JOHANNESBURG, June 22 — As Zimbabwe‘s disintegration gathers potentially unstoppable momentum, a swelling tide of migrants is moving into neighboring South Africa, driven into exile by oppression, unemployment and inflation so relentless that many goods now double in price weekly.

South Africa is deporting an average of 3,900 illegal Zimbabwean migrants every week, the International Organization for Migration says. That is up more than 40 percent from the second half of 2006, and six times the number South African officials said they were expelling in late 2003.

And that reflects only those who are captured. Many more Zimbabweans slip into the country undetected, although estimates vary wildly. In a nation of 46 million, most experts say, undocumented Zimbabweans could number several hundred thousand to two million.

Social tensions are ratcheting up in both nations, as Zimbabwe’s adult population dwindles and South Africans, already burdened by high unemployment, face new competition for jobs and housing. The migrants also pose a diplomatic problem, because South Africa is trying to broker an end to Zimbabwe’s long political crisis without criticizing its government or appearing to have a major stake in the outcome.

The situation is inflicting ever more misery on the Zimbabweans. The vast majority flee their country’s penury to find a way to support their families back home. But in South Africa they often find xenophobia, exploitation and a government unwilling and ill-equipped to help them.

“There’s a lot of competition” with South Africans “for other resources like housing in informal settlements, access to limited primary health care and education,” said Chris Maroleng, an expert on Zimbabwe at the Institute for Security Studies, a research organization in Pretoria.

South Africa’s government already struggles to provide free housing, medical care and employment for its own poorest, including the millions living in shantytowns. Here, where joblessness runs from 25 to 40 percent of adult workers, the Zimbabweans — now the nation’s largest migrant group — are increasingly seen as intruders, not victims, and clashes between the groups are not uncommon.

Unquestionably, the Zimbabweans are victims first. A rising number claim to be refugees from persecution by President Robert G. Mugabe‘s police and by supporters of his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. Just six Zimbabweans sought political asylum in South Africa in 2001; last year, the total was nearly 19,000, more than a third of all asylum applications in South Africa.

But most are fleeing privation, not persecution. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate was officially 4,530 percent in May; economists say it is at least twice that. Industries are operating at barely 30 percent of capacity, unemployment exceeds 80 percent and a disastrous harvest is likely to leave up to four million in need of food aid this year.

A memorandum prepared by 34 international aid agencies, including the United Nations and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, predicted this month that the country’s economy would cease to function by the end of this year.

Remittances keep the economy afloat: half of all households get most of their money from distant friends and relatives, a Global Poverty Research survey concluded last June. More than one in five of those who sent money lived in South Africa, the most of any nation except Britain.

Magugu Nyathi arrived in Johannesburg two and a half years ago and found work as a journalist for a Zimbabwe news organization. Her aunt, an office worker in Bulawayo, earns 400,000 Zimbabwe dollars a month — about $9, until the Zimbabwe dollar plummeted this week.

Now the aunt’s monthly salary is worth about $2. She survives in part on a stipend from Ms. Nyathi.

“There are families who don’t have a kid outside the country,” said Ms. Nyathi, who lives in Cape Town. “How are they surviving? Just think of it.”

Ms. Nyathi is lucky as migrants go: she has a skill and has obtained a temporary permit that allows her to remain legally in South Africa while her application for asylum is processed. Because Zimbabwe was long one of the best-educated nations in Africa, a share of migrants — particularly teachers, who have often been targets of harassment by Mr. Mugabe’s supporters — stand a good chance of finding work in South Africa, legally or not.

Johannesburg’s government said this week that 8 in 10 people who had visited a new office for migrant assistance were Zimbabwean, and that the visitors included mathematicians, geologists, engineers and experts in computers and aviation.

But skills are no guarantee of employment. At the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg, hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees gather every evening, waiting for the doors to open so they can spend the night. They occupy several floors of the building, from the foyer to stairwells and meeting rooms.

“Some of the people we have in this building are amazing,” said the Rev. Paul Verryn, the Methodist bishop of Johannesburg. “We have a doctor, two accountants, teachers, a health inspector — all sleeping on the floor.”

Even qualified migrants find it hard to get jobs without work permits or temporary permits that allow migrants to stay while they apply for asylum.

The permits are issued only in a handful of offices, and only at limited times. The Home Affairs Ministry, which regulates immigration, is frequently accused by Zimbabweans and advocacy groups of deliberately withholding permits, perhaps to force them to return home. More likely, it is simply overwhelmed: in Pretoria, for example, refugees often sleep on the streets outside the office to be the first of hundreds and even thousands who line up to apply for asylum.

Those who apply for asylum wait years for a decision, as officials tackle a vast backlog. Last year, as nearly 19,000 Zimbabwean applications for asylum flooded in, Home Affairs processed fewer than 2,000 requests from past years and granted asylum to a mere 103 people.

The growing crush of applicants presents the government with a delicate problem. During his seven years in office, President Thabo Mbeki has studiously avoided criticizing Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, and is trying to present himself as an impartial broker in negotiations between Mr. Mugabe and opposition politicians to lay the groundwork for a presidential election next year.

When a leading opposition politician, Roy Bennett, fled Zimbabwe last year under threat of arrest, his application for political asylum was denied because the South African government decided that his claims of persecution were not founded. Mr. Bennett’s farm had been seized by the government, he had been imprisoned for a year for shoving a member of Parliament and he had been accused by the Zimbabwe police of plotting to murder Mr. Mugabe.

Mr. Bennett eventually won asylum, but only after going to court.

“The problem in giving someone asylum is that you have to make a statement about the country that individual is fleeing,” said Mr. Maroleng, at the Pretoria institute. “Politically, it raises questions, and it undermines the government’s policy on Zimbabwe, which is not to engage the government of Zimbabwe” on questions of repression and misrule.

So migrants wait for a chance at legal residence that may never arrive. On Thursday, a schoolteacher and union official from Harare used his Zimbabwe civil-service passport to walk across the border in Beitbridge and make his way to Johannesburg.

The teacher, who insisted on anonymity, said he had left his wife and two children behind because he was living in fear. He had been arrested and beaten after joining a union march in September, he said. “As we go forward toward elections in 2008,” he said, “we are again targets of violence. Every morning, my life was very much in danger.”

But he might have stayed, he said, had his monthly salary not been the equivalent of $15.

Another teacher, a friend, had fled Zimbabwe last year after government spies mistook a wake in her parlor for a meeting of opposition members, and set fire to her house, she said.

“You don’t feel the pain on somebody when it’s not happening to you,” she said in a Johannesburg clinic for migrants seeking legal advice. “I never expected such a life. But I think there’s a reason why God wants this.”

But for the moment, she said: “I just want a job. I can do dishes. I don’t mind that I was a teacher.”

Bear Stearns Companies, the investment bank, pledged up to $3.2 billion in loans yesterday to bail out one of its hedge funds that was collapsing because of bad bets on subprime mortgages.

It is the biggest rescue of a hedge fund since 1998 when more than a dozen lenders provided $3.6 billion to save Long-Term Capital Management.

The crisis this week from the near collapse of two hedge funds managed by Bear Stearns stems directly from the slumping housing market and the fallout from loose lending practices that showered money on people with weak, or subprime, credit, leaving many of them struggling to stay in their homes.

Bear Stearns averted a meltdown this time, but if delinquencies and defaults on subprime loans surge, Wall Street firms, hedge funds and pension funds could be left holding billions of dollars in bonds and securities backed by loans that are quickly losing their value.

Bear Stearns acted yesterday after the hedge fund and a related fund had suffered millions in losses and after shocked investors had begun asking for their money back. The firm agreed to buy out several Wall Street banks that had lent the fund money, which managers hoped would avoid a broader sell-off without causing a meltdown in the once-booming market for mortgage securities.

The firm is, meanwhile, negotiating with banks to rescue the second, larger fund started last August, which has more than $6 billion in loans and reportedly holds far riskier investments. Those negotiations were continuing yesterday, and it was unclear whether they would be successful.

“We don’t think it is over,” said Girish V. Reddy, managing director of Prisma Capital Partners, which invests in other hedge funds. “More funds will feel the pain, but not many are as leveraged as the Bear fund.”

Nervousness about the souring subprime loans and rising oil prices sent the stock market plummeting. Already down almost 60 points, the Dow Jones industrial average fell sharply after the announcement of the bailout and closed down 185.58 points.

Shares of Bear Stearns closed down $2.06, to $143.75; the stock was down more than 4 percent for the week.

For Bear Stearns, the drama surrounding its two troubled hedge funds has given it and its prestigious mortgage business a black eye. The bailout was a major departure for the firm, which has long resisted putting too much of its own capital at risk.

But in this case, the stakes were too high. If lenders had seized the assets of the funds and tried to sell billions of dollars in mortgage-related securities at fire-sale prices, it could have exposed Bear Stearns and the market to substantial losses.

While the board of Bear Stearns never met over the funds, all of its top executives, including the chief executive, James E. Cayne; its presidents, Alan D. Schwartz and Warren J. Spector; and the chief financial officer, Samuel L. Molinaro Jr., huddled in meetings over the last few days looking to find a way to contain the crisis, according to people briefed on the discussions who could not speak for attribution.

Even Alan C. Greenberg, the 79-year-old former chairman, who spends less time these days on the firm’s matters but remains an active board member, became involved.

Yet, as Bear Stearns worked to manage the crisis, many on Wall Street speculated about how the firm could let the funds get in such a precarious position.

In fact, executives at Bear Stearns Asset Management had debated last summer whether to start the second hedge fund.

The first fund, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Fund — the one bailed out yesterday — was started in 2004 and had done well, posting 41 months of positive returns of about 1 percent to 1.5 percent a month. But investors were clamoring for even higher yields, which would require more aggressive bets on riskier mortgage-related securities and significantly higher levels of borrowed money, or leverage, to bolster returns.

The firm clearly had the expertise — it was a leader in underwriting and trading bonds and esoteric securities backed by mortgages. In addition, Ralph R. Cioffi, who ran the funds, had played a major role in building the Bear Stearns mortgage business.

So, in August, the Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Enhanced Leveraged Fund — the second fund that eventually had huge losses — was started with $600 million in investments, mostly from wealthy individual clients of Bear Stearns, and at least $6 billion in money borrowed from banks and brokerage firms. Bear Stearns and a handful of its top executives invested a mere $40 million in both funds.

The timing could not have been worse.

By the end of last year, housing prices in many areas were cresting and beginning to fall. The decline began to expose lax lending standards in the subprime market. Soon borrowers started falling behind on payments just months after they closed on their loans, forcing several large lenders into bankruptcy protection.

The Bear Stearns funds, like so many others, had invested in collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, which invest in bonds backed by hundreds of loans and other financial instruments. Wall Street sells CDOs in slices to investors. Some of those pieces have low yields but they are easily traded and carry less risk; others are more susceptible to defaults and trade infrequently, which makes them difficult to value.

Last year, $316.4 billion in mortgage-related CDOs were issued, about 77 percent more than the year before, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association said.

At first, the Bear Stearns hedge funds appeared to weather the storm. But in March, the older fund registered its first loss. One investor, who asked not to be identified because he was trying to recover his investment, said that when he moved to get his money out, he was told investors had tried to redeem 10 percent of the fund.

By April, the older fund was down by 5 percent for the year, and the newer fund had fallen 10 percent.

Managers tried to protect the fund by hedging potential losses in lower-rated securities they held, but did not do so for higher-rated bonds, which also fell in value.

“They didn’t realize this was Katrina,” the investor said. “They thought it was just another storm.”

In May, however, more significant problems began to emerge. The Swiss investment bank UBS shut its hedge fund arm, Dillon Read Capital Management, after bad subprime bets led to a $124 million loss.

Also that month, Bear Stearns Asset Management filed plans to start a public offering of a financial services firm called Everquest Financial, which, to some, appeared to be little more than a place to park the riskiest securities Bear Stearns had invested in. (The firm has no plans for now to move forward with the offering, according to a person briefed on the firm’s plans.)

Perhaps the most startling development was a sharp restatement in April of the second fund. The firm revalued some securities and told investors that the fund was down 23 percent, not 10 percent as it had said earlier.

Shocked investors began contacting Bear Stearns, demanding to pull their money out. In May, the firm froze all redemption requests. This month, at least three Wall Street firms — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch — began demanding more cash as collateral for the loans they had made.

Fighting to save the funds, Bear Stearns sold $3.6 billion in high-grade securities. Meanwhile, its adviser, Blackstone, scrambled to line up a deal in which Bear Stearns would put up $1.5 billion in new loans and a consortium of banks led by Citigroup and Barclays would put in $500 million.

In return, the lenders would have their exposure to the funds reduced but could not make further margin calls for 12 months.

Some lenders, including Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, balked and moved to sell assets. At one point Wednesday, nearly $2 billion in securities were listed for sale, although some banks, including JPMorgan, eventually canceled scheduled auctions.

By the end of the day, out of the $850 million in securities that Merrill had put up for sale, only a small portion actually sold.

In the wake of the weak auctions, several other lenders, including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, reached deals with Bear Stearns. At least some of the deals involved the lenders selling the securities back to Bear Stearns for cash, although the prices were not disclosed.

Bear Stearns is bailing one of the funds out because it is worried about the damage to its reputation if it stuck investors and lenders with big losses, said Dick Bove, an analyst with Punk Ziegel & Company.

“If they walked away from it, investors would have lost all their money and lenders would have lost all of the money,” Mr. Bove said. But “if they did that to everyone in the financial community, the financial community would have shut them down.”

SCOURING the tundra for the source of the next big boom is the Alaskan way.

Skin it, mine it, fish for it, drill for it.

It has all paid off, at least for a while. It has also propped up the state’s place in the national mythology — the alluring frontier detached on the map but also a critical supplier of the world’s wants.

Now, as oil production continues its steady decline, and the temperature creeps higher, it is far from clear what the next big boom might be, or what Alaska might become without one. Nearing a half-century of statehood, the wildest and most mysterious of American places could use a reliable map to the future. Fog seems to be rolling in instead.

Political scandal has erupted, leading to indictments for state lawmakers and even raising questions over the dealings of Senator Ted Stevens, “Uncle Ted,” the great provider for the Great Land. Global warming is puddling the permafrost and threatening coastal villages. The federal government, which spends more money on Alaska per capita than it does on any other state, may no longer be such a sugar daddy. The population, which once surged and plummeted with fortunes found and dashed, now relies more on trusty old biological reproduction for replenishment than some new rush of speculators.

“It’s sort of like this dance that keeps on changing, but it keeps us dancing,” said Neal Fried, an economist with the state’s Department of Labor. “In some ways you just have to sit back and say, wow, this is pretty amazing.”

Or you could confront it.

“Alaskans are kind of saying, What is the next boom?” said Senator Lisa Murkowski. “I think it is a hard question to answer and I think it’s wise for us to talk kind of beyond the boom-and-bust path we’ve been on. Why does it have to be a boom and bust? When will we get ourselves on a more sustainable path?”

Or you could drop all diplomacy.

“We’re basically divorced from reality up here,” said Andrew Halcro, a Republican who ran for governor last year as an independent. “People say: ‘Wow, we got a Gap or a Banana Republic, everything must be cool.’ But what you don’t look at is the big picture.”

In Alaska, of course, the picture is really big. In a state with 663,000 square miles and barely one person for each of them, it is easy to see things from a different point of view.

“We’ve been saying disaster is around the corner for years and we’ve been wrong many times,” said Gregg Erickson, an economist in Juneau who writes a newsletter about the state budget.

Asked what the future might hold once the oil finally does dry up, Mr. Erickson said: “Who knows? But we can see some outlines.”

Many ideas come straight out of the old extraction-economy playbook. The new Republican governor, Sarah Palin, a former suburban mayor, beauty pageant queen and exponent of something previously untranslatable in Alaska politics, “transparent government,” is pushing for a new pipeline that would pump trillions of cubic feet of natural gas from the North Slope to the lower 48 states, potentially delivering another Alaska boom, or at least a boomlet.

Still, even if that happens, and virtually everyone in Alaska hopes it does, most experts say the benefits will be far less than those of the Trans Alaska Pipeline, whose construction, completed 30 years ago, transformed the state.

Since the oil bust of the mid-1980s, the economy has been growing, slowly but steadily. A Target store, the first in Alaska, is set for construction outside downtown Anchorage, a stamp of retail arrival. But the backbone of the growth has been oil and federal money.

The underlying challenges are only expected to sharpen: The state has a small, aging population. It depends on oil for more than 80 percent of state revenue. While tourism, fishing and cargo shipping are growing, they are not about to supplant oil, and there is no other obvious source for major revenue that could. Not only is there no state income tax or many other fees, nearly every Alaskan gets a check each year from the state based on investments from oil revenues. Last year, the checks were for $1,107.

That tension is not new, but there is more. Beginning in the late 1990s, as Mr. Stevens, a Republican, became chairman of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, federal spending in Alaska eventually doubled, going from $4.2 billion in 1995 to $8.4 billion in 2004. Now that Democrats have taken control of Congress, the senator is no longer chairman.

“They see about three years’ worth of federal projects in the pipeline, and then after that there’s nothing,” said Mr. Halcro, the former candidate for governor. “I’ve heard from very credible sources that the people of Alaska are going to be surprised at how little federal money is coming in.”

One of those sources was Senator Murkowski, also a Republican. She was appointed to office in 2002 by her father, Frank, who held the seat for 22 years before he left to run for governor. Ms. Murkowski said last week that with Democrats in control and so-called earmarks under greater scrutiny in both parties, “the way we have typically done business or operated as a state is changing.” Big building projects like, say, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, may be on the way out.

“When you think about how the monies have come to the state, so much of it has been because we needed to build a certain capacity that states in the lower 48 have had for generations,” Ms. Murkowski said. “We were in that catching-up period. It wasn’t more than our fair share, it was our fair share. We were maturing as a state.”

Ms. Murkowski, 50, is among a younger generation of politicians, along with Ms. Palin, 43, and Mayor Mark Begich of Anchorage, a Democrat, who cast themselves as more inclined to find common ground than make deals behind closed doors.

Senator Murkowski uses words like “sustainable” when she talks about developing natural resources, and she expresses interest in alternative energy like ocean, wind, geothermal and solar. But like Senator Stevens and Don Young, the state’s sole representative in the House and also a Republican, she supports drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal that would increase oil revenues but has little support in the Democratic Congress.

Alaska has an emergency option should it ever need one, and it is like no other: the Permanent Fund, a $39 billion colossus built on oil revenues over the course of 31 years. The account earns the interest that provides residents with their annual dividend.

But the few politicians who publicly support tapping it for other purposes are usually met with an icy public response. Few are standing up for big new taxes, either. Calls for a “long-range plan” are drowned out in the search for a new resource boom. How about a controversial gold mine in Bristol Bay? The natural gas pipeline? Drilling in the refuge?

“People keep punting because they hope the next big development is going to bail us out,” said Stanley E. Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska, who spends much of his time working to protect wilderness areas from some of those proposals. “That constant pressure is there. You have a lot of Alaska sort of collectively holding its breath.”

AT a glance, Mia, the self-effacing heroine of “Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him,” Danielle Ganek’s catty vivisection of the New York art world, has little in common with her peers. They are “gallerinas,” formidably icy girl Fridays, imperious behind their steel-and-stone desks at Manhattan galleries.

In her debut novel Ms. Ganek flicks at these glorified receptionists, “pretentious creatures in intellectual fashion and high heels, dripping with attitude and sarcasm.” Black-clad ravens to Mia’s genteel wren, they trade in impeccable pedigrees, glossy sex appeal and, mostly, information.

As for Mia, a failed artist, “I never get the poop,” she says forlornly more than halfway through the book. And then, one day, she does. By the tale’s denouement, she has gleaned enough inside intelligence to impress everyone in her rarefied orbit — the reclusive artists, the pompous dealers, the art-lusting collectors, “horny as teenagers.” And she has enough poop to write a scathing tell-all about the after-hours scheming inside the proverbial Chelsea white box.

Like Ms. Ganek, her real-world alter ego, Mia also gets to live out the cherished fantasy of certain striving New Yorkers: A self-described exile with uncommon reserves of cunning and patience, Mia becomes the ultimate insider, penetrating the private recesses of her arcane world.

Ms. Ganek, 43, who wore a tailored white shirt, a beige skirt and tan sling-backs for an interview last week, shares more with Mia than her demure wardrobe. Bubbling beneath that studiedly low-key surface is a well of ambition. “I definitely have painted, badly. I can relate to that aspect of Mia’s story,” she said last week, over chilled mineral water on a rooftop terrace at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea. Without irony, she added, “I have wrestled with the creative process. Mia, on some level, her story is autobiographical.”

But while Mia acquires much of her stinging material sitting behind her concrete slab of a desk, Ms. Ganek gathers hers at the constellation of Chelsea galleries where she is a frequent visitor, and at the art fairs and galas she attends with her husband, David K. Ganek, a hedge fund manager and a Guggenheim trustee. Last year the Ganeks served as chairmen of the Guggenheim’s International Dinner, raising an impressive $4 million for the museum.

Ms. Ganek writes at a computer in her duplex, with its four bedrooms and a library, at 740 Park Avenue, one of the city’s most prestigious co-ops. Purchased last year for around $19 million, it houses a collection that includes works by noted art world humorists like Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan and Jeff Koons.

Prominent collectors (“Yes, you can read ‘prominent’ as ‘wealthy,’ ” Mia informs her readers), the Ganeks are well acquainted with the machinations of an overheated market, in which, as Mia’s boss observes, “art is the new cocaine,” and the measure of an artwork is its price.

Ms. Ganek, the daughter of Frank DiGiacomo, a former financial vice president of W. R. Grace, grew up in Switzerland and Brazil but considers herself a committed New Yorker. Since settling in Manhattan two years ago with her husband, who founded his fund, Level Global, in 2003, she has maintained a quiet presence.

But that is likely to change with the publication tomorrow of “Lulu,” which its publisher, Viking, is marketing as the “Devil Wears Prada” of the Chelsea set. Poised to become a hot beach read, the book also promises to ease Ms. Ganek’s transition from working mom and former magazine editor to certified member of A-list society in Manhattan.

Her ascent seems assured. Earlier this spring she was one of the most talked about women at a gathering at Sloan Barnett’s Georgian town house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Last Wednesday night she was the guest of Lisa Dennison, the Guggenheim director, who gave her a book party at the museum. Her photo frequently appears in The New York Social Diary, a Web site. She has been photographed at dinners in honor of designers to the Uptown crowd, and has overseen charity benefits at her home in Southampton, N.Y.

IN her book, the title character, an artists’ muse, is urged to use her hip girl-about-town status to introduce her own fashion label. Clearly Ms. Ganek knows a thing or two about self-branding. “She is a textbook lesson on how to do it,” said David Patrick Columbia, the publisher of Social Diary.” “She takes all of her advantages — her talent, her husband’s financial aura, her involvement in one of the city’s major charities” — City Harvest — “and uses them optimally.”

Mr. Columbia maintained that Ms. Ganek has shrewdly applied business techniques to raise her profile socially. Yet Ms. Ganek insisted, “I don’t have any social agenda. If you’re talking about people who go to a lot of benefits, that’s not what I do. It’s very disconcerting to go out and do these interviews,” she added. “I’m basically quite shy.”

Still, as Janet Maslin observed in a book review in The New York Times on Monday, Ms. Ganek’s rising stature and “proximity to her subject gives her an insider’s wisdom without seriously compromising her ability to dish.”

Ms. Ganek seems to have had little trouble reconciling her new insider status with an exile’s point of view. “As an American living abroad, I have always been an outsider,” she said.

Mia, too, seems at first to hover in the margins. Like any self-respecting chick-lit heroine, she skewers her boss, Simon Pryce, a peacock in Turnbull & Asser with an immovable coiffure. At the same time she nurses a crush on a young art adviser, a charmer with lank hair and a camel coat slung over his broad shoulders. ” ‘Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him’ is a genre book,” Ms. Maslin acknowledged in her review, but as a genre book, “it’s better than most.”

Ms. Ganek’s tale centers on the fate of the painting that gives the book its strangely weighty title, a 9-by-12-foot portrait of a 9-year-old girl wielding a dripping brush. The work is by Jeffrey Finelli, a one-armed “emerging” artist in his 50s, who has briefly returned to New York from his adoptive home in Italy for the premiere showing of his paintings.

On the night of his opening, Finelli steps onto the rain-slicked street in front of the Pryce Gallery and is struck by a cab. With his demise comes the inevitable spike in the value of his work, “Lulu” in particular, and the equally inevitable skirmish as a hive of scheming dealers, collectors and celebrities zoom in for the kill.

They include speculators and art trophy hunters like Martin Better, a real estate developer known to drop “five, ten, even twenty or thirty million on a piece with the nonchalant air of a housewife grabbing a box of Honey Nut Cheerios at the Stop & Shop.” There is the greedy collector Connie Kantor, married to a toilet-paper-dispenser magnate, “a moving sight gag” in five-inch heels and hooded mink sweatshirt, carrying the requisite Birkin bag, “so big it looks fake, but Connie doesn’t have the confidence to carry a fake.”

Ms. Ganek does not spare the big-ticket artists, flimflammers like Dane O’Neill, known equally for his sprawling installations and for getting naked at parties. She takes aim, too, at operators like the contessa, Finelli’s mistress, regal in black, trailing hashish plumes from her ivory cigarette holder.

Her characters have given rise to a flurry of speculation about who might be their real-life models.

“Certain people are composites,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the international co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s.

INDEED, a dealer like Simon bears a superficial resemblance to Philippe Ségalot, a New York dealer with a famously leonine mane. Stock figures, Ms. Ganek’s characters nonetheless ring true. They are bound to, Ms. Cappellazzo said: “Sitting in back rooms with someone trying to sell her something, you can’t deny that she has firsthand experience in this area.”

Ms. Ganek acknowledged that it is intriguing to play that kind of guessing game: “The art world has such colorful characters, almost costumed in the way they dress.” But while her book reads like a roman à clef, “mine are really made-up characters,” she insisted. “I don’t mean to sound defensive. It’s a fact.”

She is more comfortable discussing her family. She has no regrets about moving to New York from Greenwich, Conn., with her husband and three children, now 12, 10, and 5. “We have always been passionate New Yorkers,” she said. When one of their sons was about to enter the fifth grade, “we looked at that as a time to come home.”

She is passionate, too, about the artists she is drawn to, those who comment acerbically “on the human condition and who use humor effectively,” she said. Among her treasures is a Cattelan work called “Cheap to Feed,” a tiny stuffed lap dog that sits in the entry of her home.

“When people come into our house, they say hello, they interact with it,” Ms. Ganek confided mischievously. “It makes for interesting conversation when I have to explain, ‘No, our dog isn’t dead.’ “

PARIS, June 3 — Her long blond ponytail soaked with sweat, Maria Sharapova stood at midcourt Sunday, smiling and blowing kisses to the crowd booing her.

The stadium rumbled with jeers as she defeated Patty Schnyder in a tense fourth-round match, 3-6, 6-4, 9-7. Sharapova struck the ball with unrelenting power for 2 hours 37 minutes, eventually saving two match points. Still, the fans, reacting to what they perceived to be an earlier moment of poor sportsmanship, seemed to see nothing but a villain in a blue clingy tennis dress.

“It’s tough playing tennis and being Mother Teresa at the same time and making everyone happy,” Sharapova said, unemotionally, after the match.

The second-seeded Sharapova advanced to the French Open quarterfinals for the third time in her career. She has never made it past that round. She will play No. 9-seeded Anna Chakvetadze, who defeated No. 25 Lucie Safarova in three sets Sunday.

By then, the fans may have settled down. On Sunday, even Schnyder failed to persuade the audience to quell its anger. As the spectators booed, she lifted her right index finger to her lips, to try to hush them. But her effort was useless.

In the third set, those catcalls had reached ear-splitting decibels. As Sharapova was serving with the score 7-7, 30-love, a fan shouted. Rattled, Schnyder had lifted her hand to indicate that she was not ready, but the serve had already landed on her side of the net. When the umpire refused to replay the point, and Sharapova did not offer to do so, the crowd erupted.

Sharapova said she never considered offering to replay that point, considering the closeness of the match. Later, Schnyder did not complain.

“I was distracted, and it was the public’s choice to do it; I didn’t boo,” Schnyder said. “I think we should appreciate the champion she is.”

She added: “At the end, she was the big champion. I’m the little one who could not win.”

Schnyder, who is ranked 15th in the world, ended the match with a forehand that flew wide. On the opposite side of the court, Sharapova buried her face in her hands, as emotions washed over her.

She held her fist to her chest as she looked around the stands, seemingly deaf to the crowd’s angry roars. Though she looked on the verge of tears, she denied it later, saying she was simply grateful to have won.

In other fourth-round matches Sunday, Roger Federer, the world’s No. 1 men’s player, defeated Mikhail Youzhny for the 10th time in a row, 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4. Federer will play ninth-seeded Tommy Robredo in the quarterfinals. Nikolay Davydenko, seeded fourth, also advanced and will play No. 19 Guillermo Cañas.

On the women’s side, No. 1 Justine Henin and No. 8 Serena Williams both won their matches, setting up a rematch of the 2003 semifinal here. That match four years ago was similar to Sharapova’s match Sunday.

There was jeering and a disputed call for time that added to the intensity of a crowd that was already on Henin’s side. Williams left the court in tears. Henin left with her first Grand Slam title.

But much has changed since that emotionally charged match, which signified the best moment of Henin’s career and the worst of Williams’s. Both say they have matured since then.

“I’ve been through death,” Williams said. “I had surgery I think since then. I’ve been through a lot.”

Williams, the 2002 French Open champion, said she had become more cynical since 2003. Her half-sister Yetunde Price was murdered that year. Also, left-knee problems resulted in surgery and have plagued her career. Last year, Williams nearly fell out of the top 100 because of those injuries.

This year, though, she came back to win the Australian Open, ranked 81st.

“It takes a strong person to be at the bottom of the barrel,” said Williams, 25. “I was really down there, and it’s hard to be able to come back, especially when everyone seems against you and you have so many doubters.”

Henin has changed in completely different ways. She has gone from aloof to outgoing. After her 6-2, 6-4 victory against No. 20 Sybille Bammer on Sunday, she turned to the crowd and even giggled as she soaked up the atmosphere.

Until recently, Henin had been a loner on the women’s tour. There were reasons for that. Her mother died of cancer when Henin was 12. Afterward, Henin distanced herself from her father and three siblings to make a life on her own.

But since separating from her husband, Pierre-Yves Hardenne, late last year, Henin has begun to emerge from behind the wall she had built around her. She said that two weeks ago she restored contact with her estranged father and siblings, whom she had not spoken with in years, calling it “a lot of joy.”

“I just tried to become a better person,” said Henin, 25, who added: “I want to get more concerned, more involved, and a lot of things have changed. I feel much better about myself.”

Henin said that she and Williams had not discussed that stressful 2003 semifinal. But both players have one thing in common: they want to forget that conflict.

They played a final in Miami in March without incident. Williams won in three sets. “I let it go, and obviously she did,” Williams said. “Or whether she did or not, it doesn’t matter anymore. This is a new year.”

Los Angeles

TO the naked eye, Surfrider Beach in Malibu, Calif., couldn’t be lovelier: on a recent Friday, in 60-degree weather, the patch of the coastal mountains behind Malibu Pier was shrouded in morning fog. A flock of birds flew low over a sparse crowd of sunbathers, bobbing surfers and a lifeguard doing abdominals on a beach towel in front of his tower.

But Eric Gross, a 28-year-old creative director at his family’s graphic design studio who has been coming to Surfrider since childhood for its smooth, manicured wave, quickly shattered any postcard-quality impressions of this premier surfing beach.

Take the stench emanating from the nearby lagoon, where Malibu Creek meets the sea, he noted.

“You see discoloration and big brown blobs, like in a sewer,” Mr. Gross said of the days when the lagoon overflows and dumps untreated sewage on the waters he uses three to seven times a week. “Sometimes the water just stinks. You wash off in the shower and you’ve got this smell on you all day.”

Then there’s the taste. “Have you ever tasted bong water by accident?” he asked. “It’s just this muck.”

And the sore throats. “Sometimes you don’t know if you have a cold or you’re sick from the water,” Mr. Gross said. “Who knows what the long term effects are.”

If Los Angeles County conjures images of a warm paradise of curled waves and palm trees, the locals know better. They live along a coast with the dubious distinction of having 7 of the state’s 10 most polluted beaches, according to the latest report card from the environmental group Heal the Bay, which has given beaches like Surfrider a failing grade year after year.

Many Southern Californians find contentment just looking at the ocean from their sun decks, grateful for their views and the clean air. But there are those who persist in braving the water, never mind the historic counts of bacteria from fecal matter and other sources that can cause skin rashes, ear infections and gastrointestinal ailments, or the signs that spell out the dangers with warnings like “contact with ocean water at this location may increase risk of illness.”

So who are these people? Among the fearless: inlanders escaping the suffocating heat; tourists who don’t know any better; and die-hard surfers who try to protect themselves by taking vitamins, by making sure their hepatitis and tetanus vaccinations are up to date, and by rinsing body cavities with hydrogen peroxide.

“You get all your shots, you stay away certain times,” said Mr. Gross’s father, Paul, 60, another longtime surfer who comes out three to four times a week. He matter-of-factly detailed his post-surf regimen: “You take showers here and put hydrogen peroxide in your ears and gargle with hydrogen peroxide diluted with water.”

But many tourists come for the lifeguards, or at least settle for them. Gabriel Campos, a lifeguard for the last 35 summer seasons at the beach by the Santa Monica Municipal Pier, which is a perennial environmental underachiever, said the tourists want their pictures taken with a real-life model for “Baywatch.”

“I’ve done five shots with people today,” said Mr. Campos, 52. Residents often don’t bother with the water. Investigators studying beach attendance for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission say the beaches of Santa Monica Bay — a 60-mile stretch from Malibu south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula — are drawing almost one million fewer visits each year, largely because of public apprehensions about the water.

Water quality typically plummets when it rains, with contaminated runoff from the street and storm drain systems ending up in the ocean.

This year’s Heal the Bay report card, released on May 23, found that the state as a whole had above-average water quality because of a drought over the last year, but a dramatic drop in quality in the Long Beach area meant that Los Angeles County retained its status as the state’s leading “beach bummer.” (Right before the Memorial Day weekend, about 5,000 gallons of sewage spilled into the waters off the Venice district of Los Angeles because of a blocked sewer line, prompting a two-day closure of several portions of two popular beaches.)

THOSE craving a dip can easily drive to cleaner beaches. Sometimes the closest clean beach is less than a mile away, and 57 percent of Los Angeles County’s beaches still score an “A” or “B” in dry weather. But many of the dirty beaches have their own storied appeal and social scenes. Last weekend, the beach by the Santa Monica Municipal Pier, which sits at the foot of luxury hotels and a bustling commercial district, was packed with the usual mix of tourists, cliques of young people and families, many of them working-class Latinos.

“I try not to swallow the water,” said a 26-year-old accountant from Pasadena after taking a dip.

The accountant, who adamantly refused to give his name, said he came to this beach to swim as often as twice a week in the summer because it was near restaurants and bars and he could “tan and go party.”

“It’s a hub,” he said. “Obviously you want to go where there are people.”

But Jameel Chahal, 22, a friend in the accountant’s group who was visiting from Canada, looked around almost in disgust. The water was brown and two dead sea lions had washed up, hardly an enticement to dip in as much as toe. (It was unclear what killed the animals, but a higher level of marine-mammal and seabird deaths this year has been linked to an increase in a naturally occurring toxin produced by algae.) “I’ve never seen this color,” Mr. Chahal said of the water. “If you look out 100 meters, you don’t see water that’s clear. Why jump in the water when it’s dirty like that?”

Many beachgoers come for everything but the water. Charlie and Lizette Figueroa said the temperature had reached 80 degrees by midmorning at their home in Ontario, 35 miles east of Los Angeles. They decided to pack up a cooler, shovels and buckets for their two children and drive one hour west to Santa Monica. On the beach, the children, ages 2 and 4, made a hole to bury their father while the couple sat on beach chairs fully dressed, enjoying the cool breeze.

No one was getting wet.

“We’re here just to relax and for the kids to play in the sand,” said Mrs. Figueroa, 23, a supervisor for a bus company. “My kids would rather go in the swimming pool. My son doesn’t want to go in here. He says that the water looks dirty.”

Linwood Pendleton, a professor in the school of public health at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the principal investigator on the study on beach attendance, said that Southern Californians have become unnecessarily fearful of the ocean. He said that the area does a better job at testing water quality than elsewhere in the country, so public awareness of the issue is high.

“People should look around at all the beaches and choose the ones with the lowest risk, but don’t stay home,” he said. “The beach in Southern California is our Central Park, our open space.”

Mr. Pendleton is co-author of a study, released last year, that said as many as 1.5 million cases of sickness in Los Angeles and Orange Counties each year could be attributed to bacterial pollution in the ocean. Mr. Pendleton said that represented only a 1 percent chance of becoming sick. Even at the worst beaches, he said, the chance of becoming sick is relatively low, 5 to 15 percent.

State and county officials say that this area has the most polluted beaches because it is the state’s most populous region, noting that both development and people’s behavior — such as not cleaning up after their dogs — contributed to the problem. The county also is among the first in the state to collect samples directly in front of storm drains and creeks, where the water quality is worse.

But the officials said that cities are facing new requirements to limit bacteria at their beaches, and that $135 million in state bonds is going to cover the treatment of storm-related sewage problems at the worst sites.

“California is cleaning up its beaches,” said William L. Rukeyser, a spokesman for the State Water Resources Control Board.

Even Surfrider has been on a roll lately, with a string of passing grades in Heal the Bay’s weekly report card. For surfers like Eric and Paul Gross, forgoing the beach they consider home base is not an option.

“No matter what the dangers are,” the elder Mr. Gross said, “this is still one of the best breaks.”

LAST February, Jim Zumbo, a burly, 66-year-old outdoors writer, got a phone call at his home near Cody, Wyo., from the rock star — and outspoken Second Amendment champion — Ted Nugent. “You messed up, man,” Mr. Zumbo says Mr. Nugent told him. “Big time.”

Two days earlier, Mr. Zumbo, a leading hunting journalist, outraged Mr. Nugent and many other gun owners when he suggested in a blog post that increasingly popular semiautomatic guns known as “black rifles” be banned from hunting. Mr. Zumbo, stunned that hunters were using the rifles for sport, also suggested giving the guns, prized for their matte black metal finishes, molded plastic parts and combat-ready looks, a new name: “terrorist rifles.”

Gun enthusiasts’ backlash against Mr. Zumbo was swift. He parted company with his employer, Outdoor Life magazine. Mr. Zumbo says on his Web site that he was “terminated”; the magazine says that it and Mr. Zumbo agreed that he would resign.

But a week after hearing from Mr. Nugent, who has a devoted following among gun owners, Mr. Zumbo visited him in Waco, Tex., to make amends. For his part, Mr. Nugent was prepared to give Mr. Zumbo a lesson on the utility and ubiquity of black rifles.

“These guns are everywhere,” Mr. Nugent explained excitedly in a recent phone interview. “I personally don’t know anybody who doesn’t have two in his truck.”

Despite their menacing appearance — and in some cases, because of it — black rifles are now the guns of choice for many hunters, target shooters and would-be home defenders. Owners praise their accuracy, ease of use and versatility, as well as their potential to be customized with an array of gadgets. While the gun industry’s overall sales have plateaued and its profits have faded over the last decade, black rifles are selling briskly, says Eric Wold, an analyst in New York for Merriman Curhan Ford.

Moreover, manufacturers say, for every dollar spent on black rifles, gun buyers spend at least another customizing the guns from an arsenal of accessories. All of this has combined to make black rifles a lone bright spot for long-suffering American gunsmiths.

Yet Mr. Zumbo is not alone in finding the popularity of black rifles and the trade in them to be disquieting.

Gun-control advocates say black rifles are simply assault weapons under a different name — and just as dangerous as they were when Congress instituted a ban on some of them in 1994. The ban did not eliminate black rifles; manufacturers were able to make minor changes to comply with the law and kept selling them. (The ban expired in 2004.)

“What you have are guns essentially designed for close combat,” says Dennis Hennigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, who notes that a Beretta black rifle was among the weapons obtained by men suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on Fort Dix, N.J. “If your mission is to kill a lot of people very quickly, they’re very well suited for that task.”

But efforts to ban black rifles seem to have only fueled their rise, analysts say. And while some major gun makers were reluctant to defy the spirit of the 1994 ban, dozens of small companies emerged, and their sales surged. (It didn’t hurt that many gun owners feared greater restrictions down the road, a fear that manufacturers were more than willing to exploit.)

“Whenever there’s a push like this, business increases as people buy a firearm while they can,” says Mark Westrom, president of ArmaLite Inc., a maker of black rifles in Geneseo, Ill. “If you want to sell something to Americans, just tell them they can’t have it.”

EVEN as politicians debate increased gun regulation in the wake of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in April, gun control advocates say they are pessimistic about the chances of reining in black rifles. Illinois legislators who were trying to pass a statewide assault-weapons ban this spring ran into fierce opposition from Mr. Westrom and several other makers of semiautomatics who argued that the proposed law would cost the state jobs and hurt the economy. (The measure is still under consideration.)

The most popular black rifle has been in production since the early 1960s. In response to the Army’s need for a lightweight infantry rifle, ArmaLite had developed the AR-15, which could switch between semiautomatic (only one round per pull of the trigger) and fully automatic firing (continuous firing when the trigger is pulled). The Colt Firearms Company bought the rights to the gun and the military soon adopted it, calling it the M-16. From Vietnam through the Persian Gulf war, the M-16 was the most common combat weapon, and it remains in use by many American forces.

Because of restrictions on the sale of automatic weapons, civilians could buy the AR-15 only in a semiautomatic version. But in the 1980s, Colt drew unwanted attention when it was discovered that the gun, which had begun showing up in the arsenals of drug dealers, mobsters and antigovernment militias, could be easily converted to an automatic.

Colt redesigned the weapon to make converting it much more difficult, but when Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the AR-15 was banned alongside the AK-47, the TEC-9 and 16 other semiautomatic weapons. The act also prohibited semiautomatics that could accept detachable magazines from having more than one of five generic features that were believed to increase the likelihood that the gun would be used in a crime. The National Rifle Association lobbied hard against the bill, but many hunters agreed with the premise that assault weapons were of little use in their sport.

“These killing machines are the weapon of choice of drug traffickers, violent youth gangs and the seriously deranged bent on revenge through mass murder,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, then a House member from New York who was one of the bill’s champions, said in April 1994. “They have no place in our society.”

But if the spirit of the law was a blow to black rifles, the letter of it allowed them to live on and thrive. Colt focused on supplying weapons to the military and law enforcement. But competitors were already copying the rifle, since the original patents granted to ArmaLite had expired. All they had to do was rejigger their designs to reduce the number of offending features.

Demand for black rifles, meanwhile, began to grow. A new generation of hunters, many of whom had fired M-16s in the military, adopted them for shooting predators on rural property and stalking small game. The .223-caliber ammunition they used was inexpensive and easily found. The guns began to get a reputation for being durable despite their light weight; they also loaded automatically (unlike bolt-action hunting rifles) and their recoil was gentle enough for even novice shooters and children to withstand. Once the AR-15 was deemed accurate enough for use in high-powered rifle competitions, it soon became standard issue for target shooters.

And with the basic design of black rifles open to industrywide adaptations, gun makers began adding their own innovations and accessories to refine and improve the AR-15′s performance. By 2004, when the assault weapons ban expired, black rifles had emerged as a major category in firearms. But while Colt’s sales had shrunk in the intervening years, output exploded for black-rifle specialists like Bushmaster, Rock River Arms and DPMS.

“The little guys perfected the platform,” says Michael Bane, a gun blogger and writer who is the host of “Shooting Gallery,” a program on the Outdoor Channel on cable television. “They had the 10 years of the ban to get their chops down.”

But for most of those 10 years, these small manufacturers managed to fly under the radar of many gun owners, including Mr. Zumbo, a self-described traditionalist who says he had seen only one black rifle during a lifetime of hunting. “I had absolutely zero idea of the number of people who are into these types of firearms,” he says.

Not so for Mr. Nugent, who stocked up on black rifles before the ban took effect and estimates that he now owns about two dozen. If the boom in black rifles began in spite of the federal assault weapons ban, it has accelerated only in the two and a half years since the ban expired. Manufacturers have been freed to revive once-prohibited features like collapsible stocks, flash suppressors and large-capacity magazines.

Analysts say that images from the Iraq war showing American soldiers armed with black rifles have also helped sales, as have concerns about domestic safety after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina. “People on the street want to use what the people in the military and law enforcement are using,” says Amit Dayal, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw in New York.

Based only on the volume of accessories sold — such as high-powered scopes and flashlights — Mr. Bane estimates that as many as 750,000 black rifles, including about 400,000 AR-15s, change hands each year. Brownells, a company in Montezuma, Iowa, a big seller of firearms parts and accessories, says AR-15 gear has become its best-selling product category.

Because all but a few gun manufacturers are closely held private companies, overall sales figures for the black rifle industry are hard to come by. But companies are required to report their overall rifle production to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and based on that, many of the small manufacturers that have specialized in the guns are “on the verge of being big,” Mr. Bane says. One, Stag Arms of New Britain, Conn., opened in 2004 and is already producing 2,500 to 3,000 black rifles a month, according to the president and owner, Mark Malkowski. That would be 30,000 to 36,000 a year, roughly the same number that Colt was producing in the late 1990s.

Buoyant demand has enticed a number of established gunsmiths into the market, too. Smith & Wesson, known for its revolvers, has made black rifles a strategic priority in its turnaround. It introduced its first model in early 2006. It was so popular that the company had to supplement manufacturing of the gun, which had been outsourced, just to meet consumer demand.

“It’s our hope that we would be the share leader in the category,” says Leland A. Nichols, Smith & Wesson’s chief operating officer. He said that in the company’s own surveys of consumers, its brand outpolled all other black rifle makers before it even had a product on the market.

A similar story is unfolding at the Remington Arms Company, long one of the strongest brands in hunting rifles. The company started its first line of black rifles earlier this year. In April, Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm that recently made a deal to buy Chrysler, agreed to acquire Remington for $370 million, adding it to the gun maker Bushmaster in the fund’s portfolio and raising the possibility of collaboration between the two companies.

“A month ago black guns were not a business opportunity,” says Al Russo, a spokesman for Remington, citing the growth potential that the Cerberus deal offers. “Now they are.”

Despite their popularity, black rifles remain a target for advocates of gun control. Seven states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as several major cities, including New York and Chicago, have enacted bans on certain firearms they have deemed assault weapons, including some black rifles.

In February, Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a New York Democrat, introduced a renewal of the federal ban on assault weapons that would greatly expand the measure. But few expect the bill to gain any traction.

“It’s highly unlikely that any legislation to move an assault weapons ban is going to happen,” says Kristen Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center, a gun-control lobbying group. “That’s the sad reality on the Hill right now.”

MS. RAND says it is hard to know how often black rifles are used in crime, because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has not reported such statistics to the public since 2001. But based on anecdotal evidence, Ms. Rand says, criminals are favoring imported semiautomatics like AK-47s and SKS rifles, which are cheaper to obtain than AR-15s.

“We were never claiming that every buyer of an assault weapon is a criminal or is a potential mass killer,” says Mr. Hennigan of the Brady Center. “But the consumers of the assault weapons are going to include a higher percentage of violent criminals than other guns.”

Gun rights advocates scoff, saying that a .223-caliber bullet that comes out of a black rifle is the same as one fired from other guns. Mr. Nugent scoffs as well.

“It’s just a neat tool,” he says. “Black rifles are cool. Case closed. The more the better.”

Mr. Zumbo, chastened by the outcry that his black-rifle comments set off, says he hopes to resume writing about hunting and to revive his popular cable television show, which was put on hiatus when it lost sponsors after the blog post. He says his time at Mr. Nugent’s ranch reminded him that gun owners have to reject banning any firearm, lest it open the door to banning them all. He also says that, like it or not, black rifles are now mainstream.

“Having met the people who shoot these things, they were regular folks; they weren’t sinister people who were bent on causing harm, they weren’t hostile people,” he says. “They were interested in the guns because they were fun to shoot.”

Last year at this time, as college graduates walked out into the world, I wrote a column giving advice on how they could save money.

In droves, parents sent the column to their children. And some of those children wrote to me to vent. What I suggested was impractical, many said. How would you like to try to live on $40,000 a year in Washington or San Francisco, several asked.

What I was proposing was not radical. It was mostly the simple things my mother had drummed into me. It was advice like diverting 10 percent of your income to savings before anything else and ignoring raises and putting them into savings, too. Learn to cook, I said, and never borrow money to pay for a depreciating asset.

I also suggested cutting out the latte habit, which was my symbol for those little things in life that when turned into a habit, add up to money that could have been spent on something worthwhile and memorable.

Other people, my wife among them, pointed out that I may have been too draconian on that point. Consistent savings is a lot easier if there are small rewards along the way; otherwise, life seems as if it is just one bowl of cold grass porridge after another.

Fine feedback, indeed, and my wife’s counsel reminds me that I should have added one other bit of advice: find a partner and stay together. Study after study show that two can live more cheaply together than each alone and that divorce is the great destroyer of wealth.

But, dear graduates, the crux of the advice is still compelling. While there may be a debate among economists about how much 50- and 60-year-olds should be saving for retirement, there is little dispute about how much the young should save: more.

Saving while young is critical. It isn’t just because of the power of compounding. By that I mean that if you start saving now it will build to a larger nest egg by the time you are 65 than if you wait to start at 45. Or to put it another way, you can save a smaller amount now rather than a larger amount later.

Bank $250 a month for 40 years in a I.R.A. or a 401(k) and you will receive about $500,000, assuming a 6 percent return. Start at age 45 and you would have to put in $1,078 a month to generate the same amount by age 65.

But there is another compelling reason to get into the habit of saving. (Here is where this column also turns into advice for the older folks who are giving you this to read.) People who save a lot get used to a lower rate of consumption while working, so less money is needed in retirement.

Stretching to save a little more yields a double dividend. You accumulate more assets and you lower the amount you will need in retirement because you will not have the habit of spending extravagantly to feel fulfilled.

Inevitably though, we return to the question: How can you possibly afford to put away that much? If you are only making $40,000, a not-untypical starting salary for a college-educated professional in a big city, the weekly gross of $769 works down to $561 in take-home pay after income taxes and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicaid.

Were you to divert 10 percent of your salary to a 401(k) plan, the bottom line becomes $509.

In other words, a regular habit of savings costs you $52 a week. You easily frittered that away last week on things that you cannot even recall this week. A useful exercise that proves the point: For a week, try to list everywhere you spend cash or use your credit card.

Could you save another 10 percent a week, or $50? If you do, you are nearly set for life.

Can you live on $1,950 a month? Rents being what they are in certain cities like New York, San Francisco or Washington, sure, it will be tight. People do it by finding a roommate and watching their expenses (or asking for an occasional handout from Mom and Dad).

There may be another compelling reason to save and that is that while many aspects of retirement savings are predictable, the big unknowable is health care costs. “If you believe in the logic of the life cycle model, then once you get used to peanut butter, all else follows,” said Jonathan Skinner, a economics professor at Dartmouth College who has studied retirement issues and recently wrote a paper titled “Are You Sure You’re Saving Enough for Retirement?” for the National Bureau of Economic Research. “That’s the assumption that I am questioning: Do people want to be stuck in peanut butter in retirement?”

He said he came to the conclusion that a strategy to reduce retirement expenses “will be dwarfed by rapidly growing out-of-pocket medical expenses.” He noted projections based on the Health and Retirement Study, a survey of 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 sponsored by the National Institute on Aging found that by 2019, nearly a tenth of elderly retirees would be devoting more than half of their total income to out-of-pocket health expenses. He said, “These health care cost projections are perhaps the scariest beast under the bed.”

As Victor Fuchs, the professor emeritus of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, told me, money is most useful when you are old because it makes all the difference whether you wait for a bus in the rain to get to the doctor’s appointment or you ride in a cab.

“Saving for retirement may ultimately be less about the golf condo at Hilton Head and more about being able to afford wheelchair lifts, private nurses and a high-quality nursing home,” Professor Skinner said.

His best advice for people in their 20s and 30s: maximize workplace matching contributions, seek automatic savings mechanisms like home mortgages and hope “that their generation can still look forward to solvent Social Security and Medicare programs.”

•

Over the last two years I’ve been dispensing advice in this space about how to spend and save more wisely. This will be my last column for a spell as I am taking on editing duties that give me little time for reporting. But before I go, I want to remind the young graduates, their parents who scrimped and saved to get them there, and anyone else who stuck with me this far that are a few other rules of life worth considering.

Among them are the following. Links are available at nytimes.com/business:

¶Never pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission.

¶Buy used things, except maybe used tires.

¶Get on the do-not-call list and other do-not-solicit lists so you can’t be tempted.

¶Watch infomercials for their entertainment value only.

¶Know what your credit reports say, but don’t pay for that knowledge: go to www.annualcreditreport.com to get them.

¶Consolidate your cable, phone and Internet service to get the best deal.

¶Resist the lunacy of buying premium products like $2,000-a-pound chocolates.

¶Lose weight. Carrying extra pounds costs tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime.

¶Do not use your home as a piggy bank if home prices are flat or going down or if interest rates are rising.

¶Enroll in a 401(k) at work immediately.

¶Postpone buying high-tech products like PCs, digital cameras and high-definition TVs for as long as possible. And then buy after the selling season or buy older technology just as a new technology comes along.

¶And, I’m sorry, I’m really serious about this last one: make your own coffee.

The Atlanta lawyer who flew on crowded airplanes while infected with a dangerous form of tuberculosis said today he did not think he presented a danger when he flew and he apologized to his fellow passengers.

Andrew Speaker, interviewed on the “Good Morning America” program on the ABC network in his hospital room in Denver, said “I don’t expect those people to ever forgive me. I just hope they understand that I truly never meant them any harm.”

Mr. Speaker, 31, flew to Europe for his wedding in Greece and a honeymoon trip last month after being notified he was infected with drug resistant TB, but said he was not flatly forbidden to travel.

The dispute appeared to be based on his interpretation of language used by cautious public health officials. Mr. Speaker, 31, said he was told he was not contagious or a danger to anyone, but that officials would prefer that he did not fly.

His father, also a lawyer, recorded the meeting, he said.

“My father said, “OK, now, are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he’s a risk to anybody, or are you saying that to cover yourself,” he said. “And they said, we have to tell that to cover ourself, but he’s not a risk.”

Mr. Speaker, who defied instructions to turn himself into Italian health authorities, flew from Prague to Montreal and then drove to the United States, despite a notice to Customs agents to detain him.

Congressional investigators, who plan to hold hearings on how the case has been handled, say that the border agent at the Plattsburgh, N.Y., border crossing with Canada decided that Mr. Speaker did not look sick and so let him go.

Russ Knocke, press secretary for the Homeland Security Department, would not confirm the agent’s rationale for releasing the man, saying only that the case was under investigation by the department’s internal affairs and inspector general’s offices.

In another twist to a story that seems to grow murkier with each new revelation, Mr. Speaker’s father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a tuberculosis researcher who has worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Cooksey said he “was not involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel.” He also said that he was often tested for tuberculosis and had never been found to be infected.

The centers said that the strain of tuberculosis that Mr. Speaker has does not match any of the strains in its laboratories. And Dr. Cooksey said, “My son-in-law’s TB did not originate from myself or the C.D.C.’s labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity.”

The form of tuberculosis Mr. Speaker has is extremely resistant to standard antibiotics.

Although health officials said there was a low risk of Mr. Speaker’s transmitting tuberculosis to his fellow passengers, the case raised troubling new questions about the nation’s ability to defend its borders against the entry of dangerous infectious diseases and about the C.D.C.’s ability to handle such threats, despite extensive training exercises. Mr. Speaker’s odyssey has also set off an international hunt for his fellow passengers.

Mr. Speaker came back into the United States at Plattsburgh, N.Y., at 6:18 p.m. on May 24 in a car he had rented at Pierre Trudeau International Airport in Montreal after flying there from Prague on Czech Air.

A day earlier, on May 23, the disease control centers alerted the Atlanta office of Customs and Border Protection, a part of the Homeland Security Department, that a man with a serious medical condition might try to enter the United States and the information was entered in the department’s computer system.

The department instructed any border control agents who encountered the man to “isolate, detain and contact the Public Health Service,” Mr. Knocke said.

If Canadian officials had known about the detention order, a quarantine officer would have isolated Mr. Speaker, escorted him to a hospital and arranged his secure transport back to the United States, said Jean Riverin, a spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Also, Italian officials said that they did not learn about the case until Mr. Speaker had left Italy. Cesare Fasari, a spokesman for Italy’s Health Ministry, said that had the Italian health officials been notified in time, they would have “intercepted the man and invited him to be treated in a hospital” with his permission.

Early yesterday morning, the disease control centers flew Mr. Speaker, who wore a mask, in a chartered plane to Denver, where he was taken by ambulance to National Jewish Medical and Research Center for definitive treatment of his infection.

Dr. Gwen A. Huitt, an infectious-disease expert at the centers, described Mr. Speaker as tired, cooperative, emotional and concerned about the publicity his case was receiving. He was not coughing, had no fever and was “very relieved to be in Denver” for definitive treatment. If tests determine that the infection is confined to one area of a lung, doctors may perform major surgery to remove a part or lobe.

Whatever drug treatment Mr. Speaker receives is expected to continue for years and will involve risks of side effects that could damage his kidneys and liver, Dr. Huitt said.

Mr. Speaker is being confined to a standard two-bed hospital room that is equipped with special ventilation to suck out air and then pass it through ultraviolet light and a filter that kills microbes. He is likely to be confined to the room for several weeks.

After examining Mr. Speaker, Dr. Huitt said she was “very optimistic” about his future because he was young and athletic.

At a news conference, Dr. Huitt said her initial impression was that Mr. Speaker contracted the dangerous strain from someone else and did not develop resistance from anti-tuberculosis treatment that C.D.C. officials said he took earlier. Treatment in Denver was expected to start today, she said.

Dr. Huitt said Mr. Speaker had traveled extensively over the last six years to countries where tuberculosis is more common than in this country, but she declined to say where.

One key test was encouraging. It indicated that Mr. Speaker was at low risk of transmitting the infection to others. The test involved collecting sputum from induced coughing. Dr. Huitt and others added chemical stains to a smear of the sputum on a glass slide and examined it under a microscope. They saw no tuberculosis bacteria. The same findings came from tests performed in Atlanta earlier in the year and at Bellevue Hospital and Grady Memorial Hospital in recent days.

Dr. Huitt said her team would repeat the test over the next two days, for a total of three times, as is standard practice.

In 17 percent of tuberculosis cases, the source is a patient whose smear is negative, according to studies from Vancouver, British Columbia, and San Francisco.

Mr. Speaker’s wife is with him. A skin test performed earlier in the year showed that she was not infected.

“We have not done any new tests on her,” Dr. Huitt said.

Andrew Speaker flew to Paris from Atlanta on Air France Flight 285 (Delta co-share 8517) on May 12 for his wedding in Greece, and planned to return from a honeymoon on June 5.

Jason Vik, 21, a passenger on the outgoing flight who just graduated from the University of South Carolina, Aiken, is now waiting for results of a TB skin test.

Mr. Vik spoke angrily about Mr. Speaker’s behavior. “He stepped on a plane with 487 people, one of the largest aircraft that Boeing makes, and he put us all at risk, just so he could go get married,” he said.

Dr. Mario Raviglione, who directs the World Health Organization tuberculosis department, said that despite technology and communication technology “we’re not there yet, and there is the possibility for infectious people to cross borders without the knowledge of authorities.”

Feminism didn’t bridge the divide between men and women, it broke the barriers separating best friends.

Betty Friedan made the suburbs safe for sisterhood. By the time “Sex and the City” rolled around, female bonding — especially over fancy cocktails — was as much a part of popular culture as fishing trips and fraternity hazing rites.

The fact that nowadays women are allowed to like one another, even at the expense of men, is at the core of ladies-night hits like “Grey’s Anatomy.” So atavistic series like “The Bachelor” and “Desperate Housewives” that play down female camaraderie and instead showcase hissy fits and catfights have a naughty, contrarian tang.

That retro allure is what drives tonight’s premiere of “The Starter Wife,” a USA mini-series that explores the plight of the discarded Hollywood socialite. It’s a satire-lite soufflé that follows all the steps of the chick-lit recipe. (If “Jane Eyre” were written according to today’s rules, the orphaned governess would be dragged to a bar by two female friends and a gay male pal and plied with mixed drinks and pool boys until she forgot all about Mr. Rochester and his mad starter wife.)

Debra Messing (“Will & Grace”) plays Molly Kagan, whose studio mogul husband, Kenny (Peter Jacobson), tells her by cellphone that he wants a divorce. Based on a best-selling novel by Gigi Levangie Grazer, the wife of the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, “The Starter Wife” is a throwback to “The Women,” Clare Boothe Luce’s 1936 play about divorce among the rich and pampered. “The Starter Wife” is set in Malibu and Brentwood, not Park Avenue, so it’s also a lot like the 1940s radio show “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife” and the novels of Jackie Collins.

These kinds of tell-all tales mix satirical flicks at the follies of the rich and famous (Kenny prepares their young daughter for school by saying, “Don’t forget to share your cookies with Violet Affleck”) with the voyeuristic spectacle of grown-up women channeling their inner Mean Girls.

All soap operas centered on women include vixens and villainesses, so the difference lies mainly in the proportion. Molly Kagan has a few loyal female friends — and a gay decorator — but the juice of her tale comes from the snooty, gossiping frienemies who snub her in restaurants and kick her off charity committees when she loses her status as The Wife of.

And the beauty of cable lies in the gradation of expectations. On premium networks like HBO or Showtime, “The Starter Wife” would seem trite and a little too obvious. On USA, it’s an escapist hoot.

“The Starter Wife” serves as a comic chaser to “Army Wives,” a more serious, and surprisingly engrossing, Lifetime series on Sunday about what happens to spouses left on base when their soldiers are deployed to combat zones (a lot). It’s a little like “The Unit,” the CBS drama about an elite team of commandos and their wives, but the focus of this Lifetime drama is on the women behind the men in uniform.

“Army Wives,” which stars Kim Delaney, examines women of varying age, rank and serial blunder who come together under the stress of military life — and the needling of a few bad women. Not all the bonding spouses are female, however. One member of the clique is an army psychiatrist whose wife returns from a two-year rotation in Afghanistan with a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Female solidarity — or the lack of it — seems to be a popular theme this summer. ABC even ordered up a reality show, “Ex-Wives Club,” featuring Marla Maples, the former Mrs. Donald Trump; Angie Everhart, who was once engaged to Sylvester Stallone; and Shar Jackson, who is the mother of two of Kevin Federline’s children and who lost him to Britney Spears. Those three professional exes lend their expertise to ordinary people who are suffering the pain of rejection.

Their methods can be brutal. On the premiere, the scornees are sent to a life coach, Debbie Ford, who runs an emotional boot camp in Palm Springs, Calif. The schedule begins early: “8:00 a.m. — Anger.”

But the founding members of “Ex-Wives Club” also offer empathy. Ms. Maples was careful in the first episode on Monday to speak well of her ex-husband, but at times she couldn’t resist a lateral dig. Ms. Maples helps Kevin, a would-be mortgage broker, organize a networking party in the real estate community. “I did this so many years with my ex-husband,” she replies when he thanks her. “And to be here with someone like you who appreciates it …” Tearing up, she breaks off.

Molly could use that kind of support. Instead, when Kenny dumps her for a sexy young pop singer named Shoshanna, Molly finds herself shunned by her fellow worshipers at what she calls the Church of Perpetual Upkeep. After losing her gym membership and even her coveted spot in a Mommy and Me class, she runs away. Not far, however. She retreats to the Malibu house of her oldest and hardest-drinking friend, Joan (Judy Davis), who has entered rehab. Lonely, Molly befriends the security guard, Lavender (Anika Noni Rose of “Dreamgirls”), who is preoccupied with college loans, not collagen.

Molly’s decorator, Rodney (Chris Diamantopoulos), sticks by her, but Cricket (Miranda Otto) is torn. Her husband is a director of blockbuster comedies who wants Kenny’s studio to back a serious film, “The Dutch Bureaucrat’s Son,” and doesn’t want Kenny to think he and Cricket side with Molly. It doesn’t take long for Cricket to come to her senses. Molly’s senses are divided between the flirty overtures of her husband’s boss, Lou (Joe Mantegna), and a buff Malibu beach bum, Sam (Stephen Moyer).

“Army Wives” is a street-smart homage to those who also serve because they stand and wait. “The Starter Wife” is not exactly groundbreaking social satire, but it’s a sassy look at those who stand behind their Hollywood men, and are waited upon by servants.

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy, May 29 — Business at Pizzeria Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The reasons include eggshells, scuzzy teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, moldy wine bottles — all in an unbroken heap of garbage, at places 6 feet high, stretching 100 or more yards along the curb to the pizzeria’s doorstep.

“If you see all this trash, you don’t have much desire to eat,” said the owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days, is very angry at his leaders.

For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on their refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into a real crisis, as much political as sanitary: trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump it officially filled up. Then, on Saturday, the last legal dump closed.

As the piles rose and the stench spread, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights — one of many trash-related protests that included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. And while a patchwork of emergency measures has eased the crisis in the past few days, even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.

“The people are right,” said Guido Lauria, in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage. “You smell this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they complain.”

The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra.

But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point here.

As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places or ways to get rid of garbage, largely because of local protests or protection by one politician or another. But years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperature rose, creating as much stink as unsightliness).

“This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure,” said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of Parliament for the center-left Daisy Party. Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling “to make strong choices” to build new dumps or incinerators.

And so, as the world’s news media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets, the nation’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual “extremely energetic appeal” to all levels of government and to politicians of the left, right and center finally to solve the crisis. At stake was not just public order, he said, but “the image of the country.”

The president’s office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case Mr. Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town — led by one devout and praying woman called La Passionaria di Parapoti — to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.

That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the surrounding communities to finally begin digging out — and to lower tempers a little, too.

Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to a tourist trade it depends heavily on, seems largely clean, and in the last few days, the sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.

But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains, compounding longstanding problems in the poorer south of Italy, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of dingy high-rises already plagued by drugs and the Camorra.

On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, drug dealers sat across the street from a Dumpster spilling over with construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot.

“It’s never been like this — I can’t tell you why,” said Sabato D’Aria, 37, owner of a small grocery nearby.

Politicians, he said, only “talk, talk, talk, but in the end you see very little.”

“Unfortunately, here in the south we are always more penalized. Italy is divided.”

There is also the problem of the Camorra, which profits extraordinarily in the endless crisis over trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war.

The Camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis — and far more harmful than legal ones to humans and the environment.

In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been proposed by an emergency commission: greater recycling and the opening of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring provinces. But as has happened in several of the identified towns over the last two weeks, local people protest loudly.

“The reaction is very strong,” said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government’s “trash czar.” She called it “an exaggerated Nimby syndrome,” in which the “not in my backyard” protestors get disproportionately shrill media coverage.

And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, just north of Naples — and residents there have been complaining too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three grey smokestacks for the region’s only incinerator, set to go on line in several months, rise from the town’s edge.

But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attracts clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor’s yard.

“Acerra shouldn’t die,” said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. “It should fight.”

So the question remains whether Naples is really ready to overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can finally agree where new dumps and incinerators should be located. (Shipping garbage abroad does not seem to be an option: Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy’s trash.)

If difficult decisions are not made — and quickly — nearly everyone fears that trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and questions about how this can still happen in Europe.

There are many skeptics. Giorgio Lanzaro, a Naples city councilor in charge of the environment, noted how strong the protests had already been in communities where the trash might be stored only temporarily.

“I have some doubts whether this is over,” he said.

The rate of diagnosed clinical depression among retired National Football League players is strongly correlated with the number of concussions they sustained, according to a study to be published today.

The study was conducted by the University of North Carolina‘s Center for the Study of Retired Athletes and based on a general health survey of 2,552 retired N.F.L. players. It corroborates other findings regarding brain trauma and later-life depression in other subsets of the general population, but runs counter to longtime assertions by the N.F.L. that concussions in football have no long-term effects.

As the most comprehensive study of football players to date, the paper will add to the escalating debate over the effects of and proper approach to football-related concussions.

The study, which will appear in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, found that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said they had been found to have depression. That is three times the rate of players who have not sustained concussions. The full data, the study reports, “call into question how effectively retired professional football players with a history of three or more concussions are able to meet the mental and physical demands of life after playing professional football.”

In January, a neuropathologist claimed that repeated concussions likely contributed to the November suicide of the former Philadelphia Eagles player Andre Waters. Three weeks later, the former New England Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson not only revealed that his significant depression and cognitive decline had been linked by a neurologist to on-field concussions, but also claimed that his most damaging concussion had been sustained after his coach, Bill Belichick, coerced him into practicing against the advice of team doctors.

While consistently defending its teams’ treatment of concussions and denying any relationship between players’ brain trauma and later neurocognitive decline, the N.F.L. has subsequently announced several related initiatives. The league and its players union recently created a fund to help pay the medical expenses of players suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or similar dementia. Last week, N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell announced wide-ranging league guidelines regarding concussions, from obligatory neuropsychological testing for all players to what he called a “whistle-blower system” where players and doctors can anonymously report any coach’s attempt to override the wishes of concussed players or medical personnel.

The N.F.L. has criticized previous papers published by the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes — which identified similar links between on-field concussions and both later mild cognitive impairment and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease — and reasserted those concerns this week with regard to the paper on depression.

Several members of the league’s mild traumatic brain injury committee cited two main issues in telephone interviews this week: that the survey was returned by 69 percent of the retired players to whom it was mailed, and that those who did respond were relying solely on their memories of on-field concussions. One committee member, Dr. Henry Feuer of the Indiana University Medical Center and a medical consultant for the Indianapolis Colts, went so far as to call the center’s findings “virtually worthless.”

Dr. Ira Casson, the co-chairman of the committee, said, “Survey studies are the weakest type of research study — they’re subject to all kinds of error and misinterpretation and miscalculation.”

Regarding the issue of players’ recollection of brain trauma, Dr. Casson said: “They had no objective evaluations to determine whether or not what the people told them in the surveys was correct or not. They didn’t have information from doctors confirming it, they didn’t have tests, they didn’t have examinations. They didn’t have anything. They just kind of took people’s words for it.”

According to other experts, the 69 percent return rate was quite high for such survey research, which has been widely used to establish preliminary links between smoking and lung cancer, explore the relationship between diet and health, and track trends in obesity and drug use.

After reading the depression study and considering the league’s issues with recollective survey research, Dr. John Whyte, the director of the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute in Philadelphia and an expert in neurological research methodology, said he did not share the league’s criticisms.

“To the person who says this is worthless, let’s just discard a third of the medical literature that we trust and go by today,” said Dr. Whyte, who has no connection with either the N.F.L. or the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, which is partly funded by the N.F.L. players union. “Here, the response rate was good and not a relevant issue to the findings. We have some pretty solid data that multiple concussions caused cumulative brain damage and increased risk of depression, and that is not in conflict with the growing literature.

“Do I think this one study proves the point beyond doubt? No. Does it contribute in a meaningful way? You bet.”

The study, which underwent formal, anonymous peer review before publication, reported that of the 595 players who recalled sustaining three or more concussions on the football field, 20.2 percent said a physician found they had depression. Players with one or two concussions were found to have depression 9.7 percent of the time, and those with none, 6.6. (Respondents were on average 54 years old and had played almost seven seasons in the N.F.L. A minimum of two seasons was required for inclusion in the study.)

The study considered concussions sustained in high school and college as well, not just in the N.F.L. Because the diagnosis of concussions has undergone substantial refinement since the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the survey respondents had played, a modern description of symptoms — such as nausea or seeing stars following a strong blow to the head, not simply being knocked unconscious — was provided.

Members of the N.F.L. concussion committee criticized the use of such a retrospective definition. They also cited a mail survey by doctors at the University of Michigan, results of which were published two months ago in the same American College of Sports Medicine journal, that found the self-reported incidence of depression among retired N.F.L. players to be 15 percent — similar to that of the general population — and that such depression was strongly correlated with the chronic pain many N.F.L. retirees experience.

The associate editor-in-chief of the journal who handled the review of both papers, Dr. Thomas Best, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the studies did not conflict. Dr. Best explained that the Michigan study did not consider concussions specifically, and that the North Carolina study in fact used statistical tests to account for players’ chronic pain and found that the strong correlation between number of concussions and depression remained virtually unchanged.

“The North Carolina paper is not saying that N.F.L. players are or are not at risk for depression,” said Dr. Best, the medical director of the Ohio State University‘s Sportsmedicine Center. “What we learned from the paper is that there’s a correlation between the number of concussions sustained and depression they experience later in life.”

Mr. Goodell said last week that the league’s concussion committee had just begun its own study “to determine if there are any long-term effects of concussions on retired N.F.L. players.”

Dr. Casson, the committee’s co-chair, said that players who retired from 1986 through 1996 would be randomly approached to undergo “a comprehensive neurological examination, and a comprehensive neurologic history, including a detailed concussion history,” using player recollection cross-referenced with old team injury reports. He said that the study would take two to three years to be completed and another year to be published.

Given that the average N.F.L. retirement age from 1986 to 1996 was approximately 27, a random player from that period would be approximately 46 at the N.F.L. study’s completion, eight years younger than those considered by the paper being released today.

Dr. Kevin Guskiewicz, the center’s research director and the principal author of the study, said that even with those differences he was confident the N.F.L. study would corroborate his group’s conclusions.

“It sounds as if they need to study the question themselves to believe the findings,” Dr. Guskiewicz said. “I think they’re going to be very surprised at what they find, compared with what they’ve been led to believe by members of their own committee.”

LOS ANGELES — For Will Ferrell, who commands up to $20 million for movies like “Anchorman” and “Blades of Glory,” starring in a short Web video may not seem like the best use of time.

But one afternoon in early March, Mr. Ferrell walked to a guest cottage at his Los Angeles home with a small crew that included Adam McKay, who is his production partner and the director of “Anchorman.”

With a camcorder rolling, Mr. Ferrell improvised a sketch as a down-on-his-luck tenant being harassed by a foul-mouthed, booze-sodden landlord. The actor playing the landlord was Mr. McKay’s 2-year-old daughter, Pearl.

“The Landlord,” which took 45 minutes to shoot and cost next to nothing to produce, was posted on the new Web site FunnyOrDie.com on April 12.

As of yesterday, the sketch had been viewed about 30 million times, and the newly posted outtakes have been watched more than 1.6 million times. (This being Hollywood, Mr. Ferrell and Pearl have already shot a sequel: “Good Cop, Baby Cop.”)

Another punch line of the story, though, is that Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay started the site with the financial backing of Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that made a name for itself, not to mention billions of dollars, by investing early in YouTube and Google.

The Internet, of course, is already filled with cheap laughs — YouTube alone offers a lifetime’s supply of home videos (some funny, most not). But now many experienced comedians, talent agents and financiers are seeing the Web as a way to showcase talent while trying to turn a profit. In January, for example, Turner Broadcasting began SuperDeluxe.com, which features videos created by comedy pros and amateurs. And last year, IAC/InterActiveCorp, controlled by Barry Diller, bought a 51 percent stake in the parent company of CollegeHumor.com for an estimated $20 million.

Already, the seven-week-old FunnyOrDie.com, which highlights short videos by veteran comics like Mr. Ferrell as well as videos submitted by amateurs, is in discussions with potential advertisers.

The actor and his colleagues have enlisted some famous friends to volunteer their services. Brooke Shields, who is married to Chris Henchy, a writer and partner in FunnyOrDie.com, is a playground mom in one short video. And Bill Murray is planning to make a video, too, Mr. McKay said.

Clients of Creative Artists Agency, which helped broker the deal with Sequoia, have also made short videos for the site — including the actor and comedian Ed Helms, who created a series of clips called “Zombie American,” and the boxer Oscar De La Hoya.

In an interview last week at his second-floor office on a side street along Hollywood Boulevard, Mr. Ferrell acknowledged that he had been ambivalent about the site at first. “But then we thought, ‘Maybe this could work,’ ” he said. “We are not putting so much pressure on every piece that it be perfect. Everything isn’t, ‘Oh my God! This has to be so funny.’ It’s amusing, observational. We’re trying not to make it so slick.”

The pairing of Hollywood talent and Silicon Valley financiers has all the familiarity of a movie sequel. When the first Internet boom reached its peak in the late 1990s, many actors, writers and directors made the pilgrimage to the headquarters of the venture capital firms along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., to seek financing to create entertainment for the Internet.

Many of those ventures failed, largely because traditional Web shows were expensive to create and the technology at the time made it cumbersome to watch videos online. Among those that faltered were Pop.com, Digital Entertainment Network and Icebox.

Another cruel reality is that it is hard to be consistently funny, even with the help of deep pockets. Last summer, for example, Time Inc. closed its OfficePirates.com Web site, a satirical look at workplace issues, because it did not have a big enough audience.

A big change from the late 1990s, though, is that there is now better technology to stream videos, and audiences seem more willing to watch them, leading many investors and Hollywood talent to see a new opportunity.

“Our responsibility is to continue to make it better,” said a Sequoia partner, Mark D. Kvamme, referring to FunnyOrDie.com. “If it doesn’t succeed, it is our fault.”

The idea for the site started with Mr. Kvamme, who approached Creative Artists in 2006 with his pitch to finance a site for experienced comics.

“If you look at all the sites out there, a large portion of them have comedy,” he said, “but it is a mish-mash. There was no place that had a good smattering of professional videos and user-generated content.”

Agents at Creative Artists introduced Mr. Kvamme to Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay last year. Then Mr. Kvamme visited the two men on the set of “Blades of Glory” to persuade them to join the new venture.

Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay, who had worked together on “Saturday Night Live,” were reluctant at first. “I don’t really know much about the Internet,” Mr. Ferrell said.

The reality of having to sit through three weekly meetings and spend hours reviewing videos and writing comments for the site also seemed daunting to them, not to mention a distraction from their more lucrative movie and television careers (the time they are devoting to FunnyOrDie.com is all sweat equity at this point, since they are not being paid).

Even so, they came around to seeing the venture as an opportunity to experiment with their own material and to be exposed to ideas from other comics that they could later develop into television shows and movies.

Once Mr. Ferrell started making short videos, he enjoyed it. “You get to exercise that same muscle you did at the show,” he said, referring to his days on “Saturday Night Live.”

Mr. McKay also came up with the categories that voters use to rate their favorite videos — “immortal” if a video was great, “the crypt” if it was not.

And while Mr. McKay and Mr. Ferrell review the 20 most popular videos posted, they also have been careful not to censor the site.

When a user posted a video poking fun at Alec Baldwin, whom they know from “Saturday Night Live,” they briefly took it down, but posted it again because they did not want to set a precedent for banning videos that made fun of their friends.

“Unless it’s a hate crime or porn, it goes up,” Mr. McKay said. The actor Nick Thune posted a video based on his stand-up routine about masturbation, which became the third most popular video on the site, viewed more than a million times.

Mr. Thune said that Mr. Ferrell’s involvement in the site lent credibility to sketches like his. “The thing about YouTube is that it is so broad,” Mr. Thune said. “If Will Ferrell is there, it must be good.”

Sequoia and Gary Sanchez Productions — Mr. Ferrell’s company, where Mr. McKay is a partner — declined to disclose specifics about their initial investments, though Mr. McKay said that he and Mr. Ferrell had been given a budget of $5,000 to create their first videos. (The rest of the money — which Mr. Kvamme estimated to be in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” — was spent building the site.)

But because of the heavy traffic on FunnyOrDie.com, Sequoia has increased its investment to several million dollars and hired 10 full-time employees, with plans to expand the staff to 25.

Mr. McKay says they hope to share revenue with other video makers once the site starts to make money. For now, though, the site gives comics and actors a way to attract potentially huge audiences without the help of a Hollywood studio.

Creative Artists, which Mr. Kvamme said also owned a stake in the venture, is already using the site to promote its clients. Michael Yanover, the head of business development for Creative Artists, said that he had approached Mr. Ferrell and his colleagues about creating a video featuring Oscar De La Hoya ahead of his May 5 fight against Floyd Mayweather.

They agreed and, in 30 minutes, shot a video, “The Fight After the Fight,” which has been viewed more than 185,000 times as of yesterday.

“Basically he got a commercial that someone else financed and shot,” Mr. Yanover said.

But Mr. McKay warns that any videos that smack of Hollywood manipulation are going to be a turnoff to visitors. “That’s when a site starts smelling bogus,” he said.