Margaret Talbot

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.