorporate this small victory into an otherwise rigorously unsentimental picture. "We don’t have a lot of victories," Simon told his colleagues. "As cynically as the rest of this stuff is ending, it will validate the one place we put any of our sincerity, which is individual action." It’s hard to classify Simon politically, but anytime you start thinking of him as some sort of bleeding-heart socialist you’re brought up short by his unremitting skepticism about institutions.

During the writers’ meetings, Burns and Simon often finished each other’s sentences. They met in 1985, when Simon was covering the criminal career of Melvin Williams, and Burns was the lead detective investigating him. Burns had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Baltimore drug trade, a conviction that he was right about most things, and an autodidact’s intellectualism. When Simon first arranged to meet Burns, at a public library, he discovered him with a stack of books, including John Fowles’s The Magus, and a volume by Hannah Arendt. "Once I found him, I didn’t let go," Simon told me. After they finished writing Season Five of The Wire, they teamed up again on Simon’s next project for HBO: a miniseries called Generation Kill, based on the 2004 book, by Evan Wright, about a Marine platoon in Iraq. Simon recalled, "Ed used to drive the other cops crazy because he knew better at every point how to do an investigation, and then when he got the cases to court he would tell the prosecutors how to present them. He pissed them off. And when he was in the school system the assistant principals learned to hate him." In the early days of The Wire, Simon said, he and Burns used to have "hellacious" arguments -- he compared them to scenes from "a toxic marriage." He continued, "I finally said to him, ‘I’m not going to abdicate. I always have to trust my own ideas in the end. I’ll pick the ones out of your sixty ideas that I think are going to work, and I’ll leave the others on the table.’ But there were also moments when he fought really hard for something and in the end I saw it." Burns, Simon said, "always pushes me further than I would go on my own." He is the show’s policy visionary -- the one who, Simon half joked, "is only working in TV till somebody realizes that they ought to give him all the money to fix our social problems."

Before shooting began in April, scene-by-scene blueprints for the first four episodes were doled out to various writers. The most prolific are Simon and Burns, along with Lehane, Pelecanos, and the novelist Richard Price. All the scripts, Pelecanos said, are minutely mapped out. "In the end, the final word is David’s," he said. "I have come to where I try and write in his voice. We have an expression -- ’You give it up.’ There were times when David and I were going at it pretty hard and I managed to get a lot of what I wanted. Other times, maybe thirty per cent of what I’d written made it into the final script. But he’d told me from the beginning, ‘You’re lucky when you get thirty per cent into a finished script.’ On city politics in particular, I knew anything I wrote would be completely reworked by Simon and Zorzi -- I had never researched that world and didn’t know anything about it. And, truthfully, I fought that thread -- Carcetti, all that. I didn’t think anybody would want to see it, and I didn’t want to write it. But, in the end, I think Simon was right. It made the show richer and gave a more balanced and panoramic view of the city. You just can’t understand the streets without understanding politics."

David Simon was born in 1960, and brought up in a comfortable, book-filled house in Silver Spring. His father, Bernard Simon, was the public-relations director and the chief speechwriter for B’nai B’rith, and his mother, Dorothy Simon, was a homemaker who went back to college in her fifties and became a counsellor for runaway teens in McLean, Virginia. She attended the University of Maryland at the same time David did and graduated summa cum laude, whereas Simon, who was consumed by his work editing the college newspaper, was a C student. ("B-minus, maybe, but that would be generous," Simon said.) Simon’s brother Gary, who is fourteen years older than David, is now the head of the infectious-diseases program at George Washington University Medical Center. His sister Linda, who was ten years older, was an abstract painter; she died of breast cancer in 1990. Laura Lippman, Simon’s wife, says that her mother-in-law once told her that David was her most "interesting" child; one day, she came home and found him curled up in the dryer, laughing to himself.

At the dinner table, Gary Simon recalls, David was often privy to "political discussion at a level of exposure that wouldn’t be typical for a six-year-old kid." The Simons were committed New Deal Democrats -- Bernard Simon was a fervent supporter of Hubert Humphrey. Once, when the family arrived late for a Kol Nidre service and found the synagogue doors closed to stragglers, Bernard became so angry that he decided to found his own Saturday-morning service; it took place in another synagogue’s basement. "There were always rabbis around," Gary says. "And a lot of discussion. David was an active participant in that as a kid." The family kept kosher, Gary says, "till one day a neighbor gave me a piece of bacon, and that was the end of that. Neither David nor I feel religious. I would say we feel traditional."

Reporting attracted Simon early on. Bernard Simon had started out as a journalist -- before he went to work in public relations, he’d been the managing editor of the N.Y.U. student newspaper, and a stringer for the Hudson County Dispatch -- and he had friends who were reporters. One was Irving Spiegel, who was known as Pat, because, as a religion reporter for the Times, he spent so much time in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Simon described Uncle Pat to me in an e-mail: "He could play concert piano, and composed verses of the ‘Metropolitan Desk Opera,’ a never-ending farce of the Times that he would perform at parties, goofing on co-workers and bosses. He could recite Shakespeare in Yiddish. He had a way of seizing the floor at parties and ranting comically at imagined affronts and outrages. As a young child, I thought he was typical of newspapermen in his élan and brass. I expected to meet lots of people like Uncle Pat. It was a different place and time, I guess. Between knowing Pat and my father taking me to see a revival of ‘The Front Page’ at Arena Stage when I was eleven or twelve, I was sold a bill of goods."

David Mills, now a television writer in Hollywood, worked with Simon on the Diamondback, the University of Maryland paper, and remembers that Simon produced great humor pieces. Mills said, "He had a full-blown writing personality as an undergraduate. He was always getting parking tickets, so he did these rambling, profane, angry pieces about the student ticketers, his nemeses." He continued, "Though people don’t talk much about the humor in The Wire, it’s there. You drop somebody into an alien environment -- a closed society like the homicide cops or the drug culture -- and the key to working your way into that culture is to understand the jokes, which David does. It’s crucial, because, if it weren’t there, the work would be too depressing. It’s crushing subject matter, but not necessarily to the cops -- they’re making jokes while they’re looking at dead bodies -- and not to the people shooting dope, even. They’re not necessarily walking around saying, ‘Woe is me.’ There’s a grim humor that springs out of that life."

In his senior year, Simon became the College Park stringer for the Baltimore Sun. He wrote so many stories that a shop steward complained he was violating the union contract; after he graduated, the Sun put him on staff full time. He was assigned to the police beat. Rebecca Corbett, the former Sun editor, told me that Simon "saw the cop beat as a whole window onto the sociology of the city, a way of examining the failings of government, a way to think about policy, especially drug policy, and a way of telling stories." She continued, "David would say that all he ever wanted to be was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. It was his home. He was tremendous fun, because he was passionate. He always wrote too long; he could be pigheaded; he was a deadline pusher. And he got into all kinds of labor stuff at the paper. At one point, I told him that he could not circulate another memo until I’d seen it."

Simon wrote about how the interplay of cocaine and semi-automatic weapons jacked up the city’s murder rate; he wrote about the homicide unit on Christmas -- "which seemed ironical enough to my twenty-five-year-old sensibilities," he said. And he wrote an obituary of a police informant with a photographic memory and a talent for ruses, who became the basis of the character Bubbles on The Wire. Occasionally, he published articles that strained for literary effect -- such as an extended comparison of a convicted drug dealer and Shakespeare’s Richard III. But even as Homicide and The Corner were published to excellent reviews, he continued to write standard newspaper fare -- "F.B.I. NOW MONITORING STATE PROBE OF HAGERSTOWN PRISON RIOT," "MURDER SUSPECT, STOPPED FOR SPEEDING, WAS FREED."

After years of reporting in Baltimore’s ghettos, he found himself at ease with being the only white person in a room, or the only person in the room who didn’t know how to re-vial drugs, and found, too, that he could channel the voices of people in the game. "To be a decent city reporter, I had to listen to people who were different from me," Simon explained. "I had to not be uncomfortable asking stupid questions or being on the outside. I found I had a knack for walking into situations where I didn’t know anything, and just waiting. A lot of reporters don’t want to be the butt of jokes. But sometimes it’s useful to act as if you couldn’t find your ass with both hands."

Along the way, Simon grew deeply attached to his adopted city, Baltimore -- or Bodymore, Murdaland, as the graffiti in the title sequence of The Wire has it. Rafael Alvarez, the Sun colleague who became a "Wire" writer, told me that when he and Simon worked together they liked to "hang out at 3 A.M. at the end of Clinton Street, drinking cheap beer, maybe whiskey. You know those scenes of McNulty and his partner drinking at the railroad tracks? That’s basically what we were doing. There were old warehouses and scores of feral cats. We’d sort of stare across the harbor at Fort McHenry, talking about the city we both loved." Simon and Alvarez were both connoisseurs of the Baltimore vernacular, and some of the sayings that Alvarez learned from his father, a merchant marine, made it into the scripts. If you were crazy, you were "half goofy," and if you were drunk you were "half in the bag" or had "half a load on." ("Why half? I always wondered," Alvarez said.) If you lost your job or died, you were "finished with engines." Simon relished Alvarez’s eye for Baltimore detail, and let him indulge it in his work for The Wire. In one script that Alvarez wrote, there’s a scene in the office of the union boss in which a dartboard hanging on the wall features a photograph of Robert Irsay, the owner of the Baltimore Colts, who, in 1984, took the team to Indianapolis. "Simon and I are the kind of guys who, when we see those horseshoes with the word ‘Indianapolis’ on them, we want to throw up," Alvarez said.

Alvarez noted of Simon, "He could have been out there in L.A. years ago, writing scripts." But Simon never considered leaving. It helped that Laura Lippman, Simon’s third wife -- whom he began dating in 2000 and married last year -- was a Baltimore girl, whose mystery novels were set in the city, and who had no intention of leaving it. And it helped, too, that his second wife, a graphic artist to whom he’s still close, and with whom he shares custody of the couple’s thirteen-year-old son, Ethan, lived just outside the city. (Once, when I was visiting the tall, narrow Baltimore row house where Simon and Lippman live -- Simon also owns and writes in the place next door -- I noticed a menorah that Ethan had made for them, in which the candleholders were tiny handcrafted facsimiles of the books they’d published.)

In the early nineties, the Sun came under new leadership, and Simon’s "Front Page" fantasy sputtered out. The Times Mirror Company, which had bought the paper in 1986, brought in a new editor, John Carroll, and a new managing editor, William Marimow, both veterans of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and both with fine reputations as newsmen. "When the boys from Philly showed up, they arrived with a mythology that they had the keys to the kingdom and they were gonna show us how to do journalism," Simon said. "But to my great surprise -- because their reps preceded them -- they were tone-deaf and prize-hungry and more interested in self-aggrandizement than in building lasting quality at the paper."

Simon liked the new regime even less when it began thinning out the staff with buyouts. It was only the beginning of an era in which newspaper readerships and budgets got smaller. In 2000, the Times Mirror Company was itself bought by the Tribune Company. And when John Carroll later quit the editorship of the Los Angeles Times

Though Simon took the Sun’s second buyout offer, he still misses breaking news, his wife says. As he once wrote in an essay, he "had long imagined" himself "bumming cigarettes from younger reporters in exchange for back-in-the-day stories about what it was like to work with Mencken and Manchester." For a man who has been as successful as he has in a new career, his anger hasn’t abated much toward the forces that, as he sees it, drove him out of journalism. The flip side of his loyalty -- he is the kind of guy who will take off work to attend a funeral for the ninety-something mother of a retired rewrite man he used to work with at the Sun -- is his tendency to hold a grudge. In April, on a Baltimore public radio show, Simon remarked that he still remembers the name of the girl who wouldn’t kiss him in grade school when they were playing Spin the Bottle, and of the pasteup guy who, back in 1985, excised the last precious paragraph of one of his stories. He went on, "Anything I’ve ever done in life, down to cleaning up my room, has been accomplished because I was going to show people that they were fucked up and wrong and that I was the fucking center of the universe." It was a joke, but not entirely. Evidence of Simon’s feuds often ends up on The Wire. In the fourth season, Simon introduced a highly unpleasant supervisor of the major-crimes unit -- someone who is more than willing to close down any investigations that might embarrass politicians, and of whom a sergeant says, "He doesn’t cast off talent lightly. He heaves it away with great force." His name is Marimow.

The real William Marimow, who is now the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, says that he’s baffled and dismayed by Simon’s "obsession" with what went on at the Sun: "He is as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab pursuing the white whale." Marimow says that the Sun made great strides in narrative and in-depth journalism -- and was acknowledged for doing so in the Columbia Journalism Review and other publications -- during the same years that Simon "claims we were destroying it." He recalls only two conflicts with Simon: one over a raise that Simon wanted, and one over an article that Simon wrote about "metalmen"-people who strip houses of copper piping and sell it. Marimow didn’t like Simon’s use of the word "harvesters" to describe "people who were destroying homes. I thought it glorified them. He disagreed." Now, Marimow says, "it’s this drumbeat, year after year, of rewriting history."

Carroll, for his part, said that when he became editor the Sun was a "fallen angel" that had enjoyed "its journalistic peak in the nineteen-twenties and thirties... . Among newspaper journalists elsewhere, the Sun was regarded as uninspired and underperforming. It clearly needed work." He said, "Were we prize-hungry? I’d be thrilled to accept a Pulitzer. Wouldn’t you?" He went on, "David considers himself the ultimate police reporter, and he disdains anyone else who succeeds at it. Bill Marimow won two Pulitzers as a police reporter; David won zero. One doesn’t need a degree in psychology to understand why David is so enraged about both Bill and the Pulitzers."

Simon’s television career has been less acrimonious. In 1991, the director Barry Levinson optioned Simon’s book Homicide for a television series. Simon was happy to receive a check, and hoped that the show would lead to more sales of his book, but he didn’t think it would change his life all that much. Then the show’s producers suggested that Simon try writing a script. Simon called up David Mills, his old Diamondback colleague, who was now working as a reporter at the Washington Post. Neither Mills nor Simon had ever written a script. But Simon has proved remarkably good at identifying friends and associates who could make a major life transition -- from journalism to screenwriting, from crime to acting, from police work to television production. Mills says of Simon, "He brought me on for a lark, and it changed my life." The two men wrote a script about a tourist whose wife is killed in front of him and their young children. Tom Fontana, one of the producers, considered it too dark, and held on to it until the second season of Homicide,when Robin Williams agreed to guest star. The script won a Writers Guild Award. Mills recalls, "I jumped all over that. I got an agent, I moved out here to L.A. I was, like, ‘David, a door has opened for us.’ I got on N.Y.P.D. Blue and I kept trying to tell him, ‘There’s money to be made out here.’ But he’s a newspaper guy in a way I never was." Eventually, though, Simon did immerse himself fully in television. He became a producer on Homicide, and spent years learning from Fontana -- how to write scripts, how to cast actors, how to be a useful presence on the set. It was worth it, Fontana told him: "You become a producer to protect your writing."

Last November, Simon and his wife travelled to New Orleans. On a chilly Sunday morning, they walked up Louisa Street, in the Ninth Ward, with the Nine Times Social and Pleasure Club parade. The Nine Times is a "second-line club" -- part of the New Orleans tradition of honoring people who have recently died with a high-stepping, glitzily costumed procession, accompanied by brass bands. It emerged in the post-Reconstruction period, when African-Americans couldn’t get burial insurance but wanted their friends and neighbors to pass on in style. This particular club was made up of people who lived in a Ninth Ward housing project called the Desire, which had been torn down. The day’s parade was a sendoff for a Mr. Hollis Magee and a Mr. Donald (Pig) Green, and it proceeded boldly across a freeway overpass to Desire Street and, ultimately, to Piety Street. Simon was visiting because the next series he hopes to do for HBO is set in New Orleans -- he loves the city, and wanted to use it as a setting even before the storm, though he certainly does not know it as well as he knows Baltimore. He was doing the kind of hangingout research that he used to do as a reporter: listening to how people talk, picking up phrases and perspectives on the world.

The series will focus on New Orleans’s music community, and Simon plans to base some of the main characters on real people: a jazz trumpeter named Kermit Ruffins, who plays with a band called the Barbecue Swingers; Donald Harrison, Jr., a musician who is also the chief of an Indian tribe that performs at Mardi Gras; and Davis Rogan, a local d.j. and piano player. Rogan was at the parade -- Simon had picked him up earlier at his house, whose decrepit interior had more shades of paint than I had ever seen in any dwelling. Rogan is a tall, shambling guy with unruly sandy hair and a soul patch. He seemed to know every musician in New Orleans, and perhaps two-thirds of the people at the parade. He teaches music in the New Orleans schools, and he once ran for state representative on a platform of legalizing marijuana and using the revenues to fix the city’s streets -- "Pot for potholes!" was his slogan.

Simon had tracked Rogan down in France, where he’d been some sort of artist-in-residence at an abbey. "I was in the Loire Valley, surrounded by very rich old people, most of whom had been dead a thousand years -- Eleanor of Aquitaine, people like that," Rogan recalled. "And French people kept asking me, ‘Is New Orleans dead?’ ‘No, you fucking idiot!’ " He spoke good-humoredly over the parade musicians, who were playing "It’s All Over Now." He said of the city, "It is what it is now."

We walked over washboard streets, past boarded-up houses with desiccated spider plants hanging from the porch ceilings. A large dead gull lay in the street. Many of the houses were still spray-painted with messages indicating the number of live or dead people inside. Some had messages about animals, which Rogan found objectionable: "How’d you like it if your house was spray-painted in big black letters with something about a pit bull? Why didn’t they take it all the way-spray-paint, you know, ‘Rat in back!’ "

Simon said he had heard that some of the housing projects hadn’t been reopened yet, though they could, with some cleaning up, be viable places to live.

"Yeah, they’re going for a scattered-site housing plan now," Rogan said.

"Really scattered," Simon said. "Like, from Houston to Atlanta."

It was a blue-sky day, and the nip in the air was just enough to wake up a musician who’d played a late-night gig. A woman in a black puffy jacket and ankle-strap stilettos drank Sutter Hill wine through a straw, while a white hipster girl in her twenties banged on a Little Tikes drum. Another woman stood over a man who was lying on the ground; both of them laughed as she joked, "I’m gonna whip your ass!" People were smoking cigars, taking photos with their cell phones, dancing to the music. Somebody was selling two things -- Jack Daniel’s and candied apples -- from the back of a truck. Simon looked around quietly, taking it in, though every once in a while he hummed along to the music or asked Rogan a question. Simon wore slightly baggy jeans, one of his porkpie hats, shades, and a black fleece jacket. He wasn’t being secretive about his information-gathering, but he was being low-key. As he told me later, "It was too early in the process to have politicians or community leaders, or all the people looking to get on some Hollywood tit, trying to bum-rush this thing. There’s a time and a place for that down the road, if this thing gets any kind of green light, but now it’s just about getting comfortable with these voices and this world, and writing a good pilot and first-season bible. If I screw that up, it ends right there."

Musicians, Simon complained, were harder to pin down for meetings than drug dealers. He decided that it was better to attend gigs and approach them between sets. That evening, we went to a club, Jin Jean’s, to watch Kermit Ruffins play. Sipping a vodka-and-cranberry, Simon explained, "I’m listening now for how they use a phrase or tell a story. Like, I’ve asked musicians, What do you say when you hit a bad note? They said they call it a ‘clam.’ I was, like, Really? I called it that in my high-school jazz band thirty years ago."

Compared to The Wire, he said, the New Orleans project will have to be "a smaller, more intimate story about musicians reconstituting their lives." Simon is planning to work with Eric Overmyer, a writer who lives part time in the city. "New Orleans is a place where even nuances have nuances," he said. "It has an incredibly ornate oral tradition."

Simon said that he was eager to explore his love of music on the new show. The singer-songwriter Steve Earle, a friend of Simon’s, says, "David is a music freak." The two men met after Simon cast Earle in The Wire, as a scruffy twelve-step drug counsellor named Walon. For The Wire, Simon did not want music perpetually in the background; it had to come from something visible in a scene, like a boom box or a car with open windows. There were two exceptions: every season ends with a montage accompanied by a song, and the opening credits feature "Way Down in the Hole," a twisted gospel song written by Tom Waits. Simon’s search for the right opening song was intense. He went through his record collection -- which runs to Woody Guthrie, the Pogues, Muddy Waters, jazz, and R. & B., including New Orleans groups like the Meters-looking for something that would imply "misplaced faith in the postmodern, post-industrial gods. Obviously, given that order, there was not a lot that worked." Waits’s song fit this high-flown criterion, but Simon felt that his "white man’s growl" wasn’t right for the first season, which was so deeply rooted in black West Baltimore. So he decided to use a cover version by the Blind Boys of Alabama. For the next season, set at the port, where many of the main characters were white union guys, he returned to the Waits original, and then he decided to change the interpretation every season, to reflect the shifting focus of the show. The fourth season, with its schools story line, featured a version by a Baltimore boys’ choir. This year, it will be Steve Earle, whose bottomed-out voice suits the homeless theme.

The day after the parade, Simon took a drive around New Orleans. He said, "This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter. The Wirehas not really done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can’t be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don’t they just move away?" Indeed, the City Council of Baltimore once nearly passed a resolution that proposed steps to counter the bad image of Baltimore propagated by The Wire. In 2005, the Sun quoted a report by an image-consulting company that the city had hired. "Baltimore is plagued by negative press and harmful characterizations in the media, resulting in an inferiority complex," it said. "The perception of Baltimore is The Wire, The Corner, Homicide ... a hopeless, depressed, unemployed, crackaddicted city." And, under the headline "NO WAY TO TREAT A TOWN," a reviewer for the New York Post quipped, "I don’t know this Simon guy, but he doesn’t seem to like Baltimore very much, although he makes a very good living writing about it."

Simon discounts such criticism, but he acknowledged, "On The Wire, we’ve been so angry about what’s been mangled in public policy, and what’s at stake, that we really didn’t have time to celebrate what the city can be." A goal of the new series, he thinks, will be to make a case for the glories of the American city -- "why we need to accept ourselves as an urban people." And, to his mind, it doesn’t get any better than New Orleans. "At the Macy’s parade, when they show New York, they gotta get the dancers from Broadway shows out in the streets doing a kick line," he said. "In New Orleans the musicians are already in the streets."

Not long ago, Simon pulled off a coup that only he could have. It combined his media savvy, his loyalty to the people he’s written about, and his commitment to changing the way the underclass is represented. In The Corner, Simon and Burns had written extensively about a woman named Fran Boyd, a smart, likable person who had a devastating addiction to heroin, and whose first husband eventually died of his addiction. After Simon and Burns finished reporting the book, they introduced her to a man named Donnie Andrews, who was serving time for murder. Like the character Omar in The Wire, Andrews had robbed drug dealers at gunpoint. Eventually, he killed one.

Andrews had turned himself in to Burns, and Simon had written about him. Burns sensed that he was somebody who could support Boyd in her flickering hope of getting off heroin for good. As Burns told her, "You think you know it all? Well, I’ve got someone for you." After Burns gave Boyd’s phone number to Andrews, the two began talking for hours on the phone every week, and Andrews, a former heroin user himself, persuaded her to change. For twenty-eight harrowing days in the Baltimore Recovery Center, she got detoxed, and, over the next twelve years, she became a drug counsellor for recovering addicts, a far better mother to her two sons, and a guardian for two nieces and a nephew, all while lobbying to get Andrews released. She and Andrews fell in love. In April, 2005, after seventeen years in federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, Andrews was freed. The two made plans to marry in Baltimore, in August of this year.

Since Boyd and Simon first met, they had become close friends. In fact, she and both of her sons played small parts on The Wire; her younger son even became an assistant film editor on the show. When Simon heard about Boyd’s engagement, he jumped into action.

In recent years, Simon had become an unlikely fan of the "Vows" column in the Times -- the Sunday feature in which a couple’s wedding is described in detail. Wouldn’t it make a statement, he thought, if Fran and Donnie’s wedding was covered by "Vows"? Usually, the couples were privileged: Ivy League graduates in Vera Wang dresses and Armani tuxes. Simon called up one of the "Vows" editors, introduced himself, and made his pitch. When the editor called back to say she liked the idea, she told him that the paper wanted to do a feature article about Boyd and Andrews as well. A few weeks later, the editor told Simon via e-mail that the "Vows" column had been cancelled. That made him mad. "Having Fran and Donnie in the ‘Vows’ section was inclusive and smart, an unspoken triumph for the N.Y.T. itself -- a democratization," he explained to me in an e-mail. "To do a feature was far less so -- in fact, it was the opposite, in a way. As if such a marriage were grist for a news feature but unsuitable to be considered among other romances."

So Simon called Bill Keller, the editor of the Times, and made his pitch again. Are you saying, Keller asked, that you’d rather have the "Vows" piece than a front-page feature? Yes, Simon told him, strange though it might seem. Keller said that he’d have to think about it and call him back; he was a fan of The Wire, but this decision would have to be made on its merits. In the end, he called Simon and said that he’d read the feature and it made him want to go to Fran and Donnie’s wedding. The feature ran -- on the front page of the August 9th edition.

The "Vows" column ran on August 19th. It said that Boyd and Andrews were married at a catering hall in Baltimore, by the pastor of the A.M.E. church where Andrews is now head of security and does anti-gang outreach work. According to the Timesthe bride wore a strapless, beaded wedding dress. The groom wore a black tuxedo with a pink tie. They marched down the aisle to the accompaniment of a Luther Vandross song, "Here and Now." The guests included the actors Dominic West, Sonja Sohn, and Andre Royo from The Wire. David Simon was the best man.

Duped

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 03:05:00 -0400

The most egregious liar I ever knew was someone I never suspected until the day that, suddenly and irrevocably, I did. Twelve years ago, a young man named Stephen Glass began writing for The New Republic, where I was an editor. He quickly established himself as someone who was always onto an amusingly outlandish story -- like the time he met some Young Republican types at a convention, gathered them around a hotel-room minibar, then, with guileless ferocity, captured their boorishness in print. I liked Steve; most of us who worked with him did. A baby-faced guy from suburban Chicago, he padded around the office in his socks. Before going on an errand, Steve would ask if I wanted a muffin or a sandwich; he always noticed a new scarf or a clever turn of phrase, and asked after a colleague’s baby or spouse. When he met with editors to talk about his latest reporting triumph, he was self-effacing and sincere. He’d look us in the eye, wait for us to press him for details, and then, without fidgeting or mumbling, supply them.

One day, the magazine published an article by Steve about a teenager so diabolically gifted at hacking into corporate computer networks that C.E.O.s paid him huge sums just to stop messing with them. A reporter for the online edition of Forbes was assigned to chase down the story. You can see how Steve’s journalism career unravelled if you watch the movie Shattered Glass: Forbes challenged the story’s veracity, and Steve -- after denying the charges, concocting a fake Web site, and enlisting his brother to pose as a victimized C.E.O. -- finally confessed that he’d made up the whole thing. Editors and reporters at the magazine investigated, and found that Steve had been inventing stories for at least a year. The magazine disavowed twenty-seven articles.

After Steve’s unmasking, my colleagues and I felt ashamed of our gullibility. But maybe we shouldn’t have. Human beings are terrible lie detectors. In academic studies, subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, fifty-four per cent of the time. They are better at guessing when they are being told the truth than when they are being lied to, accurately classifying only forty-seven per cent of lies, according to a recent meta-analysis of some two hundred deception studies, published by Bella DePaulo, of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Charles Bond, Jr., of Texas Christian University. Subjects are often led astray by an erroneous sense of how a liar behaves. “People hold a stereotype of the liar -- as tormented, anxious, and conscience-stricken,” DePaulo and Bond write. (The idea that a liar’s anxiety will inevitably become manifest can be found as far back as the ancient Greeks, Demosthenes in particular.) In fact, many liars experience what deception researchers call “duping delight.”

Aldert Vrij, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, in England, argues that there is no such thing as “typical” deceptive behavior -- “nothing as obvious as Pinocchio’s growing nose.” When people tell complicated lies, they frequently pause longer and more often, and speak more slowly; but if the lie is simple, or highly polished, they tend to do the opposite. Clumsy deceivers are sometimes visibly agitated, but, over all, liars are less likely to blink, to move their hands and feet, or to make elaborate gestures -- perhaps they deliberately inhibit their movements. As DePaulo says, “To be a good liar, you don’t need to know what behaviors really separate liars from truthtellers, but what behaviors people think separate them.”

A liar’s testimony is often more persuasive than a truthteller’s. Liars are more likely to tell a story in chronological order, whereas honest people often present accounts in an improvised jumble. Similarly, according to DePaulo and Bond, subjects who spontaneously corrected themselves, or said that there were details that they couldn’t recall, were more likely to be truthful than those who did not -- though, in the real world, memory lapses arouse suspicion.

People who are afraid of being disbelieved, even when they are telling the truth, may well look more nervous than people who are lying. This is bad news for the falsely accused, especially given that influential manuals of interrogation reinforce the myth of the twitchy liar. Criminal Interrogation and Confessions (1986), by Fred Inbau, John Reid, and Joseph Buckley, claims that shifts in posture and nervous “grooming gestures,” such as “straightening hair” and “picking lint from clothing,” often signal lying. David Zulawski and Douglas Wicklander’s Practical Aspects of Interview and Interrogation (1992) asserts that a liar’s movements tend to be “jerky and abrupt” and his hands “cold and clammy.” Bunching Kleenex in a sweaty hand is another damning sign -- one more reason for a sweaty-palmed, Kleenex-bunching person like me to hope that she’s never interrogated.

Maureen O’Sullivan, a deception researcher at the University of San Francisco, studies why humans are so bad at recognizing lies. Many people, she says, base assessments of truthfulness on irrelevant factors, such as personality or appearance. “Baby-faced, non-weird, and extroverted people are more likely to be judged truthful,” she says. (Maybe this explains my trust in Steve Glass.) People are also blinkered by the “truthfulness bias”: the vast majority of questions we ask of other people -- the time, the price of the breakfast special -- are answered honestly, and truth is therefore our default expectation. Then, there’s the “learning-curve problem.” We don’t have a refined idea of what a successful lie looks and sounds like, since we almost never receive feedback on the fibs that we’ve been told; the co-worker who, at the corporate retreat, assured you that she loved your presentation doesn’t usually reveal later that she hated it. As O’Sullivan puts it, “By definition, the most convincing lies go undetected.”

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Maybe it’s because we’re such poor lie detectors that we have kept alive the dream of a foolproof lie-detecting machine. This February, at a conference on deception research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist and the provost of Harvard, spoke of “the incredible hunger to have some test that separates truth from deception -- in some sense, the science be damned.”

This hunger has kept the polygraph, for example, in widespread use. The federal government still performs tens of thousands of polygraph tests a year -- even though an exhaustive 2003 National Academy of Sciences report concluded that research on the polygraph’s efficacy was inadequate, and that when it was used to investigate a specific incident after the fact it performed “well above chance, though well below perfection.” Polygraph advocates cite accuracy estimates of ninety per cent -- which sounds impressive until you think of the people whose lives might be ruined by a machine that fails one out of ten times. The polygraph was judged thoroughly unreliable as a screening tool; its accuracy in “distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers” was deemed “insufficient to justify reliance on its use.” And its success in criminal investigations can be credited, in no small part, to the intimidation factor. People who believe that they are in the presence of an infallible machine sometimes confess, and this is counted as an achievement of the polygraph. (According to law-enforcement lore, the police have used copy machines in much the same way: They tell a suspect to place his hand on a “truth machine” -- a copier in which the paper has “LIE ” printed on it. When the photocopy emerges, it shows the suspect’s hand with “LIE ” stamped on it.)

Over the past two decades, inventors have attempted to supplant the polygraph with new technologies: voice-stress analysis; thermal imaging of the face; and, most recently and spectacularly, brain imaging. Though these methods remain in an embryonic stage of development, they have already been greeted with considerable enthusiasm, especially in America. Private companies are eager to replace traditional modes of ascertaining the truth -- such as the jury system -- with a machine that can be patented and sold. And law-enforcement agencies yearn to overcome the problem of suspects who often remain maddeningly opaque, even in the face of sustained interrogation. Although one immediate result of the September 11th attacks was the revival of an older, and even more controversial, form of interrogation -- torture -- the war on terror has also inflamed the desire for a mind-reading machine.

Not long ago, I met with an entrepreneur named Joel Huizenga, who has started a company, based in San Diego, called No Lie MRI. Most methods of lie detection look at the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. The polygraph, for instance, is essentially an instrument for measuring stress. Heart and respiration rates, blood volume, and galvanic skin response -- a proxy for palm sweat -- are represented as tracings on graph paper or on a screen, which fluctuate with every heartbeat or breath. The method that Huizenga is marketing, which employs a form of body scanning known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, promises to look inside the brain. “Once you jump behind the skull, there’s no hiding,” Huizenga told me.

Functional MRI technology, invented in the early nineties, has been used primarily as a diagnostic tool for identifying neurological disorders and for mapping the brain. Unlike MRIs, which capture a static image, an fMRI makes a series of scans that show changes in the flow of oxygenated blood preceding neural events. The brain needs oxygen to perform mental tasks, so a rise in the level of oxygenated blood in one part of the brain can indicate cognitive activity there. (Blood has different magnetic properties when it is oxygenated, which is why it is helpful to have a machine that is essentially a big magnet.) Brain-scan lie detection is predicated on the idea that lying requires more cognitive effort, and therefore more oxygenated blood, than truthtelling.

Brain scanning promises to show us directly what the polygraph showed us obliquely. Huizenga expects his company to be a force for justice, exonerating customers who are, as he put it, “good people trying to push back the cruel world that is indicting them unfairly.” Brain scans already have clout in the courtroom; during death-penalty hearings, judges often allow images suggesting neurological impairment to be introduced as mitigating evidence. In theory, an improved method of lie detection could have as profound an impact as DNA evidence, which has freed more than a hundred wrongly accused people since its introduction, in the late eighties. If Huizenga has perfected such a technology, he’s onto something big.

At Huizenga’s suggestion, we met at a restaurant called the Rusty Pelican, on the Pacific Coast Highway, in Newport Beach. A television screen on one wall showed a surfing contest; Huizenga, who is fifty-three, with dirty-blond hair in a boyish cut, is a surfer himself. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, a master’s degree in biology from Stony Brook, and an M.B.A. from the University of Rochester. No Lie is Huizenga’s second startup. The first, ISCHEM Corporation, uses body scanning to look for plaque in people’s arteries. Before that, he worked for Pantox, a company that offers blood tests to gauge a person’s antioxidant levels.

After we sat down, Huizenga recounted the origins of No Lie. A few years ago, he came across an item in the Times about some tantalizing research conducted by Daniel Langleben, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Subjects were placed inside an fMRI machine and told to make some true statements and some false ones. Brain scans taken while the subjects were lying frequently showed a significantly increased level of activity in three discrete areas of the cerebral cortex. Langleben suggested that “intentional deception” could be “anatomically localized” by fMRI scanning. Huizenga immediately saw a business opportunity. “I jumped on it,” he told me. “If I wasn’t here sitting in front of you, somebody else would be.”

The Web site for No Lie claims that its technology, which is based on the Penn protocol, “represents the first and only direct measure of truth verification and lie detection in human history!” No Lie just started offering tests commercially, and has charged about a dozen clients approximately ten thousand dollars apiece for an examination. (No Lie sends customers to an independent imaging center in Tarzana, a suburb of Los Angeles, to insure that “quality testing occurs according to standardized test protocols.”) Some of these initial clients are involved in civil and criminal cases; the first person to use the service, Harvey Nathan, was accused in 2003 of deliberately setting fire to a deli that he owns in South Carolina. A judge dismissed the charges, but Nathan wanted to bring suit against his insurance company, and he thought that documented evidence of his innocence would further his cause. So in December he flew to California and took No Lie’s test. He passed. Nathan said, “If I hadn’t, I would have jumped from the seventeenth floor of the hotel where I was staying. How could I have gone back to South Carolina and said, ‘Oh that machine must not have worked right’? I believed in it then and I believe in it now.” Nathan’s exam was filmed for the Discovery Channel, which may soon launch a reality series centering on brain-scanning lie detection.

Several companies have expressed interest in No Lie’s services, Huizenga told me. (He would not name them.) He said that he will be able to accommodate corporate clients once he has signed deals with other scanning facilities; he is in talks with imaging centers in a dozen cities, including New York and Chicago. No Lie also plans to open a branch in Switzerland later this year.

Huizenga has been criticized for his company’s name, but he said, “It’s not about being dignified -- it’s about being remembered.” He believes that the market for fMRI-based lie detection will one day exceed that of the polygraph industry, which brings in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Investment analysts say that it is too soon to judge if Huizenga’s optimism is warranted, but No Lie has attracted some prominent backing. One of its prime investors is Alex Hart, the former C.E.O. of MasterCard International, who is also serving as a management consultant. And it has a “scientific board” consisting of four paid advisers, among them Terrence Sejnowski, the director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for theoretical and computational biology at the Salk Institute. In an e-mail, Sejnowski explained that he offers counsel on “advanced signal processing and machine-learning techniques that can help improve the analysis of the data and the accuracy of the performance.” He said of No Lie, “The demand is there, and to succeed as a company the new technology only needs to be better than existing approaches.”

Huizenga speaks of his company’s goals in blunt terms. “What do people lie about?” he asked me. “Sex, power, and money -- probably in that order.” (The company’s Web site recommends No Lie’s services for “risk reduction in dating,” “trust issues in interpersonal relationships,” and “issues concerning the underlying topics of sex, power, and money.”) “Parents say, ‘Yes, this is perfect for adolescents,’ ” he went on. “People who are dating say, ‘Yes, this is great for dating, because people never tell you the truth.’ ”

He said that his company receives dozens of inquiries a week: from divorcing men accused of child abuse; from women wanting to prove their fidelity to jealous spouses or boyfriends; from people representing governments in Africa and the former Soviet republics; from “the Chinese police department.” He said that he understood why governments were interested in lie-detection technology. “Look at Joe Stalin,” he said. “Joe wanted power, he wanted to be on top. Well, it’s hard to murder massive numbers of opponents. People in our government, and in others’, need more effective ways of weeding out those who aren’t their puppets.” Some potential foreign clients had explained to him, he said, that in societies that lacked “civilization, there is not trust, and lie detection could help build that trust.” (He wasn’t sure about that -- he was “mulling it over.”) Huizenga said that the United States government was “interested” in the kind of technology offered by No Lie; the company has hired Joel S. Lisker, a former F.B.I. agent, to be its “sales liaison for the federal government.” (Lisker declined to be interviewed, saying that his government contacts were “confidential.”)

The Pentagon has supported research into high-tech lie detection, including the use of fMRI. The major scientific papers in the field were funded, in part, by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technologies for military use, and by the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute, which trains lie-detection experts at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. (The Polygraph Institute underwent a name change in January -- it’s now the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment -- apparently in deference to new technologies such as fMRI.) Last June, the A.C.L.U. filed several Freedom of Information Act requests in an attempt to learn more about the government’s involvement with the technology. Chris Calabrese, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, said that the C.I.A. would neither “confirm nor deny” that it is investigating fMRI applications; the Pentagon produced PowerPoint presentations identifying brain scans as a promising new technology for lie detection. Calabrese went on, “We were motivated by the fact that there are companies trying to sell this technology to the government. This Administration has a history of using questionable techniques of truth verification.”

Many scholars also think that Huizenga’s effort is premature. Steven Hyman, the Harvard professor, told me that No Lie was “foolish.” But the history of lie-detection machines suggests that it would be equally foolish to assume that a few scholarly critics can forestall the adoption of such a seductive new technology. “People are drawn to it,” Huizenga said, smiling. “It’s a magnetic concept.”

In comic books of the nineteen-forties, Wonder Woman, the sexy Amazon superhero, wields a golden “lasso of truth.” Anybody she captures is rendered temporarily incapable of lying. Like the golden lasso, the polygraph, its inventors believed, compelled the body to reveal the mind’s secrets. But the connection between the lasso and the lie detector is even more direct than that: Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was also a key figure in the development of the polygraph. Marston, like other pioneers of lie detection, believed that the conscious mind could be circumvented, and the truth uncovered, through the measurement of bodily signals.

This was not a new idea. In 1730, Daniel Defoe published An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street Robberies and Suppressing All Other Disorders of the Night, in which he proposed an alternative to physical coercion: “Guilt carries fear always about with it, there is a tremor in the blood of a thief, that, if attended to, would effectually discover him; and if charged as a suspicious fellow, on that suspicion only I would feel his pulse.”

In the late nineteenth century, the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso invented his own version of a lie detector, based on the physiology of emotion. A suspect was told to plunge his hand into a tank filled with water, and the subject’s pulse would cause the level of liquid to rise and fall slightly; the greater the fluctuation, the more dishonest the subject was judged to be.

Lombroso’s student Angelo Mosso, a physiologist, noticed that shifts in emotion were often detectable in fair-skinned people in the flushing or blanching of their faces. Based on this observation, he designed a bed that rested on a fulcrum. If a suspect reclining on it told a lie, Mosso hypothesized, resulting changes in blood flow would alter the distribution of weight on the bed, unbalancing it. The device, known as Mosso’s cradle, apparently never made it past the prototype.

William Moulton Marston was born in 1893, in Boston. He attended Harvard, where he worked in the lab of Hugo Münsterberg, a German émigré psychologist, who had been tinkering with an apparatus that registered responses to emotions, such as horror and tenderness, through graphical tracing of pulse rates. One student volunteer was Gertrude Stein. (She later wrote of the experience in the third person: “Strange fancies begin to crowd upon her, she feels that the silent pen is writing on and on forever.”)

In 1917, Marston published a paper arguing that systolic blood pressure could be monitored to detect deception. As Ken Alder, a history professor at Northwestern, notes in his recent book, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession, Münsterberg and Marston’s line of inquiry caught the imagination of police detectives, reporters, and law-enforcement reformers across the country, who saw a lie-detecting machine as an alternative not only to the brutal interrogation known as the third degree but also to the jury system. In 1911, an article in the Times predicted a future in which “there will be no jury, no horde of detectives and witnesses, no charges and countercharges, and no attorney for the defense. These impediments of our courts will be unnecessary. The State will merely submit all suspects in a case to the tests of scientific instruments.”

John Larson, a police officer in Berkeley, California, who also had a doctorate in physiology, expanded on Marston’s work. He built an unwieldy device, the “cardio-pneumo-psychograph,” which used a standard cuff to measure blood pressure, and a rubber hose wrapped around the subject’s chest to measure his breathing. Subjects were told to answer yes-or-no questions; their physiological responses were recorded by styluses that scratched black recording paper on revolving drums.

In 1921, as Alder writes, Larson had his first big chance to test his device. He was seeking to identify a thief at a residence hall for female students at Berkeley. Larson gave several suspects a six-minute exam, in which he asked various questions: “How much is thirty times forty?” “Will you graduate this year?” “Do you dance?” “Did you steal the money?” The result foretold the way in which a polygraph would often “work”: as a goad to confession. A student nurse confessed to the crime -- a few days after she’d stormed out during the exam.

In the early twenties, another member of the Berkeley police force, Leonarde Keeler, increased the number of physical signs that the lie detector monitored. His portable machine recorded pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration, and “electrodermal response” -- again, palm sweat. Today’s lie detector looks much like Keeler’s eighty-year-old invention. And it bears the same name: the polygraph.

Polygraphs never caught on in Europe. But here their advent coincided with the Prohibition-era crime wave; with a new fascination with the unconscious (this was also the era of experimentation with so-called truth serums); and with the wave of technological innovation that had brought Americans electricity, radios, telephones, and cars. The lie detector quickly insinuated itself into American law enforcement: at the end of the thirties, a survey of thirteen city police departments showed that they had given polygraphs to nearly nine thousand suspects.

In 1923, Marston tried without success to get a polygraph test introduced as evidence in the Washington, D.C., murder trial of James Alphonso Frye. In its ruling, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declared that a new scientific method had to have won “general acceptance” from experts before judges could give it credence. Since this decision, the polygraph has been kept out of most courtrooms, but there is an important exception: about half the states allow a defendant to take the test, generally on the understanding that the charges will be dropped if he passes and the results may be entered as evidence if he fails.

The polygraph became widely used in government and in business, often with dubious results. In the fifties, the State Department deployed the lie detector to help purge suspected homosexuals. As late as the seventies, a quarter of American corporations used the polygraph on their employees. Although Congress banned most such tests when it passed the Polygraph Protection Act, in 1988, the federal government still uses the polygraph for security screenings -- despite high-profile mistakes. The polygraph failed to cast suspicion on Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. agent who spied for the Soviets, and wrongly implicated Wen Ho Lee, the Department of Energy scientist, as an agent of the Chinese government.

One excellent way to gauge the polygraph’s effectiveness would be to compare it with an equally intimidating fake machine, just as a drug is compared with a placebo. But, strangely, no such experiment has ever been performed. In 1917, the year that Marston published his first paper on lie detection, his research encountered strong skepticism. John F. Shepard, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, wrote a review of Marston’s research. Though the physical changes that the machine measured were “an index of activity,” Shepard wrote, the same results “would be caused by so many different circumstances, anything demanding equal activity (intelligence or emotional).” The same criticism holds true today. All the physiological responses measured by the polygraph have causes other than lying, vary greatly among individuals, and can be affected by conscious effort. Breathing is particularly easy to regulate. Advice on how to beat the lie detector is a cottage industry. Deception Detection: Winning the Polygraph Game (1991) warns potential subjects, “Don’t complain about a dry mouth. An examiner will interpret this as fear of being found out and will press you even harder.” (Many people do get dry-mouthed when they’re nervous -- which is apparently why, during the Inquisition, a suspect was sometimes made to swallow a piece of bread and cheese: if it stuck in his throat, he was deemed guilty.) Other well-known “countermeasures” include taking a mild sedative; using mental imagery to calm yourself; and biting your tongue to make yourself seem anxious in response to random questions.

Why, then, is the polygraph still used? Perhaps the most vexing thing about the device is that, for all its flaws, it’s not pure hokum: a racing pulse and an increased heart rate can indicate guilt. Every liar has felt an involuntary flutter, at least once. Yet there are enough exceptions to insure that the polygraph will identify some innocent people as guilty and some guilty people as innocent.

At the Cambridge conference, Jed S. Rakoff, a United States district judge in New York, told a story about a polygraph and a false confession. Days after September 11th, an Egyptian graduate student named Abdallah Higazy came to the attention of the F.B.I. Higazy had been staying at the Millennium Hotel near Ground Zero on the day of the attacks. A hotel security guard claimed that he had found a pilot’s radio in Higazy’s room. Higazy said that it wasn’t his, and when he appeared before Rakoff he asked to be given a polygraph. As Rakoff recalled, “Higazy very much believed in them and thought it would exonerate him.” During a four-hour interrogation by an F.B.I. polygrapher, Higazy first repeated that he knew nothing about the radio, and then said that maybe it was his. He was charged with lying to the F.B.I. and went to prison. Within a month, a pilot stopped by the hotel to ask about a radio that he had accidentally left there. The security guard who found the radio admitted that it hadn’t been in Higazy’s room; he was prosecuted and pled guilty. Higazy was exonerated, and a subsequent investigation revealed that he had felt dizzy and ill during the examination, probably out of nervousness. But when Higazy asked the polygrapher if anyone had ever become ill during a polygraph test he was told that “it had not happened to anyone who told the truth.”

To date, there have been only a dozen or so peer-reviewed studies that attempt to catch lies with fMRI technology, and most of them involved fewer than twenty people. Nevertheless, the idea has inspired a torrent of media attention, because scientific studies involving brain scans dazzle people, and because mind reading by machine is a beloved science-fiction trope, revived most recently in movies like Minority Report and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Many journalistic accounts of the new technology -- accompanied by colorful bitmapped images of the brain in action -- resemble science fiction themselves. In January, The Financial Times proclaimed, “For the first time in history, it is becoming possible to read someone else’s mind with the power of science.” A CNBC report, accompanied by the Eurythmics song Would I Lie to You?, showed its reporter entering an fMRI machine, described as a “sure-fire way to identify a liar.” In March, a cover story in the Times Magazine predicted transformations of the legal system in response to brain imaging; its author, Jeffrey Rosen, suggested that there was a widespread “fear” among legal scholars that “the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom.” Philadelphia has declared “the end of the lie,” and a Wired article, titled “Don’t Even Think About Lying,” proclaimed that fMRI is “poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy.” Such talk has made brain-scan lie detection sound as solid as DNA evidence -- which it most definitely is not.

Paul Bloom, a cognitive psychologist at Yale, believes that brain imaging has a beguiling appeal beyond its actual power to explain mental and emotional states. “Psychologists can be heard grousing that the only way to publish in Science or Nature is with pretty color pictures of the brain,” he wrote in an essay for the magazine Seed. “Critical funding decisions, precious column inches, tenure posts, science credibility, and the popular imagination have all been influenced by fMRI’s seductive but deceptive grasp on our attentions.” Indeed, in the past decade, Nature alone has published nearly a hundred articles involving fMRI scans. The technology is a remarkable tool for exploring the brain, and may one day help scientists understand much more about cognition and emotion. But enthusiasm for brain scans leads people to overestimate the accuracy with which they can pinpoint the sources of complex things like love or altruism, let alone explain them.

Brain scans enthrall us, in part, because they seem more like “real” science than those elaborate deductive experiments that so many psychologists perform. In the same way that an X-ray confirms a bone fissure, a brain scan seems to offer an objective measure of mental activity. And, as Bloom writes, fMRI research “has all the trappings of work with great lab-cred: big, expensive, and potentially dangerous machines, hospitals and medical centers, and a lot of people in white coats.”

Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a graduate student at Yale, has conducted a clever study, to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, which points to the outsized glamour of brain-scan research. She and her colleagues provided three groups -- neuroscientists, neuroscience students, and ordinary adults -- with explanations for common psychological phenomena (such as the tendency to assume that other people know the same things we do). Some of these explanations were crafted to be bad. Weisberg found that all three groups were adept at identifying the bad explanations, except when she inserted the words “Brain scans indicate.” Then the students and the regular adults became notably less discerning. Weisberg and her colleagues conclude, “People seem all too ready to accept explanations that allude to neuroscience.”

Some bioethicists have been particularly credulous, assuming that MRI mind reading is virtually a done deal, and arguing that there is a need for a whole new field: “neuroethics.” Judy Illes and Eric Racine, bioethicists at Stanford, write that fMRI, by laying bare the brain’s secrets, may “fundamentally alter the dynamics between personal identity, responsibility, and free will.” A recent article in The American Journal of Bioethics asserts that brain-scan lie detection may “force a reëxamination of the very idea of privacy, which up until now could not reliably penetrate the individual’s cranium.”

Legal scholars, for their part, have started debating the constitutionality of using brain-imaging evidence in court. At a recent meeting of a National Academy of Sciences committee on lie detection, in Washington, D.C., Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said, “When we make speculative leaps like these ... it increases, sometimes in detrimental ways, the belief that the technology works.” In the rush of companies like No Lie to market brain scanning, and in the rush of scholars to judge the propriety of using the technology, relatively few people have asked whether fMRIs can actually do what they either hope or fear they can do.

Functional MRI is not the first digital-age breakthrough that was supposed to supersede the polygraph. First, there was “brain fingerprinting,” which is based on the idea that the brain releases a recognizable electric signal when processing a memory. The technique used EEG sensors to try to determine whether a suspect retained memories related to a crime -- an image of, say, a murder weapon. In 2001, Time named Lawrence Farwell, the developer of brain fingerprinting, one of a hundred innovators who “may be the Picassos or the Einsteins of the 21st century.” But researchers have since noted a big drawback: it’s impossible to distinguish between brain signals produced by actual memories and those produced by imagined memories -- as in a made-up alibi.

After September 11th, another technology was widely touted: thermal imaging, an approach based on the finding that the area around the eyes can heat up when people lie. The developers of this method -- Ioannis Pavlidis, James Levine, and Norman Eberhardt -- published journal articles that had titles like “Seeing Through the Face of Deception” and were accompanied by dramatic thermal images. But the increased blood flow that raises the temperature around the eyes is just another mark of stress. Any law-enforcement agency that used the technique to spot potential terrorists would also pick up a lot of jangly, harmless travellers.

Daniel Langleben, the Penn psychiatrist whose research underpins No Lie, began exploring this potential new use for MRIs in the late nineties. Langleben, who is forty-five, has spent most of his career studying the brains of heroin addicts and hyperactive boys. He developed a side interest in lying partly because his research agenda made him think about impulse control, and partly because his patients often lied to him. Five years ago, Langleben and a group of Penn colleagues published the study on brain scanning and lie detection that attracted Huizenga’s attention. In the experiment, which was written up in Neuroimage, each of twenty-three subjects was offered an envelope containing a twenty-dollar bill and a playing card -- the five of clubs. They were told that they could keep the money if they could conceal the card’s identity when they were asked about it inside an MRI machine. The subjects pushed a button to indicate yes or no as images of playing cards flashed on a screen in front of them. After Langleben assembled the data, he concluded that lying seemed to involve more cognitive effort than truthtelling, and that three areas of the brain generally became more active during acts of deception: the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with heightened attention and error monitoring; the dorsal lateral prefontal cortex, which is involved in behavioral control; and the parietal cortex, which helps process sensory input. Three years later, Langleben and his colleagues published another study, again involving concealed playing cards, which suggested that lying could be differentiated from truthtelling in individuals as well as in groups. The fMRI’s accuracy rate for distinguishing truth from lies was seventy-seven per cent.

Andrew Kozel and Mark George, then at the Medical University of South Carolina, were doing similar work at the time; in 2005, they published a study of fMRI lie detection in which thirty people were instructed to enter a room and take either a watch or a ring that had been placed there. Then, inside a scanner, they were asked to lie about which object they had taken but to answer truthfully to neutral questions, such as “Do you like chocolate?” The researchers distinguished truthful from deceptive responses in ninety per cent of the cases. (Curiously, Kozel’s team found that liars had heightened activity in different areas of the brain than Langleben did.)

Langleben and Kozel weren’t capturing a single, crisp image of the brain processing a lie; an fMRI’s record of a split-second event is considered unreliable. Instead, they asked a subject to repeat his answer dozens of times while the researchers took brain scans every couple of seconds. A computer then counted the number of “voxels” (the 3-D version of pixels) in the brain image that reflected a relatively high level of oxygenated blood, and used algorithms to determine whether this elevated activity mapped onto specific regions of the brain.

One problem of fMRI lie detection is that the machines, which cost about three million dollars each, are notoriously finicky. Technicians say that the scanners often have “bad days,” in which they can produce garbage data. And a subject who squirms too much in the scanner can invalidate the results. (Even moving your tongue in your mouth can cause a problem.) The results for four of the twenty-three subjects in Langleben’s first study had to be thrown out because the subjects had fidgeted.

The Langleben studies also had a major flaw in their design: the concealed playing card came up only occasionally on the screen, so the increased brain activity that the scans showed could have been a result not of deception but of heightened attention to the salient card. Imagine that you’re the research subject: You’re lying on your back, trying to hold still, probably bored, maybe half asleep, looking at hundreds of cards that don’t concern you. Then, at last, up pops the five of clubs -- and your brain sparks with recognition.

Nearly all the volunteers for Langleben’s studies were Penn students or members of the academic community. There were no sociopaths or psychopaths; no one on antidepressants or other psychiatric medication; no one addicted to alcohol or drugs; no one with a criminal record; no one mentally retarded. These allegedly seminal studies look exclusively at unproblematic, intelligent people who were instructed to lie about trivial matters in which they had little stake. An incentive of twenty dollars can hardly be compared with, say, your freedom, reputation, children, or marriage -- any or all of which might be at risk in an actual lie-detection scenario.

The word “lie” is so broad that it’s hard to imagine that any test, even one that probes the brain, could detect all forms of deceit: small, polite lies; big, brazen, self-aggrandizing lies; lies to protect or enchant our children; lies that we don’t really acknowledge to ourselves as lies; complicated alibis that we spend days rehearsing. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine that all these lies will bear the identical neural signature. In their degrees of sophistication and detail, their moral weight, their emotional valence, lies are as varied as the people who tell them. As Montaigne wrote, “The reverse side of the truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits.”

Langleben acknowledges that his research is not quite the breakthrough that the media hype has suggested. “There are many questions that need to be looked into before we know whether this will work as lie detection,” he told me. “Can you do this with somebody who has an I.Q. of ninety-five? Can you do it with somebody who’s fifty or older? Somebody who’s brain-injured? What kinds of real crimes could you ask about? What about countermeasures? What about people with delusions?”

Nevertheless, the University of Pennsylvania licensed the pending patents on his research to No Lie in 2003, in exchange for an equity position in the company. Langleben didn’t protest. As he explained to me, “It’s good for your résumé. We’re encouraged to have, as part of our portfolio, industry collaborations.” He went on, “I was trying to be a good boy. I had an idea. I went to the Center of Technology Transfer and asked them, ‘Do you like this?’ They said, ‘Yeah, we like that.’ ”

Steven Laken is the C.E.O. of Cephos, a Boston-based company that is developing a lie-detection product based on Kozel’s watch-and-ring study. (It has an exclusive licensing agreement for pending patents that the Medical University of South Carolina applied for in 2002.) Cephos is proceeding more cautiously than No Lie. Laken’s company is still conducting studies with Kozel, the latest of which involve more than a hundred people. (The sample pool is again young, healthy, and free of criminal records and psychological problems.) Cephos won’t be offering fMRIs commercially until the results of those studies are in; Laken predicts that this will happen within a year. At the National Academy of Sciences committee meeting, he said, “I can say we’re not at ninety-per-cent accuracy. And I have said, if we were not going to get to ninety per cent, we’re not going to sell this product.” (Nobody involved in fMRI lie detection seems troubled by a ten-per-cent error rate.)

In March, I went to a suburb of Boston to meet Laken. He is thirty-five years old and has a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular medicine from Johns Hopkins. Nine years ago, he identified a genetic mutation that can lead to colorectal cancer. He has a more conservative temperament than Joel Huizenga does, and he told me he thinks that spousal-fidelity cases are “sleazy.” But he sees a huge potential market for what he calls a “truth verifier” -- a service for people looking to exonerate themselves. “There are some thirty-five million criminal and civil cases filed in the U.S. every year,” Laken said. “About twenty million are criminal cases. So let’s just say that you never even do a criminal case -- well, that still leaves roughly fifteen million for us to go after. Some you exclude, but you end up with several million cases that are high stakes: two people arguing about things that are important.” Laken also thinks that fMRI lie detection could help the government elicit information, and confessions, from terrorist suspects, without physical coercion.

He calmly dismissed the suggestion that the application of fMRI lie detection is premature. “I’ve heard it said, ‘This technology can’t work because it hasn’t been tested on psychopaths, and it hasn’t been tested on children, and it certainly hasn’t been tested on psychopathic children,’ ” he said. “If that were the standard, there’d never be any medicine.”

Laken and I spoke while driving to Framingham, Massachusetts, to visit an MRI testing center run by Shields, a company that operates twenty-two such facilities in the state. Laken was working on a deal with Shields to use their scanners. For Shields, it would be a smart move, Laken said, because customers would pay up front for the scan -- there would be no insurance companies to contend with. (Cephos and Shields have since made an official arrangement.) Laken believes that Cephos will prosper primarily through referrals: lawyers will function as middlemen, ordering an fMRI for a client, much as a doctor orders an MRI for a patient.

We pulled into the parking lot, where a sign identifies Shields as “the MRI provider for the 3-X World Champion New England Patriots.” Inside, John Cannillo, an imaging specialist at Shields, led us into a room to observe a woman undergoing an MRI exam. She lay on a platform that slid into a white tubular scanner, which hummed like a giant tuning fork.

During a brain scan, the patient wears a copper head coil, in order to enhance the magnetic field around the skull. The magnet is so powerful that you have to remove any metal objects, or you will feel a tugging sensation. If a person has metal in his body -- for instance, shrapnel, or the gold grillwork that some hip-hop fans have bonded to their teeth -- it can pose a danger or invalidate the results. At the N.A.S. meeting in Washington, one scientist wryly commented, “It could become a whole new industry -- criminals having implants put in to avoid scanning.”

A Shields technician instructed the woman in the scanner from the other side of a glass divide. “Take a breath in, and hold it, hold it,” he said. Such exercises help minimize a patient’s movements.

As we watched, Laken admitted that “the kinks” haven’t been worked out of fMRI lie detection. “We make mistakes,” he said of his company. “We don’t know why we make mistakes. We may never know why. We hope we can get better.” Some bioethicists and journalists may worry about the far-off threat to “cognitive freedom,” but the real threat is simpler and more immediate: the commercial introduction of high-tech “truth verifiers” that may work no better than polygraphs but seem more impressive and scientific. Polygraphs, after all, are not administered by licensed medical professionals.

Nancy Kanwisher, a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., relies a great deal on MRI technology. In 1997, she identified an area near the bottom of the brain that is specifically involved in perceiving faces. She has become a pointed critic of the rush to commercialize brain imaging for lie detection, and believes that it’s an exaggeration even to say that research into the subject is “preliminary.” The tests that have been done, she argues, don’t really look at lying. “Making a false response when instructed to do so is not a lie,” she says. The ninety-per-cent “accuracy” ascribed to fMRI lie detection refers to a scenario so artificial that it is nearly meaningless. To know whether the technology works, she believes, “you’d have to test it on people whose guilt or innocence hasn’t yet been determined, who believe the scan will reveal their guilt or innocence, and whose guilt or innocence can be established by other means afterward.” In other words, you’d have to run a legal version of a clinical trial, using real suspects instead of volunteers.

Langleben believes that Kanwisher is too pessimistic. He suggested that researchers could recruit people who had been convicted of a crime in the past and get them to lie retrospectively about it. Or maybe test subjects could steal a “bagel or something” from a convenience store (the researchers could work out an agreement with the store in advance) and then lie about it. But even these studies don’t approximate the real-world scenarios Kanwisher is talking about.

She points out that the various brain regions that appear to be significantly active during lying are “famous for being activated in a wide range of different conditions -- for almost any cognitive task that is more difficult than an easier task.” She therefore believes that fMRI lie detection would be vulnerable to countermeasures -- performing arithmetic in your head, reciting poetry -- that involve concerted cognitive effort. Moreover, the regions that allegedly make up the brain’s “lying module” aren’t that small. Even Laken admitted as much. As he put it, “Saying ‘You have activation in the anterior cingulate’ is like saying ‘You have activation in Massachusetts.’ ”

Kanwisher’s complaint suggests that fMRI technology, when used cavalierly, harks back to two pseudosciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: physiognomy and phrenology. Physiognomy held that a person’s character was manifest in his facial features; phrenology held that truth lay in the bumps on one’s skull. In 1807, Hegel published a critique of physiognomy and phrenology in The Phenomenology of Spirit. In that work, as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes, Hegel observes that “the rules that we use in everyday life in interpreting facial expression are highly fallible.” (A friend who frowns throughout your piano recital might explain that he was actually fuming over an argument with his wife.) Much of what Hegel had to say about physiognomy applies to modern attempts at mind reading. Hegel quotes the scientist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who, in characterizing physiognomy, remarked, “If anyone said, ‘You act, certainly, like an honest man, but I can see from your face you are forcing yourself to do so, and are a rogue at heart,’ without a doubt every brave fellow to the end of time when accosted in that fashion will retort with a box on the ear.” This response is correct, Hegel argues, because it “refutes the fundamental assumption of such a ‘science’ of conjecture -- that the reality of a man is his face, etc. The true being of man is, on the contrary, his act; individuality is real in the deed.” In a similar vein, one might question the core presumption of fMRI -- that the reality of man is his brain.

Elizabeth Phelps, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist at N.Y.U., who studies emotion and the brain, questions another basic assumption behind all lie-detection schemes -- that telling a falsehood creates conflict within the liar. With the polygraph, the assumption is that the conflict is emotional: the liar feels guilty or anxious, and these feelings produce a measurable physiological response. With brain imaging, the assumption is that the conflict is cognitive: the liar has to work a little harder to make up a story, or even to stop himself from telling the truth. Neither is necessarily right. “Sociopaths don’t feel the same conflict when they lie,” Phelps says. “The regions of the brain that might be involved if you have to inhibit a response may not be the same when you’re a sociopath, or autistic, or maybe just strange. Whether it’s an emotional or a cognitive conflict you’re supposed to be exhibiting, there’s no reason to assume that your response wouldn’t vary depending on what your personal tendencies are -- on who you are.”

When I talked to Huizenga, the No Lie C.E.O., a few months after I had met him in California, he was unperturbed about the skepticism that he was encountering from psychologists. “In science, when you go out a little further than other people, it can be hard,” he said. “The top people understand, but the middle layer don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Huizenga told me that he was trying to get fMRI evidence admitted into a California court for a capital case that he was working on. (He would not go into the case’s details.) Given courts’ skepticism toward the polygraph, Huizenga’s success is far from certain. Then again we are in a technology-besotted age that rivals the twenties, when Marston popularized lie detection. And we live in a time when there is an understandable hunger for effective ways to expose evildoers, and when concerns about privacy have been nudged aside by our desire for security and certainty. “Brain scans indicate”: what a powerful phrase. One can easily imagine judges being impressed by these pixellated images, which appear so often in scientific journals and in the newspaper. Indeed, if fMRI lie detection is successfully marketed as a service that lawyers steer their clients to, then a refusal even to take such a test could one day be cause for suspicion.

Steven Hyman, the Harvard psychiatrist, is surprised that companies like No Lie have eluded government oversight. “Think of a medical test,” he said. “Before it would be approved for wide use, it would have to be shown to have acceptable accuracy among the populations in whom it would be deployed. The published data on the use of fMRI for lie detection uses highly artificial tests, which are not even convincing models of lying, in very structured laboratory settings. There are no convincing data that they could be used accurately to screen a person in the real world.” But, in the end, that might not matter. “Pseudo-colored pictures of a person’s brain lighting up are undoubtedly more persuasive than a pattern of squiggles produced by a polygraph,” he said. “That could be a big problem if the goal is to get to the truth.”

Laken, meanwhile, thinks that people who find themselves in a jam, and who are desperate to exonerate themselves, simply have to educate themselves as consumers. “People have said that fMRI tests are unethical and immoral,” he said. “And the question is, Why is it unethical and immoral if somebody wants to spend their money on a test, as long as they understand what it is they’re getting into? We’ve never said the test was perfect. We’ve never said we can guarantee that this is admissible in court and that’s it -- you’re scot-free.” Later that day, I looked again at the Cephos Web site. It contained a bolder proclamation. “The objective measure of truth and deception that Cephos offers,” it said, “will help protect the innocent and convict the guilty.”

Little Hotties

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:11:00 -0500

Barbie is forty-seven years old, and forty-seven years is a long time to have been the alpha doll. Over the decades, many competitors have been sent out into the world to get what Mattel’s doll had: hugely profitable sovereignty over the imaginations of little girls. Some of these rivals briefly grabbed a small share of the fashion-doll market. The Tammy doll, which had a wholesome teen-aged look and came encumbered with parents, stuck around from 1962 to 1966, before Barbie squashed her flat. In 1969, Ideal Toy created Crissy, whose hair grew with the push of a button; you can still find Crissy on eBay, but not in Toys R Us.

Kenner’s spookily big-headed Blythe, whose eye color could be changed from green to blue to pink to orange, lasted for one year: 1972. (She has since been rediscovered by hipster collectors; a photographer named Gina Garan poses her in myriad scenarios, as if she were a plastic Cindy Sherman.) In the mid-eighties, Hasbro launched Jem-corporate by day, rock and roll by night. Mattel moved swiftly to undercut her with its own Rock Star Barbie. And then there were the earnest attempts to make more "realistic" fashion dolls, an enterprise doomed to oxymoronic failure. The Happy to Be Me doll, which came out in the early nineties, when childhood anorexia was a bigger media trope than childhood obesity, had a thicker waist, wider hips, and larger feet than Barbie, and left little girls cold. As M. G. Lord, the author of Forever Barbie (1994), wrote, "She may have been happy to be herself, but it was obvious, even to kids, that she had extremely low standards." And the Get Real Girls-muscular, sporty dolls who were supposed to be snowboarders, soccer players, and the like-might have appealed to athletic girls, except that athletic girls preferred to play sports. "They can kick Barbie’s butt like you wouldn’t believe," a promotional Web site promised in 2000. On store shelves, though, Barbie kicked theirs.

In June, 2001, M.G.A. Entertainment, a small toy company in Southern California, unveiled a line of dolls called Bratz. It was not an auspicious début. M.G.A. had enjoyed some success with handheld electronic toys imported from Japan -- M.G.A. stands for Micro Games of America -- and with a baby doll called Singing Bouncy Baby, but never with a fashion doll. The company was privately owned, and its headquarters were in a drab stretch of the San Fernando Valley, amid a jumble of taquerias and doughnut shops near the Van Nuys airport. Its C.E.O., Isaac Larian, an Iranian immigrant with a degree in civil engineering whose first company imported brass tchotchkes from South Korea, still made sales calls himself. When a doll designer and on-and-off-again Mattel employee named Carter Bryant brought Larian a drawing of a new doll he had in mind, Larian at first saw little to admire. "To be honest, to me it looked weird -- it looked ugly," Larian told me. But Larian’s attitude toward the tastes of children is respectful to the point of reverence, and his daughter Jasmin, then eleven years old, happened to be hanging out in his office that day. Larian asked her what she thought of the drawing. "And, you know, I saw this sparkle that you see in kids’ eyes," he recalled. "They talk with their body language more than their voice. And she says, ‘Yeah, it’s cute.’ " For Larian, that was enough: "I said, ‘O.K., we’ll do it.’ "

At first, M.G.A. struggled to give Bryant’s drawings three-dimensional form. The design showed a face in which the lips and eyes were cartoonishly prominent and the nose was vanishingly small: it was as if the doll had undergone successive rounds of plastic surgery. Molding that micronose in vinyl wasn’t easy. At the Hong Kong toy fair in January, 2001, Larian and his team had only a rough sample to show venders; the hair was Scotch-taped on. And in October of that year Toys R Us canceled its order for Bratz because initial sales were not what Larian had predicted. He borrowed money to fund more advertising; by Christmas, Bratz dolls had taken off.

In the five years since then, M.G.A. has sold a hundred and twenty-five million Bratz worldwide, and it has become the top fashion doll in the United Kingdom and Australia. Global sales of Bratz products reached two billion dollars in 2005; sales of Barbie remained higher, at three billion dollars, but they declined by 12.8 per cent. Last December, after five years in which domestic Barbie sales had either declined or stagnated for all but three quarters, Mattel replaced Matthew Bousquette, who had headed the Barbie line, with Neil Friedman and Chuck Scothon, who together had been running its successful Fisher-Price division. (Friedman, a president at Mattel, is known to be gifted at turning around flagging toy lines.) According to Sean McGowan, a toy-industry analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, Bratz has now captured about forty per cent of the fashion-doll market, compared with Barbie’s sixty per cent. Barbie is still an instantly recognizable brand name, like Kleenex or Coke, but even Scothon says, "The competition has changed. There’s no denying that."

Bratz dolls have large heads and skinny bodies; their almond-shaped eyes are tilted upward at the edges and adorned with thick crescents of eyeshadow, and their lips are lush and pillowy, glossed to a candy-apple sheen and rimmed with dark lip liner. They look like pole dancers on their way to work at a gentlemen’s club. Unlike Barbie, they can stand unassisted. I’ve heard mothers say that they would never buy their daughters a doll that couldn’t stand on its own, but perhaps they should have been more careful what they wished for. To change a Bratz doll’s shoes, you have to snap off its feet at the ankles. (It’s creepy but ingenious; because the footwear is attached to the legs, all those little shoes are harder to lose.) Their outsized feet are oddly insinuating: you can picture the Bratz dolls tottering around on their stalklike legs, like fauns waking up from a tranquillizer dart. Bratz dolls don’t have Barbie’s pinup-girl measurements -- they’re not as busty and they’re shorter. But their outfits include halter tops, faux-fur armlets, and ankle-laced stiletto sandals, and they wear the sly, dozy expression of a party girl after one too many mojitos. They are the "girls with a passion for fashion," as the slogan has it, so their adventures -- as presented in all those "sold separately" books and other paraphernalia -- run to all-night mall parties and trips to Vegas. ("Deck out and step out for a party in the streets, as you spend the weekend with the girls in the city that never sleeps.") A Bratz Princess -- one of the newer versions -- wears a tiara and, instead of a ball gown, a tight camouflage T-shirt and a short skirt. You could never imagine a Bratz doll assuming any of the dozens of careers Barbie has pursued over the decades: not Business Executive or Surgeon or Summit Diplomat -- not even Pan Am Flight Attendant or Pet Doctor. Bratz girls seem more like kept girls, or girls trying to convert a stint on reality TV into a future as the new Ashlee or Lindsay or Paris. Whereas Mattel’s Scothon likes to talk about Barbie’s "aspirational" qualities -- how she might inspire "a girl to run for President and look good while she was doing it" -- Larian prefers to talk about "fashion and fantasy" and what’s "cute."

The Bratz girls also tend to look ethnic, or, rather, ethnically indeterminate: blond dolls are in the minority in the Bratz world, as they increasingly are in the world of Bratz consumers. At the Toy Fair, the industry’s giant annual trade show in New York, Larian told me, "When we came out with these dolls, one of the things we did not want to do was just label them. Don’t call them African-American. Don’t call them Hispanic. Don’t call them Middle Eastern. Don’t call them white. Just convey difference." Larian is fifty-two years old, and he has graying, closely cropped curls and shrewd, dark eyes; he was wearing a nicely cut gray suit and an understated tie. Nearby, a group of toy retailers from around the country, most of them middle-aged white men, milled around a magenta-and-purple showroom, solemnly handling Bratz dolls and their diminutive accessories. (No one under eighteen is allowed into the Toy Fair.) Southern California, where Larian immigrated on his own, at the age of seventeen, was an inspiration for Bratz, he said, because it is a place where racial mixing is commonplace. Larian and his team picked names for the Bratz dolls that didn’t align them with any one ethnic group-made-up-sounding names (Nevra, Kiana) or names with offbeat spellings (Meygan, Roxxi) or "exotic" names with crossover appeal (Jade, Yasmin). "I was in Brazil," Larian recalled. "I asked some girls, ‘Where do you think Yasmin is from?’ and they said, ‘Oh, she’s Brazilian, she’s Latin.’ Then I was in Israel, and I asked, ‘Where do you think Yasmin is from?’ and they thought she was Middle Eastern. It’s fascinating to see that, everywhere you go." When Mattel came out with the first black Barbie, in 1968, it seemed like a well-meaning afterthought. Bratz girls were born as a multiracial pack; each one is a slightly different shade. That is enough to earn them the approval of Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer. "If I were betting on culture as a form of stocks, I would get out of skinny Barbie and into multiethnic, imaginative Bratz dolls," she wrote recently.

What Bratz dolls are both contributing to and feeding on is a culture in which girls play at being "sassy" -- the toy industry’s favored euphemism for sexy -- and discard traditional toys at a younger age. (Girls seem to be growing out of toys earlier than boys are, industry analysts say.) Toy marketers now invoke a phenomenon called K.G.O.Y. -- Kids Getting Older Younger -- and talk about it as though it were a fact of modern life over which they have no control, rather than one which they have largely created. Mattel’s Scothon said, "Kids are certainly exposed to more things at earlier ages. Their scope of reference is wider. Their exposure to media is greater." Larian told me, "Little girls are really much more sophisticated now than they used to be."

Barbie was originally intended for nine- to twelve-year-olds; today, girls widely perceive it as a toy for three- to six-year-olds. The association of Barbie with preschool girls sometimes leads slightly older girls to repudiate the doll with sadistic élan. Agnes Nairn and Patricia Gaya Wicks, professors of business at the University of Bath, and Christine Griffin, their colleague in the psychology department, published a study earlier this year revealing that seven-to-eleven-year-old girls enjoyed destroying Barbies. As one subject put it, "I just kept having to squish their heads off." Sometimes, the interviewers seemed taken aback by the girls’ ingenuity in punishing their Barbies:

FIRST GIRL: Our friend does that with Barbies.
SECOND GIRL: Yeah, she microwaves them.
INTERVIEWER: She microwaves them? Oh, gosh.
FIRST GIRL: Did she parachute one out of the house?
SECOND GIRL: Yeah, she parachuted one out of the house and it landed in the next-door neighbour’s garden.

The study concluded that girls turned on Barbie because she seemed out of fashion and disposable (children had so many of them, in so many different guises, that they were "simply being imaginative" in getting rid "of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling"), but most of all because she was "babyish," and the girls "saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown."

You used to hear the opposite theory: when girls rejected Barbie it was because she represented a sexualized womanhood they felt ambivalent about entering. But Larian, for one, thinks that Barbie now represents a "mommy figure" for many girls, and they don’t particularly want to play with a doll who reminds them of their mothers. In any case, there are some toys that kids love until they hate, and some they do not. Sean McGowan, the toy-industry analyst, said, "Nobody gets to a certain age and says, ‘I hate Mickey Mouse.’ But Barbie is now like Barney. Three-year-olds are addicted to it like crack, but all it takes is for one kid to be embarrassed and they turn on it."

For M.G.A., holding on to the six-to-twelve-year-old market -- a group that, until the eighties, wasn’t yet letting go of childish things -- means making dolls that look like celebrity hotties. As Larian wrote in Brand Strategy earlier this year, "Bratz are not merely dolls but ‘fashion icons’ that look to the runways and what kids wear in and out of school for inspiration." With Bratz, the company is selling the notion that divahood is something for girls to aspire to, with or without a talent to go with it. This is the attitude that fuels, for example, the success of Club Libby Lu, the chain of mall stores where six-year-olds can get makeovers for their birthdays, complete with hair extensions and lip gloss; it’s also the attitude behind T-shirts for little girls bearing slogans such as "So Many Boys, So Little Time" and "My Heart Belongs to Shopping." Many parents find this aesthetic weird, even repellent, but somehow hard to dodge.

Indeed, marketers counsel companies not to feel guilty about "going around moms," as the 2004 book The Great Tween Buying Machine puts it, and advertising products that parents dislike. The book’s co-authors, David L. Siegel, Timothy J. Coffey, and Gregory Livingston, who run the marketing agency WonderGroup, write that, thanks to the "nag factor," there are "plenty of examples of successful products that moms really don’t like for themselves, but they buy anyway." They cite unusual color innovations like green Heinz ketchup and blue Hawaiian Punch: "Moms do not like any one of these products, yet each has generated millions of dollars in sales." Calling "Mom-centricity" a "heinous disease," they remind marketers that all they have to do is "appease" parents, not please them. With Bratz, a parent might think, Sure, they’re sexy-looking, but at least a ten-year-old girl playing with them is a ten-year-old still playing with dolls. Fara Warner, the author of Power of the Purse: How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World’s Most Important Consumers-Women, goes further, writing that Bratz represent "a future where young girls don’t need their dolls to show them the career choices they have open to them. They already know they can choose any career and pursue it. It’s a future where the rules about the size and shape of women’s bodies, and how women express their sexuality, are far broader and more open." Whether a seven-year-old actually needs a doll that hints at how broad the rules of sexuality now are is not a question Warner addresses. This line of thinking gets even trickier when it comes to M.G.A.’s Bratz Babyz: baby dolls with makeup, lacy lingerie, and bikinis, and bottles slung on chains around their necks. ("Step back in time with the Bratz and see how it all began, as they xpress themselves with lots of style, and Baby ‘Brattitude!’ ") Parents buy Bratz Babyz for girls as young as two. A ten-year-old might see irony -- or humor -- in the outrageous shoes, collagen-plump lips, and attitude-laden pout of a Bratz doll; irony is generally lost on toddlers.

A few weeks ago, a couple named Christopher and Tiffany Himes were in the doll section of a Toys R Us in Rockville, Maryland, having a half-joking argument about Bratz dolls. Tiffany, who is twenty-seven, is a stay-at-home mother of three daughters: Emma, seven; Madison, six; and Olivia, three. She said, "Unfortunately, the girls are really into them. I say ‘unfortunately’ because Bratz are just really trashy. My husband can’t stand them."

"Oh, yeah," Chris, a thirty-two-year-old comedy writer, said. "I have some strong opinions on Bratz." He strode over to one of the Bratz shelves and peered at a box that contained something called the Wicked Twiins. Ciara was the "spunky" twin (" ‘cuz I’m always causing trouble"); Diona was the "sparkly" twin (" ‘cuz I’m in love with my own reflection"). Both Wicked Twiins were wearing black chokers, tight black T-shirts that said "Bad Girl," low-slung skirts (one chartreuse, one hot pink), and lace-up, high-heeled boots; one had bare legs, the other wore black fishnet stockings. "I mean, these are dolls that look like streetwalkers," Chris said. "Or, you know these underground ‘pumping parties’ you hear about, where people go for plastic surgery on the cheap? Well, they look like pumping-party victims." Tiffany and Chris had considered not letting the girls have Bratz -- the first doll had come into their home as a gift -- but Tiffany felt that banning toys was likely to backfire. Madison, the six-year-old, "was just really into fashion," Tiffany said, which was why she liked Bratz, and little Olivia liked them because her older sister did. Tiffany said she had noticed that the Bratz dolls did not elicit the kind of imaginative role-playing she had engaged in with Barbie as a child but, rather, focused her girls’ minds entirely on taking the dolls’ clothes off and putting them back on.

Chris pushed a button on a talking Bratz doll named Jade, which was dressed in a rhinestone-studded micromini, a tank top emblazoned with a biker tattoo, and a cropped fur-trimmed black vinyl jacket. "Do you ever get fashion ideas from celebrities?" Jade asked, and then confided, "Sometimes I get ideas from celeb photos in magazines." She added, rather unconvincingly, "Being smart is cool." Chris snorted, and Tiffany said, "Bratz will fizzle out. Barbie will stay. She might have to get sexier, but she’ll stay."

In 2002, Mattel introduced a new line of dolls: My Scene Barbie, which kept Barbie’s basic dimensions but had bigger eyes, plumper, shinier lips, and hotter clothes. A recent incarnation of the line is the unsubtly named My Bling Bling Barbie. (The Barbie Web site says of one of these dolls, "Chelsea burns up the Bling Bling scene, in an ultra hot halter top and sassy skirt sooo scorchin’.") When not "getting their groove on," the Bling Bling girls are "mall maniacs." An animated video on the Barbie Web site depicts them struggling to lay off shopping for a day. They manage only a brief visit to the park -- where the puppies they coo over turn into high-heeled boots, the fountain spouts jewelry, and the clouds above them spell out "SALE" -- before they give in and head to the mall.

The competition between Bratz and Barbie has grown increasingly nasty. In April, 2004, Mattel sued the doll designer Carter Bryant, accusing him of developing his designs for Bratz while working at Mattel and taking them to M.G.A., thereby breaching his contract. Bryant, who claims that he was not working for Mattel when he envisioned Bratz, countersued, alleging that Mattel required him to sign an overly broad and unlawful confidentiality agreement, which he claims kept him from divulging even the names of its employees. And in April, 2005, M.G.A. sued Mattel, accusing the company of trying to "muscle M.G.A. out of the business" while engaging in "serial copycatting" of M.G.A.’s products. The complaint makes much of the allegedly proprietary look of the Bratz eye, and the ways in which, it claims, the My Scene eye has evolved to mimic it:

The "My Scene" eye [originally had] lashes that radiate almost straight out, circumferentially, from the eyelids and, although the eye is more almond shaped than a "Barbie" eye, the eye is not so sleepy and heavy lidded as a "Bratz" eye and is only lightly shadowed. The new "My Scene" eye, in contrast, is dramatically more similar to a "Bratz" eye... . The doe-eyed innocent look of the "My Scene" eye [has been] replaced with a sultrier look, characteristic of "Bratz." The new "My Scene" eye ... boasts lashes that sweep out and away from the outer corner of the eye, just like the "Bratz" eye. The new "My Scene" eye is also more heavily lidded and thickly lined, and the make-up is more markedly pronounced and dramatic.

Barbie, chided the M.G.A. lawyers, "does not ‘play nice’ with others (particularly her competitors), and needs to be taught to ‘share’ (at least in the fashion doll marketplace)." The suit also alleges that Mattel has unfairly tried to lock up the market on Saran doll hair -- the long tresses that crown the vinyl heads of both Barbie and Bratz dolls and that girls love to comb-by "buying up the supply from the two main hair supply companies."

Mattel will not comment on the lawsuits, because they are still pending in California district court -- and may be for years. (It has filed court papers denying M.G.A.’s accusations.) On November 20th, Mattel amended its lawsuit against Bryant to include both M.G.A. and Isaac Larian as defendants. The new complaint alleges that "M.G.A. intentionally stole not just specific Mattel property, such as Bratz designs, prototypes and related materials, but also a vast array of trade secrets and other confidential information that comprise Mattel’s intellectual infrastructure." Larian said in response, "This lawsuit just proves that Mattel is desperate. They are living in a fantasyland. They wish they owned Bratz but they know that they don’t. We will continue to beat them in the marketplace in the old-fashioned American way, through better product innovation, better sales, and better marketing." When I spoke with Scothon, he avoided referring to M.G.A. or Bratz by name. He said, "The competition has done an awful lot of following. Barbie will be around for another forty-seven years. The same can’t be said for the competition."

When I visited Larian at the Bratz headquarters in Van Nuys, he was full of righteous scoffing about Mattel. After Mattel reintroduced the Ken doll, in February -- Ken had endured a two-year exile from store shelves after the company announced that Barbie had dumped him -- Larian had told reporters that it was "stupid publicity" and that "Ken is not going to save Barbie." (And indeed the whole Ken-is-back theme seemed so tongue-in-cheek -- the campy Hollywood stylist Phillip Bloch effused on CNN about the new metrosexual look he’d developed for him -- that it was hard to imagine his having much appeal for little girls.) During our interview, Larian dispatched an assistant to gather up a pile of My Scene dolls that he had on his desk; she dumped them on the table where we were eating lunch, so that I could study them. "My Scene was a knockoff," he declared. "They don’t even look like Barbie! They look like Bratz!" Take the dolls home and show them to your six-year-old, he urged me more than once; see if she agrees that they look alike. Part of M.G.A.’s suit depends on its ability to prove that customers have been confused about which product is which. But in practice few Bratz -- or Barbie -- loving girls seem to have any trouble telling the difference.

Barbie occupies a unique place in the history of American toys. Before she was launched, in 1959, most of the dolls that children played with were baby dolls or sturdy-legged little-girl dolls. In 1987, the staff of the Strong Museum, a toy museum in Rochester, New York, interviewed ninety-eight women about their early-twentieth-century childhoods -- specifically, how they had played. The recollections were often about climbing trees, jumping in haystacks, skating, and sledding; one woman remembered splashing in a stream and "getting bloodsuckers all over my legs." Many of the girls played with dolls into their teenage years. They lavished baby dolls with maternal care -- diapering and feeding them as they’d seen their mothers do with younger siblings. The Dy-Dee Doll, invented by a Brooklyn schoolteacher named Marie Wittam, in the early thirties, even wet herself: you pushed a button on her stomach and water came out of a tube. The popular Betsy Wetsy, which was introduced soon afterward, performed the same dubious trick. The little-girl dolls -- such as Patsy, whose manufacturer, Effanbee, touted her as a "lovable imp" with tiltable head and moveable limbs -- were more like cheery companions to have tea with, read to, or take on special romps. "The dolls that looked like infants I would mother," recalled one woman. "The dolls that looked like they could be miniatures of me were my friends." Another woman recalled that she had played with her baby dolls until she was nine, when she acquired a baby brother.

Barbie was different -- she was meant to be a young adult, a gal about town, possessor of a glamorous wardrobe and an imposing pair of breasts. Barbie was invented by Ruth Handler, the tenth child of a Polish Jewish immigrant family in Denver, Colorado. Her father, Jacob Mosko, was an entrepreneur who started a successful business making custom truck bodies. As a young woman, Ruth Mosko moved to Southern California, where she worked as a stenographer at Paramount Pictures and married Elliot Handler; in 1945, the couple, along with Harold Mattson, founded Mattel. It became the most successful toy company in the world.

One of Handler’s inspirations for the Barbie doll was a postwar cartoon character who had originally been featured in the German newspaper Bild. Lilli, as she was called, was a tough little blonde with an eye for the main chance; eventually, she had been turned into a lewd three-dimensional novelty item intended for purchase by men. Handler saw possibilities in Lilli, though she had to look past some of her trappings, as she recalled in her 1994 autobiography, Dream Doll. Lilli’s face was "too hard-looking," but her body was "another story":

Here were the breasts, the small waist, the long tapered legs I had enthusiastically described for the designers all those years ago.The idea had been the result of the many times I had observed my daughter Barbara playing with paperdolls with her friends. While the toy counters in the early 1950s were heavy with paperdolls of every size, shape, and form, Barbara and her friends always insisted on buying only adult female paperdolls. They simply were not interested in baby paperdolls or even those representing ten-year-olds, their own age. Pretending to be doing something else, I’d listen, fascinated, to the girls as they played with these paperdolls hour after hour. And I discovered something very important: They were using these dolls to project their dreams of their own futures as adult women... . It dawned on me that this was a basic, much needed play pattern that had never before been offered by the doll industry to little girls. Oh, sure, there were so-called fashion dolls, those who came with more than one outfit. But these dolls had flat chests, big bellies, and squatty legs-they were built like overweight six- or eight-year-olds. The idea of putting a prom dress on such a doll, had such a dress even been available, was ludicrous.

Handler worried that "little girls would be intimidated by too much beauty" in a doll, but, unlike some of Barbie’s future critics, she decided that the girls could handle it, and, after the first models, she made the dolls still prettier. Initially, Mattel produced brunette and red-headed Barbies, but the blondes were the runaway best-sellers.

In 1958, a year before Barbie’s début, Mattel commissioned a study of toys by Ernest Dichter, one of the marketing gurus anatomized in Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957). A Jewish émigré from Vienna who had trained as a psychoanalyst, Dichter reinvented himself with vulpine glee in the United States, offering his services to American brands such as Ivory soap and Chrysler. Like some sitcom parody of a Freudian, he tirelessly dug up sexual explanations for consumers’ reactions to products. (Thus, the Edsel failed because its designer had "castrated" it by putting an artful hole between the front fenders; it was a challenge to market hot dogs to women, because, as one man whom Dichter interviewed said, "My wife gets mad at me when I munch or suck contentedly on my frankfurter.") Dichter’s work for Mattel, which is discussed in detail in Lord’s excellent Forever Barbie, was a prescient example of conducting focus groups with a psychological edge. Dichter detected a notable and exploitable wedge between mothers and daughters when it came to Barbie. Many girls loved her; many mothers did not -- and the disapproval they expressed sounded a lot like the disapproval you hear mothers expressing about Bratz today. Either the complaints that children are becoming too knowing too early are to some extent perennial, or companies keep pushing the bounds of what parents find acceptable, and parents are limited in what they can do to push back. (Both explanations probably have some truth.)

One mother told Dichter, "I know little girls want dolls with high heels but I object to that sexy costume. I wouldn’t walk around the house like that. I don’t like that influence on my little girl. If only they would let children remain young a little longer... . It’s hard enough to raise a lady these days without undue moral pressure." Another admitted that her daughter would be "fascinated" by Barbie, but said she wouldn’t buy the doll for her: "It has too much of a figure... . I’m sure she would like to have one, but I wouldn’t buy it. All these kids talk about is how the teachers jiggle."

As Lord reports, Dichter believed that mothers could be bought off. One mother who initially found the doll too racy changed her mind when she heard her daughter say how "well groomed" Barbie was. Could Barbie make tidy little hair-combers out of grubby tomboys? If so, then maybe those pontoon breasts could be overlooked. Dichter concluded, "The type of arguments which can be used successfully to overcome parental objection are in the area of the doll’s function in awakening in the child a concern with proper appearance." At the same time, a doll with a "sophisticated, even wicked" wardrobe would satisfy a girl’s urge to rebel against her mother.

There were always mothers who refused to allow Barbie in the house. (Anna Quindlen once wrote of her desire to drive a "silver lamé stake" through Barbie’s "plastic heart.") And there were always girls who didn’t particularly care for dolls. In the past, they probably called themselves tomboys; now they’re more likely to refer to themselves as what they are not -- they aren’t girly-girls. Annie, a smart, dog-loving ten-year-old I know, says she’s just "not a doll person" and dismisses Barbie as "so twentieth century." Other dolls invite a different fantasy than Barbie does, and tend to unite mothers and daughters more. Groovy Girls, made by Manhattan Toy, are soft dolls that wear trendy but not revealing clothes, smile rather than pout, look to be tweens themselves, and seem to fulfill the old doll-as-pal role. But Groovy Girls don’t command anywhere near the shelf space at major retailers that Barbie and Bratz do.

American Girl, the line of dolls from different historical eras, has positioned itself as a brand that helps girls hold on to little-girlhood for a bit longer. The dolls are meant to be nine-year-olds; they come with books that offer historically correct, if bland, details of life in the American past and tell slightly anachronistic tales of feminine pluck. (Felicity, from the eighteenth century, dons boys’ clothes to ride a horse she isn’t supposed to; Whartonian-rich-girl Samantha democratically befriends the Irish maid next door.) The American Girl Place stores in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles offer themselves as approachably elegant, slightly retro sites for mother-daughter bonding; at in-store cafés, shiny-haired girls in party dresses and mothers with just-freshened lipstick and switched-off cell phones chat over tea sandwiches and chocolate mousse. (The restaurants even place a box full of conversation-starting questions on each table: If you were a character from a book, who would you be? Would you rather have the power of flying or becoming invisible?) Last year, American Girl launched a campaign to "Save Girlhood." Its Web site bore the message: "Save unicorns. Save dreams. Save rainbows. Save girlhood." It went on, "The way we see it, girls are growing up too fast. From every angle, today’s girls are bombarded by influences pushing them towards womanhood at too early an age-at the expense of their innocence, their playfulness, their imagination." Even some girls see American Girl dolls as an antidote to the K.G.O.Y. poison. "They look like regular girls -- they don’t have all that makeup on like Barbie or Bratz" is how Annie puts it. But the dolls are expensive-nearly a hundred dollars for a starter kit of doll and book -- and sold only by catalogue, on their Web site, or at American Girl Place. American Girl, whose parent company has been owned since 1998 by Mattel, will never be a mass consumer brand, like Bratz or Barbie dolls, which cost less than thirty dollars on average. (Based on M.G.A. figures, Bratz products outsold American Girl last year by a rate of five to one.)

American Girl dolls -- expensive, innocent-looking, and old-fashioned -- are on one side of a class and cultural divide. Judging from the families you see shopping at American Girl Place, the dolls appeal disproportionately to well-off white parents willing to spend whatever it takes to help prolong their daughters’ childhood. Bratz and My Scene Barbies, by contrast, are peddling the toy world’s version of gangsta chic. Fara Warner notes that Bratz dolls mimic the fashions that their very young owners regularly see "on cable channels such as MTV and BET." And Sean McGowan, even more candidly, says that Bratz have the same allure that "makes rap popular with white kids in the suburbs."

Isaac Larian may hate Mattel, but he admires Ruth Handler, whom he calls a "true entrepreneur." Larian grew up in Tehran, where his father owned a textile shop, and he helped out from the time he was eleven. When he was seventeen, he told his parents he wanted to go to the United States. They sent him to Los Angeles "with seven hundred and fifty dollars-a lot of money for them." In his first job, he washed dishes from eleven at night to seven in the morning at a coffee shop in the predominantly Hispanic city of Lawndale. Later, he waited tables and put himself through school at California State University, Los Angeles, where he got a degree in civil engineering. Entrepreneurship is what appealed to him, though. After graduating, he began importing cheap brass doodads from South Korea, starting a company called Surprise Gift Wagon. In the late eighties, he persuaded Nintendo to give him the American rights to their handheld games. "The first year, we sold twenty-two million dollars in games, and we had a thirty-five-percent profit," he recalled. "But the next year we had ten million dollars’ worth of Nintendo games that nobody wanted anymore. The kids wanted something new." He concluded from that experience that a company marketing to kids has to keep an avid eye on trends. "With Bratz, we need to change them every three, four months," he explained. "What you see in the stores today was not in the stores last year. And when we come out with our fall line, what’s in the stores in the spring is not going to be there. And the key is to be fresh, to listen to the kids carefully, because they change literally every week. And you have to think, What are they into now, and come up with products that let them be ahead of the curve. If we stop doing that, the same thing that happened to Barbie is going to happen to us. They’re gonna throw us in the trash can."

Larian likes to tell a story about the first Bratz doll, which wore pants with fashionable embroidery trim at the cuffs. When M.G.A. released the doll for the international market, Larian decided that the trim was too expensive and it was left off the pants. He thought nobody would notice. But, he recalled, "You wouldn’t believe how many letters we got from kids in the U.K. saying, ‘I was in New York, and the Cloe doll or the Yasmin doll that I saw in America had this little embroidery on the pants and the one I bought in London didn’t have that.’ " Kids, he learned from that experience, notice visual details at a level of precision that surprises adults. And kids’ opinions about toys, Larian believes, are always right. "I have insomnia -- people in my company think I never sleep," Larian said, smiling but not joking. "I take home all these fan letters, and I read them at night. Our designers -- it’s mandatory for them to read those letters carefully, too. We pay attention -- we make toys kids want. The secret formula is to listen carefully to kids. They tell you. If they don’t like something, they say, ‘This sucks.’ If they like it, they tell you. And if they want you to make it better they tell you."

One recent afternoon, I sat in a darkened room behind a one-way mirror with Larian and Rachel Griffin, of the M.G.A. publicity team, as they watched a focus group for a new product line: the Bratz Genie Magic dolls. The four little girls gathered inside -- Ember, Emily, Kristine, and Morgan -- were between the ages of eight and ten. They all had sneakers on, and their sweatpants and windbreakers bore the marks of the back yard or the classroom: grass-stained knees, a dusting of chalk. They sat on bright-colored beanbag chairs, looking alert and easily amused, happy to have got out of school a little early. The interviewer was a beautiful young woman with spike-heeled boots, extravagant black curls, and a humorless mien. She started by asking why the girls liked Bratz. Kristine, who was ten, cited the difficulty of losing their shoes. Ember, who was nine, called out, "They’re just so fashionable!" And Morgan, who was eight and had long straight dark hair, remarked that Barbies "all look the same. They’re all blond." Larian, who sat next to me, murmured contentedly, "Good girl. Kids are so smart." In fact, Barbies now come in a number of hair and skin colors, but for Morgan an annoying aura of blondness still clung to the Mattel doll.

Kristine was the expert, the one who had seen "Bratz," the tie-in television show, and who appreciated specific qualities about the dolls’ hair and shoes. Emily and Ember were more reticent. Morgan had a goofy, anarchic way about her. Maybe it was because she was younger-"Dang, why am I so young?" she asked cheerily, of no one in particular -- but she seemed to see something faintly ridiculous in the self-serious world of fashionistas. Still, she, like the other girls, had a disconcerting tendency to spout ad-style triads of adjectives when asked what she’d tell others about Bratz products. "How would you describe these to your mom?" the interviewer asked, gesturing to the Genie Magic dolls and accessories. "Cool. Fun. Playful," Morgan recited. "Awesome. New. Fantastic," Kristine added.

After a while, the interviewer left the room, having invited the girls to play with the Genie Magic dolls and some of their accessories, including a flying carpet and a bottle from which the genie was supposed to emerge. The girls didn’t know one another, but they slipped into companionability easily enough. A couple of them made the magic carpet fly around the room. There was some desultory talk about which of the Bratz Genies had a boyfriend, and there were invitations to tea -- amazingly, tea remains a central trope of doll play, no matter how incongruous. (It’s hard to imagine Jade, say, being excited by her grandmother’s quilted tea cozies.)

Kristine, who wore her dark curly hair in a ponytail, spent a lot of time combing the long straight hair of the big-headed Bratz Genie doll. "I’ve combed her hair, and it’s finally pretty," she said after a while. "I love combing hair."

To which Morgan replied, "I know, but it’s so boring."

"It’s actually fun," Kristine insisted.

The girls seemed to regard the word "sassy" as code for something more exciting and scandalous. By the time the interviewer came back into the room, Morgan was bouncing around, knocking over packages and singing, "I’m sassy! I’m sassy! Yeah!" and the girls were cracking up.

"O.K., guys," the interviewer said primly. "I need you to focus for a couple more minutes."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the one-way mirror, there were signs of distress. Larian was hanging on these little girls’ every word. Again and again, he fired off messages on his BlackBerry based on their more or less idle chatter. The girls were the unwitting lords of this realm, although their power was of a limited sort -- the answers children’s marketers listen to so keenly are only to questions they have designed in pursuit of parents’ money. Nevertheless, in the moment, the keenness of the listening and the watching made Ember and Morgan and Kristine and Emily seem influential indeed. For instance, the girls had been blithely referring to a Bratz Genie’s bottle as her "house" or her "castle," causing Larian to groan and type agitatedly into his BlackBerry. "Jesus Christ, we’ve got to fix that," he said. The packaging and advertising campaign clearly called it a bottle.

The interviewer asked the girls, "What are you calling this over here?"

"The royal castle!" the girls cried out at once.

"If we call it a bottle, is that wrong?"

Yes, they said. They liked the "genie’s castle" or the "genie’s royal house." Later, the interviewer asked about their preferences between genies and princesses. Bratz was putting a lot of resources behind the Genies this season. "Princesses!" the girls chorused.

"Most girls really want to be princesses," Kristine explained. "Like Queen Elizabeth -- girls at my school, they want to be like Queen Elizabeth’s daughter." (Somehow, I don’t think she meant Princess Anne.) "When we were smaller, we used to play princess in the castle. A princess -- you really want to be one. You’re really rich and stuff."

Morgan chimed in: "Genies are really unexpected, but princesses are something you really like." And she added, with daffy precision, "Girls will choose princesses because they’d rather be one -- technically, of all the girls in the world, let’s say five to one."

"Oh, my God," Larian moaned.

Other problems were discovered. The girls didn’t realize that a design on the Bratz Princess box was supposed to be a picture frame; one of the girls thought it was coiled hair. Larian tried to take comfort in the fact that the girls recognized the handle on the box as a tiara that they could wear themselves. Still, he grumbled, "That frame costs a dollar-fifteen more a unit." Larian typed into his BlackBerry. "People from product development should be here," he said crossly.

Within a few weeks, M.G.A. had changed the labelling on the Genie Bottle -- it was now a Genie Magic Royal Castle. By the end of the summer, the Genie Magic line had taken off, selling more than a million dolls. M.G.A. soon expanded, by acquiring the Little Tikes toy company, and began planning a move to bigger headquarters in the San Fernando Valley. Morgan, Kristine, Ember, and Emily had spoken.

The Baby Lab

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 00:01:00 -0400

On weekday mornings at nine o’clock, at Harvard University’s Laboratory for Developmental Studies, the babies start arriving in a long procession, looking like young pashas in their luxurious, oversized strollers. Researchers rush out to greet them, brandishing toys and consent forms. One day this summer, eight-month-old William was carried into a small, darkened room, where he sat on his father’s lap and viewed, on a screen in front of him, rectangles and dots shrinking in size or number. He was alerted to a new picture by a silly boing noise (and a brief appearance by Clifford the Big Red Dog). William, who is blond and wide-eyed, contemplated this spectacle with the grave dignity of the preverbal. By noon, most of the lab’s half-dozen study rooms were occupied. Babies listened to French and English speakers coo over toys and watched piles of sand grow and diminish; toddlers hunted after hidden Cheerios and gauged the nature of gravity and solidity.

The lab, which sprawls over three buildings on the Harvard campus, is a pleasant place, with wide windows offering an expansive view of Cambridge. The waiting area has a wooden train set, and a Gary Larsonesque cartoon that someone taped up is captioned "At the National Sippy Cup Research Center." A bulletin board in the office lists ongoing studies in a surrealistic shorthand: "Talking Blobs," "Blocks and Holes," "Wet Animals." The lab is a domain of peculiar little scenarios, all energetically and painstakingly staged for the very young in an effort to probe the black box -- the mysterious machine -- that is their minds. It is also the domain of Elizabeth Spelke, a fifty-seven-year-old cognitive psychologist, who supervises the work of ten graduate students, twenty undergraduate research assistants, and assorted visiting scholars and postdocs, most of whom are testing various aspects of her signature idea -- namely, that babies come into the world mentally equipped with certain basic systems for ordering it. Her grad students call the lab Spelkeland.

A few weeks earlier, Spelke had watched a videotape of a researcher who was running a pilot study with a talkative, curly-haired two-year-old girl. The study, which used finger puppets, was aimed at determining what kinds of mathematical concepts a toddler might understand intuitively. Could she track the number of bunny puppets that were missing when the researcher removed them from her fingers, stowed them in a box, then lifted them out, leaving one or two inside? This little girl seemed to be doing just that -- she wasn’t satisfied with the number of bunnies that the researcher, Véronique Izard, had removed from the box, and she was craning her neck in search of more puppets. Like all studies in Spelke’s lab, this one would be evaluated at both a high level and a humble one. "Yes!" Spelke said, punching the air. "Wow! She definitely expected another one." Izard struggled to push a recalcitrant bunny puppet onto her finger, and Spelke frowned. "We definitely need to get puppets that go on faster," she said.

Later, I talked with Spelke in her sunny corner office, which featured stray touches of whimsy -- an inflatable palm tree, a windup toy brain on a crowded bookshelf. When she leans forward to make a point, her shoulders hunch; she is tall and gangly, with straight, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, large oval glasses, and a way of speaking about her work that is at once eager and precise. "I’m fascinated by babies and little kids," she said. "But the questions that really keep me up at night are: What distinguishes us from other animals? How do we make sense of what goes on around us? What are the core notions that all of our systematic knowledge is based on?"

Over the past three decades, Spelke has created a series of ingenious studies that have given us a picture of the baby mind which is far different from the long-standing view of it as, in William James’s famous formulation, a "blooming, buzzing confusion." As Spelke likes to say, there are some forms of knowledge that humans get "for free." Even at two and a half months, she argues, infants apprehend certain laws of the physical world -- for example, that objects are cohesive and distinct and cannot pass through solid surfaces, and that they move along expected trajectories unless something obstructs them. Contrary to the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget -- who believed that babies were born with sensory capacities but with no real knowledge, and who theorized, in 1954, that infants lacked a sense of "object permanence" -- Spelke says that even newborns understand that things still exist when they can no longer see them. Babies, in her view, have a sense of other people as "goal-directed agents" who are capable of forming intentions and acting on them. And humans are endowed with a natural sense of geometry, an ability to orient themselves in space.

In 1981, Spelke, along with her colleagues Barbara Landau and Henry Gleitman, published the results of a study in which they introduced blind, or blindfolded toddlers into a room with objects in four locations. They had the children walk between them on a specific path, then asked them to use another path to move one object to another -- putting a toy onto a chair, for example. The kids proved strikingly adept at the task. Spelke’s experiment linked her to Socrates, who quizzed an uneducated Athenian slave on principles of shape, angle, and line, found him remarkably apt, and concluded that geometry was a gift of the human soul. (Descartes, too, believed that humans had an innate sense of geometry; he described an exercise in which a blind man holding two sticks in front of him could infer the point at which the sticks crossed.)

Spelke’s work even suggests that babies have an ability to compare large approximate sets. In 2000, a study that she did with the psychologist Fei Xu showed that six-month-old infants can reliably distinguish between displays of eight and sixteen dots; a 2005 study revealed that they could tell the difference between sixteen and thirty-two. (The subjects ran into trouble with smaller ratios.) Babies can also do a kind of addition and subtraction, tracking small numbers of objects and reasoning about what happens when one is added or taken away.

In Spelke’s view, these innate capacities are the foundations for all kinds of other learning. She told me, "When you are a baby, even before you acquire language, you need a stock of concepts, so that, for instance, when someone says, ‘Look at the dog,’ you can divide up the world in such a way that you know what to look at." Human babies share most of these core capacities with other animals, suggesting that they are part of our evolutionary heritage. Even desert ants, which leave home to look for carcasses to feed on and make their way back by a different but direct path, possess what Spelke would call "natural geometry." And many animals, from pigeons to monkeys, can distinguish between quantities. What is uniquely human is the capacity to combine such core abilities -- through the medium of language, Spelke surmises -- into more sophisticated capabilities; a baby’s intuitive sense of quantities eventually flowers into an ability to perform mental arithmetic.

Spelke’s ideas have been enormously influential among academics. "Nowadays every psychology student is taught that James and Piaget were wrong," the cognitive scientist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker wrote in Time five years ago. "From their earliest months, in fact, children interpret the world as a real and predictable place... . This new understanding is largely the legacy of Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke." Karen Wynn, an infant-cognition researcher at Yale, told me, "Spelke has done more to shape our understanding of how the human mind initially grasps the world than anyone else." In 2000, when the Association for Psychological Science gave her its William James Fellow Award, the citation noted that Spelke had "developed techniques of studying infants’ beliefs that are far more probative than might have been imagined only a short time ago," and that her work had begun "to answer perennial philosophical questions about the origins of human knowledge about space, objects, motion, unity, persistence, identity, and number."

That infants could be said to have "beliefs" at all is a surprising notion, and one that would give many parents pause. It gives some cognitive psychologists pause, too. Spelke’s findings about how infants perceive objects -- as solid, continuous, and perduring even when you don’t see them -- have been widely replicated, and are now firmly established in the infant-studies curricula. But her more ambitious theories of "core knowledge" have their critics. Empiricists argue that scientists such as Spelke underestimate how much babies learn through experience; evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker think that we are genetically encoded with many more core competencies than the four or five that Spelke allows for, including things like an ability to tell edible from poisonous food and to sense danger. Other scholars think that Spelke has contributed to a distorted view of babies as preternaturally smart. Marshall Haith, a developmental psychologist at the University of Denver, believes that she and her colleagues "seriously overplay what is going on in infants’ heads." As he sees it, Spelke’s "rich interpretation of infants’ capabilities encourages parents and caretakers to feel as though they have to pour as much into the ‘sophisticated’ infant mind as possible." In this view, Spelke’s research has helped fuel the modern parent’s obsession with Baby Einstein videos and bilingual nannies.

Yet Spelke’s arguments could be seen as doing the opposite. After all, in her opinion, infants come equipped with crucial knowledge that they will never need to be taught. As she wrote to me in an e-mail, "Infants are world-class learners and can be trusted to select, more or less on their own, experiences that will enhance their learning. From the earliest age, they attend to novel objects and events. They are also highly predisposed to learn by observing and interacting with other people." She went on, "There seems to be a common assumption, in thinking about children’s development, that earlier is better. So, the reasoning goes, if it’s good for a four-year-old to understand counting, it would be even better if a two-year-old could be induced to understand counting. There’s no evidence to support this assumption and some reason to be skeptical of it. Two-year-olds are already engaged in the task of mastering much of the encyclopedic knowledge about objects, events, places, and people that we adults take for granted. Diverting them from this task by introducing other tasks, like learning to read or work with numbers, seems useless at best and possibly harmful."

One of the most contentious elements of Spelke’s thinking is her firm conviction that boys and girls are born with essentially the same cognitive tools. (Although she has not done experiments expressly designed to assess gender differences, she has never found sex to be a relevant factor in any of her cognition studies.) In 2005, the former Harvard president Lawrence Summers said, during a speech, that women’s underrepresentation in fields such as engineering was "not easy to attribute to socialization," and speculated that it was the result of innate gender differences. At Harvard, Summers’s remarks set off all manner of soul-searching and recrimination: meeting after meeting at which Summers apologized, sort of apologized, or failed to apologize to female professors and other offended parties; a lack-of-confidence vote by the faculty of arts and sciences; dozens of op-eds condemning him for bumptiousness and sexism. When he ultimately announced his resignation, last February, it was in large part because important people at the university had never forgiven him.

Spelke had been one of Summers’s fiercest critics, calling his remarks "wrong, point for point." And she lambasted him for ignoring a more obvious explanation for the disparity in achievement: "the impediments to women’s progress posed by long-standing patterns of prejudice, unwelcoming environments and unequal resources." Spelke soon found herself at odds with old allies like Steven Pinker, whom she debated at Harvard at the height of the tumult, in April, 2005, on "the science of gender and science." Recent studies, Pinker said, suggested that men and women had intrinsic differences in aptitude; Spelke acknowledged the existence of small variances but said that there was no aggregate gap in ability.

The field of evolutionary psychology is prone to a cheerful -- sometimes gleeful -- fatalism about sex differences. (Older men ditching their aging wives for nubile mistresses? Men are genetically programmed to spread their DNA! Women more inclined toward gardening than particle physics? Blame it on our hunter-gatherer ancestors!) Although Spelke is a staunch Darwinian who believes, like Pinker, that natural selection shaped the modern human brain, her research on infants and toddlers has led her to conclude that gender is simply not a significant dividing line when it comes to doing math or science. Other scientists, including Pinker, believe that some sex differences in cognition emerge later, perhaps with the hormonal changes of puberty. But Spelke tends to believe that these effects are minimal, and, in any case, are trumped by the fundamental commonalities manifest in infants and young children.

"We have a tendency, when we think intuitively about ourselves and other people, to greatly overemphasize differences," Spelke said as we sat on her back-yard deck in Cambridge, a vantage point from which you notice that she lives an enviable five-minute walk from her laboratory. "We think that differences we can see on the surface signal some deeper, underlying difference, and I think this is almost always an illusion. To me, the important and interesting implication of the sex-difference stuff is not that there should be more or fewer women in science; it’s how much we are alike. And, sure, biologically we play different roles, and we can imagine that Darwinian evolution might create cognitive differences, and even two different psychologies for men and women. But, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t turned out that way. We are deeply alike. And we see this when we study infants."

Babies and toddlers, for all their charm, are messy research subjects, in more ways than one. At the Harvard lab one morning this summer, six-month-old Alice sat on a bench in the waiting area, crumpling up--and drooling over--the consent forms that her father was trying to sign. Blue-eyed, six-month-old Jaleanna, who sat on her mother’s lap, appeared mildly interested in the piles of colored sand that a lab intern kept pouring onto a small black stage, but she was riveted by her mother’s hands. "Do you think you could possibly hold her a little differently, so she can’t play with your thumb?" the lab intern asked delicately.

Designing an experiment for studying babies is complicated by the fact that they cannot speak, let alone fill out questionnaires, or do much of anything that requires motor skills. The developmental psychologist Paul Bloom, of Yale, in his book Descartes’ Baby writes, "It is difficult to learn about the mental life of any creatures that cannot use language, but a baby poses special challenges. Mature nonhumans, although nonverbal, are physically adroit. Chimpanzees can easily express their preferences through coordinated action; pigeons peck; rats run through mazes, and so on. But young babies just lie there, crying and gurgling." They also easily get restless and out of sorts, which means that anyone who wants to study them has to work quickly.

The researchers at Spelke’s lab must constantly adjust their protocols to account for unforeseen behavior. At a lab meeting that I attended, Véronique Izard’s bunny-puppets study was under discussion; one researcher pointed out that you couldn’t necessarily conclude much from a toddler’s continuing to search inside a box, as children tend to be fascinated by the boxes themselves (just as babies often like the wrapping paper better than the gift). "Oh, yeah," a grad student added. "They always reach in. You’re sticking a box in their face; there’s nothing else to do except stick their hands in." Somebody wondered whether filling the box with Styrofoam peanuts, in order to make the puppet search more challenging, might be a good idea; somebody else countered that it would involve too much cleanup afterward. Two visiting scholars from Sweden lamented that toddlers had too much fun with the task that a new study was designed around: dropping blocks into shape-sorting boxes. It slowed things down, because the children, all about twenty-four months old, weren’t very good at it. "They can sit and do this for an hour," Claes von Hofsten, one of the Swedish scholars, said. "They make enormous mistakes, but they do it again and again and again."

At the lab, children must be accompanied by their parents, and babies are held by them. Parents -- especially the sort of parents who respond to letters from a Harvard lab (which gets their names from the Cambridge City Hall and other local governments) -- aren’t always able to resist coaching. Nathan Winkler-Rhoades, a graduate student in Spelke’s lab, ran into that problem when he was testing two-year-olds to see whether they can ascertain the relationship between a room and a simple map of it (a difficult developmental leap). One mother, frustrated by her little girl’s incomprehension of the task, jumped up in exasperation and said, "Look, honey: This is the room. This is the picture of the room."

Experiments can be derailed when babies get hungry, wet, or cranky. Particularly avid wailers have to be dropped from studies altogether. Spelke and her researchers call this population the "fuss-outs." One afternoon, I watched videotapes of a study that Winkler-Rhoades was doing, which was staged in a circular white room where Spelke and her students conduct experiments involving orientation in space. (I found the room creepy, not least because once you’re inside you can’t tell where the exit is. But a graduate student told me that when Spelke walked in for the first time she spun in circles, delighted with its possibilities.) On one tape, a small boy had stopped in the middle of the experiment in order to pick up a chair and pound it on the floor. "When they quit, they really quit," Winkler-Rhoades said. "I’ve lost about a third of my subjects to fuss-outs. You get kind of romantic about the work, how we’re building theories, but, day to day, it feels nothing like the grandiosity it’s going to be woven into." We watched for a few minutes as a little girl in braids who turned out to have an unusually good sense of direction scampered around the room. "Her nose was running the whole time," Winkler-Rhoades said, sounding very much like a non-parent.

For much of the history of experimental psychology, which has its origins in the nineteenth century, babies weren’t considered worthy or practical subjects for research. In 1897, Wilhelm Wundt, a prominent German psychologist, wrote, "The results of experiments which have been tried on very young children must be regarded as purely chance results, wholly untrustworthy on account of the great number of sources of error. For this reason, it is an error to hold, as is sometimes held, that the mental life of adults can never be fully understood except through the analysis of the child’s mind."

One Victorian scientist who was eager to study infants was Charles Darwin, who wrote one of the first "baby biographies"-- diaristic examinations of a baby’s every burp and grasp. In 1877, Darwin published his Biographical Sketch of an Infant, basing it on notes that he had made during the babyhood of his oldest child, nicknamed Doddy. In Darwin’s account, the doting father is as easy to detect as the dispassionate scientist. He wrote, "On the seventh day, I touched the naked sole of his foot with a bit of paper, and he jerked it away, curling at the same time his toes, like a much older child when tickled... . Once when he was 66 days old, I happened to sneeze, and he started violently, frowned, looked frightened, and cried rather badly... . For a long time afterwards sounds made him start and wink his eyes much more frequently than did sight." Darwin took note of early language, such as Doddy’s appropriation of the word "mum," at fourteen months, to signify all foods. He observed that his son, when asking for food, gave the word "a most strongly marked interrogatory sound at the end." He added that the boy "also gave to ‘Ah,’ which he chiefly used at first when recognizing any person or his own image in a mirror, an exclamatory sound, such as we employ when surprised."

In the nineteen-twenties, Jean Piaget and his wife, Valentine, embarked on a project of fine-grained -- at times minute-by-minute -- observation of their three children; they also performed gentle experiments on them. The Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in his book The Quest for Mind, writes, "Piaget’s method and materials were deceptively simple. He sat near his child, who was lying in the crib, or playing on the floor, watched the infant’s spontaneous behavior, and from time to time introduced various kinds of interruptions or ‘problems,’ carefully noting the child’s reactions to these impositions. The experimental materials were restricted to the most banal objects: pens, berets, pocket watches, boxes." Piaget did not conduct controlled experiments or statistical analyses, but his delineation of the stages of a child’s mental development -- from egocentrism to the interiorization of thought to a symbolic understanding of the world -- has exerted a resilient influence on education, as well as on cognitive psychology. As Steven Pinker told me, although much of Piaget’s theoretical superstructure has "imploded" under experimental scrutiny, "for a guy who just played with his three kids, his observations have stood the test of time astonishingly well." Piaget’s version of the baby biography was not only the crucible of cognitive psychology but also the most convincing argument to date that babies were interesting.

In recent years, technology has offered new ways of creating such records. Deb Roy, a cognitive scientist at M.I.T., and his wife, Rupal Patel, a professor of speech and hearing sciences at Northeastern, are one year into a project of videotaping the first two to three years of their son’s life--an enterprise that involved the installation of microphones and fish-eye video cameras in every room of their house. Roy told me that he hopes the project will yield new insights into language acquisition. One of the first things they’ll be analyzing is how their son learns early words like "car," "bath," or "bye." Roy explained, "Often a child will ‘under-extend’ these words--using them only in specific contexts, like saying ‘car’ only when he sees a car through the window. We’ll track the history of a word, every time it’s used, and see what cues it." He went on, "When you’re a diarist, you have only so much time, and, typically, you’re also the caregiver. You can take notes of only a very small subset of experience." Roy seemed undisturbed by the idea of domestic life in the company of an all-seeing camera, though he noted that his home was equipped with "Oops!" buttons that allowed him to erase moments better left to the imagination than to scientific posterity.

Observing a baby’s external behavior is, to say the least, an oblique way of assessing its mind. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists began looking for a more direct window into the infant soul. Though babies can’t control their hands or limbs very well, they do have control over their eyes. Show them two images, and they often exercise that control by looking longer at one than at the other. It’s probably too much to say that they "like" looking at one more than the other--who knows what a baby’s affective connection is to a picture of a checkerboard or a purple cow?--so psychologists adopted the more neutral word "prefer." By looking longer, the theory goes, babies show a preference for one image over another, and, by the same token, an ability to distinguish between them.

In the late nineteen-fifties, Robert Fantz, a psychologist at Western Reserve University, noticed that newly hatched birds preferentially peck on a spot where food is sprinkled. He kept reducing the size of the food pellets until birds couldn’t perceive them well enough to peck at the spot. He then tried something similar with human babies: he put two images side by side -- one a black-and-white set of stripes, the other a gray block -- and found that infants looked longer at the stripes. Fantz made the stripes narrower and narrower until they blended into a gray haze and babies could no longer register a difference.

Fantz’s method, known as a "preferential looking" study, was embraced by baby researchers, who soon discovered things about infants that no one had been able to document before: they could distinguish colors (and preferred red); they recognized their mother’s face and voice, even as newborns; they preferred looking at human faces to looking at anything else; they could reliably distinguish among facial expressions. As Spelke told me, preferential looking "gave us a set of tools that let us play Twenty Questions with a baby. ‘Yes or no -- does this look like this or like that?’ Progress was slow, but over the course of a decade or two you could learn a lot." Of course, it wasn’t absolutely clear what some of this gazing meant. If a baby didn’t evince a looking-time preference between, say, sky blue and teal blue, did that mean he couldn’t tell the difference between them -- or that he could, but judged them equally appealing?

In the seventies, other baby researchers -- chiefly, the psychologist Frances Horowitz -- observed that if you keep showing babies the same visual stimulus they eventually look at it less and less. When something that they perceive as new comes into their line of vision, they perk up and look at it longer. Spelke and Xu exploited this tendency in their dots experiment, which is easily replicated. Show an infant a picture of sixteen dots over and over again, and measure how long he looks at it each time. After a while, he gets used to it--or "habituated," as psychologists say -- and the time he spends looking at it decreases. Then show him eight dots; he will likely look at it longer, presumably recognizing it as something novel -- which suggests that he can distinguish between a quantity of eight and a quantity of sixteen. If you were to try preferential looking without habituating the baby first, he probably would not look longer at one set of dots than at the other, since neither is more intrinsically entertaining. Bore him with one set of dots, though, and you should be able to tell something. (At the Harvard lab, looking times are measured by two people who each use a button to indicate when they see the baby look away; their results are then compared and consolidated by a computer. One day, in Spelke’s lab, I watched a researcher named Ariel Grace flash the same face on the screen again and again for a baby. "Congratulations, Alice," she murmured as she saw the baby’s looking time fall below the target number of seconds. "You’re officially bored.")

Spelke’s renown in psychology is based, in part, on her use of looking-time measures to answer questions not only about perception but also about cognition. Did infants have expectations of how the world worked -- and could you tell what those expectations were by determining what surprised them? Starting in the eighties, Spelke and several other researchers -- including Renee Baillargeon, of the University of Illinois, and Karen Wynn, of Yale -- developed a provocative variation on the preferential-looking scheme, usually called the "violation of expectations" study. These experiments were staged a little like magic shows. Babies sat in a darkened room, watching scenarios of varying degrees of plausibility unfold on a small stage. Spelke, for example, showed the babies a ball rolling along a path with an obstruction in the middle of it. A screen was lowered and then raised to reveal the ball either resting against the obstruction -- where it logically should be -- or on the other side of it, as though the ball had magically rolled through a solid surface. Spelke found that babies looked longer at the unexpected event. In a 1983 experiment, Spelke and her colleague Philip Kellman placed a gray wooden barrier on the stage, parallel to the proscenium and raised a few inches. The baby watched as what appeared to be a long stick, its tips extended above and below the barrier, crossed the stage. Spelke and Kellman wanted to know if a three-month-old baby would assume -- as an adult would -- that he was watching just one stick, even though the middle portion was concealed. Then they lifted the barrier, revealing sometimes one stick, sometimes two. Their hypothesis was that if babies found the appearance of two sticks strange they would look longer at the two sticks. The babies did, staring at the two sticks thirty seconds longer.

Spelke and Kellman’s finding contradicted Piaget’s theory of object permanence, and it galvanized other psychologists. Piaget’s notion was based on experiments with his children which involved motor skill -- watching, for example, to see whether his daughter Jacqueline continued to search for a toy duck after Piaget hid it under a sheet. Spelke thought that limitations in babies’ ability to lift and grab, more than limitations in what they could represent in their minds, were the real obstacle. In a series of papers, Spelke boldly argued that babies did not have to depend on a fumbling, trial-and-error exploration of their world for all their knowledge of it. They were born with some knowledge -- though it would need testing and revising along the way.

Spelke and like-minded researchers emphasize that they are talking about a baby’s "implicit knowledge" -- no infant, even if he could talk, could say why he can’t walk through a wall. They are not claiming that babies spin theories about motion and gravity while wearing out their pacifiers. As Karen Wynn explained, the kind of understanding that babies reveal by looking longer at an unprecedented event is "available only to their attentional systems. It’s a kind of general alert -- ‘Pay attention, something interesting and unexpected has just happened.’ That need not be explicitly available at a conscious, salient level; it could be at an automatic, unconscious one."

Some more recent studies of toddlers and preschoolers have raised a seeming paradox: the older children’s sense of solid objects appears to be less secure than that of infants. (A 2003 article on this topic is subtitled "Why Do Infants Look So Smart and Toddlers Look So Dumb?") Rebecca Rosenberg, a psychology graduate student at Harvard, has lately been running a study in which she shows two-year-olds a cabinet with a shelf in the middle and a sliding door that conceals the front. With the sliding door open, she drops a Koosh ball on the shelf and asks her subject if the ball is on top or under it. The toddler usually confidently responds, "On top!" But when Rosenberg conceals the shelf with the sliding door, and drops the ball again, most children have no idea where the ball is--they will say that it has vanished or fallen to the bottom of the cabinet (sailing right through a solid wood shelf). It isn’t until at least the age of three that kids can perform this task successfully, Rosenberg told me. "It’s just astounding to see the toddlers fail at it," she said. "We know that couple-month-old infants already know about solidity. Do they somehow unlearn what they knew as infants? That seems unlikely."

One possibility, of course, is that Spelke’s infant studies, or their conclusions, are somehow flawed. Spelke said that she is interested in the toddler studies, but she is not worried by them. She believes that the knowledge we have in one system (say, the attentional system) isn’t always available to us in others (say, the verbal or motor systems). Even adults show this split. Wynn told me about some recent studies in which adults are asked to predict where a ball that rolls around and around a circular ramp will finally come out. Adults, she said, are "terrible at it if they’re asked to draw the pathway the ball took, or make a verbal prediction of the path it will take. But if they are asked to reach in and find the ball, their hand automatically goes to the right place. With their motor system, they can anticipate correctly, but that knowledge isn’t accessible to them verbally."

To the layperson, there’s something faintly comic about looking-time studies. So much strenuous effort is made to engage the attention and record the fleeting stares of bobble-headed babies who are distracted by their own feet and fingers; and so many lofty claims about human nature are being based on these odd little encounters. Nevertheless, the looking-time paradigm has proved remarkably durable, and is widely trusted by researchers in the field. Brain imaging may be the next wave in infant studies, but it’s not yet very useful. Babies don’t lie flat and hold perfectly still, as an M.R.I. requires, unless they’re asleep--and if they’re asleep you can’t show them anything.

When Spelke was an undergraduate at Harvard, in the late sixties, she studied with the eminent child psychologist Jerome Kagan. "I was doing an undergrad thesis, looking at attachment and emotional reactions in babies," she recalled. "But I realized that we didn’t have a clue about what babies actually understood. I really wanted to study these emotional and social issues. But it seemed as if we first needed to know some basic things about what infants perceived and understood. So I made what’s become a thirty-year detour into human nature and the human mind."

The first major stop on the detour was Cornell, where Spelke earned her Ph.D. in an expeditious four years. One of her mentors was Eleanor Gibson, the grande dame of developmental psychology, who was gifted at designing elegant experiments. The most famous of these is known as the "visual cliff." (In the waiting area at Spelke’s laboratory, a small diorama depicts the experiment, with a doll standing in for the baby.) In the 1957 study, a sturdy sheet of glass was laid on a three-foot-high platform, with some of the glass extending beyond the platform. Gibson pasted checkerboarded paper between the glass and the platform; she also placed the paper on the floor, beneath the overhanging glass, creating the appearance of a checkerboarded "cliff." Would a baby who began crawling along the patterned path sensibly stop at the edge of the platform, even if his mother were coaxing him to continue onto the glass overhang? The answer was yes. The babies clearly had depth perception, Gibson concluded, and they did not require direct sensory experience of a cliff edge to know the most important thing about it.

Spelke said of Gibson, "She was the best experimental psychologist I ever met. I’ve spent my whole life aspiring to be like her. She combined hard-nosed experimental rigor with an insistence that the work you do be directly connected to real-world phenomena. Never do a study the motivation of which is to understand the result of a previous study. Do a study the motivation of which is to understand how people are functioning in the real world."

Spelke found Gibson inspiring for another reason, too. Gibson managed to have both a prominent scientific career and a family, without much help at home; her husband, a theorist of perception, had adopted a quixotic schedule that involved working all night and sleeping most of the day. Spelke recalled, "What most impressed me was that she could carry on with her whole life of teaching, running her lab, and doing these absolutely superb experiments, all while raising two children and taking out the garbage and cutting down the Christmas tree. I looked at her life, and I thought, Boy, this is an existence proof. This life is possible. Totally insane, maybe, but possible."

The first breakthrough in Spelke’s quest to understand how much infants knew occurred at Cornell. Piaget had contended that in babies the five senses operated separately, and that "inter-modal perception"-- the capacity to recognize, for instance, that the clattering sound you just heard and the pot lid you just saw your mother drop are part of the same event -- developed later, in toddlerhood. Spelke was skeptical of the Piaget line; in the mid-seventies, she devised an experiment to test it. She showed babies two films, on side-by-side screens, while playing the soundtrack for just one of them. Babies focussed on the screen for which the soundtrack was appropriate, correctly matching the picture and the sound.

Spelke’s first academic post was at the University of Pennsylvania. After nine years, she moved to Cornell, then to the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at M.I.T.; in 2001, she accepted an offer from Harvard, in part so that she could work alongside the cognitive psychologist Susan Carey, with whom she enjoys "productive disagreements." Along the way, Spelke was married briefly and later had a daughter, Bridget, who is now a pre-med student at McGill University, in Montreal. When Spelke was thirty-seven, she met her second husband, Elliott Blass, a psychology professor who was then at Johns Hopkins and is now at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Spelke recalled, "I was raising Bridget as a single mother, and felt quite complete and satisfied and happy in my life, which I think is always the moment at which you fall in love with someone." She and Blass had a son, Joe, who will enter the University of Chicago this fall. Blass studies motivation and emotions. "We sort of divide up the field between us," Spelke said. "But we’d rather talk about movies." She went on, "I adore movies. And, from the time my kids were old enough to keep their eyes open for two hours, they’ve been going to movies. We bought our present house because it’s walking distance from the Harvard Film Archive. And, when we first moved in, it was a hot August and then a hot September, and I remember watching Leni Riefenstahl on the Berlin Olympics with them for days." When I expressed surprise over this choice, she said earnestly, "They’re gripping. Oh, they’re wonderful movies for kids."

Spelke and her husband have a second home, a ramshackle farmhouse in the Loire Valley; they’ve spent all their sabbatical years in France, as well as nearly every summer while Bridget and Joe were growing up. To Spelke’s delight, both children are bilingual and "bicultural," with close friends in both countries. She wasn’t always so sanguine, though, about how this particular experiment would turn out. When she enrolled her then three-year-old son at the local école maternelle, he announced that he wasn’t going to say a word all year long. "For Joe’s first four months, the entire class would be focussed on some activity, and Joe would be off in a corner looking at Tintin books," she recalled. "And I thought, He’s never going to learn a word of this language; he’s never going to be integrated; I’m a terrible mother. And then, four months in, we were walking into class, and he said, ‘I’ve changed my mind now, Mom, I’m going to talk.’ And the next time I went in he was speaking complete sentences in French and singing all the songs, which he had learned all the words to while pretending not to pay attention. Both kids said it was the best year of their lives, and made them feel they can go anywhere or do anything."

Spelke mistrusts products that are marketed as brain boosters for babies, but, in an e-mail, she said that she thinks it’s "a good idea, whenever possible, for parents to expose their babies to people, places, and events that they themselves love and want their children to enjoy with them later on. There’s little explicit memory for events or places that are experienced in infancy, but I do think (and some research supports this) that there is implicit emotional memory for them." Spelke may never test this notion in her laboratory, but she is satisfied with the data generated by her family. She went on, "My hunch is that my own children love the things I love--travel, movies, blundering along in new languages--in part because they have been exposed to these things with me, literally since birth."

Spelke’s work has always been oriented toward finding the universal human attributes that lie beneath what she calls--optimistically, perhaps--the "superficial" cognitive differences of language, culture, and gender. At M.I.T., Spelke was inspired by Noam Chomsky’s ideas about the properties shared by all languages. "Beneath the surface variability of human languages are deep commonalities," she said in a public lecture with Chomsky last year. "Common underlying principles have to be there, because children have to be able to learn any of the world’s languages depending on where they happen to be born. And, as a matter of fact, they learn these languages very rapidly with no instruction, and from rather minimal and fragmentary evidence."

Lately, Spelke’s cross-cultural preoccupations have been sparking ideas for her kind of fastidious, imaginative, and weirdly specific experiments. (Working out the kinks of studies is clearly something she relishes. More than once, I heard her exclaim, "Damn, this is hard!" while talking to students about refining an experimental design--but she always said it with a grin.) A few years ago, Spelke, working with Susan Hespos, of Northwestern University, fashioned a study around a curious linguistic distinction that is made by Korean but not by English. Korean speakers indicate whether an object fits loosely or tightly with something else--a ring on a finger, a shoe in a box, a cup inside another cup--whereas English speakers simply use "in" or "on." (In English, a wedding ring is "on" your finger, but it could also be "on" the kitchen counter.) Spelke and Hespos relied on looking-time measures to see if five-month-old infants living in English-speaking households would also note the loose-versus-tight distinction--by looking longer at a cylinder that fitted loosely into a container after they’d been habituated to looking at a cylinder that fitted tightly, and vice versa. The babies detected the difference. Apparently, before their own language had convinced them that the distinction wasn’t a vital one, they carried a concept of it in their minds. In 2004, Spelke and Hespos wrote up their findings in modest, technical language for the journal Nature. ("Our research focuses on the crosscutting conceptual distinctions between actions producing loose-and tight-fitting contact relationships ... ") As a result, the layman might not have noticed that they were making an aggressive philosophical claim: that thought preëxists language. "These findings suggest that humans possess a rich set of concepts before we learn language," Spelke told The Financial Times when the study came out. In the science press, her colleagues concurred. "How do we think about the world before we are corrupted by culture and the world?" the psychologist Paul Bloom asked. "One way to learn is to look at babies."

Spelke has recently explored another way of addressing Bloom’s question. She has been working with a team of French researchers, including the linguist Pierre Pica and the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who are studying the Mundurukú, an isolated Amazonian tribe. (Since the Mundurukú are suspicious of outsiders, Pica is the only team member who goes to the Amazon. He travels to the jungle with a solar-powered laptop, and videotapes all the testing sessions.) The Mundurukú don’t have maps or compasses, words for any geometric shape except the circle, a counting routine, or words for numbers above five. Nonetheless, according to the team’s experiments, they do have a sense of geometry that allows them to navigate efficiently. And they also have the two core math abilities that Spelke has identified: the ability to differentiate between quantities and the primordial sense of addition and subtraction. When tribe members were given maps for the first time, they were able to orient themselves correctly and find hidden objects. Mundurukú children, when shown five right triangles and one isosceles triangle, and asked, in their language, to point to the "ugly" or "weird" one, performed as well as American children on a similar task. The Mundurukú could add and subtract with numbers under five, and they could do approximate number comparisons as successfully as the educated French speakers who constituted the control group. ("Pierre Pica came back from the Amazon with these necklaces," Spelke announced, laughing, at a recent lab meeting. "One of them has got a carving of hands on it, and several of the hands have only four fingers on them. It was, like, ‘Look! Hands have approximately five fingers!’ ") For Spelke, all this has been further confirmation of the notion that certain core abilities emerge spontaneously, and universally.

Spelke’s universalism, combined with her view that some mental capacities are inborn, has led her to an unusual place in academe. She believes in a fundamental human nature but parts company with other Darwinians when she casts doubt on the idea that cognitive gender differences are innate. A committed liberal who talks indignantly about race and gender discrimination, she diverges from most left-wing academics -- who like to conceive of human beings as "socially constructed" -- when she posits a biological basis to discrimination. Some of the newest studies in her lab examine whether babies make distinctions between people on the basis of race, or the language they speak. A recent study, led by Spelke’s graduate student Katherine Kinzler, showed that twelve-month-old babies are more likely to choose food offered by a stranger who speaks their parents’ language, even though they don’t yet speak themselves, and are only beginning to understand much of what is being said to them, and even though, at the moment when they are offered the gift, the stranger isn’t speaking. It could be, Spelke said, that there is "a core system whose job is to take all the people out there and divide them up into groups, so that when you encounter new people, or even familiar people about whom you have limited information, you can make inferences about their behavior and decide what you’re going to do."

Recently, when another graduate student, Kristin Shutts, presented the lab’s initial findings at a conference in South Africa, the response from some scientists was vitriolic -- the researchers were accused of "reifying" the concept of race. Spelke knows that if further studies eventually confirm the existence of an "us versus them" instinct in babies, it won’t be a welcome finding. But she believes that we shouldn’t be wary of asking the question--"Just because babies see it doesn’t mean it’s right," she said. In her view, nurture, or human will, is ultimately more powerful than nature, because humans are capable of rejecting certain aspects of their evolutionary inheritance -- recognizing them as wrong, either factually or morally or both.

She said, "Suppose it turned out that babies were predisposed to racism--that, once they figure out what race their parents are, they negatively evaluate people of other races. The worry would be that such a finding somehow justifies racism in adults, or makes us more defeatist about combatting racism. I would put it exactly backward. I would say, insofar as racism exists in human societies, we have a phenomenon and we need to know what produced it. Cognitive scientists have learned over the last couple of decades that people are really bad at probabilistic reasoning. We don’t conclude from this that we should fold all our statistics departments! We say, ‘Let’s try and understand what it is about the way that we think about numbers that makes us bad at understanding probability, and figure out what we can do to overcome those weaknesses.’ "

Spelke is equally determined to overcome what she considers to be sexist attitudes about women and science. Her debate with Steven Pinker was ostensibly on the limited subject of whether intrinsic gender differences accounted for the paucity of women among the ranks of tenured engineering, physical science, and math professors at élite institutions like Harvard. Nevertheless, the debate ranged farther, into basic questions about men’s and women’s ambitions and aptitudes. It was a civil occasion, certainly, but lively enough that the Harvard Crimson couldn’t quite resist calling the exchange a "showdown of the sexes."

When Pinker stepped up to the lectern, he chided Spelke, his fellow-innatist, for embracing "the extreme nurture position." He took issue with public remarks that Spelke had recently made at a campus panel, in which she declared that the evidence against an intrinsic male aptitude in science was overwhelming-- "as conclusive as any finding I know of in science." She had added that she found it hard to see how anyone could make a case for the other side. Pinker paused, then said, to an eruption of laughter, "Well, we certainly aren’t seeing the stereotypical gender difference in confidence here!"

Spelke had argued that gender bias and social expectations, some of them quite subtle, were the significant factors behind women’s limited presence in top scientific jobs. (For example, women tend to be evaluated for tenure in the same years that they are most likely to be having children.) But she had not claimed that men and women are indistinguishable in their cognitive profiles--just that the differences they do show don’t add up to a clear advantage for one sex or the other. There were good data to suggest, she noted, that men and women tend to resort to different strategies when solving certain types of math problems, for instance. Spelke elaborated on this at the debate with her usual punctiliousness:

If a task can only be solved by representing the geometry of the layout, we do not see a difference between men and women. But if the task can be accomplished either by representing geometry or by representing individual landmarks, girls tend to rely on the landmarks, and boys on geometry. To take another example, when you compare the shapes of two objects of different orientations, there are two different strategies you can use. You can attempt a holistic rotation of one of the objects into registration with the other, or you can do point-by-point featural comparisons of the two objects. Men are more likely to do the first; women are more likely to do the second... . Because of these differences, males and females sometimes show differing cognitive profiles on timed tests. When you have to solve problems fast, some strategies will be faster than others. Thus females perform better at some verbal, mathematical, and spatial tasks, and males perform better at other verbal, mathematical, and spatial tasks. This pattern of differing profiles is not well captured by the generalization, often bandied about in the popular press, that women are verbal and men are spatial. There doesn’t seem to be any more evidence for that than there was for the idea that women are people-oriented and men are object-oriented. Rather the differences are more subtle.

Pinker countered that, at the level of achievement they were discussing, small differences might matter a lot. He wasn’t talking about a gap in general intelligence -- he agreed that neither gender had an advantage in this regard -- or about the kinds of basic core abilities that Spelke had studied in infants. He wasn’t even talking about overall mathematical and spatial abilities, where, he conceded, men and women might well be equal. He was referring to rarefied competencies -- like the ability to mentally rotate shapes -- at which men tend to be faster and better.

"In many ways, this is an exotic phenomenon," Pinker said. "It involves biologically unprepared talents and temperaments: evolution certainly did not shape any part of the mind to do the work of a professor of mechanical engineering at M.I.T., for example." At issue here, Pinker argued, were "extremes of achievement. Most women are not qualified to be math professors at Harvard because most men aren’t qualified to be math professors at Harvard." Pinker noted that the I.Q.s of females are less variable, predominating in the middle range, whereas males slightly predominate at both ends, accounting for both "more idiots and more prodigies." Beyond that, Pinker said, loomed bigger, psychological sex differences. Men across cultures, he noted, constituted the more risk-taking and competitive sex -- though why risk-taking and competitiveness were more adaptive attributes for, say, aspiring mathematicians than for aspiring sociologists wasn’t exactly clear.

After Pinker and Spelke had given their talks, they sat at a table onstage, and listened to each other without interrupting. But when Pinker spoke, Spelke wore one of those smiles which suggest a certain effort--and when she spoke she used her large hands to make sweeping gestures, as if she were dismissing one silly notion after another. When Pinker started talking about how "the most subjective fields in academia--the social sciences, the humanities, the helping professions" had the greatest representation of women because they jibed with "what gave women satisfaction in life," Spelke looked as though she’d had enough. "I think it’s a really interesting possibility that the forces that were active in our evolutionary past have led men and women to evolve somewhat differing concerns," she began. "But to jump from that possibility to the present, and draw conclusions about what people’s motives will be for pursuing one or another career, is way too big a stretch." The career choices people pursue now, she concluded acidly, were "radically different from anything that anybody faced back in the Pleistocene."

Pinker was suggesting that, because of both sexual selection and parental-investment issues, women are selected to be more nurturing and men more competitive. Suppose that this were true, Spelke said, in the final words of the debate. What sort of motivation made a better scientist? Was it "competitive motives like those J. D. Watson described in The Double Helix to get the structure of DNA before Linus Pauling did? Or nurturant motives of the kind that Doug Melton" -- the Harvard developmental biologist -- "described recently to explain why he’s going into stem-cell research: to find a cure for juvenile diabetes, which his children suffer from? I think it’s anything but clear how motives from our past translate into modern contexts. We would need to do the experiment, getting rid of discrimination and social pressures, in order to find out."

The literature on sex difference is contradictory and confusing, and since the Summers upheaval there has been one volley after another. In a recent issue of Nature, the Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres published a commentary on having done science as both a man and a woman. He had a sex change at forty-two, and found that he was treated with more respect upon becoming a male-evidence, he claimed, that "discrimination" is what holds female researchers back. On the other side, Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California at San Francisco, has just published The Female Brain, in which she claims, among other things, that women use twenty thousand words a day, whereas men use an economical seven thousand. (The implication, presumably, is that women are better suited for gossiping or novel-writing than for, say, composing scientific abstracts.) None of these arguments settle the matter, though a firm belief in gender difference does seem to produce more best-sellers -- think of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus -- which could suggest either that the gender-difference view accords more with people’s common sense and experience or that Spelke’s hunch is right, and we are evolutionarily predisposed to dwell on difference. In the end, Spelke’s belief in universal aptitude may be proved only if women eventually do join, in significant numbers, the ranks of the math and science faculties where they are currently sparse. A hundred years ago, plenty of people believed that the reason there weren’t more female doctors was that women were intellectually and physically ill-suited for the job -- and that these shortcomings were innate and immutable. Today, half of the medical students in the country are women.

Recently, I asked Pinker about the cause of his disagreement with Spelke, given their shared belief in innate forms of cognition. "It’s hard to know," Pinker said. "Gender might be a factor. Also, my brand of nativism is tied more explicitly to evolutionary biology, which opens the door to differences between men and women in the same way there are differences between the sexes in almost all species." He added that, generally, what Spelke thinks is most interesting about human psychology is what we all have in common. He tended to agree, he said, but not to the extent that Spelke did.

Spelke’s mode of inquiry, as fruitful as it has been, can sometimes seem rigid and doctrinaire. Are looking-time measures really equal to a task as complex as assessing, say, whether there is a universal human impulse toward prejudice? Can infants really be said to have such a tendency, or is Spelke overloading her interpretation of a baby’s extended glance? Spelke’s belief in hardwired capacities strikes some developmental psychologists as reductive. Alison Gopnik, a baby researcher at Berkeley, has described Spelke’s idea of "core knowledge" as a "fundamentally oversimplified theoretical account."

Indeed, in some recent infant studies, babies’ preferences seem to show surprising mutability. A 2006 study that Spelke’s researchers are looking at with interest -- one of the authors, Talee Ziv, is now working at Spelke’s lab -- involved Caucasian infants raised in Israel, African infants raised in Ethiopia, and Ethiopian infants raised in Israel. Presented with photos on a screen, the white Israeli infants preferred looking at new faces of their own race; African babies raised in Ethiopia preferred to look at African faces. But the Ethiopian-Israeli infants, who had been exposed since birth to people of both races, showed no preference. The import of this study is ambiguous, Spelke said. The finding could mean that babies aren’t born prejudiced after all -- that they learn to be wary of others only if they grow up in an isolated environment. Or it could mean that babies are programmed to trust people who look more like their own parents, and that this instinct can be counterbalanced through enlightened education.

If the latter interpretation proved to be the case, Spelke would be optimistic. As she recently posted on Edge, a Web publication that airs scientific controversies, "Humans are capable of discovering that our core conceptions are false and of replacing them with truer ones." Just as our core intuitions about geometry once led humans to believe that the world was flat -- until the science that humans perfected proved otherwise -- core intuitions might lead us to believe that linguistic and racial differences mean something more fundamental than they really do.

"Nobody should be troubled by our research, whatever we come to find," Spelke told me. "Everybody should be troubled by the phenomena that motivate it: the pervasive tendency of people all over the world to categorize others into different social groups, despite our common and universal humanity, and to endow these groups with social and emotional significance that fuels ethnic conflict and can even lead to war and genocide." This mirrors her belief that, in time, feminism will embolden more women to take up high-level careers in the physical sciences, and more of us will recognize how alike men’s and women’s minds really are. For Spelke, who has spent most of her life documenting the core knowledge that we’re born with, the most important thing about it is our uniquely human ability to rise above it.

The Agitator

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 04:00:00 -0400

"Yesterday, I was hysterical," the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he'd allowed his animal to take in front of Fallaci's town house, on the Upper East Side. Big mistake. "I no longer have the energy to get really angry, like I used to," she added. It called to mind what the journalist Robert Scheer said about Fallaci after interviewing her for Playboy, in 1981: "For the first time in my life, I found myself feeling sorry for the likes of Khomeini, Qaddafi, the Shah of Iran, and Kissinger -- all of whom had been the objects of her wrath -- the people she described as interviewing 'with a thousand feelings of rage.' "

For two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were among the world's most powerful figures: Yasir Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his 1972 interview with her was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press," said that he had been flattered into granting it by the company he'd be keeping as part of Fallaci's "journalistic pantheon." It was more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left her subjects unskinned.

Fallaci's manner of interviewing was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn't hurt that she was petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent. During the Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to the Italian Ambassador "if K.I.A." In these images she looked as slight and vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting on the student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police with the wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first impulse of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his sweater, in order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her essential toughness never stopped taking people -- men, especially -- by surprise.

Fallaci's journalism, at first conducted for the Italian magazine L'Europeo and later published in translation throughout the world, was infused with a "mythic sense of political evil," as the writer Vivian Gornick once put it -- an almost adolescent aversion to power, which suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her preface to Interview with History, a 1976 collection of Q&As, "Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born." In Fallaci's interview with Kissinger, she told him that he had become known as "Nixon's mental wet nurse," and lured him into boasting that Americans admired him because he "always acted alone" -- like "the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town." Political cartoonists mercilessly lampooned this remark, and, according to Kissinger's memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon. (Kissinger claimed that she had taken his words out of context.) But the most remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci bluntly asked him, about Vietnam, "Don't you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it's been a useless war?" and Kissinger began his reply with the words "On this, I can agree."

Fallaci's interview with Khomeini, which appeared in the Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had traveled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah's home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran's Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, "Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?" The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. "If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat."

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to "hide themselves, all bundled up," when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who "contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress;" they weren't women like Fallaci, who "go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men." A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: "How do you swim in a chador?" Khomeini snapped, "Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women." Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. "That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now." She yanked off her chador.

In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, "At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview." When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she'd better not even mention the word "chador." Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. "First he looked at me in astonishment," she said. "Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, 'Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.' "

Fallaci recalled that she found Khomeini intelligent, and "the most handsome old man I had ever met in my life. He resembled the 'Moses' sculpted by Michelangelo." And, she said, Khomeini was "not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort of king -- a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God."

Upon leaving Khomeini's house after her first interview, Fallaci was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she'd been in the Ayatollah's presence. "The sleeves of my shirt were all torn off, my slacks, too," she recalled. "My arms were full of bruises, and hands, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."

Today, Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, The Rage and the Pride and The Force of Reason, have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult relationships with translators in the past.) A third, The Apocalypse, was recently published in Europe, in a volume that also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into "a colony of Islam," an abject place that she calls "Eurabia," which will soon "end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt." Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing -- invasion -- only this time with "children and boats" instead of "troops and cannons." And, as Fallaci sees it, the "art of invading and conquering and subjugating" is "the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled." Italy, unlike America, has never been a melting pot, or a "mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship. Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us...who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us." Muslim immigrants -- with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools -- have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds. (European governments are, in fact, hardening on these matters: France recently deported a Muslim cleric in Lyons who advocated wife-beating and the stoning of adulterous women.)

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. "If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your 'right of thought and expression.' But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a 'Well done, good for you.' But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched." The rhetoric of Fallaci's trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims "breed like rats;" in the second, she writes that this statement was "a little brutal" but "indisputably accurate." She ascribes behavior to bloodlines -- Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because "too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood" -- and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in The Rage and the Pride she complains about Somali Muslims leaving "yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery" in Florence. "Good Heavens!" she writes. "They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?" Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day "shit in the Sistine Chapel."

These books have brought Fallaci, who will turn seventy-seven later this month, and who has had cancer for more than a decade, to a strange place in her life. Much of the Italian intelligentsia now shuns her. (The German press has been highly critical, too.) A 2003 article in the left-wing newspaper La Repubblica called her ignorantissima, an "exhibitionist posing as the Joan of Arc of the West." A fashionable gallery in Milan recently showed a large portrait of her -- beheaded. After the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published the long article that became The Rage and the Pride, La Repubblica ran a reply from Umberto Eco, which did not mention Fallaci by name but denounced cultural chauvinism and called for tolerance. "We are a pluralistic society because we permit mosques to be built in our own home, and we cannot give this up just because in Kabul they put evangelical Christians in jail," he wrote. "If we did, we would become Taliban ourselves."

Fallaci has repeatedly fallen afoul of some of Europe's strict laws against vilifying religions or inciting racial hatred. (In Europe, the prevailing impulse toward certain kinds of outre opinions is to ban their expression.) In 2002, a French group, Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between Peoples, tried unsuccessfully to get The Rage and the Pride banned. The following year, Swiss officials, under pressure from Muslim groups in that country, asked that she be extradited for trial; the Italian Minister of Justice refused the request. And she currently faces trial in Italy, on charges that amount to blasphemy, of all things. Last year, Adel Smith, a convert to Islam who heads a group called the Muslim Union of Italy, and who had previously sued the government to have a crucifix removed from his sons' classroom, persuaded a judge in Bergamo to allow him to charge Fallaci with defaming Islam. A Mussolini-era criminal code holds that "whoever offends the state's religion, by defaming those who profess it, will be punished with up to two years of imprisonment." Though the code was written to protect the Catholic Church, it has been successively amended in the past ten years, so that it encompasses any "religion acknowledged by the state." The complaint against Fallaci marks the first time that the code has been invoked on behalf of any religion but Catholicism. (In January, Fallaci's supporters in the Italian Senate pushed through an amendment to the code, reducing the maximum penalty to five thousand euros.)

Yet Fallaci's recent books, and the specious trial that she is facing as a result -- her books may offend, but it is no less offensive to prosecute her for them -- have also made her a beloved figure to many Europeans. The books have been best-sellers in Italy; together they have sold four million copies. To her admirers, she is an aging Cassandra, summoning her strength for one final prophecy. In September, she had a private audience with Pope Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence outside Rome. She had criticized John Paul II for making overtures to Muslims, and for not condemning terrorism heartily enough, but she has hopes for Joseph Ratzinger. (The meeting was something of a scandal in Italy, since Fallaci has always said that she is an atheist; more recently, she has called herself a "Christian atheist," out of respect for Italy's Catholic tradition.) Last December, the Italian government presented her with a gold medal for "cultural achievement."

Fallaci's arguments appeal to many Europeans on a visceral level. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the "honor killings" of young women in England and Sweden, and the controversy in France over whether girls may wear head scarves to school have underscored the enormous clash in values between secular Europeans and fundamentalist Muslim immigrants. In Holland, immigration officials have begun showing potential immigrants films and brochures that detail certain "European" values, including equality of the sexes and tolerance of homosexuality. The implicit suggestion is that in order to live in Europe you must accept these ideas. Such clumsy efforts betray the frustration and confusion that many Europeans have felt since the riots that broke out in the suburbs of Paris last fall -- perhaps the most spectacular sign that the assimilation of Western Europe's fifteen million Muslims has stalled in many places, and never started in others.

Some European intellectuals have given Fallaci credit for offering an enraged, articulate voice to people who are genuinely bewildered and dismayed by the challenges of assimilating Islamic immigrants. In 2002, writing in the Italian weekly Panorama, Lucia Annunziata, a former foreign correspondent and columnist, and Carlo Rossella, then the magazine's editor, argued that The Rage and the Pride had "redefined Italy's conception of the current conflict between the Western world and the Islamic world...Oriana Fallaci has confronted the issue with ironclad simplicity: We are different, she has said. And, at this point, we are incompatible." The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, writing in Le Point, said that Fallaci "went too far," reducing all "Sons of Allah to their worst elements," yet he commended her for taking "the discourse and the actions of our adversaries" at their word and -- in the wake of September 11th, the execution of Daniel Pearl, the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, and other atrocities committed in the name of Islam -- not being intimidated by the "penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it."

Last year, a support committee for Fallaci collected some letters that it had received from people across Italy and presented them as a testimonial to her. A Florentine couple wrote, "Brava, Oriana. You had the courage and the pride to speak in the name of most Italians (who are perhaps too silent) who still have not sold out the social, moral, and religious values that belong to us...If [immigrants] do not share our ideas, then why do they come to Italy? Why should we endure arrogance and interference by those who have no desire to integrate into our system and who are darkened by anti-Western hatred? We welcome them as guests, but immediately they act like the owners." Another fan wrote, "In this tragic and historic moment, only one voice has been raised high to speak for the conscience of most Westerners... . That is why we are impotently witnessing the breakdown and decline of a civilization whose values are now ridiculed by those who are in charge of protecting them... Thank you, Oriana."

Fallaci owns an apartment in Florence and has an estate in the Tuscan countryside. But she spends most of the year in New York, where she leads a fairly solitary life and, necessarily, spends a lot of time visiting doctors. In November, when she delivered an acceptance speech for an award given by the conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, it was a rare public appearance.

"Darling," she growled over the phone the first time we spoke, "as you well know, I never give interviews." Strictly speaking, this isn't true. Over the years, she's given many of them, sometimes with embarrassing results -- in Scheer's 1981 Playboy interview, she complained about homosexuals who "swagger and strut and wag their tails" and "fat" women reporters who didn't like her. When I visited her on a rainy Saturday afternoon in April, and again the next day, I found her voluble and dramatic, capable of leaping to her feet to illustrate a point, and shouting when she felt the point warranted it -- which was often. She smoked little brown Nat Sherman cigarettes; smoking, she believes, "disinfects" her.

Fallaci's New York residence is a handsome nineteenth-century brownstone, painted white, with a walled garden in the back. She had longed for such a house since childhood; as a young girl in Italy during the Second World War, she'd found a Collier's magazine in a care package dropped by U.S. military pilots, and fallen in love with a photo essay about American houses. "It's funny to say that, with the marvelous architecture we have in Italy, I desired a house like this," she said. "I grew up with this obsession of a white house with a black door." Inside, the second-floor rooms, where we talked, had a scholarly, slightly worn elegance. The bookshelves held translations of Fallaci's books and leather-bound early editions of Dickens, Voltaire, and Shakespeare. There were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil paintings on the walls; an old-fashioned cream-colored dial phone sat on a small table with a stained-glass lamp. It was the sort of setting where you could imagine retired professors sipping port and sparring genially over Greek participles. It was not the sort of setting where you expected to find a woman of Fallaci's age yelling "Mamma mia! " and threatening to break various people's heads and blow things up.

We sat down next to a table piled with newspaper clippings from Italy, which chronicled Fallaci's anti-Islamic crusade: articles by her and articles about her, often on the front page. The Italian press is, as she puts it, "ob-sess-ed" with her. One article, "Reading Oriana in Tehran," which had run in La Stampa, claimed that Fallaci was a legend among independent-minded women in Iran. "That's damn good!" she said. Fallaci's earlier books are widely available in Iran, but the trilogy has been banned. "You know what these women did?" she said. "They got copies in English and in French, and they photocopied them, chapter by chapter, and distributed them to others. They can go to jail for that." The reporter for La Stampa had mainly found women who admired Fallaci for her earlier work: two female university students noted that Fallaci had been equally tough on the Shah and on Khomeini, and that she'd shown up to get her Iranian visa wearing nail polish and jeans.

On the day I visited, Fallaci was dressed like a refined European lady: tweed skirt, leaf-green sweater, handsome antique jewelry, suede pumps. She wore her hair tied neatly at the nape of her neck rather than long and loose, as she used to, but she still looked beautiful -- she has a perfect oval face and robust cheekbones. She put on a pair of jewel-rimmed reading glasses as she brandished another clipping, and said with satisfaction, "Ah, this is the scandal!" The conservative newspaper Libero had campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Fallaci to be made a Senator for Life, an honor conferred by the Italian President. According to the paper, the outgoing President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, had considered giving Fallaci the title, but lost his nerve. "To me, in a sense, it was a relief," Fallaci said. "I didn't want to be Senator for Life, and stay in Rome. I would not know where to sit." She hopped up to demonstrate, pointing to the left and the right sides of an imaginary aisle -- she belonged to no political side. Nevertheless, with evident delight, she noted that Ciampi's "wife was infuriated at him" for the decision. "For some time, she didn't speak to him. Three days after Christmas, she managed to have me receive a bouquet of white flowers. That was cute."

I visited Fallaci on the day before the Italian election, in which Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was defeated by the center-left candidate, Romano Prodi. Fallaci told me that she had not sent in an absentee ballot. She loved referenda: "Do you want the hunter to go hunting under your window? No! Do you want the Koran in your schools? No!" "No" was something Fallaci was happy to say. But Berlusconi and Prodi were "two fucking idiots," she said. "Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn't vote. No! Because I have dignity... If, at a certain moment, I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on my own face."

Many of the clippings on Fallaci's table focused on Adel Smith's lawsuit against her. She said that she would not attend the trial, which is scheduled for later this month. Although she is no longer at risk of incarceration, she invoked the possibility. "Because, you know, I am a danger to myself if I get angry," she said. "If they were thinking to give me three years in jail, I will say or do something for which they give me nine years! I am capable of everything if I get angry."

I'd always thought of Fallaci as an icon of the nineteen-sixties -- one of those women who had lived an emancipated life without ever calling herself a feminist, an insouciant heroine out of The Golden Notebook or Bonjour Tristesse. She denigrated marriage, got thrown out of nice restaurants for wearing slacks, and hung out with Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman. Her autobiographical novel Letter to a Child Never Born (1975) was a free woman's despairing confession of ambivalence about bearing a child. A Man(1979) was a fictional tribute to her great love, the Greek resistance fighter

Alexandros Panagoulis, who died in a suspicious automobile accident in Athens three years after they met. Panagoulis had been imprisoned, and endured torture, for his failed attempt on the life of the Greek junta leader George Papadopoulos, in 1968. "I didn't want to kill a man," he told Fallaci in an interview. "I'm not capable of killing a man. I wanted to kill a tyrant." As a political prisoner, Panagoulis was defiant toward his captors and wrote poetry in his own blood; Fallaci considered him a model of what it is to be a man. I thought of her as a product of that heady time when big and bloody political matters were still at stake in Europe (dictators ruled Spain, Portugal, and Greece), but small, sophisticated cultural rebellions (movies, hair styles, poetic manifestos) made life chic and interesting. There's some truth to this image, but Fallaci's sensibility is a product less of the sixties than of the forties, and the struggle against Fascism in the Second World War.

Fallaci was born in Florence in 1929, to a family with a long history of rebellion. Her mother, Tosca, she said, was the orphaned daughter of an anarchist -- "and I tell you those were people with balls! With balls! And they were the first ones to be executed." On both sides of her family, she said, she had relatives who fought for the Risorgimento -- "people who were always in jail." Fallaci was an avid reader as a child (her parents lived modestly but splurged on books), and a favorite author was Jack London. His tales of brave acts in the face of savage nature inspired her to become a writer. She describes her father, Edoardo -- a craftsman who became a leader in the anti-Fascist movement in Tuscany, and who served time in prison for it -- as a sweet man. "Heroes can be sweet," she said, adding that Panagoulis had been that way, too. But both of Fallaci's parents prized courage and toughness in their three daughters. In The Rage and the Pride she tells a story about the Allied bombardment of Florence on September 25, 1943. She and her family took refuge in a church as the bombs began to fall. The walls were shaking -- the priest cried out, "Help us, Jesus!" -- and Oriana, who was the eldest, at fourteen, began to cry. "In a silent, composed way, mind you," she writes. "No moans, no hiccups. But Father noticed it all the same, and, in order to help me, to calm me down, poor Father, he did the wrong thing. He gave me a powerful slap -- he stared me in the eyes and said, 'A girl does not, must not, cry.' " Fallaci says that she's never cried since -- not even when Panagoulis died.

As a teenager, Fallaci did clandestine work for the anti-Fascist underground -- she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia, and she carried explosives and delivered messages. After Italy surrendered, in September, 1943, and American and British prisoners began escaping from prison camps, one of her tasks was to accompany them "past the lines" and to safe refuge. Fallaci was chosen because she wore her hair in pigtails and looked deceptively innocent. "It was so scary, because there were minefields, and you never knew where the mines were," she recalled. "When my mother read that in a book later, she said, to my father, 'You would have sacrificed newly born children! You and your ideas.' And then she said, 'Well, but I had a feeling you were doing something like that.'"

Fallaci's parents looked upon the Americans as their particular friends, and when she was in high school they insisted that she learn English when her classmates were studying French. It was the beginning of a lifelong affinity for America, even when, as during the Vietnam War, she was sharply critical of its policies. "In my old age, I have been thinking about this, and I have reached the conclusion that those who have physical courage also have moral courage," she said. "Physical courage is a great test." She added, "I know I have courage. But I'm not alone. My sister Neera was like me. And my second sister, Paola, too. It came from the education my parents gave us."

She proudly told a story about her mother, which, like other recollections, sounded as if it might have been polished over time. "When my father was arrested, we didn't know where they had him, so she went everywhere for two days and finally she found him, at the house of torture. It was called Villa Triste. They killed people there. And the Fascist major was named Mario Carita -- Major Charity. Mother -- I don't know how she did it -- she went to the office of Major Charity, passing a room that was full of blood on the floor, the blood of three men who had been arrested and tied together, and one of them was my father. Carita says, 'Madam. I have no time to lose. Your husband will be executed tomorrow morning at six. You can dress in black.' My mother got up -- and I always imagine the scene this way, as if she were the Statue of Liberty -- and my mother said, 'Mario Carita, tomorrow morning I shall dress in black, like you said. But if you are born from the womb of a woman, ask your mother to do the same, because your day will come very soon.' You could think for a year before you came up with something like that -- to her, it came." Her mother was pregnant at the time, Fallaci went on. "She mounted on her bicycle, and all at once she had pains so terrible. She entered into a beautiful building and, in the atrium, she lost the child. She put it in, I don't know, a handkerchief or something. She mounted the bicycle again. She rode home. I opened the door, and there was mother, as pale as snow. And before she entered she said, 'Father will be executed tomorrow morning at six, and Elena' -- that was the name she had given the baby -- 'is dead.' No tears." In the end, Edoardo Fallaci was spared, though he spent additional time in jail. Fallaci's sister Neera became a writer, and died of cancer; Paola is a perfectionist gardener -- imagine a cross between Martha Stewart and Oriana -- who raises prize-quality chickens on Fallaci's property in rural Tuscany.

Fallaci sees the threat of Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters grew up fighting. She told me, "I am convinced that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done the same thing." She elaborated, in an e-mail, "Look at the Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose their culture, or so-called culture, on us...I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West."

Fallaci refuses to recognize the limitations of this metaphor -- say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not the same as an annexation by another state. And although European countries should indeed refuse to countenance certain cultural practices -- polygamy, "honor killings," and anti-Semitic teachings, for example -- Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly, European countries have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating Muslim residents. In Germany, where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be offered in schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained that the Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam. The result, the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington, is that "Islam as taught in Turkish schools is a sort of modernized, semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the full Wahhabi blast." (This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci's objections, however, have more to do with her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany -- she does her own wailing imitation -- is a form of oppression. Yet such examples do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating.

"They live at our expense, because they've got schools, hospitals, everything," she said at one point, beginning to shout. "And they want to build damn mosques everywhere." She spoke of a new mosque and Islamic center planned for Colle di Val d'Elsa, near Siena. She vowed that it would not remain standing. "If I'm alive, I will go to my friends in Carrara -- you know, where there is the marble. They are all anarchists. With them, I take the explosives. I make you juuump in the air. I blow it up! With the anarchists of Carrara. I do not want to see this mosque -- it's very near my house in Tuscany. I do not want to see a twenty-four-metre minaret in the landscape of Giotto. When I cannot even wear a cross or carry a Bible in their country! So I BLOW IT UP! "

The magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is opposed to abortion, unless she "were raped and made pregnant by a bin Laden or a Zarqawi." She is fiercely opposed to gay marriage ("In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals"), and suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the United States these past few months "disgust" her, especially when protesters displayed the Mexican flag. "I don't love the Mexicans," Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the hands of Mexican police in 1968. "If you hold a gun and say, 'Choose who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,' I have a moment of hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls."

In The Rage and the Pride, Fallaci portrays the attacks of September 11th as a thunderclap that woke her from a quiet, novel-writing existence and transformed her, almost unwillingly, into an anti-Islamic rebel. But Fallaci's distaste for Islam goes way back. Reasonable worries about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism were combined with a visceral revulsion and the need for a new enemy, in the post-Fascist, post-Communist world. Her interviews with Yasir Arafat (whom she loathed), Qaddafi (whom she also loathed), and even Muhammad Ali (whom she walked out on, she says, after he belched in her face) all fuelled her antipathy toward the Muslim world. So did her experiences in Beirut during its disintegration, in the nineteen-eighties -- the basis for her 1990 novel, Inshallah.

I started wondering if Fallaci would tolerate any Muslim immigration, or any mosque in Europe, so I asked her these questions by e-mail, and she sent back lengthy replies. "The tolerance level was already surpassed fifteen or twenty years ago," she wrote, "when the Left let the Muslims disembark on our coasts by the thousands. And it is well know...that I do not accept the mendacity of the so-called Moderate Islam. I do not believe that a Good Islam and a Bad Islam exist. Only Islam exists. And Islam is the Koran. And the Koran says what it says. Whatever its version. Of course there are exceptions. Also, considering the mathematical calculation of probabilities, some good Muslims must exist. I mean Muslims who appreciate freedom and democracy and secularism. But, as I say in the Apocalypse,...good Muslims are few. So tragically few, in fact, that they must go around with bodyguards." (Here she mentioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former member of the Dutch parliament, whom Holland, shamefully, declared last month that it would strip of her citizenship, citing an irregularity in her 1997 asylum application.) She wrote that she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in Europe "insidious" and "offensive," because it "aims to portray me as the bloodthirsty fanatics, who during the French Revolution beheaded even the statues of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ and the Saints. Or as the equally bloodthirsty fanatics of the Bolshevik Revolution, who burned the icons and executed the clergymen and used the churches as warehouses. Really, no honest person can suggest that my ideas belong to that kind of people. I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its Mein Kampf, its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently."

My second meeting with Fallaci was a less inflammatory encounter. She is an excellent cook, and she made us lunch -- cotechino sausage, polenta, mashed potatoes, and delicious little tarts with pine nuts and dried fruit -- and served champagne. I'd never seen anyone approach certain kitchen tasks with such ferocity. "I must CRUSH the potatoes," she declared. At one point, we spoke about populist leaders in Latin America, and the political left's romance with them over the years; I mentioned Hugo Chávez, the President of Venezuela. "Mamma mia! Mamma mia! " Fallaci shouted from the kitchen. "Listen," she said more calmly. "You cannot govern, you cannot administrate, with an ignoramus." When I left, she insisted on giving me a bag of chestnut flour and dictating a recipe for a dessert that she says children love. "If you make a mistake, you spoil everything," she instructed, adding, "Get the good olive oil -- not the kind they do in New Jersey."

Fallaci was wearing a sweater and a skirt again that day. Late in life, she realized that skirts are more comfortable than the pants she had favored as a young woman. Besides, she wore pants when other women didn't because she was "a person who had always gone against the current," certainly since she started her writing career, at age sixteen, as a beat reporter for a Florentine newspaper. Now that everybody wore pants, what was the point? She had some evening dresses upstairs, relics from a brief period in her early thirties when she'd been a little less serious. But now they felt to her "like monuments;" where would she wear them? We talked about the historical novel that she had set aside after September 11th, when "this Islam business kidnapped me," her regrets that she's never had children, and her long illness. One of her doctors, she said, had asked her recently, "Why are you still alive?" Fallaci responded, "Dottore, don't do that to me. Someday I break your head." She added, "Another day, I smiled and said, 'You tell me -- you are the doctor.' See, I got offended. 'I don't want to come here to hear about my death. Your duty is to speak to me about life, to keep me alive.' "

She surprised me with a charming story about being a young writer in New York in the nineteen-sixties. At the time, she recalled, she'd had a chance to interview Greta Garbo -- a mutual friend wanted to set it up. But Fallaci admired Garbo's fierce and elegant privacy, and didn't want to pursue the matter. And then one winter evening Fallaci was shopping at the Dover Delicatessen, on Fifty-seventh Street, and Garbo happened to be there: "You couldn't not recognize her. She was Greta Garbo. She was dressed like Greta Garbo -- with the hair, the glasses. And she was choosing chicken with extreme care. She would look at a leg and toss it back, then the breast, and so on. And I felt ashamed of myself that I was observing her. I went in the other aisle, and I remember I got a lot of things, because I wanted her to go out and not go by me." It was a rainy night and Fallaci had no umbrella. She recalled that Garbo, on her way out the door, stopped and held it open. "She said, 'Here, Miss Fallaci.' I looked like a poor, pitiful bird." They walked together, under Garbo's umbrella, to the corner of Third Avenue, and Fallaci -- in a rare moment of restraint -- barely said a word.

After I had interviewed Fallaci, I discovered two great examples of her journalism that I had not read before. In a witty 1963 article about Federico Fellini, Fallaci describes with wary, nervy thoroughness the many times and places that the great director kept her waiting. When she finally corners him, she begins by saying, "So then let us brace ourselves, Signor Fellini, and let us discuss Federico Fellini, just for a change. I know you find it hard: you are so withdrawing, so secretive, so modest. But it is our duty to discuss him, for the sake of the nation." She goes on in this vein until Fellini cuts her off, saying, "Nasty liar. Rude little bitch." In her introduction to the interview, she writes, "I used to be truly fond of Federico Fellini. Since our tragic encounter, I'm a lot less fond. To be exact, I'm no longer fond of him. That is, I don't like him at all. Glory is a heavy burden, a murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare." Equally absorbing, in a different way, was the section of her 1969 book, Nothing, and So Be It, in which she describes the events of October, 1968, in Mexico City, when soldiers shot and bayoneted hundreds of anti-government protesters. Fallaci was detained with a group of students, and was ultimately shot three times. "In war, you've really got a chance sometimes, but here we had none," she writes. "The wall they'd put us up against was a place of execution; if you moved the police would execute you, if you didn't move the soldiers would kill you, and for many nights afterward I was to have this nightmare, the nightmare of a scorpion surrounded by fire, unable even to try to jump through the fire because if it did so it would be pierced through." Dragged down the stairs by her hair and left for dead, Fallaci was ultimately taken to a hospital, where she underwent surgery to remove the bullets. One of the doctors who cared for her came close and murmured, "Write all you've seen. Write it!" She did, becoming a crucial witness to a massacre that the Mexican government denied for years.

These pieces showed Fallaci in her prime. In her e-mail, however, she told me that she didn't really remember the interview with Fellini -- only that she didn't like him. And her memories of Mexico City in 1968 had largely devolved into a dislike of Mexicans. Fallaci's virtues are the virtues that shine most brightly in stark circumstances: the ferocious courage, and the willingness to say anything, that can amount to a life force. But Fallaci never convinced me that Europe's encounter with immigration is that sort of circumstance.

Not that it would matter to her. "You've got to get old, because you have nothing to lose," she said over lunch that afternoon. "You have this respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don't give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn't used to say before -- you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness -- now I open my big mouth. I say, 'What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself -- I say what I want.' "

Darwin in the Dock

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Courtroom battles about the teaching of evolution rarely have devoted much discussion to the science of evolution. This is partly because few working scientists have been willing to testify against evolutionary theory, and partly because judges have been reluctant to engage the heady question of what constitutes science. Even in the Scopes "Monkey Trial," of 1925, the judge, John Raulston, limited the issue at hand to whether John Scopes, a high-school teacher, had broken a Tennessee law against teaching "that man has descended from a lower order of animal." He refused to consider whether the law made any sense in scientific terms, and rebuffed efforts by the defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, to bring in an array of evolutionary scientists. In Epperson v. Arkansas, the landmark 1968 Supreme Court case in which a biology teacher named Susan Epperson successfully sought to overturn a state law banning the teaching of evolution, the trial in Little Rock lasted less than a day and did not include any scientific testimony. Edwards v. Aguillard, a 1987 case in which the Supreme Court struck down a statute requiring that creationism and evolution be taught side by side in public-school science classes, began in district court with a summary judgment against the Louisiana law, and thus had no testimony at all. Last spring, when the Kansas Board of Education held hearings on the teaching of evolution that were dominated by advocates of intelligent design, evolutionary scientists boycotted them, perhaps to their regret: in November, the Kansas board voted to include challenges to Darwinian theory in the state standards.

Nothing in the background of John E. Jones III-the judge who recently presided in a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, courtroom over Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the first case to test whether it is constitutional for public-school classes to present the argument of intelligent design-suggested that he would deviate from this pattern. Jones, who is fifty years old, was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. His family owns golf courses. In 1995, Tom Ridge, who was then the state's Republican governor, appointed him chairman of the state liquor-control board; in that post, he banned the sale of Bad Frog Beer, because its label shows a frog giving the finger. Yet the trial that Jones oversaw, which took place in a functional courtroom trimmed with teal and white panels, turned out to be rather like the biology class you wish you could have taken. Lawyers spent six weeks posing questions like "What is science?" and "Who was Charles Darwin?" Proponents of intelligent design--the argument that certain features of the natural world are so complex and intricately put together that they must have been deliberately fashioned--claimed that it was a bold new scientific idea that had been unfairly maligned. And scientists who believe that intelligent design is merely a repackaged version of creationism made a case for evolution that was thrilling in its breadth (evidence from homology, modern genetics, molecular biology, the fossil record) and satisfying in its detail (a recently excavated fossil of the oviraptor, a small carnivorous dinosaur of the kind that evolved into birds, depicts the creature brooding over its eggs like a hen).

The trial ended the first week of November. Jones has said that he will render his verdict by the first week in January, which is just before the ninth-grade biology students at Dover Senior High School are scheduled to start their unit on evolution. If Jones sides with the school district, the students will be read a four-paragraph statement casting doubt on the validity of Darwinian theory and touting intelligent design as an alternative. If Jones sides with the plaintiffs, he will establish the precedent that including intelligent design in a public-school curriculum represents a tacit endorsement of Christianity-thus violating the First Amendment, which states, in part, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

During the trial, which did not have a jury, Jones sometimes joked, in his appealingly growly baritone, about all the science he and everyone else in the courtroom were contending with. One morning, he deadpanned that stopping for an early lunch break would allow for a "nice, long afternoon of expert testimony." After a few hours of instruction from Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, Jones observed that his "friends in the jury box"--the reporters--looked "like they could use a little caffeine." When a lawyer for the plaintiffs, Witold Walczak, asked Miller how he would explain to his mother the microbiology he had just been laying out, Judge Jones chimed in, "Or me!" Jones has the rugged charm of a nineteen-forties movie star; he sounded and looked like a cross between Robert Mitchum and William Holden. (According to a local paper, the Judge's wife thinks that Tom Hanks should play him--a not entirely idle bit of speculative casting, since a representative from Paramount Pictures sat through the whole trial, filing dispatches to a potential screenwriter.) Despite his jokes, however, Jones not only allowed copious expert testimony but often seemed keenly interested in it, tilting his head toward the witnesses and raising his eyebrows in mild surprise. He seemed particularly engaged when Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at Berkeley, started showing slides of prehistoric animals-which he called, variously, "critters," "guys," and "paleozoic roadkill"--in order to illustrate that we have a lot of transitional fossils demonstrating the evolution of fish to amphibians and of dinosaurs to birds. And Jones clearly enjoyed Padian's remarks on the educational value of dissecting your Kentucky Fried Chicken (the pointy part of the wing shows where the individual digits of the dinosaur fused together in birds).

You sometimes hear it said that a courtroom is not a proper venue for debating science. In this case, it proved to be an ideal forum. For one thing, it allowed for the close questioning of Michael Behe, the Lehigh University biochemist who is the leading intellectual of intelligent design (and one of the movement's few working scientists). Under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, a dogged lawyer for the plaintiffs, Behe conceded, for example, that a definition of science that could be expanded to embrace intelligent design could, by the same token, embrace astrology. And he was unable to name any peer-reviewed research generated by intelligent design, though the movement has been around for more than a decade.

The trial also allowed the lawyers to act as proxies for the rest of us, and ask of scientists questions that we'd probably be too embarrassed to ask ourselves. In a courtroom, you must lay an intellectual foundation in order to earn a line of questioning--and so the lawyers stripped matters neatly back to the first principles of science. Considering how often it is said that evolution is "just" a theory, for instance, it is clear that many people either do not know or do not accept the scientific definition of a theory. The lawyers for the pro-evolution side went to great lengths to make the point that, although all science is provisional, a scientific theory is a powerful explanation that unites a large body of facts and relies on testable hypotheses. As Padian testified, it is not "something that we think of in the middle of the night after too much coffee and not enough sleep."

Intelligent design is an argument by inference. If we walk down the beach and see the words "John loves Mary" in the sand--an example offered by the intelligent design textbook "Of Pandas and People"--we can infer that someone wrote them. We can make a similar inference, the textbook claims, when we look at the inner workings of some of nature's niftier products. In intelligent design's precursor forms--the nineteenth-century arguments of the Reverend William Paley, for instance, who rhapsodized about the mechanics of the human eye--the implied author is clearly God. The modern version of intelligent design, however, declines to specify who the master designer might be. Behe and other advocates will freely admit that, for them, the designer of life on earth is the God of Christianity. (Intelligent design, Behe has written, is "less plausible to those for whom the existence of God is in question, and is much less plausible for those who deny God's existence.") But, conceivably, the intelligent designer could be space aliens or a time traveller from the future. It's hard to believe that any proponents of the idea actually believe this.

The example that proponents of intelligent design dote upon is the bacterial flagellum, the outboard-motor-like apparatus that propels some bacteria. This tiny wonder isn't just machinelike, they argue; it is a machine, something that could never have been produced by random mutation and natural selection, no matter how many billions of years you gave it. (Behe has claimed that all its parts would need to be present and working at once for it to function.) During the trial, the flagellum was invoked dozens of times. The cumulative effect of all these return engagements was the opposite of the one intended, however: it began to seem as if the intelligent-design movement had hitched its wagon to one very tiny star--that on the side of evolution you had a vast accumulation of evidence from sundry disciplines, and on the other side you had . . . an extracellular appendage. To be fair, Behe cited a few other examples of "irreducible complexity," like the blood-clotting mechanism. But when one of the lawyers for Behe's side joked that "we could probably call this the Bacterial Flagellum Trial," he was hitting a little too close to home. Indeed, on the penultimate day of the trial, when Scott Minnich, a professor of microbiology at the University of Idaho who was testifying for the intelligent-design side, showed a slide of the bacterial flagellum, Judge Jones offered the dry understatement "We've seen that." Minnich, who up until then had struck a staid, even sombre tone, acknowledged the sentiment: "I kind of feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor's fifth husband. As the old adage goes, I know what to do, but I just can't make it exciting."

Behe's testimony went on for three days--longer than that of any other witness. He certainly looked professorial, with his graying beard and oversized glasses. And he seemed authoritative when he discussed the recondite structures of microorganisms. But under cross-examination Behe sometimes sounded evasive and circumlocutious; he seemed to have trouble hearing challenging questions, and would put his hand to his ear and ask the lawyer to repeat them.

Eric Rothschild kept at him with cheerful mercilessness. "Let's start with the bacterial flagellum," he said at one point. "You've made a point about how complicated and intricate it is?" Behe nodded. Rothschild went on, in a deceptively reassuring gee-whiz tone: "And it really is! I mean, it looks remarkable. But a lot of biological life is pretty remarkable."

Behe saw what he was up to. "That makes me very suspicious," he said.

"You're suspicious about how remarkable biological life is?" Rothschild asked incredulously. Then he marched Behe through a list of biological marvels, whose marvellousness Behe duly acknowledged: photosynthesis; the stars and planets; flowers. Rothschild's point was that arguments expressing astonishment at nature's complexities are obvious and infinitely extendable--why limit yourself to the bacterial flagellum?--and generally considered insufficient as science, however pleasing they might be from a philosophical or aesthetic perspective. When Rothschild added "the entire human body" to his list, saying, "Now, that's an amazing biological structure," Behe gazed upward dreamily and joked, "I'm thinking of examples."

"Hopefully, not mine!" Rothschild responded.

"Rest assured," came the reply.

Rothschild then asked Behe how, exactly, the designer executed his handiwork. Behe declined to speculate, but Rothschild pressed him for specifics, just skirting absurdity. Was the designer limited to making "the blueprint"? ("Well, no, the designer would also have to somehow cause the plan to, you know, go into effect," Behe replied.) Did the designer make each and every protein in the flagellum? (That was a difficult question to address and would require "lots and lots of distinctions to be made.") Did the designer fashion every individual flagellum or just "the first lucky one"? And so on.

In his writings, Behe has noted that his claim that the bacterial flagellum could not have emerged through evolution is open to rebuttal: "To falsify such a claim, a scientist could go into the laboratory, place a bacterial species lacking a flagellum under some selective pressure (for mobility, say), grow it for ten thousand generations, and see if a flagellum--or any equally complex system--was produced." Rothschild asked Behe if he had attempted such an experiment. No, Behe said, with a weary smile; he doubted it would be fruitful, and he preferred to spend his time on other things.

Even if such an experiment were performed and failed to give rise to a bacterial flagellum, Rothschild suggested to Behe, it would hardly be dispositive. "It's entirely possible that something that couldn't be produced in the lab in two years or a hundred years, or even in a laboratory that was in operation for all of human existence, could be produced over three and a half billion years," he said. Behe conceded the point. And that, Rothschild concluded, is precisely why the age of the earth is crucial to any biological theory about the origins and development of life. And yet, Rothschild observed, "it doesn't matter to intelligent design" whether the earth is "billions of years old or ten thousand years old."

"Intelligent design is not a person," Behe retorted. "So it doesn't have feelings like you are describing."

For the vast majority of scientists, the argument against intelligent design starts with the notion that science is bound by methodological naturalism--it looks for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and has nothing to say about the supernatural. This was the foundation the plaintiffs' lawyers had to lay, and they had an ideal craftsman in Kenneth Miller, the Brown biology professor. Miller is the co-author of a best-selling series of high-school and college biology textbooks; students who lug the books around in their backpacks typically refer to them by their cover photographs--the "dragonfly book," the "lion book," and the "elephant book." He is also one of the few prominent scientists willing to debate creation scientists and intelligent-design advocates. (Many mainstream scientists don't want to be bothered to debate something they find as uncontroversial as the theory of evolution. Miller has been doing it for years, aided, perhaps, by his experience as an umpire for N.C.A.A. softball. In that capacity, a recent article on Miller reported, he has had "every foul word in the book hurled at him, and some dirt, too.") He is also a practicing Catholic, and therefore embodies the notion that religion and science are, as Stephen Jay Gould once called them, "non-overlapping magisteria." Miller, who is slim and has a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, addressed counsel on both sides as "sir," made delicate scholarly jokes that weren't too geeky, and answered each question with undiminished energy, as though he'd heard it before, but not that day, so, really, it was as fresh and interesting as ever. He has a firm voice and a forthright way of putting things: after noting that 99.9 per cent of the organisms that have ever lived on earth are now extinct, for instance, he said that "an intelligent designer who designed things, 99.9 per cent of which didn't last, certainly wouldn't be very intelligent."

Under direct examination by Walczak, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Miller described the tenets of science: practitioners seek their explanations in what can be observed, tested, and replicated by others.

"These rules don't apply just in the United States?" Walczak asked.

"No, sir, they don't," Miller said. "I think science might be the closest thing we have on this planet to a universal culture."

"Why are these rules important?" Walczak said.

"If you don't have these rules, you don't have science," Miller explained. "If you invoke a nonnatural cause--a spirit force or something like that--in your research and I decide to test it, I have no way to test it. I can't order it from a biological-supply house. I can't grow it in my laboratory."

"So supernatural causation is not considered part of science?" Walczak asked.

"I hesitate to beg the patience of the court with this, but, being a Boston Red Sox fan, I can't resist," Miller said. "One might say, for example, the reason the Boston Red Sox were able to come back from three games down against the New York Yankees was because God was tired of George Steinbrenner and wanted to see the Red Sox win. In my part of the country, you'd be surprised how many people think that's a perfectly reasonable explanation for what happened last year. And you know what? It might be true. But it certainly is not science . . . and it's certainly not something we can test." Judge Jones, who did not interrupt this exchange, appeared to be suppressing a smile.

In the fall of 2003, the assistant superintendent of the Dover Area School District, a pleasant but persistent fellow named Mike Baksa, began making frequent visits to Dover High when the science teachers were having lunch. Bryan Rehm, who taught physics and environmental science at the time, recalled Baksa's talking to them about "biology, biology, biology"--in particular, about the board's concerns with the evolution unit. Bertha Spahr, a chemistry teacher who has taught at Dover for forty-one years, had heard from Baksa before. At the trial, she testified that he wanted to give her "a heads-up that there is a member of the school board who is interested in having creationism share equal time with evolution." The school-board official was Alan Bonsell, a conservative Christian who owns a radiator-and-auto-repair shop.

Spahr has short brown curls, an alert, birdlike manner, and, it seems, a strong aversion to what she considers nonsense. Her fellow-teachers call her Bert. "In Bert's class, it's her way or no way," her younger colleague Jen Miller told me. "But I can't tell you how many kids she's taught who have gone into chemistry or science because of her." On the stand, wearing a black pants suit with an austere gold pin, and replying precisely and astringently to cross-examination, Spahr recalled her annoyance with another member of the school board, Bill Buckingham, this way:

SPAHR: He had asked more than once if we teach man comes from a monkey. In response to that, in utter frustration, I looked at Mr. Buckingham and I said, "If you say man and monkey one more time in the same sentence, I'm going to scream." He did not do that, and I didn't have to. QUESTION: And that's because you're Italian, Mrs. Spahr, is that right? SPAHR: Sicilian.

It was in 2002, Spahr testified, that she first sensed a new and censorious attitude toward evolution in Dover, a town of nineteen thousand people in a largely rural corner of York County. That August, she learned that a janitor had removed and burned a student's classroom mural depicting the ascent of man-hominid ancestors evolving into modern humans. She testified that when she complained to the school superintendent, Richard Nilsen, she was told to mind her own business.

At the trial, Rehm said that he and his colleagues kept telling Baksa, "We're not going to balance evolution with creationism. It's an inappropriate request...There's no educational purpose for it." Yet "the next day or two days later," he said wonderingly, Baksa would be "back at lunch again with the same questions and the same concerns." Eventually, school-board members started passing on to the teachers, via Baksa, various materials, among them a video called "Icons of Evolution," a critique of Darwin based on a book that has been roundly dismissed by mainstream scientists, and a list of biology textbooks used by Christian schools. Jen Miller, a Dover biology teacher for thirteen years, testified that Bill Buckingham complained to her about a note in the teachers' edition of the biology textbook suggesting that students discuss what adaptations humans might undergo if they were sent to other planets. Buckingham didn't like the idea, Miller said, because "if we were asking students to do that, it showed man evolved and that kind of thing."

Miller started reconsidering lesson plans that had worked well for her in the past. She had been fond of a time-line exercise in which she took her students into the hall and laid a long thin strip of tape on the floor; everybody helped write in dates for the origins of the earth and of various species. The exercise made explicit the standard scientific theory about the age of the earth: four and a half billion years, as opposed to the six to ten thousand years generally proposed by creationists. Miller, who found the relentless push and pull with the board stressful, dropped the time line. "I had never experienced anything like this before," she told me. "Up till then, I had always been very comfortable in my own classroom."

Robert Linker, an amiable and generally relaxed young biology teacher, who was also the school's wrestling coach, was getting nervous, too. Typically, he had started off the evolution unit by drawing a line on the blackboard. On one side he'd write "Evolution" and on the other side "Creationism." Evolution was based on the fossil and DNA record, and creationism was based on the Bible. Evolution, he'd say, is what we discuss in this class. Creationism was something to take up elsewhere--at home or in church. Feeling pressure from the school board, he stopped doing that. "I just felt there was some controversy, because I had to go to two meetings and, for the first time, tell how I taught a particular subject," Linker testified. "I didn't know if I was really doing something wrong with writing that 'creationism' word on the board."

By June, 2003, what had been unfolding as a behind-the-scenes struggle at Dover High was becoming public. At a June 7th meeting, the school board discussed adopting a new biology textbook, and Buckingham complained that the book-co-authored by Kenneth Miller-was "laced with Darwinism." Max Pell, a former Dover High student and current Penn State student, stood up to protest; according to several witnesses, Buckingham asked him if he'd ever heard of brainwashing, and suggested that it was happening at places like Penn State, which taught evolution over and over until it was accepted as fact. At a June 14th meeting, which was attended by a hundred Dover residents, the two local newspapers reported that Buckingham said, "Two thousand years ago, someone died on a cross. Can't someone take a stand for Him?" After the meeting, he told a reporter, "This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such." On the stand, Buckingham admitted that he had made those statements, but claimed that he had made them at an earlier board meeting. A number of witnesses recalled his making both statements. And virtually everyone who spoke at the trial about that June meeting recalled that during public comment Buckingham's wife, Charlotte, had delivered a long and emotional speech in which she quoted Scripture and declared evolution to be incompatible with the Bible. Some people recalled her asking how Dover could teach anything but creationism.

This summer, Buckingham quit the school board and moved to North Carolina, several months after announcing that he was in rehab for an addiction to the painkiller OxyContin. On the stand in Harrisburg, Buckingham, who wore a tan blazer with a pin of an American flag within a cross, was subdued, at times to the point of inaudibility. He insisted that he had wanted intelligent design, not creationism, to be taught in the Dover schools. He and two other board members, Alan Bonsell and Sheila Harkins, all testified that they simply wanted students to be aware of flaws in the Darwinian model; even if they themselves knew little or nothing about intelligent design--on the stand, Harkins acknowledged that she didn't have a definition of intelligent design in mind when she voted for it, adding, "I still don't today"--they thought that awareness of the argument would foster critical thinking. Buckingham said, "I didn't want the students to hear just [about evolution] because they would accept it as fact when there is another viable scientific theory out there called intelligent design. I wanted them to have more of a well-rounded education."

At one point, under cross-examination, Buckingham staunchly maintained that no board member had ever spoken in public, or to another board member, about creationism. This was an awkward moment, since two witnesses-one for the defense and one for the plaintiffs-had already testified that the board's president, Alan Bonsell, had mentioned creationism and school prayer at a board retreat. It became more awkward still when a lawyer for the plaintiffs showed a video clip from the local FOX affiliate, in which Buckingham, who was being interviewed, clearly says, "It's O.K. to teach Darwin, but you have to balance it with something else, such as creationism." Buckingham claimed that this comment had been accidental: he had been "like a deer in the headlights," trying so hard not to say the word "creationism" that he couldn't help but blurt it out. A Freudian slip? the plaintiffs' lawyer Steven Harvey asked him. No, Buckingham replied: a "human one."

In the end, it wasn't very hard for the plaintiffs to make the case that several of the school-board members had been eager to see creationism added to the curriculum and, after discovering that the idea was legally problematic, had latched on to the term "intelligent design." For example, in June, 2004, a board member named Heather Geesey sent a letter to one of the local papers, in which she argued, "Our country was founded on Christian beliefs and principles. We are not looking for a book that is teaching students that this is a wrong thing or a right thing. It is just a fact. All we are trying to accomplish with this task is to choose a biology book that teaches the most prevalent theories. The definition of 'theory' is merely a speculation or an ideal circumstance. To present only one theory or to give one option would be directly contradicting our mission statement. You can teach creationism without it being Christianity. It can be presented as a higher power."

On October 4, 2004, Alan Bonsell announced at a school-board meeting that the district had received an "anonymous" donation of sixty copies of the textbook "Of Pandas and People," by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon. (A typical paragraph reads, "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact--fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.") Bonsell later admitted, in a deposition, that the donor was his father.

At the trial, Bill Buckingham revealed that he had been involved in the acquisition of the textbooks. He testified that he had stood up in front of his church one Sunday and said that there was "a need" for money to purchase copies of "Pandas." ("I said, 'If you want to give money, fine. I'm not asking for any, I'm not telling you to give any, it's up to you,'" he recalled on the stand.) The congregation donated eight hundred and fifty dollars, which Buckingham gave to Bonsell, who handed it over to his father. In his deposition, Bonsell had not been forthcoming about where the money came from--nor was he candid about the matter at another board meeting, when he was asked who the donor was. (By the end of the trial, counsel for the plaintiffs had said "That's not what you said in your deposition" so many times that one of them finally made a joke out of it. When Eric Rothschild asked Mike Baksa whether something had caused his "antennae" to go up, Baksa joked that he didn't have antennae. "That's not what you told me at your deposition," Rothschild intoned portentously.)

On October 18th, the school board voted to make students "aware of gaps/problems in Darwin's theory and of other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design." Teachers of ninth-grade biology would have to read their students the following statement:

The Pennsylvania Academic Standards require students to learn about Darwin's Theory of Evolution and eventually to take a standardized test of which evolution is a part. Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is not evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origins of life that differs from Darwin's view. The reference book "Of Pandas and People" is available in the library along with other resources for students who might be interested in gaining an understanding of what Intelligent Design actually involves. With respect to any theory, students are required to keep an open mind. The school leaves the discussion of the Origins of Life to individual students and their families. As a Standards-driven district, class instruction focuses upon preparing students to achieve proficiency on Standards-based assessments.

It was, as its defenders like to point out, a one-minute statement. Plenty of students would just tune it out. It was also a statement that, as its detractors argued, was singular in the high-school curriculum. Evolution was the only scientific theory that the Dover school district was expressing any reluctance about teaching. Of all the scientific theories that the students would learn about in ninth-grade biology, only this one was declared to be riddled with "gaps"--gaps for which, confusingly, there was "not evidence."

Over the next several months, four board members--including Angie Yingling, who had initially voted with the majority, then reversed her position-announced their resignations, claiming that Buckingham and his supporters were accusing them of atheism or a lack of patriotism. Yingling said at the time that she saw a religious agenda "spiralling out of control."

In a tense exchange with the school board, the teachers at Dover High had tried to modify the language of the disclaimer that was to be read to students. They liked a sentence that Mike Baksa, the perennial middleman, had written into the draft of the statement: "Darwin's theory of evolution continues to be the dominant scientific explanation of the origin of the species." They also supported including the word "yet" before the word "evidence" in the sentence "Gaps in the theory exist for which there is not evidence." The board declined to adopt these compromises. Students would be allowed to leave the classroom when the statement was read, but the teachers consid

The Candy Man

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

Roald Dahl, the British author of children's books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the "writing hut," and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf's house. Dahl died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, but one day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and local families swarm in like guests at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. There are games--Splat the Rat and Guess the Number of Sweeties in the Jar--and tea, cakes, and orange squash for sale. An R.A.F. band plays in the shade of the house. This year, I attended myself. The appointed day was hot and bright, with a clear sky that Dahl would have described as "milky blue." The girls wore sherbet-colored canvas hats; the boys, their pale legs poking out of shorts, looked destined for sunburns. Many of the kids peered inside the writing hut--they weren't allowed in--and seemed to discover there further evidence that Dahl was a strangely sympathetic adult who shared a preoccupation with candy, a clinical fascination with the body, and a love of ingenious, self-devised schemes.

The adults who looked into the hut were less impressed. The walls, lined with Styrofoam, were stained sepia from all the cigarettes Dahl smoked; there was a grotty wing chair; and wires for a jury-rigged heating system dangled from the ceiling. "You'd expect it to be grander," one woman said. But the kids saw more possibilities in a musty old hut of one's own. They liked the fact that Dahl, unsatisfied with desks, had designed a baize-covered writing board, to balance on his lap just so. And they loved that he kept, on a side table, a jar containing gristly bits of his own spine, which had been removed during an operation on his lower back. Next to the jar was a waxy-looking knob that turned out to be Dahl's hip bone, along with a titanium replacement.

"It makes a good letter opener," one little boy said of the prosthetic hip.

"Has it got blood on it?" another asked hopefully.

Several young visitors asked for permission to hold the ball of chocolate-bar wrappers that Dahl had made as a young man; he scrunched a new one into the ball each day, after eating his habitual lunchtime treat. (Now hard and surprisingly heavy, the wad resembles a small cannonball.) Still, what seemed to excite the children the most was the paperback collection of Dahl's own work. "Look!" several of them cried. "There are the books!"

Dahl, whose first book for children, "The Gremlins," was published in 1943, and whose last, "The Minpins," was published posthumously, in 1991, has been astonishingly popular for nearly half a century. In a 2000 survey, British readers named him their favorite author. Around the world, more than ten million copies of his books sold last year. This number is all the more striking because Dahl did not write an extended series, which is often the key to mega-success as a children's writer. Nor, in an era when many children's books are specifically marketed to either boys or girls, does his work appeal primarily to one gender. Six of his books have been made into movies, and a monster-budget version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (1964), directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as the daft, dangerous, and endlessly inventive confectioner, Willy Wonka, opens in July.

Dahl is also, however, a children's writer whom many adults over the years have disliked or distrusted, though they have not always found it easy to say why. It's not because his work is sexually explicit (a common complaint about, say, Judy Blume's). There is no hint of sex, or even romance, in Dahl's children's books, most of which are intended for preadolescent children. Nor are they disappointing as pieces of writing-quite the opposite. Dahl's books, which move along at a seductively brisk pace, are propelled by crisp verbs ("clambered," "chirruped," "rasped") and delightful made-up words ("swishfiggler," "snozzcumber," "Vermicious Knids"). He plays exuberantly with synonyms ("He's dotty!" they cried. "He's barmy!" "He's batty!" "He's nutty!" "He's screwy!" "He's wacky!"). The tone is conversational, confiding, and funny, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation points and PHRASES WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. It's as if the sentences came embedded with their own stage directions. (Like "Winnie the Pooh" and "Alice in Wonderland," Dahl's books originated as stories told aloud to children; he had five of his own.) In a Dahl book, you are never out of earshot of a sly authorial voice that is sharing a secret joke about a character--or is announcing that it's about to yank you out of a scene that's becoming a bit too gross or distressing.

Adults' objections to Dahl have more to do with his sensibility. There is bathroom humor: the protagonist of "The B.F.G." (1982), the Big Friendly Giant, insists on "whizpopping," his word for farting, in front of the Queen. And Dahl has a waspish tone-unsentimental, ever so slightly sadistic, and archly amusing--that's closer to Evelyn Waugh's than to Beverly Cleary's. (Lemony Snicket, the author of "A Series of Unfortunate Events," owes a significant debt to Dahl.)

"Matilda" (1988) is the story of a prodigiously bright little girl who suffers at the hands of her boorish mother and father. The book offers a bracingly disdainful commentary on neglectful, selfish parents. But, first, Dahl has a little fun at the expense of the doting ones:

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Even when their own child is the most disgusting little blister you could ever imagine, they still think he or she is wonderful. Some parents go further. They become so blinded by adoration they manage to convince themselves their child has qualities of genius.

Well, there's nothing very wrong with all this. It's the way of the world. It's only when the parents begin telling us about the brilliance of their own revolting offspring, that we start shouting, "Bring us a basin! We're going to be sick!"

School teachers suffer a good deal from having to listen to this sort of twaddle from proud parents, but they usually get their own back when the time comes to write their end-of-term reports. If I were a teacher, I would cook up some real scorchers for the children of doting parents. "Your son Maximilian," I would write, "is a total wash-out. I hope you have a family business you can push him into when he leaves school because he sure as heck won't get a job anywhere else." Or, if I were feeling lyrical that day, I might write, "It is a curious truth that grasshoppers have their hearing organs in the sides of their abdomen. Your daughter Vanessa, judging by what she's learnt this term, has no hearing organs at all."

Routinely in Dahl's books, adults who mistreat children or animals get grotesque comeuppances, and these are often engineered by the victims, through their own cunning and courage. In "The Twits" (1980), the repellent Mr. and Mrs. Twit are glued upside down to the floor by the enterprising monkeys and birds they've been tormenting. In "James and the Giant Peach" (1961), the evil Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge are crushed to death when James and the eponymous peach roll down a hill. And it's not just bad parents who get their comeuppance. In "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Dahl metes out nasty punishments to unpleasant children. The greedy Augustus Gloop is squeezed into the chocolate works; the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde blows up into a giant blueberry; the television addict Mike Teavee is miniaturized; the spoiled Veruca Salt is dropped down a garbage chute. That the kids all make it out of the factory in the end doesn't much soften the fact that Wonka saw them go with no regret--indeed, with considerable glee.

In many children's books--contrary to what parents tell their children about the meaning of appearances--physical ugliness signifies its moral equivalent. Dahl takes this to an extreme, describing his villains' repulsive attributes with brio: Mr. Hazell's "great, glistening, beery face . . . as pink as a ham," in "Danny, the Champion of the World" (1975); Aunt Sponge's resemblance to "a great white soggy overboiled cabbage"; the "grizzly old grunion of a grandma" in "George's Marvelous Medicine" (1981)--the one Dahl book I find irredeemably sour--who has "a small puckered-up mouth, like a dog's bottom." Dahl shared with George Orwell an acute sense of why small children often see adults as unsightly or intimidating. "Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upward, and few faces are at their best when seen from below," Orwell wrote. Dahl once said that adults should get down on their knees for a week, in order to remember what it's like to live in a world in which the people with all the power literally loom over you.

In Dahl's fiction, the bad characters aren't just bad; they're swing-kids-around-by-their-braids awful--a quality that some adult readers find unsubtle but many children find hilarious and satisfying. Even the good adult characters are often rash or easily cowed, whereas the kids in Dahl's books are usually sensible, mature, and unflappable. (The kids make all the "good decisions," as my nine-year-old son puts it.) And in Dahl's stories the kinds of elaborate schemes that children are forever concocting--and that sensible adults are forever rejecting as impractical or dangerous--yield triumphant results. When the Giant Peach is attacked by sharks while floating across the ocean, James comes up with the idea of attaching loops of string to a flock of seagulls, in order to lift the peach into the air-and, voila, that's precisely what happens!

Dahl's books regularly show up on the American Library Association's list of titles that patrons ask to be restricted from young children or removed from the shelves. In 1995, a mother attempting to expunge Dahl from elementary-school libraries in Virginia told the Washington Post that in his books "children misbehave and take retribution on adults, and there's never, ever a consequence for their actions." According to this surprisingly common critique of Dahl, to defy one adult--no matter how bad a person--is to defy us all.

In 1972, the Horn Book, a journal of children's literature, published a screed against Dahl by Eleanor Cameron, a children's-book author. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," she charged, was "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children." The book was not just about candy; it was candy, "in that it is delectable and soothing while we are undergoing the brief sensory pleasure it affords but leaves us poorly nourished with our taste dulled for better fare." Dahl reviled television, but his book provided the same easy satisfactions: it was a fast-paced, plot-driven celebration of empty calories. The science-fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in to second Cameron's criticism, though she had to admit that "children between eight and eleven seem to be truly fascinated" by Dahl's books. Indeed, one of her own children, she regretted to say, "used to finish 'Charlie' and then start right over from the beginning (she was subject to these fits for about two months at age eleven). She was like one possessed while reading it, and for a while after reading she was, for a usually amiable child, quite nasty." The books, LeGuin concluded, "provide a genuine escape experience, a tiny psychological fugue, very like that provided by comic books."

In the nineteen-eighties, feminists lambasted Dahl for his supposed misogyny, focussing on "The Witches" (1983). In 1985, one critic called the book "a dangerous publication," which bore a "striking similarity" to the "misogynistic" fifteenth-century witch-hunting text "Malleus Maleficarum." It was a bizarre comparison. Dahl does write in "The Witches" that a "witch is always a woman"--but not that a woman is always a witch. The strongest, most appealing character in the book is the boy narrator's cigar-smoking, tough-minded, and immensely loving grandmother.

Anti-Dahlism has been further fuelled by a 1994 unauthorized biography, by the British writer Jeremy Treglown, which presents a complicated, domineering, and sometimes disagreeable man. Dahl was "a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist and a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies," Treglown writes. "He was also . . . a fantasist, an anti-Semite, a bully and a self-publicizing trouble-maker." When his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a severe stroke at the age of thirty-nine, he adopted a cruel-to-be-kind strategy--bullying, goading, and sometimes humiliating her into acting again. He was prone to eruptions of pique. In 1981, Robert Gottlieb, who was at the time the editorial director of Knopf, Dahl's American publisher, severed ties with Dahl, citing his "abusiveness" to the staff. More than once, Dahl offered up anti-Semitic remarks; in 1983, he told a journalist that "there's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity . . . I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason." (Such noxious sentiments, it must be said, cannot be found in his work for children.) And, in 1989, Dahl, who had no trouble waxing indignant about attempts to ban his own work, denounced Salman Rushdie as "a dangerous opportunist" after the fatwa was issued against him. Dahl's personal reputation is justifiably tainted, but his work has been unfairly assailed. When it comes to literature for adults, we've mostly stopped judging a work by its author's personal morality. Why should we hold children's writers to a stricter standard?

Dahl's own childhood had a lovely, rather magical side, as well as a bitter, Draconian one. He was born in 1916, in Llandaff, Wales, to Norwegian immigrants. His father, Harald, was a successful ship's broker. His formidable and capable mother, Sofie, looked upon him as her favorite; Roald, one of five children, was known as "the apple." When Roald was three, the eldest girl, Astri, who was seven, died of appendicitis. Harald Dahl was so "overwhelmed with grief," Dahl writes in his 1984 memoir, "Boy," that he had no strength to fight a bout of pneumonia; he died two months later.

Each summer, Sofie took the children to a remote island in Norway, where Roald heard marvellous stories about witches and trolls, swam in the ice-blue fjords, and ate ice cream with "thousands of little chips of crisp burnt toffee mixed into it." Yet the British boarding schools that he attended, starting at the age of nine, were mostly a misery. Much of "Boy" consists of Dahl's recollections of beatings by his headmasters. Caning was the favored mode of punishment. "I was frightened of that cane," Dahl writes. "There is no small boy in the world who wouldn't be. It wasn't simply an instrument for beating you. It was a weapon for wounding. It lacerated the skin. It caused severe black and scarlet bruising that took three weeks to disappear, and all the time during those three weeks, you could feel your heart beating along the wounds."

When Dahl was at school, his talents seem to have gone unappreciated. A report card from Repton in 1930-which is on display at the new Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, in Great Missenden-offers the following assessment of his performance in English: "A persistent muddler, writing and saying the opposite of what he means. Fails to correct this by real revision or thought. Has possibilities." This seems particularly unfair, given that the young Dahl, judging by a sample of his juvenilia at the museum--"The Life Story of a Penny"--already showed flair as a storyteller. But perhaps his teachers didn't much approve of his nascent sympathy for the underdog-in this case, a lump of copper that must endure having "a picture of King George V's head stamped cruelly on one side of me."

One compensation for Dahl was that he excelled at games and sports. Being tall probably protected him from a certain amount of torment, too--as a teenager, he was well on his way to acquiring his adult nicknames, Lofty and Stalky. He and the other boys at Repton also enjoyed a curious perk, courtesy of the Cadbury chocolate company. "Every now and again, a plain grey cardboard box was dished out to each boy in our House," Dahl writes in "Boy." Inside were eleven chocolate bars--aspirants to the Cadbury line. Dahl and the other boys got to rate the candy, and they took their task very seriously. ("Too subtle for the common palate" was one of Dahl's assessments.) He later recalled this as the first time that he thought of chocolate bars as something concocted--the product of a laboratory setting--and the thought stayed with him until he invented his own crazy factory.

Dahl is brilliant at evoking the childhood obsession with candy, which most adults can recall only vaguely. In his books, candy is often a springboard for long riffs on imagined powers and possibilities. Far from being the crude ode to instant gratification that critics like Cameron detect, Dahl's evocation of candy is an impetus to wonder. When Billy, the boy in "The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me" (1985), opens his own candy shop--talk about wish fulfillment!--he orders confections from all over the world. "I can remember especially the Giant Wangdoodles from Australia, every one with a huge, ripe, red strawberry hidden inside its crispy, chocolate crust," he says. "And The Electric Fizzcocklers that made every hair on your head stand straight up on end. . . . There was a whole lot of splendid stuff from the great Wonka factory itself, for example the famous Willy Wonka Rainbow Drops--suck them and you can spit in seven different colours. And his stickjaw for talkative parents." The word "confection" has a double meaning in Dahl's world--candy is a source not only of sweetness but of creativity. On a field trip recently, I sat next to three nine-year-old boys who spent forty-five minutes in a Wonka-inspired reverie, inventing their own candies.

When Dahl left Repton, in 1934, he did not go to college but instead took a job with Shell, which eventually sent him to East Africa to sell oil. When the Second World War broke out, Dahl joined the R.A.F. as a fighter pilot. "Going Solo," the sequel to "Boy," offers lively accounts of Dahl's encounters with African wildlife--especially the dread black mamba snake--and eccentric British expatriates, "this pack of sinewy sunburnt gophers and their bright, bony little wives." And it contains thrilling stories of Dahl's experiences flying missions over the Mediterranean. In 1940, he crashed in the Sahara, and suffered injuries that caved in his nose. The plastic surgeon who rebuilt the nose tried, unsuccessfully, to make it look like Rudolph Valentino's.

When Dahl began to suffer blackouts as a result of his crash injuries, he stopped flying, and in 1942 went to Washington, D.C., as a military attache. He met Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway and played poker with Senator Harry Truman. He began to write up some of his wartime experiences. He also met Walt Disney, to whom he sold "The Gremlins," his first children's story. It was based on an R.A.F. legend of gnomelike creatures with the capacity to sabotage a flight. (No movie version was ever produced.)

Most of Dahl's early writing was for adults. He specialized in wartime stories and macabre tales with surprise endings, or what the British call "a twist in the tail." In a typical story, a wife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, then cooks the murder weapon and serves it to police investigators. But by the early sixties some of that success had begun petering out. The New Yorker, which had earlier accepted several stories, now sent rejection notices. Dahl's adult stories were crisply, shiveringly enjoyable--rather like "Twilight Zone" episodes--but they showed little compassion or psychological penetration. It was children, it seemed, not adults, on whom Dahl could lavish empathy.

In 1953, he married Patricia Neal, who had recently ended a long affair with Gary Cooper, and the following year bought a house in Buckinghamshire, near his mother and sisters. Dahl adored his children, but in his family life he suffered several tragedies. His baby son, Theo, was badly injured when a car hit the carriage his nanny was pushing across a street in Manhattan. He survived but suffered from hydrocephalus. A daughter, Olivia, died from measles at the age of seven. Treglown writes that, shortly after Olivia's death, Dahl and Neal visited his old headmaster, the retired Archbishop of Canterbury. Dahl wanted to think that Olivia could have the companionship of dogs in the afterlife, because she had loved them so in life. He was furious when the Archbishop told him that the Christian vision of Heaven did not include canines.

In 1965, Neal suffered a stroke while she was pregnant with the couple's fifth daughter, Lucy. While she recovered, Dahl took over running the household; he even drove the kids to school in the morning. If he was sometimes moody or gruff or turned on people who disappointed him, who can blame him? He was pragmatic and resourceful. Prompted by Theo's difficulties, he helped devise a valve for draining water on the brain which was used to treat thousands of children. And if he was not physically affectionate with his children-as Tessa Dahl, his eldest daughter, has written-he shared their interest in pranks, knock-knock jokes, and incessant teasing. He also had a gift for creating an aura of magic. Dahl once directed Tessa to look at the grass below her bedroom window. Fairies, he explained, had inscribed her name on the lawn. (He'd done it himself, by sprinkling weed killer.) When the Dahls hosted slumber parties, he'd rouse the children at midnight, take them outside, and tell them stories under a tree.

After thirty years of marriage, Dahl divorced Neal, and, in 1983, he married Felicity Crosland, a wood-carver with whom he had been having a long affair. He seems to have found greater happiness and serenity with Felicity, who was fond of gardening and cooking. Tessa Dahl has observed of her father, "When in 1983 he wrote, in 'The Witches,' 'It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you,' he was a changing writer. My father had fallen in love. When he married my stepmother in the early eighties, everything altered."

Several of Dahl's best books--"The B.F.G.," "The Witches," "Matilda"--were written during this late period. In these works, his natural acidity is tempered with sweetness. Each book centers on a relationship between a child and an adult which is a dream of perfect understanding and companionability. The boy protagonist of "The Witches" adores his Grandmamma, who tells him the gruesome truth about witches and helps him defeat them. When the boy is transformed into a mouse--one that still has his own voice and feelings--he is comforted to realize that, with a mouse's shorter life span, he won't outlive her. He tells her happily, "I'll be a very old mouse and you'll be a very old grandmother and soon after that we'll both die together." (None of Dahl's ideal adult companions are mothers--they are fathers, grandparents, or mother surrogates, such as the ladybug in "James and the Giant Peach.") In "The B.F.G.," an orphaned and unloved girl, Sophie, forms a strong friendship with the only living giant who refuses to eat human beings:

"Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiffs-quiddled around."

"That happens to everyone," Sophie said.

"Not like it happens to me," the B.F.G. said. "I is speaking the most terrible wigglish."

"I think you speak beautifully," Sophie said.

"You do?" cried the B.F.G., suddenly brightening. "You really do?"

"Simply beautifully," Sophie repeated.

"Well that is the nicest present anyone is ever giving me in my whole life!" cried the B.F.G. "Are you sure you is not twiddling my leg?"

"Of course not," Sophie said. "I just love the way you talk."

"How wondercrump!" cried the B.F.G., still beaming. "How whoopsy-splunkers. How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter."

And yet the essence of Dahl is his willingness to let children triumph over adults. He is a modern writer of fairy tales, who intuitively understands the sort of argument that Bruno Bettelheim made in his 1976 book, "The Uses of Enchantment." Children need the dark materials of fairy tales because they need to make sense--in a symbolic, displaced way--of their own feelings of anger, resentment, and powerlessness. Children also benefit from learning about violence and brutishness in fairy tales, Bettelheim writes, for it counters the "widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in our life is due to our natures--the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly." Many fairy tales--and most of Dahl's work--are complex narratives of wish fulfillment. They teach the reader, Bettelheim writes, that "a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence--but if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious." Or, in any case, this is a hopeful fantasy which sustains us all.

Dahl's most memorable protagonists--Charlie, James, Matilda--are timid characters who nevertheless succeed. Quiet, polite Charlie Bucket is the unexpected winner of Wonka's contest precisely because he is quiet and polite. Little James is an orphan--on the very first page, his parents are dispatched by an angry rhinoceros that has escaped from the London Zoo--who is humiliated and beaten by his aunts. By befriending the eccentric insects who live in the prodigious peach in his back yard, and giving free rein to his own sweet ingenuity, he gets across the ocean to New York, where news of his feat brings "hundreds and hundreds of children" to the door of his new peach-stone house, in Central Park. "The saddest and loneliest little boy that you could find now had all the friends and playmates in the world," Dahl writes. Matilda discovers a secret power to move objects merely by thinking--a power that is attributed to her mind's not being challenged enough. (This theory makes a lot of sense to kids, who can still imagine that vast territories of their brains have yet to be explored.) She uses her magical skill to write an accusatory message on the blackboard at school, which terrifies her nemesis, a floridly nasty headmistress named Miss Trunchbull, into fleeing her post.

There is no evidence that Dahl ever read Bettelheim, and none that he was the sort of man who would have gone in for psychoanalysis. But there is evidence that he thought about childhood in a way that placed struggle and conflict at the center of things, much as psychoanalysis does. "I have very strong and almost profound views on how a child has to fight its way through life and grow up to the age of, let's say, twelve," Dahl told a BBC interviewer in 1988. "All their lives they're being disciplined. When you're born or when you're one or two or three, you're an uncivilized creature. And from that age, right up to twelve or fifteen, if you are going to become civilized and become a member of the community, you're going to have to be disciplined. Severely. Stop eating with your fingers and spitting on the floor and swearing and anything else you want to mention. And who does this disciplining? It is two people. It's the parents. . . . Although the child loves her mother and father, they are subconsciously the enemy. There's a fine line, I think, between loving your parents deeply and resenting them."

Most of Dahl's young readers are presumably not mistreated, and yet they intuitively understand that the beatings and humiliations meted out to his young characters are metaphors for the powerlessness of being a child. And they appreciate that Dahl so nakedly takes their side. Adult readers, meanwhile, are given a renewed sense of children's separateness--and, sometimes, their rage. Dahl's attunement to the aggressive labors of civilizing a child is no longer fashionable; it smacks of generational conflict, Oedipal struggles, and the grim days when children had to eat all the food on their plates, even if it was liver and onions. Such raw displays of adult power, which marked the lives of many children when Dahl was growing up, in the nineteen-twenties, are no longer common, thankfully. Perhaps this explains some of the adult resistance to Dahl's books: as parenting has become more self-consciously "nice," with less firm divisions between grownups and children, it's unsettling to read narratives of unbridled childish resentment. (Matilda uses her superior brain power to exact devious revenge on her own parents.) We believe that we understand and communicate with our children far better than our parents or grandparents did with theirs, and we therefore can't imagine that our kids could secretly feel oppressed by our reasonable and enlightened approach to child-rearing. Dahl's books mercilessly upend this illusion of harmony.

Fortunately, the violent subtext of the books is often leavened by the delightful illustrations of Quentin Blake, who began working with Dahl in the nineteen-seventies. Blake's loose, sketchy, bemused drawings underscore the comical and the absurd sides of Dahl's work. Blake was sometimes unnerved by the savage and scary elements of Dahl's stories, but he came to appreciate what a visual writer Dahl was. Dahl, who had an unusually vivid sense of what his characters looked like, believed that many children's books had too few illustrations-and was greatly pleased when Blake managed to generate a hundred drawings for "Matilda."

Like an indulgent father offering extra helpings of dessert, Dahl was eager to give children more of what they craved: more pictures; more fantasies of mastery; more sly mockery of grouchy, boring adults; more visions of dizzying enjoyment. Recently, a nine-year-old friend of my son's wrote me a letter about why he likes Dahl: "His writing is imaginative and exciting, and after I read 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' I felt like tasting all the candy in the world." It was an excellent way of evoking the delights of Dahl, whose best stories do what G. K. Chesterton, in his essay "The Ethic of Elfland," said that fairy tales did: inspire in children a sense that life "is not only a pleasure but an eccentric privilege." Dahl's purse-lipped critics fail to recognize that his stories don't merely indulge a child's fantasies--they replenish them.

Best in Class

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 30 May 2005 03:00:00 -0400

Daniel Kennedy remembers when he still thought that valedictorians were a good thing. Kennedy, a wiry fifty-nine-year-old who has a stern buzz cut, was in 1997 the principal of Sarasota High School, in Sarasota, Florida. Toward the end of the school year, it became apparent that several seniors were deadlocked in the race to become valedictorian. At first, Kennedy saw no particular reason to worry. "My innocent thought was what possible problem could those great kids cause?" he recalled last month, during a drive around Sarasota. "And I went blindly on with my day."

The school had a system in place to break ties. "If the G.P.A.s were the same, the award was supposed to go to the kid with the most credits," Kennedy explained. It turned out that one of the top students, Denny Davies, had learned of this rule, and had quietly arranged to take extra courses during his senior year, including an independent study in algebra. "The independent study was probably a breeze, and he ended up with the most credits," Kennedy said.

Davies was named valedictorian. His chief rivals for the honor were furious -- in particular, a girl named Kylie Barker, who told me recently that she had wanted to be valedictorian "pretty much forever."

Kennedy recalled, "Soon, the kids were doing everything they could to battle it out." As we drove past sugary-white beaches, high-rise hotels, and prosperous strip malls, he told me that the ensuing controversy "effectively divided the school and the community." Kennedy took the position that Davies had followed the school's own policy, which he had been resourceful enough to figure out, and whether he should have been allowed to load on an easy extra class was beside the point. He'd done it, and he hadn't broken any rules. Davies's guidance counsellor, Paul Storm, agreed. In an interview with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune at the time, he said of Davies, "He's very clever. He said, 'I want to be valedictorian. I've figured out I need to do this and that. Can you help me?' Denny had a good strategy, and this strategy was available to anyone who was a competitor.”

Barker's supporters argued that what Davies had done was a sneaky way of gaming the system. “It never crossed my mind to approach it as a strategy,” Barker, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry at Northwestern University, said. “I just thought it was something you worked really hard for.” Kimberly Belcher, who was ranked third that year, and who is now studying for a doctorate in theology at Notre Dame University, told me, “Among our friends, who were sort of the Academic Olympics and National Honor Society types, it was a big deal. Most of the people I knew thought that it was unfair of Denny to use what we thought of as a loophole to take a class that was too easy for him, and to do it secretly. We felt betrayed. I'm not angry anymore, but, boy, I was angry then.” Davies, who is now a captain in the Air Force, and is stationed in Germany, said that he didn't care to comment about the dispute, except to say that he was a “firm believer in the idea that people benefit from healthy competition.”

During the final weeks of the school year, Kennedy was meeting with both sets of riled parents, and students were buttonholing him in the hallway. “I'm telling you, it was hostile!” he said. Some teachers considered boycotting graduation; students talked about booing Davies when he walked out onstage. Kylie Barker's mom, Cheryl, said that she recalls getting a call in the middle of the day from Kylie's chemistry teacher, Jim Harshman, who asked her to pick up Kylie from school, saying, “She's in a pressure cooker here, and she's about to burst.”

Kennedy tried to broker a compromise. Davies had suggested that he and Barker be named co-valedictorians, and Kennedy embraced the idea. But the Barkers weren't excited about it. “The principal was trying to make everybody happy, and when you do that there's always somebody who isn't,” Cheryl Barker said. “I guess it was me.”

Kennedy remembers finally “convincing everybody to agree reluctantly -- and I do mean extremely reluctantly -- to have co-valedictorians.” He went on, “I have been in education basically my whole life, and I've been to a lot of graduations in my time. But I dreaded this one. Sarasota High is a big school -- three thousand kids -- and there were probably seven thousand people in the audience. At that time, it felt like half of the students in the room hated one of those two valedictorians and half hated the other. The tension was so thick that I was sitting up there in my cap and gown sweating buckets the whole time.” In the end, both students got through their speeches -- Kylie's was about integrity -- without incident. But Kennedy, a likable traditionalist who has been married to his childhood sweetheart for thirty-seven years, concluded that it was time to get rid of valedictorians at Sarasota High.

Kennedy convened a committee to consider various alternatives, and it was decided that from then on all students in the top ten per cent of the class -- which at Sarasota means about seventy-five people -- would march in first during graduation and have an asterisk printed next to their names on the program. “Students and parents got to see more kids recognized,” Kennedy said. “It made everybody feel better.”

Sarasota is a competitive school district -- while visiting the area, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read, “My Child Was Student of the Month at Tuttle Elementary” -- but most of the local high schools have followed Kennedy's lead. Riverview High School has also eliminated valedictorians and salutatorians; Booker High School ended the tradition last year. Four years ago, North Port High opened near Sarasota. George Kenney, its principal, recalled thinking that it “would be easier to just start out without valedictorians, so we wouldn't be taking something away later on.” He added, “There's an awful lot of clawing and scratching to get to the top. You have families at some schools coming in freshman year saying, 'How can my kid get to No. 1?' And the pressure that puts on teachers is inexcusable. 'Valedictorian' is an antiquated title, and I think it has more negative connotations and effects than positive ones.”

When Kennedy left Sarasota High to form a charter school, the Sarasota Military Academy, in 2001, he did not even consider having a valedictorian. Kennedy has an amiable way about him, but he's not kidding when he says, “My advice to other principals is, Whatever you do, do not name a valedictorian. Any principal who does is facing peril.”

At one time, it was obvious who the best students in a school were. But now the contenders for the valedictorian title, especially at large, top performing suburban high schools, are numerous and determined. Many schools offer Advanced Placement courses -- and sometimes honors and International Baccalaureate classes -- extra weight when a student's G.P.A. is calculated, so that an A earns 5.0 points, versus 4.0 in a regular class. Students who fill their schedules with A.P. classes, as the ambitious ones tend to do, can end up with G.P.A.s well above 4.0.

Jim Conrey is the director of public information at Adlai Stevenson High School, in Lincolnshire, Illinois -- a public school with forty-five hundred students that is well funded enough to have such a thing as a director of public information. Students at the top of their class, Conrey said, are often separated by one thousandth of a decimal point. A few years ago, a school committee issued a report saying that “parents routinely phone the principal's office to express their concern over the competitive nature of our numerical ranking practice. Minuscule differences between the ranks of two students can often be perceived as major differences. Is a student ranked No. 1 in a given class really the 'best' student in that class?” As of this year, Stevenson High will no longer have a valedictorian and a salutatorian. Instead, students can apply to speak at graduation, and a faculty panel will select two winners. “If you go to a really good school, you could be ranked a hundred and thirty-fourth in your class and still be a really good student,” Conrey said.

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students taking A.P. or International Baccalaureate classes in math more than doubled, from 4.4 per cent of graduating seniors to 9.5 per cent. My own high school, North Hollywood High, in Los Angeles, had three or four A.P. classes when I graduated, in 1979 (a time when we were told that our most illustrious alumnus was Bert Convy, the game-show host; Susan Sontag had gone there, too, but nobody mentioned her). Now it has twenty-two.

Some schools, responding to the critique that competition has got too bruising, have decided that naming a single valedictorian is part of the reason that today's students have become so anxious. (Many small private schools came to this conclusion long ago, and never adopted the valedictorian tradition.) An organization called Stressed Out Students, which is headed by Denise Clark Pope, a Stanford education professor, has a list of about twenty-five schools, mostly in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, that have pledged to try to make students and their parents less driven. Pope told me that “it would be healthier to eliminate valedictorians or change the rules, so that, for example, anyone who wants to can put their hat in the ring, and then there can be a vote for the best graduation speaker. Then you get a person who really wants to give a speech. It's not an academic contest.”

A number of schools now call everyone who gets a 4.0 or higher a valedictorian. At Cleveland High School, in the San Fernando Valley, there will be thirty-two valedictorians this year. At Mission San Jose, in Northern California, there will be twenty-three. “We have such an outstanding student body that it was just hard to get that definitive,” Stuart Kew, the principal of Mission San Jose, said. “Occasionally, we get the criticism that it's so watered down it doesn't mean anything. But the students don't feel that way.” On graduation day, each of the school's many valedictorians will speak at a ceremony, where, one hopes, the chairs will be comfortable.

The single-valedictorian tradition is also being endangered by lawsuits. In 2003, Brian Delekta, who narrowly missed having the highest G.P.A. in his class, sued his school district, near Port Huron, Michigan, asking that he be credited with an A-plus, instead of an A, for a work-study class that he took at his mother's law firm. (In addition, Delekta asked for a restraining order on the publication of class rankings.) In another case that year, Blair Hornstine, a senior at Moorestown High School, in New Jersey, and the daughter of a New Jersey superior-court judge, sued the local board of education to be named the school's sole valedictorian; she also asked for two hundred thousand dollars in compensatory damages and more than two million dollars in punitive damages. Hornstine had an unspecified illness that caused “substantial fatigue,” and, with the consent of the school district, she had taken many of her classes at home, with private tutors. Her transcript showed twenty-three A-pluses, nine A's, and a single A-minus; two-thirds of her classes were A.P. courses. Her weighted G.P.A. was 4.6894, which reportedly put her .055 points ahead of her closest competitor, Kenneth Mirkin.

The school board, however, decided that Hornstine's home instruction had given her an unfair advantage and that she should share the valedictorian title with Mirkin. Judge Freda Wolfson sided with Hornstine. The defendants, she wrote, “should revel in the success” of their accommodation to a student's disability “and the academic star it has produced,” instead of seeking “to diminish the honor that she has rightly earned.” In her ruling, Judge Wolfson nevertheless made a larger point about the insidious effects of naming a top student. “The fierceness of the competition in Moorestown High School is evidenced by the widespread involvement of parents in this dispute, which may have been fueled by the school's emphasis on grade-based distinctions,” she wrote. “While the school's Handbook states that it seeks to minimize competition by no longer reporting class rank . . . elsewhere it heightens the levels of competition by naming a valedictorian.” The case inspired a mocking Web site, the Blair Hornstine Project, and a flood of vitriolic Internet commentary; Hornstine was so excoriated by critics in her home town that she did not even attend graduation. The Moorestown Board of Education acknowledged no wrongdoing but eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement, under which Hornstine was reportedly paid sixty thousand dollars. (Harvard, which had admitted her to the Class of 2007, rescinded the offer not long after a local paper for which Hornstine had written a column revealed that she had plagiarized material.)

I recently spoke to some students who had been involved in legal actions over the naming of a valedictorian, and they seemed to share a common attitude toward the experience. On the one hand, they shrugged off the importance of the honor -- they had gone on to colleges where valedictorians were so plentiful that to have claimed bragging rights would have been seriously uncool. On the other hand, they could easily recall their high-school state of mind, and feel indignant all over again, utterly convinced that they had done the right thing. In 2003, Sarah Bird, a senior at Plano West Senior High School, in Plano, Texas, requested a hearing before the local school board. Another student, Jennifer Wu, had been named sole valedictorian, although her G.P.A. was virtually identical to Bird's. Bird had played on the school's basketball team. The sport was treated like a physical-education course by the school, and for several semesters she had been given unweighted A's. This had put her at a disadvantage, Bird felt. The hearing, at which Bird's lawyer asked that the two students be named co-valedictorians, involved some very close parsing. Brent William Bailey, Bird's lawyer, told me, “Going in, the other girl had a G.P.A. of 4.46885 and Sarah had 4.46731 -- so that was a difference of .00154. Then the calculations were redone and Sarah came out with a G.P.A. of 4.47647.” The school board granted Bird's request. “I was prepared to go ahead with a lawsuit if it hadn't gone our way,” Bailey recalled. Wu, who expressed unhappiness over the decision to the Dallas Morning News, then requested a hearing of her own, to question the way the process was handled. Wu is now a sophomore at Harvard, where she is a pre-med student. We spoke just before finals, and she clearly had other things on her mind. “Nobody in college cares about your having been valedictorian,” she said. “My roommate had no idea I was valedictorian. It doesn't come up, and I don't think about it.” Still, when I asked Wu why she had complained to the school board, she said, “I wanted to make sure the school knew how traumatic something like this can be -- thinking you're competing under one set of rules, and having an expectation because of that, and then finding out you're competing under another.”

Stephanie Klotz's academic ambitions made her stand out at Valley View High, in Germantown, Ohio, from which she graduated in 2001. “We weren't from here originally,” Klotz told me. “My dad had been in the military, and we'd lived in Pennsylvania, Idaho, Texas, and upstate New York. I knew there was a big world out there, and I was going to go out and conquer it. I wasn't going to get married right out of high school and be a housewife with twenty kids.” Klotz paused, but not for long. “I mean, Germantown is a place with only three stoplights. I come from a very educated family, and expectations are set at a higher level than they are in a small farming town.” Then, too, Klotz said, she was always kind of a “nerd -- a science nerd, a nature nerd.” She continued, “My dad went deer hunting when I was three years old, and they were cutting up the deer next door, because my mom wouldn't let it in the house, and I was, like, 'Daddy, can I play with the head?' ” As a young girl, she loved accompanying her father, an anesthetist, to the hospital, where she was allowed to observe surgeries. At Valley View, where football is very popular -- T-shirts bear the slogan “Valley View Football Is Life. Nothing Else Matters” -- Klotz was often unhappy. She doesn't like football, and was captain of the dance team, which, she said, “got me made fun of -- that and being smart. I'd say, 'I want to see you do a kick line for an hour!' ” She also worked with the town's rescue squad (“I was so service-oriented; I did hundreds and hundreds of hours of service work”), loved science, and hated English and history. She was often “bored to tears” in classes that she found insufficiently challenging, but she got straight A's anyway, as well as tens of thousands of dollars in college-scholarship money.

Several weeks before the school year ended, the principal of Valley View told Klotz that she and four other students would share the valedictorian title. Klotz thought the decision was odd -- as she recalled, one of the girls had got a B -- but she let it go. “Notices were sent out, relatives notified,” her father, Randy Klotz, said. Three of the students had G.P.A.s above 4.0 because they'd taken at least one A.P. course, whereas Stephanie, whose G.P.A. was 4.0, had not. (Instead of taking A.P. history in her junior year, Stephanie, who hoped to become a doctor, had decided to take another chemistry course.) Three weeks before graduation, Stephanie was told that the school was reversing its decision: she and Megan Keener, another girl with a 4.0 G.P.A., wouldn't be valedictorians after all. (Keener, too, lacked A.P. credits, though she had been taking classes at local colleges.) Two students with G.P.A.s above 4.0 would be named co-valedictorians, and a third would be salutatorian. “I would be nothing,” Klotz recalled.

When Klotz told her parents, they complained first to the principal, then several times to the school board. Finally, the family hired a lawyer and sued the school district, the superintendent, and the principal of Valley View. A judge in the Common Pleas Court of Montgomery County, Ohio, sided with the Klotzes, and, days before graduation, issued an order reinstating Klotz and Keener as valedictorians.

"At first, I was, like, I'm seventeen, I can't be dealing with this before I graduate from high school,” Klotz told me. “I'm not strong enough. And then I thought, I need to fight for the people who are coming after me, who really aren't strong enough to fight.” Graduation day, she recalled, “was kind of a comedy event, really. I was sitting there, bored, twirling my tassels.” Klotz said that she wasn't allowed to speak, because the decision to reinstate her title was made just before graduation day. One of the valedictorians who did speak, she recalled, “read that Dr. Seuss book 'Oh, the Places You'll Go!' to the audience. I mean, she read practically the entire book.” Klotz remembers being given “so many academic awards and plaques, it was ridiculous. Every time I sat down, I had to get up again to get an award. I had so many plaques I literally couldn't carry them off the stage, and I'm, like, 'Oh, yeah, right, I'm not valedictorian?' ”

Klotz graduated magna cum laude from the University of Dayton in May, and will start medical school at the University of Cincinnati in August. At college, Klotz realized that she was “a little fish in a big sea with a lot of valedictorians.” But she's glad that she sued: she learned that she could be a fighter when she needed to be, and she showed Germantown that she couldn't be “walked all over.” Klotz, who is engaged to be married to a social worker, is working as a waitress until school starts. To her fiancé's chagrin, she's been watching a lot of “trauma-and-E.R. shows” at home. (He lacks her strong stomach.) “There's so much focus on all the terrible things youths in our society do -- murdering each other, using drugs -- that I think it's good to focus on the positive things, as opposed to people who are dropping out and are failures,” she said. “There are all these special programs to keep kids in school, give them a special experience, make them feel special. So much of classroom experience is focussed on these kids who are lacking. There's nothing to reward the kids who are self-motivated and are working hard.”

The first public high school in the United States, Boston's English Classical School, was founded in 1821. Within a few decades, the practice of designating a valedictorian had become an established tradition in American high schools. There was little public financing of secondary schools and a good deal of hostility to them, at least until the eighteen-eighties. High schools were so widely criticized as palaces of privilege, teaching Latin to the children of the rich, that Horace Mann, the education reformer, tried for a while to come up with a new name for “high school,” reasoning that perhaps the phrase implied “superior and exclusive,” William J. Reese notes in his 1995 history “The Origins of the American High School.” (In fact, many high-school students in the nineteenth century were middle-class girls training to support themselves as teachers.) By 1900, roughly ten per cent of American adolescents were enrolled in high school, and public funding remained relatively small.

The graduation ceremony, and in particular the valedictory, served an important purpose for proponents of publicly funded secondary education. A clever graduate declaiming loftily was something to show off to the local taxpayers, and, besides, graduation ceremonies were popular entertainments in an age that lacked television and radio and honored elocution and oratory. “By the late eighteen-fifties, approximately four thousand spectators attended the graduation exercises at Philadelphia's Central High School -- and twice that number was turned away,” Reese writes. “Eight to ten thousand citizens arrived for the event in Cleveland in the eighteen-seventies.” In smaller towns, five hundred or more people might show up to see five or six graduates.

The valedictorian prize also celebrated people who weren't often publicly recognized: studious girls. In the nineteenth century, young women largely outperformed young men in American high schools. They generally won more prizes, graduated at higher rates, and displayed lovelier penmanship. At graduation, girls would read while sitting or standing on a low step, since it wasn't considered proper for them to speak from a platform. Still, the opportunity to appear before an audience of hundreds or thousands, to be singled out for one's academic achievements, must have been heady at a time when modesty and self-effacement were the constant counsel for young women.

In 1981, two professors, Terry Denny and Karen Arnold, began following the lives of eighty-one high-school valedictorians -- forty-six women and thirty-five men from Illinois. (Their sample is, admittedly, narrow.) According to Arnold's 1995 book “Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians,” these students continued to distinguish themselves academically in college; a little less than sixty per cent pursued graduate studies. By their early thirties, most were “working in high-level, prestigious, secure professions” -- they were lawyers, accountants, professors, doctors, engineers. Arnold totted up fifteen Ph.D.s, six law degrees, three medical degrees, and twenty-two master's degrees in her group. The valedictorians got divorced at a lower rate than did the population at large, were less likely to use alcohol and drugs, and tended to be active in their communities. At the same time, Arnold, who stays in touch with her cohort, has found that few of the valedictorians seem destined for intellectual eminence or for creative work outside of familiar career paths. Dedicated to the well-rounded ideal -- to be a valedictorian, after all, you must excel in classes that don't interest you or are poorly taught -- the valedictorians had “used their strong work ethic to pursue multiple academic and extracurricular interests. None was obsessed with a single talent area to which he or she subordinated school and social involvement.” This marks a difference, Arnold said, from what we know about many eminent achievers, who tend to evince an early passion for a particular field. For these people, Arnold writes, a “powerful early interest evolves into lifelong, intensive, even obsessive involvement in the talent area.” She goes on, “Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.” Valedictorians, by contrast, conformed to the expectations of school and carefully chose careers that were likely to be socially and financially secure: “As a rule, valedictorians relegated their early interests to hobbies, second majors, or regretted dead ends. The serious athletes among the valedictorians never pursued sports occupations. Most of the high school musicians hung up their instruments during college.”

Becoming a valedictorian at a top high school is a gruelling trajectory -- involving perhaps a dozen A.P. classes and hours of study each night. Sometimes students cave in to the pressure. In 2002, Audrey Lin, one of Mission San Jose's many valedictorians, admitted that she had cheated to get to the top in high school, and gave back her valedictorian plaque. Lin, who is now a student at Berkeley, made her confession in conjunction with the release of a study by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, in which three-quarters of the high-school students surveyed acknowledged having cheated on a test the previous year; ten years earlier, the number had been sixty-one per cent.

In some ways, it seems that the valedictorian is a status designed for a simpler time, when fewer people aspired to college. It isn't entirely suited to a brutally competitive age in which the dividing line between those who go to college and those who don't may be the most significant fissure in American society, and in which the children (and parents) of the upper middle classes have been convinced that going to an exceedingly selective college is the only way to insure wealth and happiness.

Still, perhaps something is lost if schools eliminate valedictorians. Like spelling bees, the contest for valedictorian offers a pleasing image of a purer meritocracy, in which learning and performing by the rules leave one hardworking person standing. It seems sad to abolish the tradition -- and faintly ridiculous to honor too large a group. (If we're trying to be more sensitive, doesn't it make ordinary students feel worse when they can't be one of several dozen valedictorians?) Maybe the answer is to stick to one valedictorian but to make the rules of the contest clear, and to be sure everyone knows them. Maybe the honor should go to the student who is not necessarily the smartest but the most adept at running a peculiarly American kind of academic marathon, one that requires prodigious energy, tactical savvy, and a Tracy Flick-like determination. (Remember the Reese Witherspoon character from “Election”?)

“Over the past ten years, a lot of school districts have been abolishing the valedictorian, and I'm against that,” Karen Arnold told me. “On the day we allow anybody who's always wanted to be a quarterback to play on the high-school football team, then we can get rid of valedictorians. If we rank anything, we ought to rank what we say is most central to school, which is to say, academic learning.”

A few weeks, ago, I met Cheryl Barker, the mother of Kylie, the girl at Sarasota High School who, as it turned out, was one of the last two valedictorians at the school. Her daughter went to Furman University, in South Carolina, then to Northwestern. Cheryl Barker was a waitress when Kylie was in high school, and she is now the manager of a family-style restaurant in Sarasota. Her husband owns a print shop, and they have two younger children, a daughter who is graduating from Florida State this year and plans to go to law school, and a son who just graduated in the top ten per cent from Sarasota High.

Cheryl Barker still marvels at how hard Kylie worked, how determined she was, how she never missed a day of school, how she'd go to the library all the time to use the computer because they didn't have one at home. Barker thinks that it was a mistake for the high school to stop naming a valedictorian and a salutatorian. “Those kids all know who the No. 1 and 2 are, anyway,” she told me over coffee. “Everyone's so afraid of getting sued or losing their jobs these days that they try too hard to candy-coat things.” But, she added, “there are some kids who what they're good at is studying. That's what they do. They deserve something special to strive for. They do.”

American Girl Crazy!

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

I don't have anything against dolls, but part of me has always found them a little creepy -- their inert perfection, their blinky eyes, the way you find them in odd corners of the house, limbs akimbo, as if dropped from a great height. As a child, I had a Barbie with a frothy black cocktail dress and a Heidi doll I was fond of, though I could never get her hair rigged back up into those cinnamon buns on either side of her head after I'd unbraided it. I was impatient and a klutz, so buttons and bows, especially tiny ones, were a trial. In any case, I was more of a stuffed-animal girl myself, and my daughter, who is five, seems to be one too. She's had a few baby dolls, which she has graced with peculiar names -- Ha-Ha, Pogick -- but her interest in them, though warm, is intermittent. They spend most of their time upside down in the toy basket, missing crucial garments, which is why, I suppose, I don't care much for that genre of children's story in which toys come to life and bemoan their little masters' neglect of them.

So it was something of a surprise to me when, about a year ago, I developed a mild obsession with American Girl dolls. I read the catalogs; I read the books. I made a special trip to American Girl Place, the vast doll emporium in New York, where, without my children, I felt like a doll stalker or one of those self-styled hobbyists with a little too much time on her hands. (I kept thinking of a little amusement park we sometimes go to that has an ominous placard forbidding adults to enter unaccompanied by children.) I drifted by the clusters of mothers and grandmothers and little girls in satin-lined winter coats, their noses pressed against glass cases of doll accessories, their expressions sweetly avid. Sales people kept asking pointedly if they could help me.

Could they? I didn't know. The American Girl story fascinated me partly because of its sheer, almost shocking success. Mostly it fascinated me because of what it seemed to say about American girlhood. Parents I knew with girls on the brink of adolescence seemed anxious to prolong their daughters' childhoods, and some had specific advice on how to do so. Encourage an interest in horses -- that was my sister's idea. She was certainly relieved that her thirteen-year-old spent most of her afternoons mucking out stables and soaring over jumps rather than, say, IMing trash talk to her friends. Sports, in general, other people recommended -- unless they were the kinds of sports that led to extreme dieting. But for more and more families, it seemed, American Girl dolls were the chosen talisman against unwanted precocity.

How odd, when you think of it, that such an idea should exist. Who would have predicted that here in America, at the start of the twenty-first century, girls in high-necked Edwardian dresses, girls in bonnets, girls with labor-intensive chores, would seem so sturdy, competent, and admirable -- so much like the girls we hoped our little girls would want to be? But there it is: perhaps the most popular strategy for protecting your young daughter from Britneyhood and Paris Hiltonville, for holding her from the brink of mall-haunting, 'ho'-dressing tweendom, is to get her interested in American Girl dolls. It is a strategy that involves buying something in order to try and be something: the mother of a girlish girl, an innocent girl, a girl who, at nine or ten, still likes playing with old-fashioned dolls. But then again, there aren't that many options for parents who don't wish to succumb to what the toy industry calls "age compression," or "kids getting older younger" -- KGOY, for short. "The girls these days grow up so fast," a seven-year-old girl's grandmother explained to Newsday in 2003. The woman and her husband were waiting patiently in line at the opening of American Girl Place in Manhattan. They had already paid about four hundred dollars for Kaya, the Nez Perce American Girl doll and various accessories, but they did not regret it. "These toys," the woman said, "help them be girls for a little longer." These toys, she implied, were needed.

American Girl dolls are a very big deal, though if you have sons and no daughters, you may have to take my word for it. But this, in brief, is the story: In 1986, a forty-five-year-old woman with the fateful name Pleasant T. Rowland started a new career as a doll entrepreneur. Rowland had been an elementary school teacher, a TV news reporter, and a textbook author, but in 1984, when she accompanied her husband on a business trip to Colonial Williamsburg, she had something of an epiphany about what she wanted to do next. She loved the material culture of history, the stuff you could touch -- the wood, the pewter, the parchment. Rowland wondered whether there was a new way to market this tangible history to children, and she was still wondering when she headed into a toy store that Christmas to buy dolls for her eight- and ten-year-old nieces. She didn't want Barbie and she wasn't crazy about the other choices either. "Here I was, in a generation of women at the forefront of redefining women's roles," she recalled years later, "and yet our daughters were playing with dolls that celebrated being a teen queen or a mommy."

Soon Rowland hit on the idea of combining her love of history with her drive to create an uplifting girl culture. She would accomplish her aim by marketing dolls that represented little girls from different periods in American history. Eventually there would be eight of them: Kaya, an "adventurous" Nez Perce girl; Felicity, a "spunky" colonial girl; Josefina, a "hopeful" girl living on a New Mexican rancho in 1824; Kirsten, "a pioneer girl of strength and spirit"; Addy, a "courageous" girl who escapes slavery; Samantha, "a bright, compassionate girl living with her wealthy grandmother in 1904"; Nellie, who is Irish and also "practical and hardworking," which is just as well, since she was "hired to be a servant in the house next door to Samantha"; Kit, a "clever resourceful girl growing up during America's Depression"; and Molly, "a lively, loveable schemer and dreamer growing up in 1944." The dolls would be exceptionally well made -- Rowland went all the way to Germany for doll eyes that met her exacting standards for realism -- and outfitted in costumes that could pass some sort of muster for historical accuracy without sacrificing any girl appeal. (Nellie, the servant girl, for instance, would not be clad in anything too practical or gray, nor would Addie, the slave, look too disheveled. Their boots, however, would have a lot of buttons.)

Each girl had a book and eventually a series of books that told her story, and each book was sprinkled with historical details: steamboats, breadlines, Victory Gardens. In a sense, all the girls are pretty much the same girl -- the historical backdrops change, but the same basic personality type cycles cheerfully through all of them. All American Girls are "plucky," "spunky," and mildly adventurous but not overtly rebellious, and they are never misfits. They often have a pesky boy in their lives: a brother or neighbor who annoys them to no end. They are inclined to help the less fortunate, useful to the household economy, talkative without being mouthy, and bright without being egg-headed. Because all the leading characters in the books have a second and more compelling life as dolls (though pleasant enough, the books are not great children's literature), they must be pretty. Some of the most memorable children's book heroines are not pretty -- though it is understood that they may grow up to be handsome or striking or even, to the discerning eye, beautiful -- which is one reason so many generations of awkward, intellectual girls have loved them. Jo in Little Women is famously plain and tomboyish; Meg in A Wrinkle in Time describes herself as "snaggle-toothed," "myopic," and "clumsy," a bespectacled frump in the shadow of her gorgeous mother; even dear Laura in the Little House books compares herself unfavorably to her golden-haired, lady-like sister Mary, who always remembers to save her complexion by wearing her hat. In a freestanding book, a homely or an unkempt heroine is fine. In a book that supplies back story for a doll, it won't do.

The girls of color -- Josefina, Addy, and Kaya -- came later, but neither late arrival nor cultural distinctness did anything to alter their essential personality or, in some respects, their appearance. All American Girl dolls are plump-cheeked and sturdy-legged (the dolls look younger -- and hence cuddlier -- than the girls illustrated in the books), with round eyes and small smiles that reveal precisely two teeth. The catalogs often show girls matched to dolls by race: Addy is snuggled by an African American girl, Josefina by a Hispanic one. But in real life, girls quickly exhibited a happy disregard for such conventions. Kaya, the native American doll, for instance, has entranced girls of various ethnic backgrounds. (She is, after all, a nine-year-old with ready access to fast horses, beaded dresses, and the wide-open plains.)

The concept was, almost from the beginning, a remarkable success. Pleasant Company did not advertise and made its wares available by catalog only, but between September and December of its first year, 1986, it sold $1.7 million worth of products. By 2003 it had sold seven million dolls and eighty-two million books, still without advertising. In 1998 it opened its first store -- American Girl Place -- in Chicago, which became, in its first year, the top-selling store on Chicago's prime shopping street. In 2003 it opened a second American Girl Place, on Fifth Avenue in New York. "Place" was a significant word, for both the Chicago and New York stores were meant to be more than stores: they were destinations for families, safe harbors for innocent girlishness and mother-daughter bonding. Each store featured a doll hospital; a hair salon, where, for fifteen dollars, doll tresses could be styled by an adult; a theater with a live, Broadway-meets-Branson

Supreme Confidence

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 04:00:00 -0500

Lining up to hear a Supreme Court Justice speak is more like lining up for a rock concert than you might think. This is especially true if the speech is on a college campus and the speaker in question is Justice Antonin Scalia. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a favorite on the feminist lecture circuit; Clarence Thomas has vivid stories of growing up as a "nappy-headed little boy running barefoot" around Pinpoint, Georgia; Sandra Day O'Connor is the preferred Justice at awards luncheons where crystal figurines are handed out.

The Auteur of Anime

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes an angular, modernist form -- black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon -- it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child's fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs -- inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage -- to a rooftop garden of world grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.

Situated in a park on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Ghibli Museum is dedicated to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the most beloved director in Japan today, and -- especially since his film "Spirited Away" won the Oscar for best animated film, in 2002 -- perhaps the most admired animation director in the world. Miyazaki's zeal for craft and beauty has set a new standard for animated films. With few exceptions, we seldom know the names of directors of children's films, but if you have seen a Miyazaki film you know his name. He not only draws characters and storyboards for the films he directs; he also writes the rich, strange screenplays, which blend Japanese mythology with modern psychological realism. He is, in short, an auteur of children's entertainment, perhaps the world's first.

Miyazaki designed the Ghibli himself. The museum was partly funded by his movie studio -- after which it is named -- and is now a hugely popular, self-sustaining attraction. Though the museum is intended for children, who might be supposed not to care so much for beauty per se, it is, in nearly every detail, beautiful. A reproduction of the cat-shaped bus in Miyazaki's "My Neighbor Totoro" (1988), which is large enough for children to climb on, has glowing golden eyes, and fur both soft and bristly, like a caterpillar's. The museum showcases not only the visual splendor of Miyazaki's films but also what inspires them: among other things, a sense of wonder about the natural world; a fascination with flight; a curiosity about miniature or hidden realms. When I visited the museum this summer, it struck me as one of the few kid-oriented attractions I know that take seriously the notion of children as natural aesthetes -- in part because it portrays for them a creative life that they might plausibly lead as adults.

One typical exhibit, "Where a Film Begins," depicts a room in which a young boy dreams up an idea for a movie. The room is supposed to be a study inherited from the imaginary boy's grandfather, and the mise en scene captures an idealized, slightly antique coziness; a glass jar of colored pencils sits atop a wooden desk, and worn tapestry pillows rest on a library chair. The display conjures a creative young mind's half-glimpsed notions and sudden enthusiasms: models of a flying dinosaur and a red biplane hang from the ceiling; thick books about birds and fish and the history of aviation occupy the bookshelves. As sentimental as it is, this room makes you think with pleasure about the dreamy stage that often precedes the making of art. Standing amid its congenial clutter, a child visitor can easily grasp how it is, as Miyazaki writes in the museum's catalogue, that "imagination and premonition" and "sketches and partial images" can become "the core of a film." Indeed, "Spirited Away," the story of a sullen ten-year-old girl who finds herself transported from an abandoned theme park into a ravishing spirit world, was inspired in part by Miyazaki's own visit to a peculiar outdoor attraction -- a Tokyo museum where old Japanese buildings, including a splendid bathhouse, had been carted from their original locations.

Miyazaki is detail-oriented to the point of obsession -- he traveled to Portugal just to look at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that had long haunted him, and sent Michiyo Yasuda, the color designer for his films, to Alsace to scout hues for his latest movie -- and so, too, is his museum. For the in-house theatre, which shows short films that he makes especially for the museum (including a sequel to "My Neighbor Totoro"), he hired an acoustic designer to create an uncommonly gentle sound system. Miyazaki wanted the opposite of the "tendency in recent Hollywood films," which is "to use heavy bass to try to pull the audience into the film." He thinks that movie theatres can be claustrophobic, even overwhelming places for young children, so he wanted his theatre to have windows that let in some natural light, bench-style seats that a child can't sink into, and films that make them "sigh in relaxation." Miyazaki fondly remembered the days when cigarette smoke in a theatre could draw your attention to the beam of light stretching from the projector, so he placed the projector in a glass booth that protrudes into the seating area. "I want to show children that moving images are enjoyed by having huge reels revolving, an electric light shining on the film, and a lot of complicated things being done," he explains in the museum's catalogue. Colleagues told him that projecting the films digitally would help preserve them, but Miyazaki relished the idea that, eventually, viewers might see "worn film with

The Struggle

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 08 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

It was hard to find anyone at the recent anti-gay-marriage rally in Washington, D.C., who had a bad word to say about gays. Chandra Judy, who had come to the "Mayday for Marriage" rally on the Mall with her husband, Manford, and their ten-month-old baby, Eloise, "really wanted to say," for instance, "that this was not about gay-bashing." Chandra, who is slender and blond and wore jeans and shiny pale-pink lipstick, said she was a professional dancer in Washington, and knew a lot of gay people. She had no objection to civil unions. What she and her husband were worried about was the institution of marriage. "If the sanctity of one man and one woman is not protected, if we keep expanding the definition, then where's it going to lead?" Manford wondered. "One man and ten women? A man and a child?" He did not add, as some people attending the rally did, "A man and a dog?" He wore a grave expression and appeared to weigh his words carefully. "If it's not protected at its root, then it cannot be protected."

It was a gusty, gray day; sudden cloudbursts sent yellow leaves whirling from trees. Families huddled under umbrellas and ponchos and American-flag beach towels, holding soggy cardboard containers of French fries. An eleven-year-old girl named Jenna waved a sign she had made that read, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." But most people in the crowd stuck to the Hallmarkish "Take a Stand for Marriage" logo-T-shirts or signs with a silhouette of a man and woman kissing, illuminated by romantic-looking starlight.

On the podium, speakers such as Gary Bauer, the former Presidential candidate, and Dr. James Dobson, the fatherly chairman of Focus on the Family, were gleefully tearing into "activist judges" and "imperious courts." But they didn't have much to say about gay people. Alan Chambers, the "ex-gay" president of an organization called Exodus International ("the leading outreach to men, women, and youth affected by unwanted homosexuality"), urged the crowd to "repent of our hostility to homosexual people." He went on, "If we're standing at the corner saying, 'Turn or Burn' and 'God hates fags,' we're not behaving like Christians." This earned him a big burst of applause.

Of course, this was a group of people who believe that homosexuality is a choice, a life style that one becomes "involved in," rather than a fixed identity into which one is born. Renunciation of certain life styles-drinking, drugtaking-is a familiar trope to the conservative and born-again Christians who composed most of the crowd at the rally. It makes Alan Chambers, whose wife, tousle-haired and serious, stood very close to him on the podium, seem like a persuasive person-somebody who has had sex on both sides of the divide and was here to testify to the superiority of the married, heterosexual kind. "With the gay issue, I try to make the analogy to alcoholism," Pete Baumgartle, a pastor from a nondenominational Christian church in southern Indiana, said. But, he added, "it gets me into trouble, because then it's like maybe I'm saying homosexuality is a disease, too."

All this careful sympathy for the sinner raised the question of how much appetite Americans-even Americans who oppose same-sex marriage-really have for a long fight against it. According to Michael Cromartie, who directs the Evangelicals in Civic Life project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in Washington, there is "a kind of ambivalence just beneath the surface of opposition to same-sex marriage, even among people of strong religious convictions," an ambivalence that may mean it will not become the long-lasting social crusade that the anti-abortion issue is. Cromartie believes that there is a "strand of evangelism that is not exactly libertarian, but is unwilling to beat up on anyone else for their sins; it might be rooted in a theological understanding that we're broken people in a broken world."

Chandra Judy was certainly stressing the positives, as well as she could under the circumstances. "I do believe it's a choice," she said, clapping warmly for Dr. Dobson as he strode to the stage. "But if people choose to be homosexual that's their right, and they should get legal benefits and all those things."